Platform Feminism: Feminist Protest Space and the Politics of Spatial Organization

Rianka Singh

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information University of Toronto

Platform Feminism: Feminist Protest Space and the Politics of Spatial Organization

Rianka Singh

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Information University of Toronto

2020 Abstract Platform Feminism: Feminist Protest Space and the Politics of Spatial Organization examines the relationship between platforms and feminist politics. This dissertation proposes a new feminist media theory of the platform that positions the platform as a media object that elevates and amplifies some voices over others and renders marginal resistance tactics illegible. This dissertation develops the term “Platform Feminism” to describe an emerging view of digital platforms as always-already politically useful media for feminist empowerment. I argue that

Platform Feminism has come to structure and dominate popular imaginaries of what a feminist politics is. In the same vein, the contemporary focus on digital platforms within media studies negates attention to the strategies of care, safety and survival that feminists who resist on the margins employ in the digital age. If we take seriously the imperative to survive rather than an overbearing commitment to speak up, then the platform’s role in feminism is revealed as limited in scope and potential. Through a mixed methodological approach via interviews with feminist activists, critical discourse analysis of platform protest materials, critical discourse analysis of news coverage and popular cultural responses to transnational feminist protests and participant observation within sites of feminist protest in Toronto, this dissertation argues that the platform is a media object that is over-determined in its political utility for Feminist politics and action.

Dedication

For my grandparents, Om and Nirmal Joshi.

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Acknowledgments

I’ve had a running “Acknowledgements” document on my computer for the past year. I open it periodically when I’m stuck on other parts of my dissertation to add sentences and the names of the people who have helped me get through this PhD (you should see the B-side list of people who have wronged me). It’s become my favourite form of procrastination and often seeing the names of people rooting for me has been a source of inspiration to keep writing.

Sarah Sharma supervised my graduate work and I could not have dreamed of a better mentor to guide me through doing a PhD. Sarah taught me where and how to look. My work and ideas have benefited so much from being in close proximity to Sarah’s brilliant mind- thank you for allowing me to write across from and alongside you. So much time and care were put into my ‘student training,’ not just as a researcher but in how to navigate all of other parts of academia and these are lessons that will stick with me forever. Sarah became the director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology around the same time that we began working together and this dissertation is also very much shaped by the amazing scholars that she has brought to the centre over the past four years. Thank you, Sarah, for keeping me laughing and making these past 5 years so much fun. My scrapbook is overflowing.

Leslie Regan Shade served on my committee and kept her office door across the hall open for me to wander into over the past 5 years. I owe so much of my growth as a scholar to Leslie and her ability to ask me tough questions I didn’t want to answer. Alessandro Delfanti has created a community here for his students that I feel very lucky to have been a part of. His generosity, honest feedback, and moral compass have shaped my scholarship. Carrie Rentschler’s feedback and insightful questions of this dissertation were incredibly generative and my work will be better for it. Thank you to David Nieborg too, who participated in my defense and challenged me to expand and develop this project.

My dissertation would not have been possible without the participation of the activists and scholars I interviewed for this project. Michèle Pearson Clarke, OmiSoore H. Dryden, Sarah Jama, Cayden Mak, Katherine McKittrick, Ladan Siad, and a founding member of the Medina Mentorship Collective, all generously shared their time, ideas and stories with me. I am so inspired by their commitment to care for their communities and make the world more livable.

I have learned so much from my academic mentors and friends at the University of Toronto. Nicole Cohen, Beth Coleman, TL Cowan, Tero Karppi, Patrick Keilty, Heather MacNeil, Rhonda McEwen, Cait McKinney, Michelle Murphy, Jeremy Packer, Jasmine Rault and Brian Cantwell Smith have all offered guidance and mentorship at difference stages of this program. This dissertation was also shaped by the conversations I have had on patios, in between karaoke songs, and during the half time of basketball games in busy bars with, Réka Gál, Jack Jamieson, Chaya Litvack, Emily Maemura, Curtis McCord, Karen Dewart McEwen, Katie MacKinnon, Michel Mersereau, Rebecca Noone, Hannah Turner, Ashley Scarlett, Dawn Walker, Hilary Walker and Chris Young. My friend and classmate Nes Yuille began the program with me and I have kept her memory with me along the way.

My friends and extended family have provided laughter and light every step of the way. Thank you to Korey Anderson, Peggy Arrowsmith, Kyla Blackie, Rachel Hicks, Nick Klassen, Julia Lord, Erin McDonald, Cynthia Minh, Sasha Odesse, Victoria Patterson, Ken Pockele, Jaclyn Quinn, John Roman, Jessie Sawyers, Dom Sorbara, Lewis Silvestri, Jyoti Suri, Rob Ungard, Kristin Valois and Matt Zic for the love and nourishment that has sustained me over the past 5 years. Bridget Sinclair, Marlon Merraro, Georgia Sinclair-Merraro and Isadora Sinclair-Merraro have provided me with the encouragement, workouts, and hot plantain that have fueled this dissertation. Becsy Lapp, Hetty Lapp, Lorelei Lapp, and Peter Lapp have been incredibly supportive of this work, have listened to me talk about platforms for far too long, have carefully read my first drafts and came into my life at exactly the right time.

To my mom Anju, my dad Gurmit and my sisters/best buds Miekela and Sashaina, thank you for all of the forms of care and support you have provided me that have made finishing a PhD possible. Thanks for the family dinners and for listening to me mutter about the internet. Thanks for taking panicked phone calls and for knowing when it was time for hugs and when it was time for a kick in the pants. Thanks for not being too (perceptibly) disturbed when I told you I was going to dedicate the next five years of my life to becoming Doctor of Information. I am so lucky, and I love all of you so much.

Finally, thank you to my iSchool sweetheart and the best thing I found at the University of Toronto, Jessica Lapp. It has been such a gift to do this together and I am so grateful for your brilliant mind, your careful eyes, and your unfathomable patience. We’ve been through head bonks, heart burns, torn up drafts, bad ideas and good ideas and have come out on the other side. As the prophet Rihanna would say, “we found love in a hopeless place.”

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... IV

Table Of Contents ...... IV

List Of Figures ...... VIII

List Of Appendices ...... IX

Chapter 1- Introduction: The Women’s March, #Metoo and Defining Platform Feminism ...... 1

Defining Platforms ...... 6

Argument 1: A Politics Of Elevation Is Mediated By Platforms...... 12

Argument 2: Platforms Mediate Visibility ...... 18

Argument 3: We Need To Reconsider Feminist Activism in the Digital Age ...... 24

Research Design And Methodology ...... 28

Organization Of The Dissertation ...... 36

Chapter 2-Feminism’s Other Platforms ...... 38

Soapboxes: Makeshift Pulpits ...... 42

Platform Shoes: Fall, Pause Rise ...... 47

Witch Hunts And Gallows ...... 52

Auction Blocks...... 54

Conclusion: Lessons From Feminism’s Other Platforms ...... 57

Chapter 3- Convening On The Margins: Spatial Strategies And Platform Logics ...... 61

Spatial Strategies ...... 64

Platform Feminism and It’s Roving Centre ...... 66

Marginal Strategy 1: Battle Dancing ...... 72

Marginal Strategy 2: Making a Scene ...... 82

Conclusion ...... 89

Chapter 4 Platform Care: Disconnection vs. Inclination ...... 93 vi

Disconnection and Digital Tactics for Masculinist Resistance ...... 97

Inclination ...... 103

Ghost Ships And Amazon Wish Lists: An Interview With Cayden Mak...... 105

“I Don’t Give A Shit About Viola Desmond On The 10-Dollar Bill” And How To Not Care: An Interview With Omisoore Dryden...... 110

Platforms, Sidewalks, Snow, Survival: An Interview With Sarah Jama ...... 115

Conclusion: Platform Care ...... 117

Chapter 5- Toward A Feminist Platform Studies ...... 119

Platforms Defined, Platform Studies Defined ...... 123

Stepping Down: Platforms In Feminist Media Studies...... 135

Conclusion: Feminist Media Studies Meets Platform Studies ...... 141

Chapter 6- Feminist Platform Studies and The Pandemic ...... 145

Proximity, The Politics Of Not Showing Up and Platform Care-Mongering...... 148

Areas Of Future Study ...... 154

References ...... 157

Appendix A: Participant Bios ...... 180

Appendix B: Sample Interview Questions ...... 181

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Zach Blas, “Fag Face” from Facial Weaponization Suite, 2012. Source: Zach Blas.

Figure 2 Eva Peron addresses Argentinian citizens nation from her balcony, 1952. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3 Man on Milk Crate at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, 1993. Source: Philip Wolmuth.

Figure 4 The Vivienne Westwood platform shoes that Campbell wore for Paris Fashion Week, 1993. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 5 A Slave Auction in Virginia. February 27, 1856. Illustrated London News. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 6 Angela Peoples at the Women’s March on Washington. Source: Kevin Banatte.

Figure 7 A Map of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington route.

Figure 8 A Map of the 2017 New York Women’s March route.

Figure 9 A Map of the 2017 Toronto Women’s March route.

Figure 10 Stevante Clark, brother of Stephon Clark, disrupts a special city council meeting at Sacramento City Hall on March 27, 2018 in Sacramento, California. Source: Justin Sullivan.

Figure 11 Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, circa 1503. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 12 Still image from An Ode To, a performance by Solange Knowles at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. Source: Cary Huws.

Figure 13 A poster advertising a mutual aid network attached to a phone pole in Toronto’s West end. Photo by author.

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List of Appendices

Appendix A Participant Biographies

Appendix B Sample Interview Question

Chapter 1- Introduction: The Women’s March, #MeToo and Defining Platform Feminism

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016, the grand-counter narrative to his presidency seemed to come predominantly from North American feminists. The initial outcry from many women in the US, most of whom were white, was over a disbelief that fellow white woman Hillary Clinton had lost the election. New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor reported on the broken-hearted women across America whose premature celebration parties came to an abrupt end on November 8. Kantor wrote about the women already dressed in red pantsuits ready to celebrate, those who gathered around the grave of Susan B. Anthony, the woman who helped women win the right to vote in the US, and the growing crowds of Hillary supporters who waited for confirmation that Clinton would be president at the corner of President and Clinton streets in Brooklyn. These premature celebrators were “left in a state of shock,” when Clinton lost the election (Kantor November 9, 2016). The early outrage over Clinton’s monumental loss very quickly withered and morphed into a more generalized and arguably a more politically rousing anti-Trump sentiment centred on his racist, misogynist, classist, and ableist politics. One of the products of American feminists’ anger with Trump was the organizing of a Women’s March on Washington. On social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, announcements about a mass demonstration, first in Washington and then in other major cities across North America and beyond, began to spread. As a graduate student researching digital feminist activism at this time, I was thrilled at the news coverage, social media posts and text conversations with friends. We had plans to meet for the Toronto march. It was exciting to imagine that the thousands of people who clicked “Attending” on the Facebook events for these marches might actually convene and rally against what, at the time, felt like one of the biggest visible blows to progress for women, queers and people of colour in my lifetime.

