2/27/2021 Introduction: Visualizing Protest:Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent - Ada New Media
ISSUE NO. 14
Introduction: Visualizing Protest:Transnational
Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent
Ela Przybylo
Veronika Novoselova
Sara Rodrigues
Feminist signs and symbols have intricate cultural and historical lives—binding and
unbinding feminist communities, acting as frames for revolting against contexts of
misogyny and racism, and creating markers under which counter-cultural explorations
can take place. Think for instance of the willful feminist clenched fist symbol, which
rose to prominence in the 1960s, inspired by the fist of the Black Power movement
(Ahmed 2017, 85-86). Feminist symbols energize us, propel us, help us visualize our
resistance. Feminist symbols are also divisive: they speak for some more than others,
they represent certain lives and truths, and they affectively resonate with those they
represent while acting as reminders of the exclusion and expulsion of those they fail to
speak for and to and with.
In this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, we invited
contributors to engage with how protest is visualized, that is, rendered visual in the
form of iconography and through social media, and imagined as a utopian project of
feminist, queer, and anti-racist worldmaking. Inviting scholarship and creative
engagements from the overlapping perspectives of feminist media studies,
transnational feminist theory, critical race studies, visual studies, and postcolonial
digital humanities, this special issue examines the aesthetics of feminist protests in
terms of their networked circulations as well as their affective bonds and material
contexts. Exploring the emerging modes of visibility, networked solidarity, and
collaborative knowledge production, “Visualizing Protest: Transnational Approaches to
the Aesthetics of Dissent” examines the relationships between the aesthetics of feminist
transnational protest and digital revolt in a dynamic, polymedia context characterized
by amateur remixing, instantaneous sharing, immaterial labour, corporate ownership
of digital platforms, and institutionalized state surveillance of social media.
This issue was inspired in large part by our investment and fascination with the visual
lives of feminist symbology both online and offline. For example, in 2011 Flavia Dzodan
online published what has become a central energizing force for articulating the
centrality of intersectionality to contemporary feminist politics. In “My Feminism Will
Be Intersectional or it will Be Bullshit (http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-
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intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/) ,” Dzodan talked about the importance of grounded
intersectionality for feminism and challenged metaphors that conflated women’s
oppression with racialized oppression, disregarding how the two interrelate and
overlap through long histories and present-day realities of colonialism and imperialism
(Dzodan 2011). Drawing on the energy of a rich history of intersectional thinking
formulated by feminists of colour and black feminists (i.e., Combahee River Collective
1977; Crenshaw 1989, 1993; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Sandoval 2000), Dzodan’s piece
struck a chord with contemporary feminist movements. Fascinatingly, because her call
so resonated with feminists, Dzodan’s words became imprinted on feminist
memorabilia, often misquoting her words, misspelling Dzodan’s name, and sometimes
not citing Dzodan as the originator of the phraseology in the first place (Romano 2016;
Dzodan 2016). Feminist symbology travels yet it does so in capitalist contexts where to
be a feminist and to be intersectional are sometimes commodities rather than actions
or political commitments. Acquiring a certain cache, Dzodan’s articulation of
intersectionality became tweetable, sellable, and appropriated by the marketplace. Yet
while intersectionality has circulated in capitalist contexts, the inventor of the
phraseology (Dzodan) did not received adequate remuneration, speaking to the ways in
which intellectual labour, especially when appearing online, is often rendered invisible,
cooptable, and thievable (Adair and Nakamura 2017). In such ways, digital economies
can absorb and shape radical and oppositional knowledge and praxis through the
production, reworking, remaking, sharing, amplifying, and storing of digital content
(Terranova 2004). Or as Jennifer Pybus (2015), in looking at affect and personal digital
archives, writes, “every keystroke, every link, every comment that people generate can
be extrapolated for surplus value” (238). If feminist words, symbols, and actions can so
readily be consumed, what drives the force and possibility behind energizing
symbology that fuels social change?
The contributors to this issue look at the function of feminist symbols and signs in
protests, and their importance for feminist transnational mobilizing. Collectively, they
are interested in explorations of key on- and offline fabrics of protest, undertaking
critical engagements with how aesthetics flow through transnational protest across
polymedia environments and in critical readings of feminist networked mobilizations
worldwide. Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr (2010) discuss transnational
feminism as intertwined with feminist praxis. For transnational feminisms to flourish,
they maintain, attention must be paid to how knowledge is developed, striving for an
approach to knowledge-formation that destabilizes the separation between theory and
method, academia and activism, and that strives towards collaboration. Attention to the
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transnational lives of feminist symbols is thus not only interested in questions such as
migration, border imperialism, settler colonialism, globalization, but also in the
processes behind the creation of knowledge symbols made by and for oppressed
communities (Grewal and Kaplan 1994).
