Reading Need help on my assignment

Carrie Rentschler / 56. #safetytipsforladies 581

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Williams, Ray B. 2013. Do Facebook and Other Social Media Encourage Narcissism? New York: Sussex Publishers. Retrieved July 3, 2014 (http://www.psychologytoday.com/ blog/wired-success/ 201306/do-facebook-and-other-social- media-encourage-narcissism).

White, Robert W. 1989. “From Peaceful Protest to Gue- rilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” American Journal of Sociology 94(6): 1277–1302.

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READING 56

#safetytipsforladies: Feminist Twitter Takedowns of Victim Blaming

Carrie Rentschler

#safetytipsforladies: A hashtag about how tired women are of being told to do stupid, ineffective, unrealis- tic things to avoid being raped. (Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013a)

HILARY BOWMAN-SMART started #safteytips- forladies on March 21, 2013 out of exaspera- tion with dominant victim blaming anti-rape

advice-giving after reading yet another article advising women how to take a risk management approach to their own safety. As she explained on her blog,

I am absolutely sick to death of being told what to wear and what to do and how to be, as though any of that will somehow save me from being raped. It’s not a woman’s responsibility to prevent sexual assault. How about we teach men not to rape instead? ( Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013b, emphasis in original)

Before March 2013, Twitter hashtags like #SafteyTips- ForWomen shared traditional self-defense tips that

focused on potential victims’ (usually women’s) bodies and behaviors. While women can develop resistance strategies and knowledge of how to fight back against violence, most rape prevention work still places pri- mary responsibility for stopping rape on those who are targeted for this violence (see Rachel Hall 2004; Car- ine Mardorossian 2002; Martha McCaughey 1998; Carrie A. Rentschler 1999). Tweets using #safetytips- forladies called out the victim-blaming focus of most rape prevention, shifting attention from the issue of women staying safe, according to a source at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), to how to stop rape (“Stop Rape” 2013).

After Bowman-Smart’s tweet, others followed suit, humorously tweeting with the hashtag to mock the advice-giving tropes of traditional rape prevention

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582   Part IV: Social Change

a “symbolic rerouting” of anti-rape discourse, an “event marked by … a change of direction” in how we talk about and politicize sexual violence and its prevention (2013, 156). Today, #safetytipsforladies and other feminist hashtag generation around victim blaming responses to sexual violence, like #YesAll- Women (Samantha C. Thrift 2014), provide particu- larly visible examples of how social media can be used to redirect attention in feminist responses to sexual violence from campaigns rooted in the behavior of the survivor to those that target the actions of those who might rape.

Read as a collectivizing feminist response to rape culture, #safetytipsforladies reveals the femi- nist delight in exposing misogynist, victim-blaming ideas through humor, in ways that resonated around the Internet. Feminist blogs and the online press registered the impact and virality of the feminist hashtag through their “best of” and “favorites” lists. For Madeline Davies (2013) of Jezebel, “the women of Twitter took over something dumb and made it into something awesome.” In this way, the humor of #safteytipsforladies explains both its spread and the memetic remaking of feminist jokes that respond to victim blaming attitudes and slut-shaming rhet- oric (see Limor Shifman 2014, 94–96). In the pro- cess, #safetytipsforladies helped change the terms of feminist debate about sexual violence, drawing broader media attention to feminist rape prevention discourse through the derisive laughter that ener- gizes current feminisms (Susan Douglas 2010, 22). The hashtag activism of #safetytipsforladies illus- trates how humor nurtures a politics of joy and resil- ience in the face of rape culture and its apologists. Alongside the feminist feeling structures of rage and exasperation in the fight against the pernicious vic- tim blaming of so much rape prevention, feminist hashtag humor asserts the value of hijacking spaces of discussion and commentary online, articulating feminist critique in ways that also, importantly, make us laugh.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bing, Janet. 2007. “Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor in All-Fe- male Groups.” Humor 20 (4): 337–366.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013a. “Chronicling the Unex- ceptional.” Tumblr, March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. h t tp : / / pa s y l r ee . tumb l r. com/pos t /45816844116 / safetytipsforladies-a-hashtag-about-how-tired.

discourse. Tweets by Kayla @fangirl124 and FemArm- ChairRegime @femarmchairregime joked that women should don chain mail or three sweat suits, a ski mask, and sleeping bag to avoid rape, using hyperbolic exaggeration to reveal the irrational vic- tim-blaming logic behind the idea that what women wear makes them more susceptible to sexual assault. Bonnie Dean @BonDean deployed a humorous visual meme to suggest that women should leave their vagi- nas at home before they go out, referencing comic Wanda Sykes’ stand-up routine where she jokingly advised the same, while Lesley @jarvgirl suggested that women should have a 404 Error code tattooed around their bikini line. Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia), creator of the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen (2013), called out victim-blaming rape prevention by stating that most advice tells women to “stop being a woman in public. #safetytipsforladies” (March 25, 2013).

