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Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E

Distributed Activism: Domestic Violence and Feminist Media Infrastructure in the Fax Age

Carrie A. Rentschler

Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

Feminist activists in the 1990s used fax machines to disseminate crucial resources for media activism against domestic violence. This article analyzes how a particular feminist organi- zation, with the help of a public relations agency, sought to transform media coverage of domestic violence by building a feminist media infrastructure that linked organizations across the United States through newsletter distribution, illuminating the constitutive rela- tionship among social movement organizations, networking capabilities, and activist media process at that time. To evaluate this relationship, the study focuses on the specific media strategies feminists developed to respond to the high-profile O. J. Simpson gender violence case and its race-based dimensions, and to the antifeminist backlash upsurge in the 1990s.

Keywords: Domestic Violence, Feminism, Distribution, Media Activism, Public Relations, Fax, Print Culture.

doi:10.1111/cccr.12079

In 1994, a group of feminist activists against domestic violence took up a powerful new tool: the activist facsimile. Such a move may appear counterintuitive in light of the increasing use of the Internet in the 1990s, but Internet access was expensive at the time. Many organizations in the movement to end domestic violence lacked ade- quate financial resources to purchase computers and set up Internet service. So these activists, organized by the Family Violence Prevention Fund in San Francisco, Cal- ifornia, and the Washington, DC-based public relations agency PR Solutions, built a fax-based network for sharing techniques to shape media discourse about domes- tic violence. Their newsletter, Speaking Up: News and Tips for the Domestic Violence Community, became a key instrument of activist media training for movement orga- nizations across the United States. In its first issue, Executive Director of the Family Violence Prevention Fund Esta Soler and Anne Menard, Director of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, presented a vision of what the newsletter would accomplish:

Corresponding author: Carrie A. Rentschler; e-mail: [email protected]

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[From reviewing] national and regional media coverage of domestic violence, provid[ing] updates on research and new developments from government and private sources, track[ing] the “backlash” among those who are trying to minimize the epidemic, includ[ing] fact sheets and easily accessible data, and much more. (Speaking Up, November 7, 1994, p. 1).

“Every issue,” they promised, “would provide … media tips and/or material” and “open up communication channels linking each of you with others in the commu- nity” (Speaking Up, November 7, 1994, p. 1). Speaking Up represented both a feminist activist network and a media advocacy tool (1 October 1995 and 22 December 1998 issues, respectively).

By working with public relations specialists, the Family Violence Prevention Fund became a centralized hub of information within a network of feminist organizations working to end domestic abuse. The Fund and PR Solutions published Speaking Up from 7 November 1994 to November 1999, providing advocates with language and media strategies to use in order to describe the problem of domestic violence within the gendered grammar of feminist activism against challengers who disputed the gendered nature of intimate partner abuse (see Berns, 2004; Carter, 1998; Kozol, 1995; Marcus 1992; McLaughlin, 1998; Tierney, 1982). At a time of highly contentious debate about domestic violence around the O. J. Simpson murder trial and a growing right-wing insurgency against feminism, Speaking Up sought to “turn the news into contested terrain,” (Ryan, 1991, p. 4). Media coverage of the 1994 – 1995 Simpson trial had cleaved national debate around antiracist critiques of police violence and feminist critiques of domestic violence, “playing gender against race” in ways that advocates tried, but did not always succeed, to work against (see Chancer, 1998). After the 1994 electoral ascendancy of the New Right and the Newt Gingrich led “Contract with America,” right-wing identified women activists also openly challenged the feminist movement framing of domestic violence as a gendered social problem of male violence against women.

While Speaking Up illustrates how the Fund and their PR partners represented media-based advocacy in light of these challenges, it also demonstrates how advo- cates imagined what coordinated and networked media activism could be under those conditions. Through Speaking Up and their use of fax distribution, the Fund and PR Solutions engineered a key piece of the movement’s national communication capacity, providing the labor and doing the textual production that constituted it. For 5 years, Speaking Up provided over 400 movement organizations with regular information and advice on how to frame the social problem of domestic violence in talking with the media and suggestions for how to cultivate media interest. The newsletter also fulfilled a reporting function, aggregating news stories on key domestic violence legal cases and disseminating information on the activities of organizations around the move- ment. Futures Without Violence, the San Francisco-headquartered organization that was formerly named The Family Violence Prevention Fund, archives a nearly full run of the newsletter along with a set of completed surveys (97 in total, of 400 sent out to

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recipients) they conducted with recipients of Speaking Up via PR Solutions in 1995, after the newsletter’s first year of publication. These texts provide the main objects of analysis for this study.

