Failure to Launch

Failure to Launch: An Augmented Thick Description of #womenswave

L. Corinne Jones: University of Central Florida

"Image Events," Social Media, and Publicity/Privacy

Overall, my field notes suggest that people felt excited and energized. However, participants directed these energies toward different issues. Many people brought their pets and young children. People also played mostly upbeat music for the parade, giving the march a celebratory atmosphere, though this may point to Tetreault's (2019) point that the media attention of the March portrayed white women as “joyfully resistant” while they portrayed women of color as “interrupting this resistance.”  This could also be attributed to the fact that the Women’s March latched onto the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. People affiliated themselves with the women’s march by holding protest signs, wearing pink, wearing pins, and gathering at the designated spot off of Concord Street before the parade.

Pictures carried important currency. As DeLuca (1999) notes, contemporary activist movements are performative and often rely on "image events"  However, image events are more than just a way to garner media attention; DeLuca claims that they are also a means by which activists can expand the limits of what people think is possible (12). Especially with groups who have historically been under threat for even existing, the act of visibility is a kind of “reterritorializing” or normalization of their existence (19).

Similarly, pictures were important at the march. At the park, there were designated places for people to take pictures with pink backgrounds. People also asked strangers to take pictures of them with their signs, a practice more common at tourist sites. Furthermore, while people might normally chafe at the idea of unsolicited strangers taking their picture, it was a common and accepted practice at the march. For instance, when I tried to take pictures of people’s signs to document them, people struck poses even though they did not know me. I saw similar interactions between others. Additionally, there was a tacit expectation that these photographs would be posted and circulated on social media. The designated picture sites at the park referenced social media and people talked about posting their photographs on Instagram. Finally, the act of including hashtags on their signs points to the assumption that these pictures would be circulated online in some capacity. These pictures became a kind of currency because they all had the potential to become “image events.”

In this atmosphere in which pictures held currency as they could become “image events,” it seemed as if the creators of the signs and posters wanted their posters and pictures to be public. However, recent scholarship on users’ perceptions of researchers use of public tweets indicates that people are not always aware of the fact that their public posts and pictures may be used for researchers, nor are they always comfortable with this usage (Fiesler & Proferes, 2018). So, while the social norms at the march allowed me to take pictures and even encouraged the circulation of these pictures, these participants may not have been aware of the possibility of their pictures being used for a research agenda, nor may they have consented. This tension led to my decision to omit many pictures of people and their signs as well as direct quotations, but it also points to the ways in which shifting perceptions of privacy online affect offline practices and it furthers a technofeminist approach that challenges the binary between online and offline spaces.

While much feminist scholarship points to how feminist researchers include their participants in their studies and reports (Blair & Tulley, 2007), a technofeminist approach that challenges binary distinctions between online and offline might also consider the images that they use in their publications and if their participants would consent to having their images circulated. This is especially true since digital compositions can be recomposed by other rhetors, who may have ill-intensions (Sheridan, Ridolfo & Michel, 2012, 82). By blurring the banner image in this webtext, and by omitting images of people who did not consent and whom I may have put at risk by publishing photographs of them, I tried to enact a feminist ethic of care toward my participants. As such, I enacted a technofeminist methodology in by choosing not only to document the march using the currency of images, but also to omit images in my curation and presentation.

Please click here to go back to the Qualitative Data page