Figure 4. Image showing buttons for marijuana legislation and Bernie Sanders sold at Lake Eola Park on Jan. 19, 2019.
Failure to Launch: An Augmented Thick Description of #womenswave
L. Corinne Jones: University of Central Florida
Fragmentation
The criticism that the march was fragmented is apparent in the co-occurring hashtags and signs. Co-occurring hashtags that appeared at the march on signs included #womensmarch, #mmiw (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), #MeToo, #trumpshutdown, and #believewomen. These co-occurring hashtags point to the overlapping, but also different movements that became attached (Edwards & Lang, 2018) to #womenswave: arguments about sexual assault, arguments about violence against marginalized populations, and political arguments. They may show how rhetors negotiated using #womenswave as it had become fragmented and ambiguous with so many attachments. In addition to these hashtags, other signs and booths at the march and rally indexed even more conversations about political parties, policy changes, and social/cultural issues.
Though not all of these signs or booths specifically used #womenswave, the fact that they were at an event that was organized around the hashtag speaks to their affiliation with it. Politically, signs called for impeachment proceedings against Trump, and others referenced democratic politicians including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders. In terms of policy, signs and merchandise referred to immigrant and refugee rights and the debate about a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Signs about policy also referred to birth control, marijuana legalization, the ERA, climate change, Medicaid expansion, and gun legislation.
Socially and culturally, some signs referenced a controversial Gillette razor ad, and others revolved around legalization of sex workers. While there were many signs explicitly referencing intersectionality, assumedly in response to the criticisms of the march, someone troublingly carried a sign promoting the YouTuber PewDiePie, who has been criticized for making anti-Semitic remarks in the past (Campbell, 2017).
The following images of some of the buttons sold at the end of the march demonstrate the diverse issues to which people attached #womenswave. This is important because it speaks to how the hashtag, like a meme, mutated and became attached to different causes (Vie, 2014), sometimes for the economic benefits of vendors. Though vendors’ usage of the hashtag for economic might be seen as capitalizing off of social issues, it also helps to spread awareness about those issues (DeArmas, Miller, Givoglu, Moran, & Vie, 2019).
Figure 5. Image showing buttons for legalizing abortion sold at Lake Eola Park on Jan. 19, 2019.
Figure 6. Image showing buttons for gun legislation sold at Lake Eola Park on Jan. 19, 2019.
Vie (2014) contends that memes (including hashtags) can create real-world change by building identifications, especially in kairotic moments. Vie’s example focuses on a specific meme (the Marriage Equality logo) for a specific policy issue, though it mutated. While there was a general consensus at the Women’s March that women needed to challenge the Trump administration and many women seemed to identify with a larger movement, the actual policies with which these signs and booths took issue demonstrate a plethora of perspectives and policy issues. One sign in particular demonstrates the diverse issues that people used #womenswave to index: The sign pointed to the Black Lives Matter movement, science, and immigration policy. Another woman held an umbrella with a different issue on each panel of the umbrella, indexing conversations about the government shutdown, women’s rights, and gun laws.
These different and sometimes contradictory issues espoused in the co-occurring hashtags, signs, and booths at the march are important. First, they point to Bonilla and Rosa’s intertextual linkages, but it is unclear to what exactly they are linking back, as these are all separate issues. Is the #womenswave all of these different issues, or is it just the one issue to which that particular sign is referring? In their case study on #orlandostrong, DeArmas, et al. (2019) point to a similar ambiguous “about-ness.” Though this drift in meaning can raise awareness about other issues (Vie, 2014), it also muddies the meaning of the original hashtag as well. DeArmas (2018) notes that the meanings of hashtags drift from the original content as others appropriate it for their own ends. However, he contends that the act of pairing hashtags helps audiences to sort through the “noise” and clarify what conversation a hashtag is indexing (95).
This drift in meaning also demonstrates how #womenswave does not provide a clear interpretive frame indexing what something is “really about”; protesters used it to be “really about” many issues. A woman may support the ERA, but she may support a border wall; therefore, using #womenswave will index one movement that her message is “really about” but it may also falsely point to another issue which her message is not “really about.” Furthermore, if hashtags are inventive when they build on doxic dualisms as Alford (2016) contends, the fact that these signs gloss over the possible tensions between these different issues points to how, #womenswave (without co-occurring hashtags) tries to bring together and unify these multiple perspectives and ideas, rather than build productively build on their dualistic tensions. So, while memes and hashtags may cause real-world change when they refer to specific policy issues (Vie, 2014), without specific policy issues at the center of the hashtag, the “what” of the hashtag is unclear.
To further complicate matters, even with clear policy issues, as was the case in Vie’s study, the meaning of the hashtag can drift (DeArmas, 2018; Vie, 2014), as different people want the hashtag to spur different actions (beyond marching). Though #womenswave and #womensmarch clearly brought together a public of women who identified with several larger issues and who were outraged about something, they were not all outraged by the same thing; rather there were multiple fragmented publics marching for different issues.
DeLuca (1999) suggests that contemporary activist movements eschew traditional organizational structures and traditional legislative and material goals in favor of creating identities and spreading worldviews (9). Similarly, in her recent work on the use of Twitter in activist movements, Zeynep Tufekci (2017) contends that the fragmented nature of contemporary movements may benefit them because they can spread messages quickly through new digital technologies. However, Tufekci also notes that lack of organizational structures may also prove to be a detriment to activist movements as well. She contends activists’ lack of central leadership compromises the movement’s ability to negotiate both with external adversaries and between factions within the movement. She claims that the lack of organization “fails to signal an organizing capacity powerful enough to threaten those in authority” (71).