Carrie A. Rentschler

#Safetytipsforladies: Feminist Twitter Takedowns of Victim Blaming

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

Doing feminism in the network: Networked laughter and the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme

We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilising the derisive laughter that energises current feminisms. Using the 2012 case of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, we argue that feminist memes create online spaces of consciousness raising and community building. The timeliness, humorous affect and media techné of meme propagators become significant infrastructures for feminist critique, what we term ‘doing feminism in the network’. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, as others argue, we illustrate how the networking and distribution capacities of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and the online shopping site Amazon.com also cultivate new modes of feminist cultural critique and models of political agency for practising feminism through meme production and propagation.

Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S.

The U.S. victims’ rights movement has transformed the way that violent crime is understood and represented in the United States. It has expanded the concept of victimhood to include family members and others close to direct victims, and it has argued that these secondary victims may be further traumatized through their encounters with insensitive journalists and the cold, impersonal nature of the criminal justice system. This concept of extended victimization has come to dominate representations of crime and the American criminal justice system. In Second Wounds , Carrie A. Rentschler examines how the victims’ rights movement brought about such a marked shift in how Americans define and portray crime. Analyzing the movement’s effective mobilization of activist networks and its implementation of media strategies, she interprets texts such as press kits, online victim memorials, and training materials for victims’ advocates and journalists. Rentschler also provides a genealogy of the victims’ rights movement from its emergence in the 1960s into the twenty-first century. She explains that while a “get tough on crime” outlook dominates the movement, the concept of secondary victimization has been invoked by activists across the political spectrum, including anti–death penalty advocates, who contend that the families of death-row inmates are also secondary victims of violent crime and the criminal justice system.

States of Insecurity and the Gendered Politics of Fear

“Terrorism” has become a catchall term for the enemy who challenges U.S. imperialism. Viewed by the likes of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, terrorism is the activity of terrorists; and terrorists are not us, nor are they like us—terrorists are those who hate “our” freedom/democracy, modernity/secularism, and hard-won success. “Terrorism” has now fully replaced communism as the globe’s scourge. “Our” enemies, the enemies of democracy and freedom, exist everywhere and anywhere. Yet much of the rest of the world thinks that President Bush is more of a threat to the world than Saddam Hussein. (Eisenstein 2004, 8)

From Danger to Trauma

According to recent reports on violence committed against journalists, journalism is a dangerous, fear-inspiring job. In the wake of Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and murder in January 2002 and the less-publicized but equally brutal killings of journalists in Bangladesh, the Philippines, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other locales around the world, the international community of foreign correspondents has become particularly concerned for its safety in zones of conflict. Yet, outside of war zones, and in U.S. newsrooms in particular, reporters and news photographers who cover domestic beats and work on general assignment are also being represented, through risks to their safety and mental health on the job, in ways that depict what John Durham Peters calls ‘the weighty baggage of witnessing’: the ontological and historical weight of paying witness to events that ‘makes explicit the pervasive link between witnessing and suffering’ and ‘what it means to watch, to narrate or to be present at an event’ (2001, pp. 708–9).

Doing feminism: Event, archive, techné

Contemporary feminisms in the Western world are defined more and more by what is declared and registers as feminist across media platforms, especially those on social media: from Twitter hashtag campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported (Canada), #EndSexism (UK) and #Solidarityisforwhitewomen (US), to Tumblrs such as ‘Feminist Ryan Gosling’. The spread of feminist memes, such as 2012’s ‘Binders Full of Women’, and Beyoncé performing in front of the giant neon ‘FEMINISM’ sign during the television broadcast of the US Video Music Awards in 2014, are ‘literally putting the spotlight on feminism’ (Little, 2014). Examples such as these demonstrate how closely linked the ideas of ‘doing feminism’ and ‘making media’ are, particularly when surrounded by feminist discursive publics whose critical commentary foments lively debates about media and feminism. Feminist authors, bloggers and Tweeters like Laurie Penny (2014) and Roxane Gay (2014), among many others, not only contribute to these debates, they help define and produce them. They provide poignant feminist responses to current events and feminist issues; they model critical forms of interpretation; they share information; and in the process, they often make us laugh. Penny and Gay have published highly acclaimed books about the current state of feminism and their own personal relationships to the movement, marking a key juncture in which feminist bloggers and Tweeters have become centrally recognised voices of contemporary feminism. In the words of Feministing’s Samhita Mukhopadhyay, ‘feminist blogs are the consciousness raising groups of our generation’ (see Johnson, 2013; Loza, 2014). Back in 2007, Tracy Kennedy correlated the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s American women’s movement – where women ‘joined collectively to talk about their experiences of sexism and oppression under a system that

Risky Assignments: Sexing “security” in hostile environment reporting

This article analyzes the post-feminist, neo-liberal construction of “risk” and “security” in a recent set of post-9/11 training manuals for non-embedded journalists who prepare to work in what security texts call “hostile environments.” It investigates the ways these training documents translate ideas about risk and reporting, through the language of choice, into sexed and gendered prescriptive cues about securing professional comportment in the field. While the documents present the potential risks of hostile environments in terms of a kind of “sexual equity of risk,” this article argues that security training texts re-sex journalism through photographs and diagrams which put the man back into the war zone.

An Urban Physiognomy of the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder

This article analyzes how news photographs and textual accounts of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder and its 38 witnesses formulated the problem of crime in the city as one of failed witnessing in urban conditions. It analyzes the press images of Austin Street in Kew Gardens and a police portrait of the victim as facialized surfaces that journalists and editors used to interpret the failure of witnesses who were said to have watched or heard Winston Moseley’s assaults on Genovese. In years since, the number of witnesses has been called into question, as has the claim that Genovese’s neighbors did not call the police or offer direct assistance. In reviewing a case made famous through the construction of its 38 witnesses, the author shows how crime scene photography and victim portraiture played their part in conjuring the witnesses and their presumed inaction. Through these representations, this famous story of failed witnessing created an urban physiognomy of the Genovese murder whose truths lie not in the veracity of the witnesses themselves but in the ability of news and police photography to spectate the crime scene and murder victim for readers.

Bystander intervention, feminist hashtag activism, and the anti-carceral politics of care

ABSTRACT The bystander is increasingly being touted as a key agent of change for addressing racialised and gendered violence and street harassment. This essay analyses practices of bystander intervention in Black and indigenous feminist activism against racialised and gendered street harassment that are explicitly anti-carceral and transformative in their approach to achieving justice. I argue that the social media tactics of a transformative justice-informed framework on bystander intervention constitute a particular kind of networked feminist witnessing centred by the experiences of women of colour and a model of justice that challenges police violence and incarceration. Through an analysis of an assemblage of hashtags, Storified narrations of hashtag conversations about bystander intervention, and organised feminist campaigns that centre women of colour perspectives on street harassment and bystander intervention, the social media tactics analysed here model social intervention into racial and gender violence via the transformation of feeling bystanders into media witnesses to gender justice.

Gender and the Political: Deconstructing the Female Terrorist

Recent years have seen increasing interest in new feminist histories of second wave US feminism. Amanda Thirds Gender and the Political offers a different kind of history of the second wave, one t...