Methods for studying distributed activism

By focusing on issues of distribution, this article takes a transmission view of media activism centered on the distributive use value of alternative media (see Atton, 2002, p. 41). As distributive communication structures, networks enable activist organiza- tions to become “better connected for coordinating their efforts” (see Keck & Sikkink, 1998, quoted in Pickard, 2006b, p. 332). The Fund’s and PR Solutions’ fax system net- worked key organizations in the movement to end domestic violence before the era of online activism. These networks constitute the media infrastructures of feminist antidomestic violence activism, functioning as “pathways of activism”: a sociotech- nical means of interconnection that form around activist movement, the sharing of knowledge, and the building of communication networks (Enke, 2007, p. 12). Like other activist media practices, communication pathways “not only reflect or critique mainstream media and culture, they constitute and intervene in them” (Lievrouw, 2011, p. 19).

Feminists in particular tend to utilize distributed forms of activism (see Carroll & Hackett, 2006; Garrison, 2000; Miller & Smith, 2012). In the 1990s, feminist mobi- lization was especially marked by the activist capacity for technological transmission and receptivity (Garrison, 2005, p. 239). In this context, the fax network the Family Violence Prevention Fund built with the help of PR Solutions was a constitutive fea- ture of their broader movement. It also served as a model for feminist thinking about distribution (see Diani and McAdam, 2003; Pickard, 2006a, 2006b). As Cynthia Enloe (2000) suggests, feminist scholars “follow the memos” that orient practice. Through interpretation of their key documents and interviews with central organizational staff, I examine the Fund’s distributed model of activism to reveal the “centrality of process in the analysis of social movement media” (Downing, 2008, p. 42). The documentary artifacts of this distributed activism represent the communication labor that occurred behind the scenes in the development of these efforts. Movement newsletters bear the marks of this activist labor and the coauthorship of advocates and communica- tion professionals who helped write, publish, and distribute them (e.g., Gillett, 2003; Profitt, 2000; Smith, 1990; Walker, 1990).

“Documents” as Gillian Walker (1990, p. 72) argues in her analysis of Canadian policy development around the issue of domestic violence, “contain and carry the dis- cursive organization of ruling practices.” As material forms of discourse, movement documents textualize media strategies for fax distribution and circulation (see Gal, 2003). Activist discourse takes tactical and highly mobile form by being transformed into texts that can be efficiently distributed, a feature of media activism that Atkinson and Cooley (2010) identify as “narrative capacity.” Activist texts that are produced to be easily distributed demonstrate a unique set of discursive materialities, taking

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mobile material form via document type (e.g., short newsletters versus ring-bound multipage media guides), formatting style (such as easy-to-read sections or columns), and artifact size (e.g., printing on 8.5 × 11 inch paper). Looking at how organizational documents are designed to be disseminated by fax reveals a set of distribution-based practices of textual production that organized the media activist efforts of the Fund and PR Solutions. To analyze their strategies, I examine how activists organized them- selves to talk to the media through a shared grammar for representing domestic vio- lence.

As I have argued elsewhere, “we often have to look in hard-to-find places to see successful media activism at work, such as in small publications, localized print cam- paigns, hyper-targeted media outlets, and emergent new media” (Rentschler, 2003, p. 531). Much of what constitutes activist discourse occurs out of public audibility and visibility, in the middle range register of organizational communication and activist labor. The middle range represents “the space where activism happens, a discursive register that operates on a different scale and in different sites than major political economic institutions — in the homes of female activists who lead local chapters of victim advocacy organizations, in the libraries of national victim advocacy organiza- tions, and on memorial websites for crime victims” (Rentschler, 2011, p. 12). In the middle range of activist discourse, we see how advocates develop the capacity to rep- resent domestic violence in the media, and through what specific strategies. We can also see how advocates make those strategies mobile.

To analyze the newsletter’s mobility, I examine the 97 surveys that recipients of Speaking Up completed for the ways they speak to their use and subsequent distribu- tion. The surveys reveal the reach of their fax network, the specific organizations that received the faxed newsletters, and the ways recipients reported using the newsletter in relation to other information sources. They also reinforce the informational and net- working role the faxed newsletter played in the movement, demonstrating a “cultural logic of networking” at work in the Fund’s practices of media production and dissem- ination (Juris, 2008, p. 11). While online media networks such as LISTSERVs create conditions in which movement organizations can efficiently disseminate activist rep- resentations today (see Atkinson & Cooley, 2010), facsimile networks enabled this narrative capacity in 1990s feminist activism.

