What’s in a Hashtag?: Terms for Tweeting in Alliance

Alyson Cole is a professor of Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies, and American Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood, and most recently, “Precarious Politics: Anzaldúa's Reparative Reworking.” Alyson co-edits philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism.

Sumru Atuk is a completing her doctorate -- “The Politics of Femicide: ‘Woman’ Making and Women Killing in Turkey,” supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and AAUW -- in Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Sumru and Alyson are collaborating on an article about the promise and limits of #MeToo politics.

For those who remember Clarence Thomas’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee -- a televised drama that made “sexual harassment” a household word -- #MeToo felt, at first, like bad deja vu. Betty Friedan argued that women need to name sexism in order to overcome it, but the current digital protest publicizes a problem named long ago. Unlike those 1991 hearings, which focused in excruciating detail on two protagonists, Thomas and Anita Hill, #MeToo lays bare the appalling scale and frequency of women’s daily encounters with men who sexually harass and whose sexual harassment, in violation of the law, is often widely known and tolerated.

Is #MeToo the cresting of a new wave of feminism, a final reckoning with patriarchy? Or is it a perversion of the achievements of the women’s movement? Those who worry it is the latter see a McCarthyism in drag that demands the sacrifice of “good men” (Senator Al Franken and Congressman John Conyers, for example), while reviving Victorian sensibilities about female fragility; a regression into the “victim feminism” of the past when women rebuffed the joys of sex, renegotiated the terms of consent, and incited a sex panic. Critics want to retain a line between a sociable pat on the back and a threat, a disappointing date and an assault; they seek a more nuanced understanding of romantic overtures and a less nuanced understanding of sexual violation. For them, #MeToo’s trial by Twitter enacts a double infraction: criminalizing “locker room talk,” while trivializing rape.

Amidst all the celebration and consternation over #MeToo, one aspect has been overlooked: the sign under which this activism (however it might be characterized or assessed) is taking place. There have been other digital campaigns, such as #WhatWereYouWearing, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyWomenDontReport. But #MeToo is different. And this difference begins with the hashtag itself, rather than the celebrities who became its early public face. To truly appreciate the politics that #MeToo empowers, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign.

Naming the problem is only a first step, as the magnitude and tolerability of sexual violence demonstrate. Equally important is the language those challenging the problem employ to classify themselves. As Simone de Beauvoir instructed, women will remain the subjugated second sex until they learn to say “We” regarding their gender. Feminists have struggled to define what sort of social group “women” constitute, what feminist solidarity entails, and whether feminism can exist without presuming fundamental commonalities among individuals differently situated with respect to race, class, and nationality. #MeToo provides a generative alternative to articulate these collective claims without ignoring the disparate distribution of precarity and privilege among those assembled under the sign. It allows individuals to join together and recognize their “endless variety and monotonous similarity,” to borrow Gayle Rubin’s artful formulation of women’s manifold oppressions.

Hashtags are typically constructed by merging words, but conjoining ‘Me’ and ‘Too’ creates a potent new compound. ‘Me’ upholds individuality, while sidestepping the possessive ‘My,’ the reflexive ‘Myself,’ and the more frequent ‘I.’ In English, ‘Me’ rarely occurs alone in a sentence; it is more commonly used in conjunction with another subject pronoun, especially to establish a relationship. ‘Me’ thus anticipates others, a potential ‘Us.’ It issues an invitation that is not just solipsistic.

 The designation ‘Me’ certainly carries some cultural baggage, especially since Tom Wolfe’s scathing critique of the “Me Generation,” bemoaning a shift from the social activism that defined the 1960s to an atomized individualism, a problematic turning inward he observed in the 1970s. This is where the second term in the hashtag, ‘Too,’ becomes decisive by dislodging the ‘Me’ from Wolf’s tarring, and thereby helping to fulfill the promise already within the otherwise maligned ‘Me.’

‘Too’ signals more than one, a plurality prefigured by another (with whom the ‘Me’ expresses alliance) and invites more “Mes’ to join in. ‘Too’ also homophonically gestures to ‘Two’ and ‘To,’ a trebling of meaning that further destabilizes the singular personal pronoun and simultaneously evokes an imperative form -- the ‘To’ of whatever verb (still to be determined) might follow. Fused with ‘Me’, ‘Too’ creates a plural name that resonates with Luce Irigaray’s conception of a distinctly feminized “more than one.”