That women turned to Twitter to express their exasperation with rape prevention advice is quite revealing, for they simultaneously hijacked typical prevention discourse and repopulated Twitter chan- nels with a different kind of peer-to-peer advice giv- ing. Tweets using the hashtag were quickly generated and recirculated, demonstrating how humor fuels the dissemination of feminist ideas via social media (see Bing 2007). Noting the speed with which the hashtag caught on, feminist bloggers commented on the absurdity of most anti-rape advice directed at women, emphasizing the need to “shift the focus to the ones doing the raping instead” (HarlotOverdrive 2013). While tweets collectivized expressions of fem- inist “fed-upness” (Carrie A. Rentschler 2014), #safe- tytipsforladies also indexed suggestions for solving the problem of rape in ways others found useful (e.g., Kristina Chew 2013). Tweets such as Kate Wood’s @ gimmepanda combined satirical jabs at the individu- alizing, paranoia-producing “tips” format of anti-rape risk management advice while also criticizing the stranger danger paradigm of rape prevention. Rape Crisis Scotland’s humorous 2012 campaign “Top Ten Tips to End Rape,” re-tweeted with #safetytips- forladies, tells men how not to rape by, among other things, advising men to carry whistles to warn poten- tial victims. While presented jokingly, the campaign nonetheless models how to make potential rapists responsible for their behavior.

As film scholar Yuriko Furuhata argues, media hijacks like those we see in feminist hashtags represent

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Alicia Garza / 57. A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement 583

Kendall, Mikki. 2013. “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Color’s Issue with Digital Feminism.” The Guardian, August 14. Accessed August 11, 2014. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/ solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism.

Mardorossian, Carine. 2002. “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” Signs 27 (3): 743–775.

McCaughey, Martha. 1998. Real Knockouts: The Physical Fem- inism of Women’s Self-Defense. New York: New York Univer- sity Press.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 1999. “Women’s Self-Defense: Physical Education for Everyday Life.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 26 (1): 152–161.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 2014. “Rape Culture and the Feminist Politics of Social Media.” Girlhood Studies 7 (1): 65–82.

Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“‘stop rape’ dislodging ‘stay safe’ advice on social media.” 2013. CBC.ca Storify. Accessed October 16, 2014. https://storify.com/cbccommunity/both-sexes-boost- stop-rape-answer-to-stay-safe-adv.

Thrift, Samantha C. 2014. “#YesAllWomen as Feminist Meme Event.” Feminist Media Studies 14 (6): 1090–1092.

“TOP TEN TIPS TO END RAPE.” 2012. Glasgow: Rape Crisis Scotland.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013b. “#safteytipsforladies, or Why vic- tim-Blaming is Moronic.” Hilaroar (blog), March 21. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://hilaroar.tumblr.com/post/45957899437/ safetytipsforladies-or-why-victim-blaming-is.

Chew, Kristina. 2013. “Let’s be Honest: These are the 15 Best Safety Tips for Women.” The Care2 (blog), March 26. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://www.care2.com/causes/ best-15-safetytipsforladies-from-ladies-who-.

Davies, Madeline. 2013. “Women Take Over #safteytipsforladies and Make it 100 Times Better.” Jezebel (blog), March 25. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://jezebel.com/5992329/women- take-over-safetytipsforladies-and-make-it-100-times-better.

Douglas, Susan. 2010. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. New York: Times Books.

Furuhata, Yuriko. 2013. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant- Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hall, Rachel. 2004. “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management.” Hypatia 19 (3): 1–19.

HarlotOverdrive. 2013. “#safteytipsforladies (or why I want you to stop telling me how I can prevent being sexually assaulted).” Harlot Overdrive: Sex, Culture, Nonsense (blog), March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://harlotoverdrive. wordpress.com/2013/03/20/safetytipsforladies/.

READING 57

A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Alicia Garza

I CREATED #BLACKLIvESMATTER with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after seventeen-year-old

Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he commit- ted. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are system- atically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this soci- ety, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers, and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastruc- ture for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after eighteen-year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Offi- cer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people. We’ve connected people across the country working

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