The Fund’s and PR Solutions’ organizational documents evidence the decisions they made while also revealing some of the contentions within the movement around how to respond to issues of racism in advocacy against domestic violence by, for instance, posing counterframes to news media coverage of the Simpson trial in for- mats used explicitly to educate and train other advocates in how to use the media. Interviews with key advocates who were centrally involved in developing these media strategies supplement my analysis of the documentary materials, revealing how advo- cates constructed meaning around the significance, reach, and impact of their com- munication work. In 2001, I conducted phone interviews with the Acting Director of Communications at the Fund, Kelly Mitchell Clark (January 17, 2001), Director of Public Relations Karen Jeffreys of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic

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Violence, one of the few state coalitions that also integrated communication work into the mission of its organization, and Lisa Lederer of PR Solutions, who was pri- marily responsible for developing the media strategies and internal documentation that formed the backbone of the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s national com- munication network. While few quotes appear here from the interviews, they afforded crucial insight into how activists and their organizations understood their media work at the time.

Fax activism: PR and the feminist distributive imagination

The Family Violence Prevention Fund served a nationwide clientele of movement organizations, health care workers, educators, and others who actively work to end domestic violence. The Fund began in 1980 to address violence against women and children. Today Futures Without Violence conducts a broad range of programming around public policy, legal reform (including the development of domestic violence courts), child and family welfare, rights and social justice work aimed at immigrant women, health care, and workplace issues. Their funding comes from federal and state sources in addition to private foundations, corporations, and individual donors. With current investments worth over $17.9 million, the organization operates on a financial scale much greater than most organizations in the movement (Futures Without Vio- lence, 2011). With such funding, the organization has been able to support a range of media work on behalf of other organizations working against domestic violence. In the 1990s, the Fund hired public relations and public opinion firms to help develop their media strategies and the forms in which they would be distributed. PR professionals assisted them in organizing, developing, and studying their communication strate- gies, while public opinion specialists developed survey instruments to gauge how their media campaigns were being interpreted outside of the movement. Relation- ships between movement staff and communication professionals therefore powerfully shaped the infrastructures and content of the movement’s communication.

According to Thomas Streeter (2000, pp. 78, 81), advocacy groups increasingly “grow in the wedge between corporate and government public relations,” where advo- cates operate in a media sphere increasingly “circumscribed by the broader goal of cor- porate organization for which the arena was created.” For the Fund, public relations experts helped them translate their organizing goals into media discourse and facil- itated the movement of that discourse into ready-made media language that aimed to plug the Fund and other organizations into mainstream news debates. The firm Lieberman and Associates conducted public opinion surveys in order to track the success of the Fund’s first national campaign, There’s No Excuse for Domestic Vio- lence, developed in July 1994 after another public opinion firm EDK Associates ran 12 focus groups of different racial and gender make-up in five cities to test “popular understandings of domestic violence and its associated images and language” (Klein et al., 1997, p. xii). The latter study provided a public opinion baseline from which the Fund then advocated. The Lieberman and Associates’ surveys found that most

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respondents believed domestic violence crossed from a private into a public problem when abuse resulted in physical injury. The There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence campaign then targeted that threshold for action by focusing on physically violent behavior and domestic violence murders. The public opinion studies also found that the domestic violence movement needed to repeat the same message over several years in order to change the way domestic violence gets represented in the media, requiring the movement to build a sustainable narrative capacity (see Atkinson & Cooley, 2010). PR Solutions developed talking points and other media-oriented tactics for the Fund, testing media strategies and assisting them in publishing Speaking Up in collaboration with the newly created National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.