Expressed through a digital medium, individuals need not detail personal incidents or even what motivates them to retweet. (#MeToo is not the virtual version of Take Back the Night.) The mutual designation is not presumed beforehand; it is achieved. The achievement is indirect; a building of collectivity based not on shared experiences, but on experiential similarity discovered by speaking up with others, what Mlambo-Ngouko terms “accumulated experiences.” ‘Too’ amplifies the plurality of the multiple ‘Mes’, shifting the personal pronoun from “this happened to me” to an assertion of “count me in.”

 Opponents and proponents (such as those who soon declared #TimesUp) are eager to see the digital activism either dissolve or evolve into more conventional forms of politics. In their impatient call for “real” action, they neglect the important political work #MeToo already performs. #MeToo not only raises feminist consciousness, it also raises the possibility of political solidarity among individuals who may never be in one another’s shoes. The workplace harassment a Latina domestic worker endures is not interchangeable with what a Wall Street trader may face. Yet #MeToo created the context for the Campesina women to support Hollywood actresses. The sign invites such solidarities. It summons individuals to say, “Yes, that happened to me too. Not in the exactly same way, but I understand and will stand with you.”

The malleable and horizontal solidarity #MeToo nurtures is similar to what Judith Butler terms “thinking in alliance.” What we might categorize as “tweeting in alliance” requires only a mutual cause, not a shared identity or a common experience. #MeToo thus circumvents the tensions that plagued previous feminist formulations and practices, when different perspectives were ignored or disregarded and voices silenced in the effort to construct a unified account of “women.” There is no universal and ahistorical patriarchy, only the extraordinary resonance of #MeToo.

 Since this digital campaign began, individuals from around the world joined in tweeting #MeToo in different languages, chipping away at long established hierarchical divides between the so-called liberated women of the “West” and the oppressed women of the “Rest,” without adhering to some homogenized account of sexual violence. In China, emojis were used (#RiceBunny) to retain the powerful compound of ‘Me’ and ‘Too’, while defying censorship. When said aloud the words for “rice bunny” are pronounced “mi tu,” a homophone that cleverly evades detection, and emphasizes the importance of #MeToo as a sign.

Many suggest that #MeToo is a flash in the pan, or more precisely in cyberspace, or that it will provoke a backlash. But even beyond measures specific to Twitter, #MeToo has already had a remarkable impact, catalyzing the passage of new legislation in several states (Illinois, California, Oregon, Rhode Island, New York), and propelling the resignation of some egregious offenders. Catherine MacKinnon, the architect of sexual harassment law in the United States, credits #MeToo with achieving more in a matter of months than decades of courtroom challenges. As importantly, and more enduringly, the hashtag offers new terms to join feminists together in their fight against gender discrimination in all its forms.

Lori Marso — Blockbuster Feminisms

Lori Marso
Professor, Union College
Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, was one of this summer’s biggest surprise hits.  It was enormously successful at the box office with both critics and moviegoers in awe of its fabulous female superhero role model played by Gal Godot.  Many women said on blog posts and in reviews that they were moved to tears to see Diana and her sister warriors (including the glorious character Antiope, played by Robin Wright) on the Amazon island of Themyscira.  These women are powerful, confident, peace-loving, athletic, and in charge. Caroline Framke’s comment in Vox is typical: “After watching movie after movie where men saved the day with a well-timed punch while women cleaned up the mess around the edges, Wonder Woman is a goddamn revelation.”[i]
Wonder Woman was not without its detractors and controversies, however.  Israeli actress Gal Godot served two years of compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 2006 war when the IDF fought against Hezbollah-allied forces in Lebanon.  The conflict killed more than one thousand Lebanese and one million were removed from their homes.[ii] This painful recent history was stirred by casting Gal Godot as the star of her own Wonder Woman movie, resulting in the film’s ban in Lebanon. Gadot’s vocal support of the IDF has garnered additional negative attention beyond Lebanon. Media outlets have seized on the fact that in 2014, Gadot posted to Facebook: "I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens," "Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children...We shall overcome!!! Shabbat Shalom!”[iii] In a review published in Aljazeera, Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, provocatively writes: “Suppose you are a father or a mother living in Gaza, and like any other parent from Florida to Oregon you wish for your daughters to have a positive role model - then what? You hear there is this amazing Hollywood blockbuster championing the cause of a young female superhero. Could an Israeli soldier who learned her martial arts skills by helping drop bombs on your brothers and sisters, maiming and murdering them, be perceived as an Amazonian princess who is here to save the world?”[iv] Dabashi’s question upends any naïve wish that Wonder Woman could be a superhero for all young girls.