And people did show up en masse on January 17, 2017. The Women’s March became one of the largest and most widespread feminist protests in history. In a tally carried out by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressmen, it was estimated that roughly three million Americans attended rallies across the country (Chenoweth and Pressman 2017). It was estimated that 60 000 people were at the Toronto march that I attended (Vella 2017). In the days following

1 2 the marches, images circulated of entire planes filled with women on their way to Washington, donning pink pussy hats, and of the witty signs that people brought with them to the marches. There were also the videos of celebrities who mounted the various stages and took to microphones at the rallies. Gloria Steinem, Amy Schumer, Janelle Monae and Ashley Judd were some of the more popular women affectionately referred to as “mothers of the march” (Cetin 2017). These apparent movement mothers, raised above the crowd so that they were literally staged as the voices of feminism, became the loudest, and sometimes the only voices heard from these historical marches.

Months later, in October 2017, allegations against Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein for his repeated sexual assault on the women who worked for him began to surface. These charges spurred the now infamous hashtag #MeToo to go viral. It was American actress Alyssa Milano who, upon learning of Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults, posted a tweet using the hashtag #MeToo and encouraged other women to share their stories of sexual assault that helped the hashtag spread (Sayej 2017). #TimesUp, also popularized by Hollywood actresses, followed #MeToo as a way to call out Hollywood’s misogynist practices. Feminist Media Studies scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018a) refers to these viral moments of feminism as “popular feminism.” Popular feminism describes a highly visible politics that has come to mark feminist political action over the last decade. Banet-Weiser recognizes that while popular feminism does the work to make visible struggles that have historically been hard to see, it is also limiting because it often overlooks the systemic oppression in favour of a more digestible politics. Banet-Weiser locates the complicated relationship between visibility and popular feminism when she writes:

while the rising visibility of safely affirmational feminism is in many ways exhilarating, it is not an unalloyed good. It often eclipses, in the name of individual cases of abuse, the structural critique academic feminists have been making for years. The mainstreaming of feminism may, in fact, limit its impact, as if seeing or purchasing feminism and contributing to its visibility is the same thing as doing something (2018a).

The platform has appeared at the centre of these sites of popular feminism again and again. In these examples the platform, whether it be a stage or a social media platform, is inextricably tied to contemporary feminist action. In this dissertation, I argue that we might understand these aforementioned demonstrations and other feminist hashtag campaigns, as well as the Women’s Marches as part of a larger movement that I call Platform Feminism. Platform Feminism is a term I offer to capture a feminist politics that depends on the material logic of the platform. The

3 platform is a medium that elevates and amplifies some voices and renders particular ways of resisting legible. This too often translates into the elevating of only normative modes of resisting – only those that rely on the platform tend to register as resistance in the first place. Platform Feminism is built on an emerging view of platforms as politically useful media for feminist empowerment. My focus in this dissertation is to locate platforms as media that have come to structure and dominate popular imaginaries of what a feminist politics is. I argue, however, that the platform’s relationship to feminism is overdetermined in its political utility and especially in its usefulness for intersectional feminist politics. My central argument in this dissertation is that feminist strategizing needs to go beyond the platform. It must go under it, behind it and recognize the organizing labour, politics of social reproduction, the intertwining and often at odds demands of care and visibility, and the uneven desires for legibility that are obscured by the actual medium of the platform.

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In that article, Crenshaw argues that Black women are are “sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” (1989, 140). Intersectionality can therefore be defined as a framework that takes into account intersecting social categories, such as race, gender, sexuality, class that together contribute to discrimination and disadvantage. Crenshaw goes on write that because “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (1989, 140). In the context of Platform Feminism, recognizing the intersectional means contending with the different biopolitical contexts that produce non-normative relationships to mobility, temporality and space too (Foucault 2010 [1978]; Sharma 2011). Sarah Sharma shows this non-normative relationship to time when she writes that, “Sleep, rest, bathroom breaks, rushing, staying awake, waiting, and waiting on are differentially experienced depending on where one fits within the biopolitical economy of time” (2011, 441). Sharma then argues that “the experience of time becomes increasingly uneven and complicated by a range of social differences. Everywhere bodies are differently trying to keep up. Recalibration is the temporal component of biopower” (2011, 442). Platform Feminism

4 disguises how resistance and protest are often intertwined in providing sustenance to the communities in question. Many people who live on the margins resist out of survival.

For instance, in October 2019, hundreds of people met outside of a small branch of the Toronto Public Library to protest the library’s decision to allow Megan Murphy, a trans exclusionary radical feminist to host an event at the branch. Murphy’s stance on trans people was put on display when in 2016 she appeared in front of the Canadian senate to oppose a law that added gender identity and expression to the federal list of prohibited grounds of discrimination (Hoard 2019). When members of Toronto’s LGBTQ community and their allies gathered to protest Murphy and the Toronto Public Library, they did so because their right to exist was being put into discussion. The protest was a matter of survival for Toronto’s trans community. Outside of the library, the crowd of protesters engaged in call-and response readings of poetry written by local trans writers. Some protestors tried to enter the library and were held by police. The protest at the Toronto Public library showed that resistance is a differential bodily experience that goes beyond the sweaty palms and a shaky voice induced by stepping up to a platform to speak in public.

In trying to tease out and substantiate what is not being accounted for within Platform Feminism the obvious overrepresentation of white women is not the main issue. Taking to the platform has clearly opened up new understandings of the differential politics of saying #MeToo, whether one is in a corporate setting or working on the factory floor. For instance, Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn’s exposé at two Ford plants in Chicago for The New York Times, revealed decades long sexual misconduct that had gone unaccounted for. It was only after the #MeToo movement, that female employees at the Chicago plants began to formally organize and reveal the persistent harassment in the automotive industry (Chira and Einhorn 2017). Instead, the issue is how the very form of the platform straightens and whitens the movements because they privilege rising up as the dominant spatial tactic. Sarah Ahmed argues In Queer Phenomenology, “that the orientation of objects is shaped by what objects allow [her] to do. In this way an object is what an action is directed toward” (2006, 52). Ahmed’s work here is useful for thinking through how platforms have become something that popular feminism is oriented toward and why such an orientation matters. As Ahmed argues “orientations involve directions toward objects that affect what we do, and how we inhabit space. We move toward and away from objects depending on how we are moved by them” (2006, 28). Following Ahmed’s line of reasoning, taking to the

5 stage signifies a new position of power, an accomplished task. Speaking up takes up much more room than the quieter collective and communal forms of resistance that emerge quite often out of survival. Liberal Feminism casts the self at the centre even when it comes to resisting patriarchy. The presence of the stage, the platform, the hashtag, casts too much aside by design. In many ways, to truly acknowledge the intersectional and corporeal dynamics of power would strip white liberal feminism of its guaranteed platform. Alternatively, this dissertation will show how people who have been subject to ongoing histories of dispossession care for each other and find safety and survival in the digital age. In accounting for these other modes of resisting, I argue that if we take seriously the imperative to survive rather than an overbearing commitment to speak up, then the platform’s role in feminism can be brought into question.

In light of these recent moments of Platform Feminism, this dissertation addresses two key areas of investigation. First, I examine the history of elevated surfaces in order to discern how power has been mediated by platforms in various contexts through time. Second, I explore contemporary intersectional feminist activism that is organized around factors of care, safety and survival rather than the amplifying logics of the platform. While my research emphasizes a North American context, and specifically a focus on Toronto, the city from which I write, there are examples throughout that draw on global perspectives. I employ a mixed methodological approach involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation, historical research and critical discourse analysis to do this work. The flexible research design I used during the course of my research was in an attempt to try to capture both the contemporary landscape of global feminist resistance and the history of mediated elevation that I believe continues to shape politics today.

Major and popular feminist movements, such as the Women’s Marches and #MeToo serve as examples of what I define as Platform Feminism throughout this dissertation. These events, and in large part both the popular and academic discourse surrounding these events, have so far been insufficient. Such movements have been denounced by feminist scholars for reinforcing the very universalizing and essentialist perceptions of ‘women’ that have historically excluded most non- white middle-class women, trans, and queer people (Moss and Maddrell 2017; Willoughby 2017). The protests have been charged as corporate and neoliberal because they disarticulate systematic violence and seem blind to other forms of oppression beyond middle class white women’s experiences in public space (Rottenberg 2017). These responses, although important

6 for laying out some of the shortcomings of the movements, seem to suggest that there are easy fixes to the popular feminist movements that have arisen over the past few years. The arguments seem to suggest that by way of more representation for people of colour, and trans, queer and disabled folks Platform Feminism could be a tool of empowerment and the widening of feminist gains in public life. But representation on the platform will not solve the more enduring and structural politics of feminism that relies on platform media. I am more concerned with how feminism gets organized by the platform and how this a politically limiting strategy.

Defining Platforms

I use the term “platform” throughout this dissertation to specifically refer to media that both literally and metaphorically raise, elevate and amplify the people that use them. This includes digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook but also includes material media objects such as stages, soapboxes, slave auction blocks and platform shoes. While Media and Communications Studies has turned its attention to studying digital platforms in this past decade, in this dissertation, I consider both material and digital platforms in order to show that there is a longstanding logic of platforms that extends well beyond this more recent attention to platforms in a digital context.

Put simply, the underlying logic of platforms that this project uncovers is that, regardless of form, platforms are a very specific media that elevate and amplify. In attending to this logic, we will see how platforms function as media that also organize the political and the social in very particular ways in the context of feminist resistance. By focusing on platforms as media objects, their capacity to structure the world becomes clearer. In turn, we will see how their logics come to matter for feminist politics. I approach the platform as a medium that structures the political rather than as a surface where the political is played out.

I draw on Tarleton Gillespie’s “The Politics of Platforms” (2010) in my definition of platforms. Gillespie connects the political use of platform with its architectural use, pointing out that the physical platform was often used as a way for a politician to make his or her voice heard, above the fray. As he argues, platform is “a term that generally implied a kind of neutrality towards use –platforms are typically flat, featureless, and open to all – [and] in this instance specifically carries a political valence, where a position must be taken” (2010, 4). Gillespie maintains that “‘platform’ emerges not simply as indicating a functional shape: it suggests a progressive and

7 egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it” (2010, 4). However, as my examination of material platforms will show, the “egalitarian arrangement” offers only a limited view of platforms that obscures the experiences of those who experience elevation differentially.