Speaking Up gave advocates the tools to build their narrative capacity. A typical issue included sections on media outreach, current legislative battles and policy issues, and high-profile court cases such as the O.J. Simpson trials, in addition to examples of how domestic violence was being covered in news and other broadcast media. The media outreach section advised advocates on how to cultivate rela- tionships with media personnel, respond to critics of the movement, address press requests around high-profile news events, and mobilize movement language and research data on domestic violence. Some issues were dedicated to advising advocates on how to launch a media campaign, such as the 10 February 1999 issue, which consisted of a 13-page special section explaining how to commence the Prevention Fund’s It’s Your Business educational campaign targeted to African American com- munities. The 1 October 1995 issue, released just 3 days prior to the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, prepared recipients for how to handle media inquiries by presenting talking points tailored to different outcomes to the trial. In addition to helping advocates shape media coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial across 26 issues of the newsletter that year, Speaking Up presented long-term media strategies for the organizational network with which it communicated and was understood to be a particularly powerful public relations tool by advocates themselves. As a respondent from the Battered Women’s Legal Advocacy Project succinctly stated in a 1995 survey of Speaking Up recipients, “Speaking to the media is scary — your publication diminishes the fear.” Another called it “the only up to date source that is reliable, convenient and national.” A respondent from Pennsylvania wrote in the margins of the survey that she would “especially use the talking points re: differing verdicts of the O.J. trial. We have already been getting calls.”

Every issue of Speaking Up’s media outreach column advised readers to “revise, localize and humanize these talking points.” Through it, the Prevention Fund, PR Solutions, and the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence communicated with a large network of advocates about how to speak with a unified voice.

People seem to understand that there is more strength if you collaborate. Don’t use a new slogan each year. [You] need to get the same message out so people hear it. [We] did lots of focus groups to find out what was best for the movement. Changing slogans every year is counterproductive. (Lisa Lederer, personal communication, January 31, 2001)

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Newsletter recipients singled out the media outreach column and the strategies it presented for responding to Simpson trial coverage and requests for interviews as especially significant. In addition to message development and responding to media queries, advocates reported using Speaking Up in their community education efforts, professional training, for information on domestic violence law in different jurisdic- tions, and for use in teaching. One recipient reported using it to make arguments against bail for batterers. Of the 97 completed surveys, 80% (78 respondents) reported using the newsletter’s talking points, 68% (66 respondents) used information from it to prepare for media interviews, and 37% (36 respondents) reported providing data from Speaking Up directly to journalists. On average, respondents reported being interviewed by the media between 5 and 15 times in the 6 months prior to the survey. While several reported doing less than five media interviews over the same period, others noted interviews in the range of 55 (the Domestic Violence Intervention Ser- vice), 62 (the Texas Council on Family Violence), and 70 (the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association).

The newsletter’s fax distribution also provided a sense of activist community that extended beyond the specific locations of shelters and coalition offices. Soler and Menard foresaw the role Speaking Up would come to play in building activist cohe- sion through organizational networks and the communities they served. Recipients of the newsletter did too. An advocate from Victim Services, Inc., in New York City described the newsletter as a “good way to share info … help join advocates into one community, one voice.” A respondent from the Empower Program in Bethesda, Maryland, stated, “This is a great service. There are so many disparate people and groups working on these issues that it is necessary to have something that links peo- ple together.” Another described how Speaking Up could “help us form media ‘bridges’ with each other,” while others spoke to the significance of receiving it by fax.

Such examples of activist networking rely on media technologies that are both “cultural material and material culture”: “not only artifacts in the material sense but also the means for creating, circulating and appropriating meaning” (Boczkowski & Lievrouw, 2008, p. 955). Via Speaking Up and its facsimile network, the Fund created an alternative discursive sphere where advocates could share strategies and infor- mation outside of mainstream channels of information exchange (see Atton, 2002; Downing, 1988; Herbst, 1994; see also Barker-Plummer, 1995; Garrison, 2000; Piep- meier, 2009). Through their use of facsimile, information sharing in the movement occurred quickly and relatively inexpensively for the cost of a short long-distance phone call.

While national organizations served as centralized information sources in the movement, the shelter system and local organizations were seen primarily as users and recipients of their information. The distribution of ideas, movement frames, and media strategy moved in a primarily uni-directional flow, from the Family Violence Prevention Fund to state and local organizations. Respondents reported that their main sources of information other than Speaking Up came from other national organizations: the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence; the National

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Resource Center on Domestic Violence; the National Network to End Domestic Abuse; and the National Organization for Women. Based on the uneven distribution of financing between national organizations and local shelters, national organizations had resources to cover the costs of professional expertise that the movement came to depend on over the 1990s in the development of its media infrastructure.

