Camilla Møhring Reestorff

Mediatised affective activism The activist imaginary and the topless body in the Femen movement

Focusing on the Tunisian Femen-activist Amina Tyler/Sboui and the topless ‘Free Amina protest’ carried out in Tunis, this article investigates the participatory practices and activist imaginary (Marcus, 2006: 6) of the Femen movement. Femen is conceptualized as an assemblage (Delanda, 2006; Latour, 2005) of protesting women and various human and non-human, mediatised (Hepp, 2013; Hjarvard, 2008; Lundby 2009) and localized actors. The article suggests that Femen’s protests undergo a dual process of mediatisation that aims to both generate a spreadable imaginary and enable communication between bodies by addressing affective registers. The mediatised ‘affective environment’ (Massumi, 2009) cues bodies and generates spreadability, yet it also produces disconnections. These disconnections might redistribute the ‘economy of recognizability’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013); however, the Femen headquarters in Kiev and Paris increasingly provide centralized interpretations of the movement and the localized actions causing the perception of Femen’s activist imaginary to be unfolded between the unrecognizable and the too recognizable body.

Introduction: unruly documentary artivism

Documentary filmmakers behaving in an unruly manner are nothing new. Since the earliest examples of nonfiction cinema, filmmakers have been accused of violating or misrepresenting their subjects, and the credibility of their films has often been called into question. In 1922, Robert J. Flaherty’s iconic silent film Nanook of the North purported to capture the everyday life of an Inuk man, Nanook, and his family; however, as it has been well documented, Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak and the woman, portrayed as his wife, was not his actual wife. Furthermore, Nanook was encouraged to use a harpoon, a by-then-abandoned weapon, instead of rifles for a dramatic scene, which was staged by Flaherty to create an ‘authentic’ record of the vanishing tradition of walrus hunting and which put Allakariallak’s life at risk. Another questionable scene depicted Nanook acting as if he was unfamiliar with modern technology such as gramophones, following the instructions of the filmmaker. While these were done in the name of salvage ethnography and its quest for authenticity, they also led to the misrepresentation of the documentary subjects and the Inuit culture of the day. Representations and misrepresentations are certainly core elements in debates about documentary ethics, and the notion of misrepresentation is often tied to an understanding of the film subjects as exploited, violated, or falsified by the filmmaker. In 1967, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies was, for instance, accused of violating the privacy of the patient–inmates at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a correctional institution in Massachusetts, for filming their frequent abuse by the authorities. It was questions of representation and misrepresentation – following nonfiction cinema’s long history of dubious engagements with documentary subjects – that led Alan Rosenthal (1988) to call for a documentary ethics, arguing that ethical considerations were an overlooked issue in the field. For Rosenthal ‘the question of ethics is at the root of any consideration of how a documentary works’ because filmmakers use and expose people’s lives. Therefore, the main question is ‘how the filmmaker should treat people in films so as to avoid exploiting them and causing them unnecessary suffering’ (Rosenthal 1988, 245). In other words, Rosenthal calls attention to the need for approaching documentary with a new sensibility – one that is marked by a concern and compassion for the filmed subjects rather than for ‘targets and self’ (Rosenthal 1988, 253).

Buying blood diamonds and altering global capitalism. Mads Brügger as unruly artivist in The Ambassador

This article argues that it is necessary to distinguish between different modalities of globalisation to ensure that we do not simply equate globalisation with global capitalism. Following this, this article conducts a study of the way in which Mads Brüggers documentary film The Ambassador challenges global inequality in relation to finance and mobility. This critique of global inequality is staged through a peculiar “unruly artivist” provocation. Mads Brügger fictionalises his character and over-identifies with the corrupt diplomat seeking to buy and trade blood diamonds. The film is unruly because it rejects any explicit ethical claims and norms of participation, thus reproducing the self-same patterns of inequality that it seeks to document. This article studies the film as an unruly documentary that applies satire, cartoon aesthetics, and culture jamming as its artivist strategy. This strategy is one of provocation. The provocation enters the mediatised public sphere, in which it simultaneously is condemned and works as a critique of the global mobility and financial inequality that it portrays. Camilla Møhring Reestorff is assistant professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at the University of Aarhus and honorary research fellow at The University of Melbournes School of Culture and Communication. She has done research on nationalism and the intertwining of art, activism, and politics in the Danish “culture war.” Her publications include work on contemporary cultural politics and political art, for instance in Globalizing Art: Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art (Thomsen and Ørjasæter 2011), and fictionality (Jacobsen, Kierkegaard, Kraglund, Nielsen, Stage and Reestorff 2013).

Instagrammable humanitarianism and the politics of guilt

ABSTRACT This article is based on a study of the collaboration between the Danish pop singer Medina and Act Alliance, the TV-program Medina and the Refugees—Access with Abdel and the harsh attacks on Medina and her humanitarian engagement on social media. The article follows three trajectories. Firstly, I suggest that Act Alliance uses celebrity advocacy in a mediatized campaign effort to mobilize young Instagrammers accustomed to peer-to-peer communication. Secondly, I suggest that Medina’s advocacy manifests as a particular form of politics of guilt, which on the one hand positions her as an “icon-body” that reproduces the classic distinction between active Westerners and passive sufferers and on the other hand challenges this distinction when her celebrity body becomes agentic. The politics of guilt is crucial because Medina and Act Alliance ask for recognition of a collective Scandinavian guilt, i.e. guilt about being on the receiving end of global inequality and consequently redemption through aid. Thirdly, I study the ways in which the politics of guilt is rejected when newspapers, bloggers and Facebook users cross-feed each other and affectively intensify a collective shaming of Medina. This kind of shaming, it is argued, is a way of rejecting guilt towards suffering others by shaming and denying Medina agency and insisting that she is merely an icon-body. Finally, while the article distinguished between politics of guilt and the shaming strategies directed at Medina, both work according to the logics of affective governmentality, seeking to govern who has agency and what the appropriate affects in the face of suffering might be. In this context, the analysis shows, shaming reflects a neoliberal and ethnocentric welfare-protectionism that conceals its own anti-refugee ideology.