In Platform Studies, the platform includes a variety of digital technologies such as social media applications, gaming consoles, or e-commerce sites. Thomas Poell, David Nieborg and José van Dijck theorize and define platforms as “(re-)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalised interactions among end-users and complementors, organised through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetisation, and circulation of data” (2019, 3). According to this definition, digital platforms increasingly play host to different “economic sectors and spheres of life” (Poell, Nieborg and van Dijck 2019, 5). I build on this definition of platforms in this dissertation by considering how material platforms also structure the political and social, which is something the field of Platform Studies has not done so far.

This is exemplified, for instance, in studies of platform labour which is broadly concerned with digitally mediated service work. Often framed as the gig economy, scholarship on platform labour has offered useful critiques of various platforms that operate by overworking and underpaying their workers (Wood et. al. 2019). Scholarship on platform labour investigates the intensified set of relations between computing technologies and casual labour (Delfanti and Sharma 2019; Wood, Graham and Lehdonvitra 2019; Scholz 2016; van Doorn 2017). In his study of platforms that facilitate an on-demand sharing economy such as Uber and Air BnB, Niels van Doorn recognizes platform labour as extending pre-existing capitalist structures and argues that “Platform labo[u]r remains thoroughly embedded in a world created by the capitalist value form, which hinges on the gendered and racialized subordination of low-income workers, the unemployed, and the unemployable” (2017, 908). Others have focused on the political economy of platforms, arguing that platforms function as digital intermediaries. In Platform Capitalism (2016), Nick Srnicek writes that platforms “are a new type of firm; they are characterized by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidization to draw in different user groups, and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities” (2016, 48). In addition, a prevailing concern about digital platforms in the field is around control and ownership of platforms as enclosed environments. In other words,

8 platforms take the internet as a whole and break it up to make a network of enclosed objects. For instance, in The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martjin de Waal, suggest that “the gateways of online sociality” sit with five high-tech companies, often referred to in Platform Studies as ‘the Big 5’- Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (2013, 5). The framework for understanding platforms as part of an ecosystem implies interdependence and interoperability between various different platform providers. The ecosystem definition also points to the wide reach of single platforms that are connected to other parts of the web.

Platform Studies has emerged as a subfield of Media Studies and has been significant for recognizing how technology firms have come to accumulate power. This work has importantly asked questions around the capacity of computing infrastructures and various mobile applications to exert control and govern all facets of society. As van Dijck, Nieborg and Poell argue, “Platforms’ ability to develop interoperable technical and economic standards and to control a set of platform mechanisms, combined with their potential to leverage network effects and global diffusion, have become crucial conditions for power accumulation” (2019, 3). My dissertation departs from these dominant theories of platforms from within Platform Studies in Media and Communication Studies. I argue that we need to consider how platforms are a form of media that structure the social, political and culture. While existing Media Studies scholarship on the topic understands that power operates through the platform, I show throughout this dissertation that actually platforms extend and maintain power by structuring the world. As a result, this dissertation offers a shift from thinking about how power is accumulated and represented on platforms towards thinking about how platforms are media objects that extend power.

I turn to and consider platforms in terms of the media theory offered by Canadian communication and political economy theorist Harold Adams Innis. Innis’ Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951) established a Toronto School of communication theory that introduced a way of investigating how communication technologies determine social and cultural arrangements. As Innis argues in The Bias of Communication, “we can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization where life and flexibility will become exceedingly

9 difficult to maintain” (1951, 34). Innis showed how any given period of time can be characterised by the use of a particular communication medium (Innis 1950; Carey 1967). Sut Jhally contextualizes Innis’ work, arguing that “communication technologies act as a landscape that frames monopolies of knowledge and exercising of spatial and temporal biases which in turn creates limits and boundaries within which social power (as well as modes of cognition) operate” (1993, 45). Taking Innis’ theory into account, my focus in this dissertation is specifically on how platforms have come to determine and shape feminist politics. Innis famously developed a theory of time and space biased media. He argued that communication technologies either have a bias toward time, meaning that a specific medium will endure through time or a bias toward space, meaning that they can be moved easily across geographic space. Following Innis (1950), I consider platforms to be space-biased media. They facilitate the expansion of decentralized power and adapt easily over time. We see this adaptability by tracing earlier iterations of platforms and recognizing the ongoing effects that they have on sustaining inequality among those who mount them. My study of platforms in this dissertation will unsettle the assumption that visibility via the platform is always about “giving someone a voice.” Instead I argue that platform mediated visibility is a way of extending and sustaining normative relationships to space that disfavours abject bodies.

An understanding of media as structuring the social has been taken up by other notable scholars who have adopted and built upon Innis’ approach to theorising media of communication since Innis made his field-defining contributions. Marshall McLuhan, for instance, famously argues that “The medium is the message” (1964) and forces us to pay attention to how various media can alter the “pace, pattern and scale” of social and political life (1964, 39). Later, other materialist media theorists like Friedrich Kittler notably stated that “media determine our situation” (1999, xxxix). Ian Angus contends that “A medium of communication…incorporates both a technology and a series of related social identities (or subject-positions)” (1998, 8). John Durham Peters argues that “media are civilisation ordering devices” (2015, 5). Taken together, these perspectives offer a particular way of developing a media analysis that privileges media forms over the information that they carry.

Joshua Meyrowitz describes this approach to theorizing media as “medium theory” (1994). Medium theory focuses on the features of specific media and asks, “What are the relative fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium

10 physically, psychologically and socially different from other media and face-to-face interactions?” (Meyrowitz 1994; 50). Likewise, Grant Bollmer explains medium theory in simple terms when he writes that “medium theory questions how people relate through media and how different forms of communication produce different effects in how people think and interact with each other” (2019, 6). We might also call such an approach to study media “materialist approach,” which is a perspective furthered by Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks (2011). Packer and Wiley suggest that in part, a materialist approach to media means that technologies are “understood as technical media environments in which we are increasingly immersed” (2011, 11). Using this approach, it can be argued that the social and political is altered by media technologies.

In using a variation of medium theory in my study of the platform, this work could be dismissed for being technologically deterministic. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young states emphatically how the charge of technological determinism usually plays out in Media Studies when he states “To label someone a technodeterminist is a bit like saying that he enjoys strangling cute puppies; the depraved wickedness of the action renders further discussion unnecessary” (2011, 121). Likewise, John Durham Peters has shown how understandings of technology as determining the social have often been read as opposing humanism. Peters lists the “sins” that technological determinists have historically been accused which include:

A sense of historical inevitability, pessimism or even fatalism; the lack of popular political control over technical decision making; a vision of technology as autonomous from human agents; a denial of cultural contingency; the reification of technology into monolithic blocks; the overestimation of the power of engineers; an insistence on a single cause; and the failure to appreciate the part played by people in the making of technical worlds (2017, 23).

It is not the case, however, that defining platforms as media that structure the world and extend power is incompatible with a feminist perspective, as these sins Peters lists might make it seem. Peters would agree. He asks and argues, “What kinds of inquiry snap shut if we let the specter of technological determinism intimidate us...If explanations attentive of the shaping role of technological mediation are ruled out, the raison d’eˆtre of the field is jeopardized” (Peters 2017, 13). In fact, media theory that highlights the ways in which media structures the social and political horizons of possibility including discourse, rhetoric, and social change has already been

11 offered by Critical Race and Feminist Media Studies scholars too. This work is especially important to my theorization of the platform because they show how materialist approaches are also humanist approaches necessary for understanding, as Jonathan Sterne puts it “the non- neutrality of media” (2014, 101). Critical Race and Media Studies scholars who take up an approach to media that privileges media form over content importantly continue to broaden what we might understand as media in the first place. Leslie Shade and Barbara Crow point out how Canadian feminist research in digital technology specifically, “continues this tradition in Canadian communication thought through its integration of traditions in political economy” (2004, 168). They go on to argue that “what makes our interventions unique have been the ways in which we overtly politicize, make the everyday central and relevant and finally, privilege and interrogate, the interrelated realms of production and reproduction” (2004, 168). We see this, for example in Sarah Sharma’s work. For instance, in her article “Taxis as media: a temporal materialist reading of the taxi-cab” (2008), Sharma claims that using medium theory allows her to ask “questions of space, time, and the cultural and political effects of transportation media are central” (2008, 458). Sharma goes on to argue that “In ‘medium theory’ media are understood as environments in which social life unfold” (2008, 458). By using medium theory in her research on taxicabs, Sharma contends that it becomes possible to attend to social difference instead of focusing only on media effects. Armond Towns applies medium theory to his research on the Underground Railroad (2016). Towns argues that the Underground Railroad is a media environment and also suggests that enslaved people were themselves media (2016, 189). Taking up Sharma’s argument, outlined above, Towns argues that by thinking of media beyond representation, we can see how “racialization processes exceed what is said in a text and includes the differential relations that we all have within technological environments” (Towns 2016, 189). In addition, communications and media scholars who think about technology and difference using a medium theory lens have considered how communications technologies create centers and margins of power (Berland 2009). I return to Berland’s work later in this dissertation.

This dissertation follows from this same tradition of media theory and allows me to approach the platform as a medium that alters and determines the political potential of feminism by way of the various infrastructural logistics the platform portends. Medium theory lends itself well to my approach to studying the platform throughout this dissertation because it allows me to focus on platforms that have come to structure contemporary feminist politics rather than focusing on

12 what type of politics are represented on the platform. In other words, in this dissertation I turn my attention to how media objects of elevation have extended power by structuring normative spatial arguments that impedes the survival of those who live on the margins. For this reason, my focus is less on the content that gets shared on platforms - the speeches, slogans, rallying cries or the actual representation of the events, even though these things are all important. Instead, I focus on how the introduction of platform media matter for intersectional feminist politics.

In sum, the platform is a powerful medium that has come to characterize feminist political struggle and feminist political futures. We only have to look to the Women’s Marches, the hash tagging campaigns, and other cancellations made by the way of Twitter to understand that this is the case. However, this dissertation’s focus is on the possibility of platforms as media that structure the political and that have their own sets of logics that interfere with, hide and obscure other forms of feminist action in the same time and place. Platform Studies has so far proceeded without a feminist perspective or a materialist media theory approach. By opening up the definition of platforms to include material and digital platforms, this dissertation works toward a shift in thinking about platforms that might help develop a model for treating difference within the field and perhaps more broadly, rather than reifying existing power structures. I provide a more robust discussion of Platform Studies and offer a suggested feminist intervention to the field in the final chapter of this dissertation. Taking this definition of platforms into account, next I present the three central arguments this dissertation makes about platform media.