The flow of information nonetheless had its utility. Several respondents reported finding the delivery of Speaking Up by fax to be especially beneficial. In the only type- written survey response archived at Futures Without Violence, a respondent from the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence stated that the timeliness of the infor- mation and the ease with which it was disseminated by fax enabled her to keep up with current events with a limited staff. Two other respondents enthusiastically reported that they read the entire issue of the newsletter as soon as it arrived to their offices by fax, while another from the Center for Battered Women in Austin, Texas, stated that Speaking Up was the most valuable newsletter she had ever received on domestic violence; she commented further on the efficiency, brevity, and ease of reading it via fax. A few advocates also used their fax machines to reciprocate information exchange with the Family Violence Prevention Fund, reversing the otherwise one-way flow of communication. According to a 1995 call log compiled by Ridgeley DuPont of PR Solutions, during the time of the survey, on 5 October, one advocate from Pittsburgh sent a fax back to the office detailing her ideas for boycotting advertisers who were sponsoring a scheduled NBC postverdict program with O. J. Simpson; the show was cancelled.

Unlike most forms of networking available today in online formats and social media, the capacity for multidirectional flow in the fax network produced by the Fam- ily Violence Prevention Fund and PR Solutions was limited, as is the archival record of counterflow from movement organizations back to the Fund and PR Solutions. While the capacity for multidirectional flow via point-to-point fax machine contacts was possible, it was perhaps not a priority, particularly in light of the network’s main use of it as a means of distributing information from a central node to individuals, smaller organizations and the offices of state coalitions. And yet despite its mostly one-way flow of information, faxing appeared to function for movement advocates as a key network of communication via Speaking Up, a way of feeling connected to each other and sharing strategies not only “down the hierarchy” from the Preven- tion Fund to smaller organizations, but in a few cases back up the hierarchy as well. Some recipients talked back and others made demands for more and different kinds of information based on their specific advocacy needs, while other organizations used the network to report back key data, local stories, and new advocacy techniques they wanted to share.

A digital divide between organizations that did and did not have access to the Internet also structured the means and direction of communication flow within the movement against domestic violence along economic lines. Many organizations faced precarious financial situations compared to the resources to which the Family Violence Prevention Fund had access. When asked on the survey whether their

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organizations could pay for subscription costs for Speaking Up of over $25, most recipients reported that their organizations faced severe budget cuts and would need to rely on free distribution from others. At a time when e-mail was becoming a regular medium of workplace communication, most respondents reported that their organizations did not have, and could not afford, e-mail. Only 13 respondents reported having e-mail addresses, three of which were the offices of state domestic violence coalitions (the others were academics, doctors, lawyers, and the DC head- quarters of the National Organization for Women). One survey respondent indicated that their organization could not afford computers, while another, when prompted to fill out an e-mail address, responded “are you kidding me? Legal services is in big trouble $-wise.”

Such financial differences speak to the range of resource-poor and resource-rich organizations Speaking Up reached, which included state coalitions against domes- tic violence and women’s centers and shelters, on the one hand, and prosecutor’s and district attorney’s offices, lawyers, educators, and some physicians active in the move- ment, on the other. The Fund continued to use print newsletters and fax machines to connect with the majority of their subscriber organizations and many recipients still relied on Speaking Up’s free distribution. Sixty-eight out of 97 survey (70%) respon- dents reported photocopying and redistributing the newsletter through movement allies, including publications such as Ms., suggesting that the newsletter had exten- sive circulation beyond the fax network and that advocates saw great importance in making sure the information received broad and free distribution to others. By March 1996, however, the newsletter encouraged subscribers to sign up for e-mail distribu- tion in spite of many organization’s expressed financial and technological limitations.

Speaking up: Counterframes for representing race and domestic violence

While faxing served to network organizations through information sharing, the specific kinds of information being shared via Speaking Up focused on changing media representations of domestic violence around the O. J. Simpson murder trial and responding to increasing right-wing challenges. According to Lisa Lederer of PR Solutions, the movement needed to provide accurate information about domestic violence and reframe representations of the Simpson case as an issue of gender justice by “get[ting] our own messages out there.” Citing antifeminist backlash against the movement by right-wing identified women, Lederer emphasized the importance of being both a service provider and a media advocate.

Being quiet and doing your work at a program or shelter is not enough. You have to be an advocate as well. That’s difficult because the movement is consumed by providing services, and when you’re turning people away [from overcrowded shelters], you don’t have time to think about the media. (Lederer, personal communication, 31 January 2001)

“Advocates,” said Lederer, “are trained in services not sound bites.” Many work under “a siege mentality … the feeling that everyone is against us” (Lederer, 2001, personal

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communication). As Lederer reported, service providers found the need to implement media strategies on top of the day-to-day struggle to provide adequate services to sur- vivors of domestic abuse daunting. They lacked the necessary media training and were already overworked and felt attacked by critics. The answer for Lederer was to provide accessible, easy-to-learn media training to advocates through Speaking Up’s media outreach column to enable advocates to take advantage of increasing news attention to domestic violence.