Jessica Bennett ignores the fact that Gal Godot can’t possibly be a superhero to girls in Gaza when in the New York Times she appreciatively cites Stacy L. Smith, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, whose research focuses on diversity in media: “Anytime we see women in powerful roles on-screen it challenges narrowly defined and antiquated views of leadership . . .” “Whether women are serving as C.E.O.s or, in the case of Wonder Woman, striding across ‘No Man’s Land’ and taking enemy fire, it broadens our notions of who a leader can be and the traits they exemplify.”[v]

But what kind of a leader is this? What kind of feminism does Wonder Woman signify?  I greatly enjoyed the movie, and in particular I loved watching Diana grow up on her all-woman, peaceful island paradise, learning to fight for justice and equality (only, though, when absolutely necessary) at the heels of Antiope. The first part of the film depicts a powerful group of woman warriors, working together, preserving their better world, and hoping to never fight again.  Other than situating her story in the midst of World War I rather than the aftermath of World War II, the film’s vision is true to the Wonder Woman origin story as historian Jill Lepore recounts:

“In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well.” Alas, that didn’t last: men conquered and made women slaves. The Amazons escaped, sailing across the ocean to an uncharted island where they lived in peace for centuries until, one day, Captain Steve Trevor, a U.S. Army officer, crashed his plane there. “A man!” Princess Diana cries when she finds him. “A man on Paradise Island!” After rescuing him, she flies him in her invisible plane to “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”[vi]

The fact that in the movie the world is saved by an American soldier allied with an actress who was an IDF soldier should give us pause. But this is to read beyond the movie.  Taking the film on its narrative merits alone, we might still worry that Wonder Woman leaves her Amazonian sisters, experiences sex for the first time with the American soldier (might she not have had sex with other women on the island?  why do we end up in a heterosexual romance yet again?), naively believes that killing one bad man/god will bring world peace (she is subsequently schooled by two man-splainers, the American soldier and the god of war, that this is unfortunately not the case), and is not at all averse to killing lots of people.  Is this the path to bringing down patriarchy?  Can one woman-warrior save us all?  And save us from what?  And from whom?

Let’s consider another Hollywood fantasy from this past summer, Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2, and another from two summers ago, Mad Max: Fury Road.  In Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2, we get a ragtag group of weirdos who stumble, quite literally, into their roles as saviors of the galaxy.  Gathered together are Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) who has cheekily named himself Starlord, Rocket (a raccoon thief voiced by Bradley Cooper), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the one woman in the bunch and the only green-skinned one, Groot (a baby tree voiced by Vin Diesel), and Drax (Dave Bautista), a tough guy with a soft heart.  In some ways, their group is a cliché, but at the same time it’s the best kind of feminist fantasy possible, one that reminds me of the pleasures of watching Stranger Things on Netflix last year.  Like in Stranger Things where a bunch of bullied queer kids and the excluded, seemingly crazy, members of the community are all proved right and join together in solidarity, in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, women join with others, others like trees and animals and even men who fight against injustice, inequality, discrimination, and who all have good hearts.  And not only do the marginalized come together; they add another woman along the way (Gamora’s sister Nebula, played by Karen Gillen).   It turns out that the seemingly cruel Nebula all along just wanted her sister to welcome her to the fold.  In this film, sororal and queer solidarity wins over patriarchy.

Likewise in 2015’s summer blockbuster, Mad Max: Fury Road.  Here we get a combination of Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy, with stunning results for feminist politics.  Furiosa’s (Charlize Theron) superhero skills exceed Wonder Woman’s by a long shot. Like in Guardians of the Galaxy, Furiosa needs others (and in this case, other women) to rescue the world from an even more dark, foreboding, and explicit vision of patriarchal excess where women are reduced to their roles as child-bearers or for sex.  Like our queer friends depicted in Guardians of the Galaxy and Stranger Things, Furiosa is a heroine for the 21st century.  She joins with others to seek justice and restore peace for the disempowered, rather than garner power for superheroes or first world nation-states.  She, and they, are the kind of bad-ass feminist collective we need so badly today. 

In spite of its emphasis on female power and possibility, we might say Wonder Woman offers a realist, or at least very sobering, perspective.  The movie opens and ends with Diana receiving a photo from Bruce Wayne (Batman) as she works at her desk.  At this point Diana is not dressed as Wonder Woman nor as an Amazon, but as a high powered, expensively clad executive.  Importantly, she is alone.  She is isolated from her sisters, having left her home out of curiosity and responsibility.  Although she has friends in the superhero community, she has lost the love of her life.  In too many ways she fulfils the patriarchal demand that if a woman does have power or possibility, she must be isolated and remain unattached.  Where is Wonder Woman’s gang of weirdos?   To make Diana’s story more like Furiosa’s, she could return to Themyscira and gather her sister-forces, or lead her superhero friends into advancing feminist futures.  This is the task of a feminist superhero. 