Drawing again on Nagar and Swarr, visualizing protest transnationally requires
recognizing the collaborative element of symbology. While feminist words and symbols
can be usurped and misused, mixing, remixing, archiving, sharing, and remaking–often
facilitated by social media–can provide compelling forms of multi-authored
collaboration that give signs and symbols multiple lives across borders and geographic
locations. This issue is interested in the immense collaborative efforts that are at the
locus of feminist knowledge production and that center around online forms of life
invention, theoretical intervention, and networked support.
Yet this is not always a vision of feminist sisterhood, unity, or solidarity but one of
dissonance, theft, and appropriation. For example, 2017 Women’s Marches saw a
reinvigorated interest in the making, crafting, and touting of feminist signs. Speaking to
feminist inventiveness, creative signage also played a role in constructing particular
types of feminist subjects. For example, white feminists carrying Dzodan’s “My
Feminism Will Be Intersectional or it will Be Bullshit” speak to a desire to be recognized
by others as intersectional rather than as necessarily partaking in intersectional
dialogue or action. This can be an individualized feminist politics in the sense that it is
more about what type of feminist one wishes themselves to be seen, in the eyes of other
feminists than about the practices and habits they undertake to fulfill that desire
(sometimes also referred to as “virtue signaling”). This is reminiscent of what Ta-Nehisi
Coates (2015) has called an “[obsession] with the politics of personal exoneration”
wherein some white people support anti-racism in order to absolve themselves from
accusations of racism (97). It also aligns with what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012)
have called “moves to innocence” in relation to settler colonialism which
“problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler
futurity” (3). More broadly, such uses of intersectionality-as-signage can also be
understood through what bell hooks (1992) identifies as “eating the other”: a white
devouring of non-white and non-western traditions, insights, and bodies, towards
making oneself more whole, more interesting, more cool, or more compelling. In
feminist signage contexts, this might involve taking on as one’s own theoretical
knowledge and the concerns of those with non-white identities—be it intersectionality,
black feminisms, or Indigenous feminisms—for the purpose of exemplifying individual
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feminist credibility above advocating and rallying for long-term, large-scale, social and
political change. As Sam Grey (2004) has discussed in relation to the ongoing exclusion
of Indigenous voices from feminist politics and as Susana Loza (2014) has exemplified
with arguments for solidarity that silence women of colour, wishes for sisterhood can
obscure settler colonialism and racism. The effects of this exclusion run so deep that a
white wish for including “difference” within its frame often relies on allowing feminist
practitioners and theorists who are white to benefit from this appropriation. “Because
Whites are usually the ones speaking about women outside their group, as well as
gathering information, creating theories” white feminists can glean personal, political,
and professional rewards from displaying and performing an anti-essentialist feminism
(Mihesuah 2000, 1247-1248). The symbology present at the Marches partook in the
making of feminist subjects and the sharing of politics and identities with others, and
yet it also presented opportunities for appropriation and remaking.
In addition to critiquing the appropriation of symbols for personal gain, exploring
feminist symbology also involves being attuned to how symbols shift from context to
context. Writing on trans of color praxis, micha cárdenas (2015) discusses the
importance of conceptualizations of “shifting.” Drawing on Chela Sandoval’s (2000)
formulation of differential consciousness wherein multiple oppressions are negotiated
through the skillset of shifting ideologies and identities based on context, cárdenas
formulates “shifting” as a method by which trans women of color navigate hostile and
violent people and spaces. Rather than “passing” which relies on the observer,
“shifting” centralizes the power of the person navigating hostile spaces while exceeding
attempts to compartmentalize others into categories. To think about feminist protest
symbols and visuals as capable of shifting is to suggest that visuals, while important
devices for fueling action and revolt, do not exist outside or beyond those who handle,
make, transcribe, translate, and cite them. Signs thus can and are used in ways that
interrupt dominant narratives, stagger the viewer’s preconceived notions, and reinvent
the world from the perspective of the sign-holder. In this sense, signs, symbols, and
visuals are powerful tools for claiming space and confronting injustice.
The contributors to this issue navigate these many possibilities of the aesthetics of
protest. One of the central themes uniting the pieces in this special issue is the interplay
between embodied protests and their social media circulations, which are loaded with
additional meanings and discourses. This interplay and co-createdness is, for instance,
central to Jenny Ungbha Korn’s analysis of the representation and circulation of a
photograph of her protesting brutality against Asians in “Race and Resistance Amid
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Feminism, Priming, and Capitalism: The (Surprisingly-Globalized) Visual of an Asian
American Woman Activist.” Similarly, in “Protesting in the Streets of Instagram,” Ali
Rachel Pearl explores the possibilities for activist movements on Instagram, suggesting
that geotag archives function as spaces of resistance where activists can connect and
amplify shared discourses. Pearl’s analysis is important because it draws attention to
user agency, evident in the way in which activists appropriate and use geotags in a
subversive and transformative way.
Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle, in “Awkwardness and Assemblage: Digital Schemes for
Feminist World-Making,” contribute to the issue by focusing on performative responses
to sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve 2015/16 and the #MeToo
movement more broadly. Using an intersectional lens, they question the inclusiveness
of feminist resistance tactics and call for the need to “continually reformulate the ways
in which we think, speak, and do feminism.” An intersectional perspective is also
driving the analysis in Rianka Singh’s piece, “Platform Feminism: Protest and the
Politics of Spatial Organization.” Informed by the McLuhan school of thought on the
foundational role of the medium, Singh critically reviews the emerging field of Platform
Studies and calls to re-evaluate the role of digital media platforms in feminist
resistance. Next, in “‘America Latina Vai Ser Toda Feminista:’ Visualizing & Realizing
Transnational Feminisms in the Women’s Worlds March for Rights,” Cara Snyder, Ana
Maria Veiga and Cristina Scheibe Wolff discuss transnationalism in the context of the
Women’s Worlds March for Rights in Brazil. Drawing attention to the non-verbal
elements of feminist movements, they aptly capture the generative force of protest
aesthetics, writing that “performances of dissent and the images that capture these,
translate politics in a way word cannot.”
Following on this, Krysta Geneviève Lynes, in “Between a Rock and a Hard Place:
Performative Politics and Queer Migrant Activisms,” explores the performative
interventions of Artists Against Evictions and LGBTQI+ Refugees, a group of queer
migrant activists in Greece. By engaging in what Lynes calls the strategy of
“displacement,” Lynes outlines how these activists intervened into a contemporary art
exhibit not adequately rooted in anti-oppressive politics, and employed the aesthetics of
dissent to create new spaces of resistance. The final piece in this issue, “Drawing the
Revolution: The Practice and Politics of Collaboration in the Graphic Novel Lissa” by
Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy reflects on the process of creating Lissa
(http://lissagraphicnovel.com/) , a feminist comic subverting conventional optics of identity in
the context of the Egyptian revolution. Unlike other pieces in this issues, Nye and
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Hamdy’s article does not focus on digital platforms specifically, yet it reinforces the
importance of the visual in oppositional knowledge-making. Together, the pieces in this
issue offer a rich and diverse take on feminist protest with its visual renderings and
transnational iterations.
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—CITATION— 
Przybylo, Ela. Novoselova, Veronika & Rodrigues, Sara (2018). “Introduction: Visualizing
Protest: Transnational Approaches to the Aesthetics of Dissent.” Ada: A Journal of
Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 14.  10.5399/uo/ada.2018.14.1
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)  
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
DIGITAL ECONOMIES FEMINIST SYMBOLS INTERSECTIONALITY TRANSNATIONAL PRAXIS
VISUALIZING PROTEST
Ela Przybylo (https://adanewmedia.org/author/elaprzybylo)
Ela Przybylo is a Ruth Wynn Woodward Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and
Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her forthcoming book Asexual Erotics:
Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press 2019) draws on
Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic to rethink the role of sex for feminist and
queer thought and practice. Ela’s work on asexuality has appeared in GLQ, Sexualities,
Psychology & Sexuality, Feminism & Psychology, in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer
Perspectives, and in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, Third Edition. She is the co-
editor of On the Politics of Ugliness (Palgrave 2018). She is a Founding Editor of Feral
Feminisms. http://www.feralfeminisms.com/ . You can nd her online at
https://przybyloela.wordpress.com.
Veronika Novoselova (https://adanewmedia.org/author/veronika)
Veronika Novoselova has a PhD from York University from the Gender, Feminist & Women’s
Studies Program. Her dissertation identies, contextualizes, and analyzes responses to
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verbal violence on digital media platforms across Canada and the United States. Located at
the intersections of media studies and feminist theory, her most recent research explores
how digitally mediated confessions reveal negotiations of privilege and difference in
feminist blogging cultures. In addition to teaching and research, Veronika has served as a
Managing Editor at Feral Feminisms, a peer-reviewed multimedia journal based in Toronto.
Sara Rodrigues (https://adanewmedia.org/author/sararodrigues)
Sara Rodrigues is a researcher and writer based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a PhD in
Social and Political Thought (York University). Her research program focuses on
phenomenological and poststructuralist engagements with the body, embodiment and body
practices. Her work has appeared in Human Studies, Sexualities, and International Journal
of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, among others. She is a Founding Editor of Feral
Feminisms. http://www.feralfeminisms.com/
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