The 1995 Simpson murder trial and 1997 civil trial provided special challenges and opportunities to feminist advocates working with the media. Television broadcasts of the Simpson trials created airtime that needed to be filled, and a serialized context of national debate in which advocates were regularly asked to contribute. According to a 1995 media audit by PR Solutions, there were only two stories on domestic violence on three national networks and 206 print stories on domestic violence between April and May of 1994. Between June and July 1994 just after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, domestic violence coverage increased to 54 network news stories and 454 print stories, and continued through the end of the murder trial (Klein et al., 1997, p. 95). During the trial, newspaper coverage of domestic violence focused on the individual victim and perpetrator rather than the larger social problem of which individual cases of domestic violence are a part (Maxwell, Huxford, Borum, & Hornik, 2000). Media attention also spread to magazines like Men’s Health, Self, People Magazine, and Emerge, where stories focused more directly on how to prevent domestic violence from a movement-sourced perspective.

Speaking Up targeted the news media for intervention due to the high profile of major newspapers and because the press drew on interpretative frameworks the Fund and PR Solutions sought to change. Against the news media’s individualization of the problem, the Fund developed mobilizing frameworks that aimed to “push … audi- ences to see problems not as individual but as collective” (Ryan, 1991, p. 71). Around the Simpson trial, Speaking Up’s media column presented counterframing strategies that targeted, among other things, the racialized portrayals of domestic violence that constituted part of the dominant media framing around the case (see Melucci, 1996, pp. 8 – 9; see also Benford & Snow, 2000). After the 1992 conviction of Mike Tyson for the rape of Desiree Washington, the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill sexual harassment case, and the 1991 Central Park jogger rape trial, “black men came to disproportionately symbolize the crystallization of feminist issues” (Chancer, 1998, p. 103; see also Bumiller, 2008, pp. 36 – 62; Kozol, 1995). As a racially saturated script of intimate partner violence, media coverage of the Simpson murder, investigation, and trial cast O. J. as both racial victim and racial villain. As Linda Williams (2001) argued, press attempts to make the case morally legible failed by exaggerating its char- acters’ racial legibility through O. J.’s black body and Nicole’s white femininity. By focusing on the interracial nature of their marriage and exaggerating their embodi- ments of racial and gender identification, press coverage of the Simpson case made it more difficult for feminist advocates to represent male violence in intimate relation- ships to the press. “The feminist movement stands to lose,” Lynn Chancer warned,

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“because … objecting to violence against women — whether in the form of rape, sex- ual harassment, or domestic violence — becomes inseparable from participating in … a decidedly racist history in the United States” (1998, p. 111).

Speaking Up challenged Simpson’s racialization by the media by focusing on how advocates could alternatively talk about race in the context of domestic violence. As Lederer explained, “The media advocacy project started around O. J., around race, and things that were just wrong. Correcting these wrong impressions [of domestic violence, and this case in particular] was an opportunity to get our own messages out there, to correct false impressions” (personal communication, 2001). Speaking Up’s media outreach column warned advocates that the “prominent issue of race in the case” would present them with particular “challenges and opportunities to explore the intersection of race and domestic violence” (see Speaking Up, “Race and the Simpson Case,” 1995, 17 March, p. 3). The 17 March 1995 column advised advocates to chal- lenge myths that suggested African American men were more likely to batter than White men, and to clearly assert that there was no place for racism in the crimi- nal justice system when they spoke with the media (p. 2). Several newsletter issues admonished advocates not to express opinions about Simpson’s guilt or innocence, or talk about specifics of the case in an attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Readers were also advised to remind reporters that Simpson was a convicted batterer in an effort to hold Simpson accountable while not publicly prejudging his guilt or inno- cence. Within this limited space of maneuver, advocates were directed to focus their efforts on educating the public about battering.