Argument 1: A Politics of elevation is mediated by platforms

The first central claim of this research is that elevation has a politics and that platforms mediate a politics of elevation. By this I mean that the practice of raising bodies is a field of contestation. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe argues that “instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires us to bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation” (2005, 35). In taking up Mouffe’s idea of democratic politics, in this dissertation I submit platforms, and specifically their capacity to both metaphorically and physically elevate people, to a terrain of contestation. I make this argument in order to trace how power is mediated by platforms. Throughout the dissertation I argue that the politics of elevation puts at stake the safety and survival of people who experience life as

13 precarious, intersectional, and outside the normative demands of liberalism’s dominant notions of public life. In other words, the politics of elevation captures how to be elevated is experienced differentially and is differently available. When particular people are elevated by the platform, they are also often subject to often violent forms of evaluation, objectification and vulnerability, not to mention violence. On the other hand, elevation via platforms can also sometimes be a measure of power. In this case, platforms are often framed as necessary for a kind of empowerment; they are spaces and places to amplify one’s voice, to have a speaking part in a narrative, and to display power, even in limited ways. This dissertation argues that this later equation between elevation and political power is too simple. Elevation is certainly imbricated with power dynamics, but these materialize in more complicated ways. They are more multi- directional than has typically been acknowledged in Platform Studies. Instead, to account for the politics of elevation is to consider how being raised is at once something both to fight for and to fight against. This dissertation reveals how elevation is at once the result and mechanism of structures of power and is complex and multi-directional. To make this argument I draw on historical research of different material platforms that have elevated people to different effects. For instance, later in this dissertation I show how witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks have physically elevated women, queer and Black people. In these examples, platforms function as violent and disciplining technologies. Media and Communications and Cultural Studies scholars have already taken into account the politics of verticality. In Media and Cultural Studies, theorizing verticality is quite often done through discussions of towers, skyscrapers and other tall buildings (Parker 2015; Wagman and Young 2019). Verticality is also implicated in accounts of power struggles over control of airspace (Weizman 2002; Peters 2015; Parks 2018). In what follows, I outline this important scholarship before returning to my own argument about the politics of platform mediated elevation.

Most recently, Ira Wagman and Liam Cole Young (2019) in their study of two famous Canadian towers, the CN Tower in Toronto and the Calgary Tower, note that Communication and Media theory has long focused on “horizontal media and networks- railroads, fur trades, highways, telephone networks, and the like” (2019, 15). Innis’s sustained interest in the Canadian Pacific Railway, is indication of Media Studies’ commitment to the horizontal field. Innis argued that “The history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad is primarily the history of the spread of western civilization over the northern half of the North American continent. The addition of technical

14 equipment described as physical property of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was a cause and an effect of the strength and character of that civilization” (1923, 287). But in “On the Mediality of Two Towers: Calgary- Toronto,” Wagman and Young suggest that we shift our attention to the vertical axis, arguing that “towers are also useful tools for thinking more closely about the political and ethical implications of how social activity is arranged spatially” (2019, 12). Wagman and Young focus on the organizing capacity of towers. Through their study of the two Canadian towers, Wagman and Young contend that “towers create platforms for a plethora of other human activities: communication, most notably, but also observation, experimentation and even violence” (2019, 4). For Wagman and Young, towers are in themselves media that communicate, store and disseminate information.

Like Wagman and Young, Organizational and Cultural Studies theorist Martin Parker’s research focuses on the organizing capacity of towers. Some common readings of skyscrapers are that they are defining features of modernity, are signs of progress or are phallic extensions of the men who build and design them (Parker 2015). However, Parker understands these to be rather easy readings of tall buildings. He goes on to complicate the idea that skyscrapers are simply displays of phallic power (2015, 231). Through connecting verticality to capitalism, Parker argues that by thinking about skyscrapers beyond their symbolic significance, we might take notice of how the towers themselves are forms of organization (2015, 219). Skyscrapers, Parker argues, are “aimed at maximizing capital” (2015, 231). In Parker’s analysis, organization and capital are made apparent in skyscrapers structuring cities and creating downtown areas, and by extension small pockets of power in a city, or how building high-rise condo buildings or office complexes changes the nature of the way people work and live (Parker 2015). In the same vein as Wagman and Young then, Parker cautions against reading towers simply as monuments symbolizing power and modernity.

Taken together this research on verticality highlights how towers have organizational capacity. They are media that structure cities and the people that live in them. These theories lend themselves to analysing how the introduction of towers to a city create its centres and its margins. Corporate office buildings and condos structure how people work, live and interact with each other too. My account of the politics of elevation diverges, however, from these other theories of verticality because, as this dissertation will show, the correlation between verticality and power is more complicated than these other theories on the topic indicate. There are some

15 obvious connections to be made between these theories of verticality and a politics of elevation. Namely, these theories also offer a reading of how elevation and power are connected. But, where these readings of verticality lay out what’s at stake in occupying high-up spaces, my research will show that the politics of elevation are also about attending to the power relations connecting to the process of elevating particular people.

Second, this dissertation is concerned with how feminist politics are implicated in a larger politics of elevation. There is much to be gained and at stake in terms of a feminist politics of elevation. We could look to skyscrapers for inspiration here too. Beyond the sort of obvious phallic symbolism of high towers, questions about the relationship between masculinity and tall buildings are worth attending to. Meaghan Morris (1992) and Merill Schleier (2009) both use the representation of skyscrapers and the men who climb in (and on them) in film to make this connection. Morris argues that in films such as King Kong and The Spire the spatial hierarchy between towers occupied by men and the everyday space below, often connected to domestic space of women, is reified. Likewise, Schleier points to moments in film where heroic men scale buildings, arguing that these moments “concern the relationship between masculinity and modernity, of which the skyscraper serves as the overarching symbol; it is a metaphor for upward mobility and capitalist achievement” (2009, 3). Climbing upward emerges as a masculinist tactic.

This becomes significant to a feminist critique of the politics of elevation because one of my lines of inquiry in this is to ask: what would happen if feminist resistance tried something different? What if instead of adopting a masculinist tactic of climbing higher, of elevating ourselves, we considered what there might be to gain from laying low? In presenting my research on resistance that is focused on care, safety and survival throughout this dissertation, I show how intersectional feminist approaches to a politics of elevation are often about subverting platforms rather than trying to mount them. In this way, I develop a theory of elevation that suggests a feminist politics that does not rely on physically or metaphorically rising to the top.

I also offer this critique of elevation as a way of thinking through a brand of corporate, and often white, feminism that suggests we “lean in” (Sandberg 2013) so that we might literally rise to the top floors of skyscrapers, where executives sit. Corporate feminism, or what Nancy Fraser (2013) and Catherine Rottenberg (2018) call “neoliberal feminism” is epitomized by high-

16 powered women who have declared themselves feminists in the past decade. For example, COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013) offers a manifesto for how women can succeed in the workplace. Sandberg writes, “I believe that if more women lean in, we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities for all. More female leadership will lead to fairer treatment for all women” (2013, 380). The crux of Sandberg’s argument is if that women work to become more confident, likable, and figure out how to maintain a work and home balance, they can ascend the corporate ladder, or as she calls it “the corporate jungle gym” (Sandberg 2013). In the same vein as Sandberg’s Lean In, another example of neoliberal feminist literature was written by former member of the US State Department and Princeton University law professor Anne Marie Slaughter. In Slaughter’s widely read article “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” (2012), she argues that “The best hope for improving the lot of all women…is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders” (July 2012). These are examples of high-powered women whose version of feminism includes an overbearing commitment to the representation of women at the top of corporate and government structures. Feminist scholars have already done the important work of critiquing these popular, neoliberal versions of feminism. For example, Rottenberg argues that “Lean In’s focus is decidedly not on confronting or changing social pressures, but rather on what “women can change in themselves,” what Rottenberg suggests are presents as women’s “internal obstacles.” As Rottenberg puts it “the shift in emphasis: from an attempt to alter social pressures toward interiorized affective spaces that require constant self-monitoring is precisely the node through which liberal feminism is rendered hollow and transmuted into a mode of neoliberal governmentality” (2018, 63). Rottenberg shows Sandberg’s argument in particular places the capacity to climb the corporate ladder on the individual.

Nancy Fraser writes in Fortunes of Feminism: From State Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crises (2013), that “neoliberalism cloaks its depredations beneath an enchanting, charismatic veil: invoking the feminist critique of the family wage, it promises liberation through waged labor in the service of capital” (2013, 240). For Fraser, when liberal feminism understands equality to mean better representation of women in capitalist society, it has failed. In a 2018 interview, Fraser defines the problem with neoliberal feminism and its reliance on equality as a matter of representation succinctly: “Equality here means trying to dismantle the barriers that

17 cause discrimination; the problem of inequality is one of discrimination, and by removing discriminatory barriers, these talented, individual women can go as high as men” (Fraser 2018). In part, Fraser’s critique of neoliberalism is that it imagines women’s liberation in terms within a capitalist system that replicates white, masculinist ideals.

Thinking about how an imperative to become elevated is inherently masculinist is my way of critiquing corporate feminism that is different from other critiques of neoliberal feminism that seem to populate Feminist Media Studies in this moment. I arrive at the same place as feminist scholars who offer critiques of neoliberal, corporate feminism in so far as I also bring into question the equation that elevation equals empowerment. However, where critiques of neoliberal feminism are thinking about elevation metaphorically, and thus critiquing the capacity for feminist representation to offer different feminist futures, my route to arriving at this conclusion is based in a material understanding of the effects of elevation. In focusing on media of elevation, I suggest that it is not just that we need to critique neoliberal feminism but that we need to reconsider the material consequences of elevation altogether. As I suggest above, we might consider elevation as antithetical to feminist politics altogether. I show how this is the case later in this dissertation.

Finally, the politics of elevation that I argue in this dissertation draws on the work of media scholar Lisa Parks who has written extensively on what she calls “vertically politics” in relation to the media coverage of 9/11 (2018). Parks argues that “a feminist critique of verticality not only calls attention to power’s vertical operations and materializations, but, in the process, weaves in an analysis of the politics of difference and conditions of embodiment on earth” (2018, 13). Parks’ take on verticality also deals with what she calls vertical space- the “continuous field of orbital, aerial, spectral and terrestrial domains…that extends from beneath the earth’s surface to the outer limits of orbit” (2018, 9). Parks’ important work on verticality is based on her contention that verticality became recognized as a high stakes political field after 9/11 when the global public’s attention had to turn to the sky. Media coverage of the terrorist attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, Parks argues, made the political significance of vertical space intelligible.