[i] Caroline Framke, “Wonder Woman isn’t just the superhero Hollywood needs.  She’s the one exhausted feminists deserve.” https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/7/15740804/wonder-woman-amazons-feminist

[ii] Max Bearak, “Lebanon bans ‘Wonder Woman’ in protest against Israeli actress Gal Godot.” Washington Post, 1 June, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/06/01/lebanon-bans-wonder-woman-in-protest-against-israeli-actress-gal-gudot/?utm_term=.02aef6fbae04

[iii] Cited in Hamid Dabashi, “Watching Wonder Woman in Gaza.” Aljazeera. 10 June. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/06/watching-woman-gaza-170610082618366.html.

[iv] ibid.

[v] Jessica Bennett, “If Wonder Woman Can Do It, She Can Too.” New York Times, 5 June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/opinion/wonder-woman-movie.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

[vi] Jill Lepore, “The Last Amazon,” New Yorker, 22 September, 2014: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon

Lynne Joyrich — Reality TV Trumps Politics

Lynne Joyrich,
Professor and Chair, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University


Since the early morning of November 9, 2016, when, against almost all expectations and seemingly all logic, Donald Trump was declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election, it has been repeatedly said that the media "failed" the American public.[i] It is true that the great majority of news reporters and political analysts did not predict this result, and thus the more than 71 million television viewers who witnessed Trump's surprising win had good reason to be stunned and shocked.

As not only a television studies scholar but an avid television viewer, I was among those stunned viewers—but while, in a sense, I was shocked, I was not surprised. That is because this election was not at all operating within the logic of previous ones or with what we typically think of as political discourse: a discourse presumably centered on platforms, policy, and arguments for how to achieve certain goals. Instead, it operated fully through a media logic—through, precisely, the "reality televisualization" of political formations[ii]. 

In that sense, then, the media did not "fail." Rather, the media fully succeeded in producing a particular effect, even if those working in the media didn't quite realize this (and perhaps still haven't). This was not a simple instrumental effect (as in a "hypodermic needle" model of media impact). Instead, it is a kind of televisual epistemology and a televisual affect intertwined, a meshing of modes of thinking and modes of feeling, which has become the "medium" in which our politics now exist (with "medium" here not only referring to a media technology but also used in the scientific sense of the substance in which something lives and is "cultured" and even gesturing toward the occult reference to emanating and auratic sensations and communications).

Within this medium logic of reality televisualization, arguments and proofs don't matter, policy positions and reasoned discourse don't matter, a sense of division between truth and fantasy, real and unreal, and action and appearance doesn't matter. What matters for a candidate is what matters for a "contestant" on reality TV: constructing oneself as a strongly profiled persona—a kind of branded, celebrified image ("Winner!")—while also communicating clearly defined personae for one's opponents ("Lyin' Ted" or "Crooked Hillary"). What works in this reality TV formation, in other words, is the production and enactment of a particular type of personality: a media personality or brand that is able to "survive" on the island or avoid getting "fired," one that can "make it work," to come back and perform the next night instead of getting voted off. This is precisely the staple reality televisual personality, who shows that he or she is able to manage risks and rewards, to balance alliances and betrayals, to "lip-sync for your life," to act out in ways that read as both strategic and authentic—or, as Trump himself put it: to engage in "truthful hyperbole."[iii] By presenting just such a persona, Trump established himself as "the idol," "the voice," "the sole survivor," making it to the end of the "amazing race,"[iv] and garnering votes from an audience used to being asked to make its choice. 

This particular kind of construction of media personality is what, in performance and star studies, is called "personification."[v] Personification involves projecting a persona (both performing the self and "realizing" the performance) in which subject and role, private person and public image, ordinary individual and extraordinary representative become, paradoxically, both equated and equivocated: each acts as alibi for the another or maybe, more accurately, as mutual guarantees (like a product guarantee). The reality television celebrity can thus stand, all at once, for him/herself as subject, for the brand image, and for all the people invited to identify with and "feel" that brand; the persona becomes effective and affective (marked as authentic despite, or even because of, the artifice of invention) through the attachments that connect the personality to his/her public.