Speaking Up’s production and dissemination of counterframes to media coverage of the Simpson trial became a key element, and goal, of the network’s media infrastruc- ture. In preparing advocates for media requests on the 1-year anniversary of Nicole Simpson Brown and Ronald Goldman’s murders, the 10 June 1995 issue advised read- ers to consider several factors when commenting on the ongoing trial:

While we each may have an opinion about O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence publicly convicting him of the Nicole Brown/Ronald Goldman murders before the jury has reached a verdict is an unwise media strategy, a potentially divisive public [missing word] and a choice that can undermine an organization’s ability to reach out to all sectors of society. (p. 2)

The issue urged advocates to take advantage of the “virtual national teach-in on domestic violence” that national media coverage helped to create (p. 2). The 9 January 1995 issue provided a list of suggested media tips for talking to the press regarding a 13 January 1995 court hearing on whether to admit evidence of Simpson’s history of abuse against his former wife, including information on how to counter misinfor- mation from right-wing identified author Christina Hoff-Sommers, who called into question the prevalence of domestic violence as a social problem.

The 25 September, 1 October, and 2 October issues from 1995 prepared advocates for the media requests that would come with the Simpson murder trial verdict on 4 October. Talking points about his acquittal encouraged advocates to condemn the

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racism of police officers and the criminal justice system (see 1 October issue, pp. 3 – 4) as a way of reframing the problem’s construction around the coalition-building efforts of antiracist activism and feminist activism against gendered violence. A sample ques- tion and answer script illustrates how the Prevention Fund and PR Solutions prepared advocates to respond to the racial politics of the Simpson trial and verdict.

Question (for any verdict): Are you disheartened by the support for O. J. Simpson — who this trial demonstrated was a batterer — from the African American community and elsewhere?

Answer: We trust the African American community to sort out the complex issues in this case, and we know that the African American community takes domestic violence seriously. This was not a verdict about domestic violence, and there was a lot more than battering at issue in this case. The trial shined a spotlight on the racism that exists — and must be eradicated — in this nation. We unconditionally condemn racism among police officers and elsewhere in society. No one is well served by renegade and racist law enforcement officers who violate the law. (“Questions and Answers on the Simpson Trial,” 1995, 2 October, p. 4)

By referring to racism as an issue for police officers and others “elsewhere in soci- ety,” the newsletter authors portrayed racism as a problem located outside of the movement. To strengthen the deployment of this framing, Speaking Up advised read- ers to codeliver messages to the media with other community groups, particularly those represented by women of color, suggesting that those already in the position to speak against domestic violence within movement organizations were presumed to be white-identified women.

Speaking Up’s media strategies spoke to the Fund’s and PR Solutions’ concerns about how feminist discourse about domestic violence addressed racism. Esta Soler (2012) described these efforts in the context of the movement’s desires to coordinate their media outreach efforts in the 1990s.

Author: It seems like there’s been a lot of coordination in the movement against domestic violence in an attempt to get the same message out across different organizations.

ES: Yes, I think that’s right. We were very instrumental in doing that. I think what happened was we had Lisa Lederer [of PR Solutions] on board, and then the O. J. Simpson trial happened. We really wanted to make sure that during that period of time that we weren’t sending different messages out to the national media and also to the local media, and then driving it up to the national.

That’s when we created Speaking Up, which became the dominant way in which people actually got the message about how to talk to the media vis-à-vis this case. Because one of our biggest concerns was the civil rights movement and the women’s movement would be head to head on that as a black man who was …

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Author: Do you mean where antiracist and feminist work was being posed in conflict around O. J.?

ES: Yes, exactly. We didn’t want the media to go there and we were pretty successful. There were only a couple of people who wanted to push that story, for any number of reasons. If you look at the media coverage it really was about the L.A. police department, and the failure of the prosecutors. The defense did a much better job. He was somebody that everyone thought was guilty, except the police department was so racist that that jury wasn’t going to convict. I think that story was really clear. (personal communication, February 17, 2012).

Soler saw Speaking Up as a direct intervention into how media coverage came to shape the meaning of domestic violence around the O. J. Simpson trial. For Soler and Lederer, Speaking Up cultivated feminist discourse about race and gendered violence, although in the process of constructing this discourse they, inadvertently perhaps, avoided the problem of racism that existed within feminist activism. In seeking to wrest control over the public framing of domestic violence as a gendered issue through carefully managed talk of race in the Simpson case, the newsletter projected a vision of antiracist and feminist coalition that located racism in the criminal justice sys- tem and media coverage of Black masculinity, but presumed it did not exist within their own ranks. The newsletter, then, focused not only on changing the terms of debate about domestic violence around the Simpson trial, somewhat surreptitiously it also provided a way for advocates to collectively talk about race and Black men’s criminalization that placed responsibility for that racism on others outside of the network.

