Feminist and Queer Practices in the Online and Offline Activism of Occupy Wall Street (Networking Knowledge, 2013) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, ed. Martha McCaughey (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture), 2014
Introduction: Cyberactivism 2.0: Studying Cyberactivism a Decade into the Participatory Web Martha McCaughey 1. Trust and Internet Activism: From Email to Social Networks Laura J. Gurak 2. Dark Days: Understanding the Historical Context and the Visual Rhetorics of the SOPA/PIPA Blackout John Logie 3. The Harry Potter Alliance: Sociotechnical Contexts of Digitally Mediated Activism Jennifer Terrell 4. Dangerous Places: Social Media at the Convergence of Peoples, Labor, and Environmental Movements Richard Widick 5. The Arab Spring and Its Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess 6. Twitter as the People’s Microphone: Emergence of Authorities during Protest Tweeting Alexander Halavais and Maria Garrido 7. From Crisis Pregnancy Centers to TeenBreaks.com: Anti-Abortion Activism’s Use of Cloaked Websites Jessie Daniels 8. Art Interrupting Business, Business Interrupting Art: Re(de)fining the Interface Between Business and Society Constance Kampf 9. Cyberactivism of the Radical Right in Europe and the USA: What, Who, and Why? Manuela Caiani and Rossella Borri 10. Young Chinese Workers, Contentious Politics, and Cyberactivism in the Global Factory Dorothy Kidd 11. Women Activists of Occupy Wall Street: Consciousness-Raising and Connective Action in Hybrid Social Movements Megan Boler and Christina Nitsou 12. Emergent Social Movements in Online Media and States of Crisis: Analyzing the Potential for Resistance and Repression Online Lee Salter
New Media, New Movements: Tracing the Construction of #OccupyWallStreet
[Awarded Highest Honors and Best Thesis in Sociology] Contemporary discourse has highlighted the role of user-generated media in social movements, such as the so-called “Twitter Revolution” of the Arab-Spring. Despite such discourse, little empirical research examines the use of user-generated media and social movements. To examine the role of not only user-generated media, but also alternative and mainstream media, this thesis asks: what role did multiple forms of media have in challenging or contributing to the growth of Occupy Wall Street? Using a mixed-method approach to analyze the first five weeks of Occupy Wall Street, this thesis samples data from 967 articles and transcripts, 90,000 YouTube videos, and 850,000 tweets, pooling from nine forms of mainstream, alternative, and user-generated media. Key findings challenge established notions of the relationship of power between the mainstream media and social movements posited by Gamson and Wolfsfeld (1993) given the role alternative and social media played in the growth of Occupy Wall Street when there was little to no mainstream media coverage. After Occupy Wall Street caught mainstream media attention, much of Occupy’s public support may have stemmed from deradicalized narratives of Occupy through the mainstream media. Finally, all mainstream coverage contained moments that discussed wealth and inequality in the U.S., perhaps significantly raising awareness towards the issues that Occupy sought to address.
The Myth of an Egalitarian Internet: Occupy Wall Street and the mediatization of social movements
International Journal of Digital Television, 2017
This article provides an analysis of the US-based Occupy Wall Street movement and its apparently more egalitarian deployment of the Internet. It considers how protest movements have been symbolically mediated through the social media tropes associated with the decentralization of power. However, it is necessary to review the complexities of horizontal social movements, the ambiguities of networked forms of communications and the more individualized types of political discourse that have been associated with ‘lifestyle’ anarchist or alternative groups. Therefore, the online protest paradigm does not simplistically equate with a mythologized equality. Instead, it is necessary to address a more complex series of cultural and material variables that have emerged in the wake of online activity.
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, OWS was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, OWS’s emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much discussed, celebrated, and attacked. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube create new contexts for activism that do not exist in old media. Plus, social media foster an ethic of individual and collective participation, thus creating a norm of perpetual participation. In OWS, that norm creates new expectations of being in the world.
FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the Occupy Movement
The Fibreculture Journal, 2015
This essay explores the paradox of activists using corporate-owned platforms-the 'master's tools' (Lorde, 1984)-in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Grounded in findings from interviews with 30 women activists from eight North American Occupy sites, this essay reveals the frictions that result from the entangled paradox between philosophies embedded within technologies and activists' philosophies. We document entanglements between corporate platforms and radical democratic ideals, and subsequent frictions between activists' ideals and more pragmatic, DIY practices. We also investigate frictions between aspirations of openness, and the realities of surveillance and infiltration by the police state. We examine entanglements through the theoretical lenses of 'connective labor' (Boler et al, 2014), 'veillance' (Mann, 2004), and the 'master's tools' (Lorde, 1984), and lay the groundwork for 'queering the binary of individuals and groups' (Barad, 2012) and recognising the non-linear, dynamic relations of social movements.
This article draws upon the insights of 75 Occupy activists from Toronto and across the United States interviewed as part of the 3-year study 'Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens'. This article highlights three major roles adopted by women in the so-called leaderless, horizontally structured Occupy movement -both within the offline, face-to-face General Assembly meetings held during the Occupy encampments and within the online spaces of Facebook pages, Web sites, affinity groups, and working committees. As key participants in the movement, women used social technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and livestreaming as modes of activist engagement, developing unique roles such as that of the 'Admin' (Social Media Administrator), the 'Documentarian', and the 'Connector'. The women's adoption of these roles illustrates, we argue, the emerging notion of 'connective labor' an extended enactment of Bennett and Segerberg's (2012) notion of 'the logic of connective action', augmenting its logic to reveal the often hidden labor of women in sustaining the networked and affective dimension of social movements. This article highlights the gendered, hybrid, embodied, and material nature of women's connective labor that has supported, and in many ways sustained, the contemporary Occupy movement.
This essay explores the paradox of activists using corporate-owned platforms—the 'master's tools' (Lorde, 1984)—in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Grounded in findings from interviews with 30 women activists from eight North American Occupy sites, this essay reveals the frictions that result from the entangled paradox between philosophies embedded within technologies and activists' philosophies. We document entanglements between corporate platforms and radical democratic ideals, and subsequent frictions between activists' ideals and more pragmatic, DIY practices. We also investigate frictions between aspirations of openness, and the realities of surveillance and infiltration by the police state. We examine entanglements through the theoretical lenses of 'connective labor' (Boler et al, 2014), 'veillance' (Mann, 2004), and the 'master's tools' (Lorde, 1984), and lay the groundwork for 'queering the binary of individuals and groups' (Barad, 2012) and recognising the non-linear, dynamic relations of social movements.
In 2011 CeCe McDonald, an African-American transgender woman, was charged with murder for killing her attacker during a racist and transphobic assault in Minneapolis. After McDonald’s arrest, local queer communities organized an astounding level of support. This article examines the CeCe Support Committee as a case study for effective grassroots organizing that is fueled by and increasingly reliant upon social media for advancing social justice. An ethnographic approach reveals how the success of the Committee’s social media activism largely depended on traditional activist strategies. Because the group’s activism was based on unpaid labor and supported by numerous physical protests, the use of social media platforms enabled the Support Committee to challenge news media’s racialized framing of McDonald’s gender non-conformity as deceiving and threatening and exposed the state-sanctioned violence enacted against her. Therefore, I contend that the transformative political potential of social media activism is only possible when sustained by coordinated, “on-the-ground” activism offline. Moreover, this case study illustrates that intersecting oppressions do not simply disappear in online activism, but that those oppressions—particularly the centrality of whiteness in organizing—continue to constrain the actual material achievements of social media activism. For the CeCe Support Committee the convergence of on- and offline activism resulted in a raised public consciousness about the disposability of transgender lives, turning a national spotlight on the violence transgender people face.