Parks also argues that what makes the control of vertical space worth fighting for is how it offers a tactically powerful vantage point. Similarly, Eya Weizman (2002) adds that a form of

18 omniscience is possible in his study of the Israeli military’s control over airspace for the purpose of totally observing what’s below (2002). John Durham Peters (2015) points out that “towers mediate between heaven and earth: they point upward to the sky but thereby gain more advantage over the earther’s surface” (2015, 233). For Peters, towers are logistical media because “they can both see and be seen and hear and make sound at great distances” (2015, 233). Like Parks and Weizman, the contention here is that what makes vertical space so appealing to power is its capacity to extend visibility. Visibility and its connection to power is what grounds the next claim too: that platforms render people legible.

Argument 2: Platforms Mediate Visibility

Platforms can have the effect of amplifying and making feminist politics more visible. We saw this, for example, with the viral spread of the #MeToo movement. The New York Times journalist Jessica Bennett called 2017, the year when the #MeToo movement became popularized, “the year in gender.” For Bennett, 2017 was deserving of such a title because it was the year that topics of gender, misogyny and sexual abuse came to dominate popular discourse. Of the connection between platforms and feminist politics Bennett writes, “feminism and the technological boost of a hashtag seem to have made for a perfect storm and a cultural awakening at once” (December 30, 2017). In 2017, Twitter became a very powerful platform for rendering misogyny more legible to the public. Throughout this dissertation, I explore this role of platforms in mediating visibility. I argue that one dominating logic of the platform is that they make people more visible. In the frame of digital platforms, we often assume and speak about visibility in terms of its empowering effects. The more attention given to a person, a cause, a movement, the better. However, as this dissertation will illustrate, platform mediated visibility is actually often antithetical to the safety and survival of those whose voices we think need to be amplified the most. The notion that more visibility is liberatory is increasingly questioned by Media Studies, Critical Race, and Feminist scholars. In the sections that follow, I outline how these scholars have problematized visibility.

There are three sets of antonyms that can be used to describe the stakes of making subjects knowable. So far, I have used visibility to explain the effect that platforms have had on feminist politics. Becoming visible is being seen. In returning again to the example of #MeToo, we might say that the hashtag made widespread misogyny and sexual abuse in the workspace visible. The

19 inverse of visibility is of course, invisibility. To be invisible is to not be seen or registered. In feminist scholarship, the concept of invisibility is often employed as a way of talking about labour and labourers who are overlooked and ignored. Arlene Daniels uses the term invisible work to describe women’s work, like childcare and housekeeping, that is unpaid for (1987, 405). This definition has since been updated to include work that is paid but still very much raced and gendered. For example, Arlie Hochschild calls on workers who either disappear from view, such as outsourced workers or hotel housekeepers or who we see through such as nannies and cashiers as examples for invisible labourers (Hochschild 2016, xii). In this framing, visibility is thus often something to be fought for as it becomes a measure of power. Another coupling of terms connected to visibility and invisibility are legibility and illegibility. When something or someone is legible, they are both recognized and understood. Some scholars argue that making subjects legible can be used as a mechanism for control. For instance, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggest that being legible to power, and thus classifiable, also makes you governable (2013, 124.) Finally, transparency and opacity are also dichotomous terms that relate to seeing and knowing. Opacity is a term that French Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant uses when he famously argues that everyone should have a “right to opacity” (1997). By this, Glissant means that everyone has the right to not be known or understood. Visibility/invisibility legibility/illegibility, and transparency/opacity are all terms used by race, feminist, and media scholars to account for how power renders people knowable and works to justify visibility, legibility and transparency as a good thing. As I show in what follows, Media Studies scholars have long been critical of this formulation and instead suggest that invisibility, illegibility and opacity are more conducive to the survival of those marked by class, race and gender and sexual orientation. This literature lends itself to my argument that feminist visibility enabled platforms can be fraught.

Michael Foucault argues that “visibility is a trap” (1977, 200). His concern is that making people visible is often a technique of state power to render people classifiable and by extension, governable. This is an idea that has since been taken up by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998). Scott explains how agents of the state are invested in “measuring and codifying” populations and the environment so as to make them more legible and thus controllable (1998, 25). More recently, John Cheney- Lippold points to how algorithms that measure humans have made us datafied subjects which he

20 calls “measurable types” (2017). As Cheney-Lippold puts it, “As everything we do becomes datafied, everything we do becomes controllable. So, when we combine “we are data” with “inside us all is a code,” we see that who we are becomes controlled, too” (2017, 262). We see in all of this work the connection between visibility, legibility and power. Being seen, measured and classified is a way to control populations.

One of the ways in which making populations legible gets justified is by presenting illegible subjects as dangerous. Jeremy Packer, Rachel Hall and Wendy Chun are media and cultural theorists who have argued that controlling populations becomes culturally justified in the name of safety and risk management (Packer 2008; Hall 2015; Chun 2016). In Mobility Without Mayhem, Packer shows how in the context of automobility the notion of safety has been used to govern populations (2008). Packer also shows how control over automobility comes to bear differentially on abject populations. As Packer puts it, “automobility and safety have been used as a means of maintaining the unequal relations of power that have worked against women, youth, the working class, and people of colour. In these ways, disciplined mobility, in the name of safety, has been a mechanism for social control” (2008, 207). Packer’s argument gets taken up by Rachel Hall in The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airports (2015). Hall’s focus is on airports as vital sites of what she calls “security culture.” For Hall, security culture makes docile bodies willingly submit to becoming transparent – thus falling into Foucault’s “trap.” Hall suggests that when we assess the benefits of transparency we should “shift away from matters of privacy, security and efficiency to a consideration of the political problem of combating new forms of description that are practiced in relation to categories of privilege, access and risk” (2015, 19).

Wendy Chun (2016) is also critical of how the notion of privacy intersects with the technological. For Chun, what we consider to be “new media” is perverted “by attempts to contain it” (2016, 98). She argues that in framing discussions about the internet in terms of privacy, access and risk, it becomes a “series of poorly gated communities, in which we think safety = corporate security” (2016, 99). Chun asks us to reframe the problem of privacy entirely by focusing on the complicated tension between transparency and privacy online. Chun shows how in early conceptions of cyberspace not knowing – and thus fearing - who was on the other side of the screen instigated a move toward transparency (2016, 108). Using examples of child porn and terrorist activity online, Chun is able to show how we have equated more security with

21 more transparency when it comes to the internet. In trying to make social media a safe space, what gets elevated is both a right to privacy and the making of identities transparent. Chun argues that this equation of security and transparency is historically raced too. She argues, “privacy was formed as a right to protect deserving white women- and thus the rest of the citizenry- from the glare of publicity” (2016, 102). Rather than fighting for a right to privacy, Chun argues, “We need to fight to be vulnerable and not attacked” (2016, 13).

In the context of the digital, there are various ways in which technologies make people legible with different implications for different populations. For example, Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism points to how Google’s algorithms classify and make legible blackness in a way that perpetuates longstanding systemic racism (2018). Similarly, Ruha Benjamin in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life argues that technologies that capture data such as credit-scoring algorithms and workplace monitoring systems “deepen inequality” (2019, 2). In the context of Noble and Benjamin’s work, we see how making information about black people legible is a way to further establish racial hierarchy and is a differential effect of transparency.

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Simone Browne makes the case for how a project of making blackness visible predates more recent digital technologies. In fact, as Browne argues, older systems of making blackness visible inform contemporary digital surveillance practices. Browne shows how lantern laws which required slaves to carry a lit candle after dark are an example of early technologies that made black bodies constantly visible to power (2015, 79). Browne’s work establishes how racialized and routinized surveillance falls into place historically.

Toby Beauchamp (2018), like Browne, highlights how the effects of legibility can be dangerous for particular groups of people. Beauchamp’s focus is on the ways that trans people experience the tension between representation and visibility. As Beauchamp argues, “efforts toward more recognition of transgender identities and bodies within surveillance systems may reduce harm for certain individuals, yet they also facilitate the workings of surveillance, bringing those identities and bodies more efficiently under biopolitical management” (2018, 19). Similarly, micha cárdenas shares this concern and points out that even when marginalized communities struggle for visibility, for trans women as an example, this can mean increased violence (2016). Taken

22 together this work troubles the assumption that visibility is experienced uniformly. More importantly for my project, it also shows how visibility becomes a technology of power even when, and even as, visibility is consistently framed as a universal and collective good.

In light of these critiques of visibility, legibility and transparency, this dissertation argues that we must intervene in an understanding of a feminist politics that is often rendered as in need of a platform to amplify politics, or for that matter, the political. Instead, I will show how activists organize differently so that their resistances are actually illegible to power. Furthermore, their political action is quite often orientated more towards survival and the politics of care rather than visibility, amplification and elevation. I therefore contend that the current logics of Platform Feminism are antithetical to what Édouard Glissant terms “a right to opacity for everyone” (1997, 194). Glissant’s point is that transparency is a Western proposition that makes subjects knowable to power and which must be resisted. Glissant writes: “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” (190). Zach Blas, also taking up Glissant’s theory of opacity argues that “feminist and queer opacity not only operates as a tactical evasion of the gaze of digital machines, like drones and biometrics systems, but also accounts for the specificities of subjects- and their particular relationalities of concealment and visibility” (2016, 156). Clair Birchall argues that transparency as an ideal limits political thinking (2011, 61). While she recognises that there are pressing reasons for power to make their practices transparent, she also wants to interrupt this way of thinking by suggesting that the Left could take up modes of secrecy as a resource of oppositional politics.

Taking into account these critical discussions of privacy, visibility, and opacity, this dissertation also builds theory that suggests opacity as an insurgent political strategy. For example, Jack Bratich positions secrecy as a strategy (2006, 2007). Bratich argues that while secrecy often gets appropriated as a technology of the state, there are also possibilities for it to be a resistance strategy. As Bratich puts it “As a strategy of reassurance, secrecy provides forms of refuse for exodus, for renewed lines of flight. As war machine, secrecy wards off further concentration of state power. As jus resistentiae, secrecy preserves the conditions under which these preventions can still take place” (2006, 507). Bratich calls on examples of political movements using masks as an example of strategic secrecy. He argues that masking is an “affirmative gesture of

23 disappearance, not simply utopic withdrawal” (2007, 52). Torin Monahan also points out how masks have been used by social movements as a way of countering surveillance, citing the Guy Fawkes masks worn by Occupy Wall Street activists or ski masks donned by Zapatistas (2015, 67). In the context of digital technologies, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum suggest strategies of digital obfuscation to counter surveillance and data collection (2015). They define obfuscation as “the production of noise modeled on an existing signal in order to make a collection of data more ambiguous, confusing, harder to exploit, more difficult to act on, and therefore less valuable” (Brunton and Nissenbaum 2015, 46). Brunton and Nissenbaum argue that while we might not be able to opt out of using digital technologies that collect our data or have any control over the fact that data will be collected, obfuscation by providing misinformation, for example, lends itself as a useful protest tactic. Providing his own example of digitally mediated obfuscation, artist Zach Blas’ work Facial Weaponization Suite, takes this idea further by using aggregated facial data from workshop participants to create masks. Blas’ work is a response to facial recognition technologies that are used as a way to control populations. For Blas, the masks are thus a way of fleeing visibility (Blas, 2012).