A focus on this enhanced persona yields, in other words, a kind of tribal individualism and an individualist tribalism. The loaded term "tribal" comes from reality television itself (where it has been used to divide contestants into and designate teams, with which we, as viewers, are encouraged to affiliate, much like by claiming ourselves on, say, "Team Bethenny" or "Team Kelly" [Real Housewives of New York], "Team Ronnie or Team Situation" [Jersey Shore], Team Jon or Team Kate [Jon & Kate Plus 8]). But the notion of a "tribal individualism"/"individualist tribalism" also perfectly describes Trump's populist nationalism, in which perceived individual success binds his affiliated group together rather than separating them (even with the enormous "real" differences between Trump and his constituents). This is a televisual logic, as television is located at exactly the borders of public and private, individual and social, sameness and strangeness, the everyday and the exceptional, the popular and the particular, the banal and the noteworthy, the fantastic and the real.[vi]

Given Trump's remarkable televisual instincts in manipulating those categories and the media persona he created for himself, his success was not that surprising from a Television Studies perspective. Deciding how to respond to the election is harder. Should those who oppose Trump simply and equally move toward reality televisualization? Should we give up on other modes of political discourse, on critical thinking, and on civic engagement, instead only to operate via the processes of branded and celebrified entertainment? This is not a trend we should embrace, and yet we need to realize that politics aren't operating according to old logics any more. We thus need to engage with media epistemologies and affects, with what Walter Benjamin called "aura" (here, the kind of media-produced aura that he linked to commodity and celebrity culture).[vii] While we certainly can't cede political debate, we can no longer just make arguments. We need also to make felt connections—even ones that may start off feeling forced or "fake" (like, arguably, all reality TV does) but that become, through our involvement itself, a new kind of "real" (real affinity, real participation). In that way, we might at least begin to produce a different kind of "mediation"— an intercession and intervention—in our media-defined politics and culture.

____________________

[i] As just some examples, see Eric Boehlert, "The Media Failed Americans This Election Season," The Huffington Post (November 7, 2016); Rachel Oldroyd, "Donald Trump and the media's 'epic fail,'" The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (November 9, 2016); Matthew Ingram, "Donald Trump: Why the Media Failed to Predict a Trump Victory," Fortune (November 9, 2016); Steve Chapman, "Trump and the media 'failure,'" Chicago Tribune (November 11, 2016); Brian Stelter, "How the Media Failed During the Election" CNN (November 13, 2016); Michael Massing, "How the media failed—again," Los Angeles Times‎ (November 18, 2016); Jeffrey M. McCall, "News media failed the public in 2016 election," The Banner-Graphic (November 17, 2016); and Shellie Karabell, "How and Why the Media Failed the Public," Forbes (November 20, 2016).

[ii] This is a logic that his been building in influence since the presidency of John F. Kennedy (often called the first "television president"), through Ronald Reagan (who, of course, was a film and television actor before becoming president), up to the media-savvy Barack Obama, and now beyond. And, of course, it is not just television that is influential. While my focus in this piece is on the relation between politics and TV, to account fully for the impact of the media on this election and on political discourse more broadly, one would certainly also need to analyze the key role played by digital and social media (in everything from the prevalence of "viral" "fake news" on social media sites to Trump's own use of Twitter) as these converged with television in producing a particular media/political formation.

[iii] "The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion." Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 58. The fact (as claimed by Schwartz) that the notion of "truthful hyperbole" was developed by Tony Schwartz, not Trump himself, only furthers my argument about the mediatized construction of a persona in which the opposition between "artifice" and "authenticity" no longer holds. See Janet Mayer, "Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All," The New Yorker, July 25, 2016, .

[iv] Reality shows referenced above include Survivor, The Apprentice, Project Runway, American Idol, RuPaul's Drag Race, The Voice, and The Amazing Race, among many other similarly structured programs.

[v] I take this term from Barry King, who differentiates between the work of a "star" and the work of an "actor" on the basis of what he calls "personification" vs. "impersonation." See Barry King, "Stardom as an Occupation," in The Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge, 1986): 154-84 and Barry King,"Articulating Stardom," in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 167–82.

[vi] The various implications of TV operating at these intersections has been the focus of much of my work. See, for example, Lynne Joyrich, "Epistemology of the Console," Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, ed. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (New York: Routledge, 2009), 15-47; Lynne Joyrich, "The Magic of Television: Thinking Through Magical Realism in Recent TV," Transformative Works and Culture 3 (2009), http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0165; Lynne Joyrich, "Queer Television Studies: Currents, Flows, and (Main)Streams," Cinema Journal 53.2 (Winter 2014), 133-139; and Lynne Joyrich, "Tubular Vision: The Ins and Outs of Television Studies," New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, second edition, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2015), 649-664.

[vii] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," translated by Harry Zohn from the 1935 essay, in Illuminations,
 ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-51.Harry Zohn from the 1935 essay, in Illuminations,
 ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-51.