Legacies of 1990s feminist media activism to end domestic abuse

For the Family Violence Prevention Fund and PR Solutions, representing domestic violence was a practical problem: how to unify strategies across relatively autonomous organizations working to end domestic violence. Building the fax network enabled the Fund and PR Solutions to move ideas through a relatively centralized network model, in a primarily though not always uni-directional flow from them to their recipient organizations. Their focus on changing mainstream news media representa- tions organized the network around a centralized hub of media strategy development. If they had focused on the development of alternative feminist media production instead, perhaps they would have built a lateral model of networking more common in the antiglobalization and Indymedia movements, whose unified but autonomous structures have led to less centralized activist networks (see Best, 2006; Pickard, 2006a, 2006b). While online network mobilization has been identified with a par- ticipatory ideal of democratic engagement, according to Kirsty Best (2006, p. 220), “representational practices are one of the primary means of enacting the language wars central to contemporary democracy” (see also Stengrim, 2005). The feminist network remained centralized in the mid-1990s in order to deploy its particular

C. A. Rentschler Distributed Activism

model of representational practice, which aimed at intervening in mainstream news media depiction of domestic violence (see also Barker-Plummer, 1995).

While many activist organizations focus on producing alternative media, accord- ing to Liz Miller and Mary Smith (2012), they often fail to plan for how to distribute the media they make. The problem of distribution is often the most difficult one for social movement organizations to address as they represent their issues to the public (Atton, 2002, p. 46). Building the capacity to distribute activist communication strate- gies distinguished the Fund and PR Solutions from other sectors of the movement against domestic violence, where organizations focused more on local and state-based strategies for representing domestic violence to the mainstream press. To nationally network, the movement required a larger imagination for how to distribute activist communication capacity. The network model I have analyzed here aimed to move resources and expertise from one part of the network to another, placing issues of distribution front and center in Speaking Up and in advocates’ use of fax machines. As Jennifer Light (2006) argues, the use and history of facsimile are still largely unac- counted for in media studies.

My aim here has been to contribute to a better understanding of how activists modeled practices of distribution in their advocacy in the process of networking their media strategies, during a period when advocates’ understanding of the network did not presume the Internet was the technological infrastructure for activist commu- nication. As Atkinson and Cooley (2010) suggest, different models and shapes of communication networks exist within different kinds of social activism, online and offline. And as Lievrouw and Livingstone (2006) argue, organizations build differently shaped techno-cultural networks to conduct distributed modes of activism. Different models of distributive activism in the network, I suggest, emerge from what Char- lotte Ryan (1991) identifies as the relationship between organizational mission and the models of media activism activists develop. In the case of the centralized network built by the Family Violence Prevention and PR Solutions, the shape of the network served the interests of mobilizing the same information to multiple organizations with the goal of changing news media coverage, in ways they had not done before.

While many studies of social movement networking today focus on social media and web-based online networks, looking back to the recent past reveals how femi- nist advocates imagined and built a print-based fax network in ways that elevated the importance of distribution for their social activism and did not rely on the Internet. In fact, they circumvented the Internet because most organizations in the network could not afford computers and Internet service, even as they sought to utilize online forms of communication. This article provides an important case study for understanding the constitutive relationship between social movement organizations and networked activism in historical context, one that does not presume networking is technologi- cally or culturally synonymous with being online (Best, 2006, p. 227), and that empha- sizes process over product as we also see today in democratizing practices online (Stengrim, 2005, p. 283). Earlier print and fax-based infrastructures of feminist media activism show how advocacy groups and movements technologically network their

Distributed Activism C. A. Rentschler

activism as a context-specific practice that involves different media platforms, the different needs and abilities of their producers and users, and different models of dis- tribution. With the increasing importance of issues of distribution in social activism, the recent history of feminist distributive activism via facsimile-distributed newslet- ters in the movement against domestic violence might help us better understand the cultural and communicative dimensions of networked activism.

Acknowledgment

The research conducted for this project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Media@McGill. Alison Fyfe conducted research assistance and transcribed some of the interviews. Thanks are also due to several readers of the manuscript, including Fyfe, Lisa Nakamura, Shoshana Magnet, Christian Sandvig, and Jonathan Sterne, editor John Downing, and the two anony- mous reviewers for their especially constructive feedback.

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