Figure 1: Zach Blas, “Fag Face” from Facial Weaponization Suite, 2012. Source: Zach Blas.

Torin Monahan is critical of these more artistic interventions into hiding, arguing that they don’t actually undermine or challenge state surveillance practices. For Monahan, poor and racialized populations that are concerned with trying to survive are less interested in “legal and philosophical abstractions like privacy” (Monahan 2015, 172). I share this concern and address it at length later in this dissertation. I argue that sometimes aesthetics, for example the widespread wearing of pussy hats at the Women’s March, can get conflated with tactics and strategies for survival. For instance, I draw on example of the thousands of South American feminists who have been disguising their faces using bandanas and fabric to cover their eyes during the large- scale dance movement that broke out at the end of 2019 in protest of ongoing issues of violence against women. This example highlights how a logic of the platform, which is to make information visible, often must be subverted in order to ensure safety through opacity.

The second argument of this dissertation, then, is that the current faith in transparent use of platforms in the service of visibility/legibility has to be questioned in light of the strategic importance of opacity to survival. The problem has nuance, however, and as I have suggested within this second argument, I will address issues of differential visibility throughout the dissertation. A right to privacy, something that Chun argues we move away from, is notably different from the right to opacity that inspires this dissertation. Clair Birchall argues that while fighting for a right to privacy is apolitical and individualistic, claiming a right to opacity is more productive for collective politics (Birchall 2020, 9). Indeed, this dissertation is concerned with how opacity is used collectivity in feminist political organizing. I show that when the collective survival of those who live on the margins is taken into account, platforms that facilitate visibility have to be questioned for their political utility.

Argument 3: We need to constantly reconsider feminist activism in the digital age

Finally, this dissertation addresses the current discourse on feminist digital activism. My aim is to show how studies of digital activism might be broadened so that they account for the differential relationships that people who live on the margins have with digital technologies as media of elevation and amplification. I argue in this dissertation that current articulations of how the technologies comes to bear on feminist activism in the digital age are too narrow and seem only to capture a particular way of resisting that relies heavily an imperative for visibility. The

25 term “digital activism” is broad and there is a range of ways in which it has been presented in Communications and Media Studies theory. For example, digital activism has been framed as extending people’s capacity to resist (Kaun and Uldam 2018), as structuring contemporary social movements (Castells 2001, 138) and as creating new networked publics that become mobilized online (Papacharissi 2015). There is also a line of scholarship on digital activism that is more interested in how people use media to communicate with each other to organize. In The Logic of Connective Action (2013) Bennett and Segerberg argue that social media produces space for politics because these platforms are adept at organizing various individual actors (2013, 750). Carrie Rentschler (2011), points us to the “communicative labour” (17) of feminist activists to make the point that the media use at the point of organizing, rather than more visible forms of resistance, is significant.

Feminist Media Studies has turned its attention to digital activism over the last decade. When online platforms figure into feminist scholarship in media and communication studies, it is through discussions of the political possibilities allowed via digital media (Keller 2012; Rentschler 2015; Baer 2016). In her article “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics and Neoliberalism,” Hester Baer (2016) commenting on hashtag feminism, posits that “In providing a critical platform for such discussions, feminist Twitter campaigns literally ‘redo feminism’” (29). But the efficacy of hashtagging has also been questioned recently, especially in light of the rise of mediated misogyny that seems to be the response to feminists taking to digital platforms (Banet-Weiser 2018b; Mendes, Ringrose and Keller 2018). There has also been important scholarship delving into how social media has been used for building more private feminist networks, as opposed to those made visible by hashtags. Rosie Clark-Parsons, for example, argues that social media sites like Facebook afford the cultivation of online safe spaces but also notes that they are largely created for white, cis-gendered women (2018, 2137).

While Feminist Media Studies scholars provide other approaches to understanding activism in the digital age they are limited in at least two ways. Firstly, there is a celebration of digital activism that tends to privilege those already afforded at least some political power, even if they are struggling to gain more. Secondly, what gets considered digital activism is too narrow in its focus on platform mediated movements. In sum, this work does not make legible the other ways that people look to survive in the digital age. Jen Schradie, whose work on digital activism (2018, 2019) troubles the assumption that widespread access to the internet has made political

26 organizing more democratic argues that it is more often right-wing populist groups who have been able to use digital platforms for activism much more effectively than the Left. Schradie also points out the costs of political movements moving online, arguing that “this variation in costs and power may exacerbate inequality within and between social movements. The digital activism gap may make collective action more difficult for groups with fewer resources and more working-class members” (2018, 71). Schradie contextualizes the problem when she writes, “Facebook revolutions and hashtag activism don’t really exist as such. This is not to minimize the analysis of hashtags, but examining only high levels of digital activism, spectacular visible protests, or Trump’s Twitter account may leave out populations or skew results.” (2019, 279). I take up this argument in this dissertation by showing examples of digital activism that are not spectacular or visible, but rather quiet and communal.

If studies of varied political power and political leanings themselves are additional ways of examining digital feminist activism, so too are the studies of uneven power relations of digital activism focused on race. Often, digital activism is both practiced by and written through a white feminist lens that assumes the safety and privilege to move both online and offline. Jessie Daniels, in her important piece, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet,” (2016) makes the argument that scholarship about digital feminism has under-theorized the “dominance of white women as architects and defenders of a particular framework of feminism in the digital era” (42). Daniels posits that the ways in which online feminism is often articulated in popular culture is through a white feminist lens, and she asks us to dissect how “white feminism has benefited from this technological development” (56). This is not to say that black, brown and Indigenous women, queer and trans folks have not taken to various digital platforms when politically organizing. For example, Black Lives Matter relied heavily on the hashtag BLM to share more accurate news about protests in Ferguson following the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer in 2014. The youth-led protest for Indigenous rights that broke out across Canada in 2012 used the hashtag protest Idle No More to similar ends (Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014). Black, feminist Media and Communications Studies scholars specifically have traced how digital platforms are used for resistance by communities who live on the margins. For instance, in their book Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender, Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles argue that “Black women are disproportionately adept users and creators of persuasive

27 hashtags and play influential roles in both racial justice and feminist network” (2020, 196). Similarly, Sarah J. Jackson notes in her earlier work on the Black lives matter movement’s use of Twitter that:

In online counterpublic networks, Black women—cis and trans, some everyday citizens with little access to institutional power and others media personalities, some queer, some straight, some poor and disabled—have played an outsized role in shaping recent national conversations about everything from police brutality to gender identity to popular culture, with the creation of hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #GirlsLikeUs, and #OscarsSoWhite” (2016, 377).

These platform reliant examples are meaningful and politically significant instances of activism but because feminist digital activism has adopted what can be framed as a white feminist tactic for resistance, these examples risk falling into the normative forms of digital activism as written by platform feminism. I address this at length later in this dissertation, where I also suggest that dominant conceptions of digital activism that rely on making voices heard are not only marked by whiteness but are also masculinist tactics too. I ask what does a digital activism look like that takes into account the ways in which people organize not just so that they can be heard, but so they can survive? How is it that caring for others can offer both a critique of a masculinist tactic of disconnection and a liberatory framework for resistance in digital culture?

In Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks (2019), Sarah Florini offers a useful and novel approach to studying digital activism. Florini argues that the liberatory potential of digital media is “tempered by the ways in which neoliberal discourses have impacted the development of technology” (2019, 12). For Florini, in instances of hashtag activism for example, the individual is emphasised and this obscures other more collective forms of activism. However, Florini also argues that Twitter is overdetermined in its political utility—her argument though is that there is too much focus on Twitter and not on the other network of platforms and digital media that are important for black digital media users to find community and collectivity. She argues that we have to also consider other sites like Instagram, Facebook, Vine and podcasts (182) as significant tools for digital activism. While this is also an important observation, it is not quite the argument I further in this dissertation. Florini’s critique is in some ways still limiting because while it expands the scope of digital activism beyond the hashtag, it stops short of thinking beyond digital platforms as media that lend themselves to giving racial and gendered politics more visibility altogether.

In this dissertation I suggest instead in order to think beyond digital activism as it currently exists, and thus to broaden its capacity to be useful for future feminist politics, we have to consider the technological not as a tool that is used by those looking to resist but rather as a way of organizing the social and political field. In this way, digital activism would include non- normative modes of resisting that are shaped by the technological in a broad range of ways. The turn toward thinking other forms of resistance that are not about the amplification of voice does not discount forms of digital activism that centre speaking out. Instead, my dissertation aims to offer an expanded understanding of resistance grounded by examples of the tactics employed by those for whom amplification is not the goal. Sometimes this means refusing normative ways of using technologies. In this dissertation I draw on examples, based on interviews with queer, feminist activists of colour specifically, that suggest approaches to digital platforms which are based on factors like care and survival over visibility and representation. I argue that ultimately, in an age of amplification which has lead us to celebrate platforms as tools for making voices heard, visibility becomes antithetical to the survival and care of particular communities.

Research Design and Methodology

This study of platforms and feminist politics employs a mixed methodological approach. The study is grounded in data collected between 2017 and 2019 through fieldwork which included in- depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation at feminist protests in Toronto, historiographical and archival research and critical discourse analysis (CDA). My research methodology was flexible by design which allowed me to capture both the fluid nature of contemporary feminist activism and its connection to the platform, as well as a historical perspective of material platforms. A flexible and mixed methodology was necessary because as Ann Gray, who writes on cultural studies research methods argues, “This approach to method acknowledges the dynamic nature of cultural and social processes and of meaning production, and has the potential to respond to complex ways in which individuals, or agents, or subjects, inhabit their specific formations, identities and subjectivities” (Gray 2002, 19). My research design therefore consciously relied on a variety of methods in order to capture the historical and contemporary politics of platforms.

