Art History & Communication Studies

Young feminists use social media in order to respond to rape culture and to hold accountable the purveyors of its practices and ways of thinking when mainstream news media, police and school authorities do not. This article analyzes how social networks identified with young feminists take shape via social media responses to sexual violence, and how those networks are organized around the conceptual framework of rape culture. Drawing on the concept of response-ability, the article
analyzes how recent social media responses to rape culture evidence the affective and technocultural nature of current feminist network building and the ways this online criticism re-imagines the position of feminist witnesses to rape culture.

Feminist activists in the 1990s used fax machines to disseminate crucial resources for media activism against domestic violence.!is article analyzes how a particular feminist organization, with the help of a public relations agency, sought to transform media coverage of domestic violence by building a feminist media infrastructure that linked organizations across the United States through newsletter distribution, illuminating the constitutive relationship among social movement organizations, networking capabilities, and activist media process at that time. To evaluate this relationship, the study focuses on the specific media strategies feminists developed to respond to the high-profile O. J. Simpson gender violence case and its race-based dimensions, and to the anti-feminist backlash upsurge in the 1990s.

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.

In a recent self-defense class, a young woman spoke of her enthusiasm for learning self-defense. Unlike the rape prevention and awareness class she was required to take as a freshman at her university, self defense seemed to be more useful and increased her confidence in her ability to protect herself and other women. Rather than increasing women's sense of vulnerability and fear, self-defense gives women tools to manage this fear and ways of identifying uncomfortable and threatening situations. To alter women's perceptions of fear and victimization,
women need practical, physical training in their own power to fight back.

We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilis-ing 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.

This article examines the movement organizing and media activist work university students do to address sexual violence, the problem of faculty/student relationships, and the failures of some institutional response. It notes, in particular, how students make sexual violence public through the use of open letters; how they create anonymous and informal online reporting platforms for students to disclose sexual violence; and how they model practices of accountability and survivor-centred care. This article notes the essential work student activists do to address, and redress, the problem of sexual assault on university campuses, and how they make their work visible. Students bear a lot of the burden for addressing the problem of sexual assault and faculty sexual misconduct on our campuses; it is a burden many faculty bear too as those who support and advocate for this change. We see how this burden gets articulated in the stories many students are telling and sharing with each other via blogs and social media posts, and the work they do drafting policy and building cross-campus student movements. Contemporary student activism, I suggest , models what responsibility and accountability for sexual violence might look like. With students Ayesha Vemuri and Arianne Kent, I am conducting a research project that examines how student activists use media to intervene in campus cultures of sexual assault, and provide new models of redress and activist imaginations for violence-free campuses. We historicize contemporary feminist student activism against rape culture in the context of longer local genealogies of shared forms of student activist practice in Canada, doing what we call a " media history of student activism. "