Failure to Launch: An Augmented Thick Description of #womenswave
L. Corinne Jones: University of Central Florida
Condensed Argumets and Policy Changes
#womenswave also does not provide a clear condensed argument as #handsupdontshoot or #Wearetrayvonmartin did (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). Though the Women’s March Florida’s website specifically calls for legislative action on dignity for incarcerated women, discrimination in labor and employment, a ban on six-week abortion rules, a ban on assault rifles, a maternal mortality prevention task force, and restrictions on youth solitary confinement (Women’s March Florida, 2019) and the national organization also has specific legislative actions calls, #womenswave alone does not directly address any of these issues or make a clear argument about them.
Furthermore, since the march, several of these issues have faced legislative challenges both in Florida and in other parts of the country, as Ron DeSantis signed a bill allowing Florida teachers to carry guns in schools (Farrington, 2019) and Georgia passed a six-week abortion bill (Nadler & Mansoor, 2019). Bonilla ad Rosa (2015) claimed that successful hashtags condense arguments (7-8), but it is unclear which argument or issue #womenswave is condensing. What is a women’s wave? What kind of change does it bring? This lack of a center or grounding content to #womenswave aligns with Alford's (2016) criticism of #bringbackourgirls, which “merely [sought] circulation through repetition,” rather than working to productively challenge existing doxic ideas as “flat.” #womenswave circulated, but it lacked content.
As I outline in the case study section of this webtext, this lack of content and lack of a condensed argument might indicate what Bowers et al. (2010) would call low “rhetorical sophistication.” They claim that rhetorical sophistication is “the extent to which its leadership is aware of and able to apply general rhetorical principles in communicating about the group and its goals” (168). Bowers et al. (2010) claim that agitative groups with low levels of rhetorical sophistication have less leverage against control groups (169-171). Though the different sub-factions within the Women’s March may have met “identity-making” goals (DeLuca, 1999, 9), they did little to enact real-world changes through policy.
However, Bowers et al. (2010) also note that not all behavior is instrumental; that is, not all behavior succeeds in producing social change (2). On the opposite end of the spectrum is “expressive behavior” (2) which does not enact social change. Bowers et al. (2010) contend that purely expressive behavior is “rare” though (2).
As such, I imagine a scale of activist behaviors as a way to conceptualize the real-world effects of hashtag activist campaigns. On one side of the scale would be instrumental hashtags that enact real-world produce real-world social change and policy changes. On the other side of the scale would be expressive hashtags, which would enact less immediate real-world social change, but could express someone’s affiliation with a group or idea. These expressive hashtags would not be completely futile or “slacktivism” though (Vie, 2014), as sharing a slogan or hashtag is itself a kind of writing (Dieterle, Edwards, & Martin, 2019).
Please see my generic scale (Figure 7) and where I would place #womenswave on that scale (Figure 8) below. Of note though, as a binary scale, this image is far from nuanced enough and other scholars could expand the scale into multiple rhizomatic directions.
Figure 7. Image showing a scale of instrumental to expressive hashtags
Figure 8. Image showing where #womenswave falls on the scale of instrumental to expressive hashtags.