Semi-structured Interviews

Participant Selection

In 2018 and 2019 I conducted semi-structured interviews with seven feminist activists who describe themselves as community organizers, artists, technologists and academics. The primary criteria for selecting participants was their varied experiences as feminist activists who have and continue to engage in and organize resistance strategies both on large and small scales. Participants were recruited through email and through introduction by mutual contacts. Of the seven people I interviewed, six were located in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These participants are Michele Pearson Clarke, OmiSoore Dryden, Sarah Jama, Katherine McKittirck, Ladan Siad and a member of the Medina Collective who prefers not to be named. I also interviewed one person, Cayden Mak who is based in Oakland, California. Biographies of these participants can be located in “Appendix A” at the end of this dissertation. When I originally designed and proposed my research, I intended to interview participants across North America who would provide insight on contemporary feminist resistance strategies. As I began to recruit people to interview, I realized that the Toronto, the city I was living in and attending protests and rallies in myself, was a location rich with activists who could speak to their experiences in organizing protest in the city. I therefore chose to narrow the scope of this part of my empirical research. However, from the outset, the aim of this dissertation has been to develop a theory of intersectional feminist resistance in the digital age, which also informed my recruitment strategy. Qualitative social researcher Karen O’Reilly calls this approach to recruiting participants “purposive sampling,” which she defines as selecting a sample that is “chosen for a purpose, in order to access people, times, settings or situations that are representative of given criteria” (2012, 44). During the course of my research, I was put in contact with Cayden Mak who lives and works in Oakland, California. While Cayden is outside of the geographical parameters I had established, after speaking with them and learning about their how their experience as a trans, Asian American technologist informed how they organize and how they approach platforms, I recognized that their perspective was important to this work and therefore also chose to include them in this study.

5.1 Interview Style

I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with all seven participants. Semi-structured interviews allowed me to have “guided conversations rather than structured queries” with all participants (Yin 2009, 106). Five interviews lasted roughly one hour and were conducted in- person. During these interviews, I recorded our conversations and took hand-written notes. One interview was done over the phone and one was done through email. While each interview was semi-structured in that I arrived with a set of questions to ask people, all tailored to their specific contexts and expertise, each of the seven interviews were distinct from one another. I have met people over the phone, at restaurants where we shared a meal, in coffee shops, in their apartments, at their offices and over email in order to accommodate the specific time and mobility constraints of the participants. For example, the interview which was conducted over email was in order to accommodate the participant who is a professor in Kingston, Ontario but commutes from Toronto to her job and therefore did not have the time to meet in person. I met another participant at her home, which she shared with a one-eyed cat who fell asleep on my laptop, which added an extra obstacle to taking notes. I learned that another participant had forgotten that we planned to meet for an interview when I showed up at their office and met their co-worker who laughed at the regularity at which such things happened. When we did finally meet, it made sense how the interview could have slipped her mind because as we talked, she was simultaneously orchestrating the logistics for a delivery of folding chairs to a gymnasium in Hamilton for a youth basketball tournament of which she was not the formal organizer of. One of the first interviews I conducted only happened after I had already met the participant on two other occasions, first with a mutual acquaintance who had connected us, then at a coffee shop where we discussed my research and finally on a third occasion where she allowed me to record our conversation. I provide these examples of the varied experiences at specific interviews here to convey the distinct nature of each interview.

5.1.1 Ethical considerations and research limitations

In both the recruitment and interviewing stages of this study, I took two central ethical considerations into account. First, I considered what it meant to try and gain access to communities that I am not a member of. For instance, the marginal strategies for resistance that I account for throughout this dissertation draw on the experiences of Indigenous, Black, and

31 disabled activists. My approach to thinking about questions of access were guided by theories of refusal and qualitative research (Simpson 2007; Tuck and Yang 2014). This important work highlights how we must refuse to mine and extract Indigenous, Black and queer communities for their experiences. In particular, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have argued, the tendency to look for stories of pain as a way of doing research is a common social science approach that often exposes and recasts private personal community stories as academic research (2014, 814). The process of navigating research that was not extractive of the folks I was talking about required taking seriously how to ask for people’s time and what questions to ask. This meant that orienting questions around the generative tactics for survival that people who experience life as intersectional adopt, rather focusing questions on struggle and grief was important to my method.

In an effort to gain the trust of participants and thus getting access to speak with them, I also created a personal website that outlined my research. I also included a brief bio on the website where I self-identify as a brown, queer woman living in Toronto. I sent the link to my website in recruitment emails in order to give potential participants as much information about myself as possible. This website actually became a topic of discussion in an interview I conducted with visual artist Michele Pearson Clarke. In our interview, Clarke talked about how she also sets up detailed websites when recruiting participants for her art projects and talked about how making these websites gives people fundamental information which she suggested is a “gesture of care” (Personal communications, November 14, 2018). The notion that information is a gesture of care takes into consideration how people might experience the process of being both recruited for and being interviewed differentially. As Clarke put it, “When you tell people what's going to happen, or you give people information, it allows them to process it at their own pace, it allows people to deal with their own anxiety” (Clarke, personal communications, November 14, 2018). Thus, in providing information through a website, my aim was both to draw garner interest from potential participants and to mitigate potential anxiety around participating in my study.

The second ethical consideration related to participant interviews was around what T.L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault have called “the labour of being studied” (2014). Cowan and Rault recognize that “the labour conditions of our research practices (those we are compelled into by the demands of academic capitalism) reinforce the market logics of symbolic and social capital (like ‘exposure’ and reputation), in which the only acceptable incentive we can offer to artists and community organizers participating in the research is ‘the good’ of community itself” (2014,

477). During the recruiting stage of my fieldwork, the idea that doing interviews is a form of labour was repeatedly reinforced. For instance, I had originally identified a Black and disabled poet and activist who lives in Toronto that I was interested in interviewing. When I visited their personal website, they had a notice on the homepage that stated that because they were burnt out from organizing in the city, they were not currently doing interviews. This homepage announcement highlighted how the capacity to resist can be draining for people and especially for those whose resistance is a matter of survival. I located another example when I met with a disabled artist and activist over dinner in the Winter of 2018. They responded to my initial recruitment email and we agreed to meet and not record an interview so that they could decide if they wanted to participate in my study. During this initial meeting, they told me about how because of their rare physical disability, they had been studied throughout their life by different university researchers. They expressed frustration in trying to access space at the same universities for artist talks and residencies and noted a non-reciprocal relationship between researcher and participant. Despite these experiences and due to the nature of my research, they decided they wanted to participate in my study. Our initial meeting lasted 2 hours and we agreed that the following week, I would come to their home to interview them formally and we would then sign ethics forms. Before leaving, we exchanged phone numbers. In the following weeks and month, I reached out to this potential participant over phone and email multiple times, but never received a reply. While I do not know for sure why I was unable to contact this person again, it is not a stretch to imagine that they decided they did not want to continue to do the labour of being studied. In light of these experiences, I therefore developed a strategy to mitigate the additional labour for the seven participants I did formally interview. This involved being flexible in meeting modes, times and locations. On two occasions, I bought participants a meal and recorded the interview as we ate. As mentioned above, I also carried out interviews over the phone and email for this reason.

5.2 Participant Observation

As part of this study, I attended, participated in and observed multiple protests, rallies and marches in Toronto which are listed and described below. I attended these events often as a participant myself but also because in observing these events, I developed a perspective on the different ways that particular activists and participants organize themselves as they march, rally, and protest in Toronto. In both participating and observing in protests, marches and rallies over a

33 three-year period, I took on the role of a “participant observer” (O’ Reilly 2012, 98). This meant I was often marching alongside those I was observing while simultaneously taking time to “stand back and notice things” (O’ Reilly 2012, 98). I used the notes function in my iPhone to record observations at these marches and wrote out longer descriptions once the protests were over. One of the central findings from this part of my research was on the spatial strategies of convening that different activist groups in the city employ. For instance, two of the marches I attended took place in the same space, on different days. The Women’s March in Toronto drew thousands of protestors and included a large stage, massive speakers for amplifying speeches and garnered a lot of media attention. On the other hand, the “Justice for Tina” march, which was a demonstration for a 15-year old Sagkeeng First Nations girl named Tina Fontaine followed the same route as the Women’s March but had many fewer participants and ended in a small rally. I describe and analyse these findings at length later in this dissertation as well.

5.2.1 Participant observation sites

Toronto Women’s March (2017): The first Women’s March in Toronto was held on January 21, 2017 and took place as simultaneous Women’s Marches were happening around the world. Protestors marched down University Avenue and ended up outside of Toronto’s City Hall at Nathan Philips Square. It was reported that more than 60 000 people attended the march (Vella 2017).

Toronto’s Women’s March (2018): The 2nd annual Women’s March was on Saturday January 20, 2018. The march followed the same route as the first march but there was a noticeably smaller crowd at this march. Still, the march drew thousands of people, and included a large-scale rally (McLaughlin 2018) although the official number was not reported as it was with the first march.

Justice for Tina March (2018): On March 3, 2018, at the Justice for Tina March, hundreds of people came together at Nathan Phillips Square to demand justice for 15-year old Sagkeeng First Nations girl Tina Fontaine. The march took place one week after the man responsible for her death was acquitted. Protestors gathered for a rally in a large circle the North-west corner of

Nathan Philips Square. The march I attended was the 2nd event held for Fontaine in Toronto. The first was in the form of a procession where 200 people, wrapped in blankets, marched in silence to mourn and honour Fontaine’s life (Johnson 2018). I draw on both the march I attended and the news reports from the first silent procession in this dissertation.

Global Climate Strike March- Toronto (2019): Global Climate Strikes were held world-wide in September 2019. The strikes were inspired by Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg who started school climate strikes in Sweden (Taylor, Watts and Bartlett 2019). On Friday September

27th, the Climate Strike in Toronto began midday at Queen’s Park. It was estimated that 15 000 people attended (Goodfield 2019). Buses of school children were brought to attend the march and multiple businesses closed so that their employees could attend as well (Goodfield 2019).

Trans Rally at the Toronto Public Library (2019): When the small Palmerston branch of the Toronto Public Library allowed a trans exclusionary radical feminist, Meagan Murphy, to hold an event at the branch, members of the trans community and the LGTBQA community more widely planned a rally at the branch to protest both Murphy and the library. Murphy has been publicly outspoken against transgender rights and the Chief Toronto public librarian Vickery Bowles maintained that allowing her to host an event at the Palmerston branch was a matter of free speech (Winsa 2019). Hundreds of people gathered outside the library for a rally that involved chanting and call-and response readings of poetry written by local trans writers (Hoard October 29, 2019).

5.3 Historiographical and Archival Research

This dissertation also relies heavily on historical research on material platforms, culled from a variety of locations. For this study I used archival documents, exhibitions at museums and galleries, and written histories of platform shoes, American slavery, witch hunts and soapbox oration for my historiographical research of platforms. I initiated my research on platform shoes by visiting the Bata Shoe Museum, located in Toronto. The Bata houses a permanent collection of 13 000 shoes and related artifacts from throughout the world. The collection spans 4500 years (“The BSM collection”). The shoes are arranged in some rooms by time period and in other rooms by type of shoe. The examples of platform shoes in the museum are scattered throughout the rooms. In doing research on platforms, I toured the rooms and took photos and notes about the names and origins of different shoes that had platform heels. To supplement this research, I also located video documentation of events such as Naomi Campbell’s infamous fall on a fashion week runway as she donned a pair of Vivienne Westwood platform shoes. In my study of slave auction blocks, I located and read through archival material that provided first-hand accounts of slave sales. In this dissertation, I draw predominately on a firsthand account of a slave auction

35 written by abolitionist Dr. John Theophilus Kramer. Kramer’s account is in the form of a pamphlet published in 1859 and currently housed as part of the Historic New Orleans online archival collection. In addition, I researched multiple accounts of witch hunting that took place in Salem, MA to inform my writing about how witches’ gallows as platforms have historically made unruly women subject to violence. Finally, I studied the history of soapbox oration. This research involved drawing on a number of existing scholarship and histories of soapboxing and locating archival material on Hyde Park’s famous Speaker’s Corner located in London, UK. This archival material was web-based and decade-spanning photography of various people standing on their soapboxes at Speaker’s Corner.

5.4 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Along with the interviews, participant observation, and historical research, I conducted critical discourse analysis (CDA) of media coverage of various protests. CDA stems from Norman Fairclough’s theory of discourse as a social practice that informs how people understand reality. Fairclough argues that discourse is an “effective mechanism for sustaining and reproducing cultural and ideological dimensions of hegemony. Correspondingly, a significant target of hegemonic struggle is the denaturalization of existing conventions and replacement of them with others” (1995, 94). Critical discourse analysis of media coverage of recent protests is thus useful for recognizing how popular media sources play a role in dictating how reality is constructed through these texts. I read popular media accounts of recent feminist protests with an eye to how dominant perspectives privileges particular resistance tactics over others. Using critical discourse analysis in this dissertation included performing close readings of newspaper articles, magazine articles and opinion pieces. Much of this analysis was on the Women’s March on Washington and #MeToo which has been very widely covered in popular media. In doing a critical discourse analysis of media coverage, I also drew on global perspectives on various protest events. This includes the Why Loiter movement in Mumbai, India, reporting on the feminist dance protests that spread through South America in November and December 2019. In the context of North American protests, I followed media coverage of various Black Lives Matter protests in Toronto, most notably around Toronto Pride and the sit-in at Toronto police headquarters. The sources for my discourse analysis include 52 English-language articles and opinion pieces from The New York Times (8), The Atlantic (4), CBC News (4), The Guardian (4), The Globe and Mail (3), CTV News (2), The National Geographic (2), Now Magazine (2), Teen Vogue (2), The Toronto Star

(2), Vanity Fair (2), Xtra (2), Al Jazeera, (1), The Boston Globe (1), The Cut (1), Detroit Free Press (1), Financial Press (1), Flare Magazine (1), Forbes Magazine (1), The Huffington Post (1), The LA Times (1), The National Post (1), The New Yorker (1), Rolling Stone Magazine (1), The Root (1), Time Magazine (1), The Washington Post (1).

Organization of the Dissertation

In Chapter 2 I offer a history of what I call “feminism’s other platforms.” This chapter develops the concept of mediated elevation by focusing on various media that raise people to differential effects. The aim of this chapter is to show how media that have historically elevated bodies interrupt dominant discourse about platforms as necessarily useful for feminist politics today. To make this argument I draw on historical research of four different media objects: soap boxes, slave auction blocks, witches’ gallows and platform shoes. This chapter argues that despite our understanding of platforms as empowering for women, as animated by the celebration of popular movements like #MeToo and other recent examples of feminist digital activism, there is a longer history of women, people of colour and queer people being put on platforms that are violent and have been used as technologies that threaten the safety and survival of those who live on the margins. I suggest in this chapter that to focus on the platform only in the context of the digital is too narrow a scope and by extension our conception of what platform media are, we might unsettle assumptions that visibility via the platform is a political utility and always a solution for feminist liberation.

In Chapter 3 I show how normative spatial arrangements at sites of resistances are organized by platform logics of amplification and elevation. Based on research with activists who resist on the margins, participant observation at feminist protests in Toronto and critical discourse analysis of media coverage of contemporary protests, I outline the differential spatial strategies adopted by intersectional feminists that are based on factors such as safety and survival rather than on making politics visible. I begin the chapter developing my theory of Platform Feminism, which I argue is a feminist politics that assumes safety and mobility in social space. I use the example of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington to contrast against more intersectional approaches to feminist resistance that have taken place over the past decade.

Chapter 4 is focused on how feminist activists find ways to perform radical acts of care for each other in the digital age. I argue in this chapter that careful resistance is a response to an age of

37 amplification mediated by digital platforms. I use Saidiya Hartman’s (2018) notion of “revolution in a minor key” to suggest how feminist resistances that come from the margins are often quiet. Drawing on the interviews I conducted with feminist activists in Toronto and Oakland, California, I show how when platforms are used for care, it is often a feminist mode of resisting amplification. Care, I argue, is a feminist response to the more enduring discussions of disconnection within Media and Communication Studies, which we might read as masculinist reactions to the age of amplification.

In Chapter 5, I suggest a novel approach to studying the platform, which I call “Feminist Platform Studies.” This chapter offers an intervention in the emerging field of Platform Studies by showing how a materialist Feminist Media Studies perspective lends itself to recognizing how platforms are media with capacity to structure social and political life. This chapter first offers an in-depth review of the growing field of Platform Studies. I outline the central claims from the field and argue that feminist and race perspectives are largely missing from existing literature. I also show how existing literature treats studies of the platform in Feminist Media Studies. In this chapter I suggest that the platform remains overdetermined in its political utility for feminist politics. I therefore argue that future scholarship in both Platform Studies and Feminist Media Studies might reconsider how platforms extend power. I argue that by approaching platforms as material media objects we arrive at a Feminist Platform Studies that helps us make sense of and critique feminism’s relationship to the platform.

Chapter 2-Feminism’s Other Platforms

The 1996 film Evita is a biopic where Madonna plays Eva Perón (Evita), the wife of Argentinian President Juan Perón who served as president from 1946-1955. Evita died of cancer young, in 1952. But in her short stint as first lady of Argentina she became known as “the spiritual leader of the nation”- a title given to her by the Argentine Congress. There’s a famous scene in the film where Madonna stands on a balcony, raised above the Argentinian public, belting out the now famous line “Don’t cry for me Argentina!” Evita’s preference for standing on a balcony to speak to (or serenade) the masses below her was not just an example of cinematic flair. The real-life Evita addressed the nation, from a balcony as well, for the last time before her death (Figure 2). This image of the beloved feminist icon singing about her need to be dazzling, to be loud, as she builds a movement below her, is remarkable for its demonstration of what feminism on the platform looks like almost 70 years later. Evita is an example of what the ideal of a woman on the platform is supposed to be. Made visible on her balcony, Evita is a feminist with a voice.

Figure 2: Eva Peron addresses Argentinian citizens nation from her balcony, 1952. Source: Wikimedia Commons

38 39

In the past decade, Western media has provided a heightened platform for feminism. Feminist manifestos, hashtag activism, and feminist-themed aspirations have surfaced on most media platforms, making a specific version of feminist subjectivity and its parent political commitments both hyper-visible and normative within popular media. Media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have enabled a visibility of feminisms that have long struggled for a broader space and place in culture. Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in her book Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018) that among other mediated spaces, such as television and film, digital platforms are spaces where “feminism becomes popular, viewed by millions of users, so that there is an opening of space to hear, think and feel feminism” (27). Popular, hypervisible feminism has therefore come to rely on the platform.

In this chapter I argue that despite a recent focus on the digital platform and feminism’s relationship to it, with the #metoo movement as the most obvious example, there is a history of women’s relationship to the platform that extends well beyond the digital. The longer history of the platform that emerges in this chapter shows that the relationship between visibility, women and platforms is much more complicated than current dominant readings of digital platforms indicate. I argue that while platforms have indeed long made people visible, the effect of such visibility has not always been to the benefit of feminist politics. Those who unduly struggle to survive, namely women, Black, queer, poor, and disabled folks might experience platform mediated elevation not as empowering but rather as yet another impediment to survival. To make this argument, I present my historical research on four different media objects that make people more visible: soap boxes, platform shoes, witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks. I first draw on histories of the soapbox, a rudimentary media of elevation that prompted a new mode of political participation. Second, I look to moments in pop culture history where platform shoes emerge as objects that mediate femininity. In a third case, I treat the gallows that witches were hung from during global witch trials, as platforms serving social control. By drawing on historical research on witch hunts, I show how the gallows served to discipline unruly women. I end the chapter by presenting archival research on first-hand accounts of slave auctions that took place in the American south in the mid 1800s. These descriptions of the slave auctions show how auction blocks put Black people on display, so that their bodies could be evaluated and sold. This chapter suggests that these objects are feminism’s other platforms. The soapbox, the shoe, gallows, and auction blocks are material objects that elevate and amplify and point to a longer

40 history and wider conception of the platform. The platforms I write about in this chapter are not networked like the digital platforms that have made popular feminism visible. Instead, dispersed through time and space, these objects that elevate and amplify those who stand on them are significant because – in addition to their historical range and surface dissimilarity – they unsettle assumptions about visibility and empowerment on the platform.

A contemporary popular feminism relies on multiple media platforms to both occupy a position of self-empowerment, and to communicate a version of empowerment to users. Feminist media studies scholar Rosalind Gill has noted a newfound visibility for feminist politics in recent years. As Gill puts it, “feminism has a visibility in media culture that it did not have even a few years ago, and we are currently witnessing a resurgence of feminist discourse and activism as well as a renewed media interest in feminist stories” (2016, 615). Carrie Rentschler and Samantha Thrift argue that an increase in visibility for feminist politics is connected to use of social media platforms. They write that “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” (2014, 239). Rentschler and Thrift go on to note the “centrality of media techné to feminist practices” (2015, 239-240). Similarly, Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued that mediated spaces such as social media, television, film and digital media are “the spaces where feminism becomes popular, viewed by millions of users so that there is an opening of space to hear, think and feel feminism” (2018, 27). In this chapter, I argue from the four cases that while social media platforms may indeed increase the visibility of feminist politics, as important research on contemporary feminism has shown, to focus on the platform only in the context of the digital is too narrow a scope to account for feminism’s longstanding relationship to the platform.

From the historical range and media diversity of the four cases in this chapter, a theory of platforms as media emerges whereby, we can consider a differential politics of elevation. For some, having the ability to rise and be seen is not only a sign of power but is a state to strive for. To be made visible is a measure of power. The popular phrase “a rise to power” itself suggests this relationship between elevation and power as individuals ascend in various institutions. However, we also know that representation is often a function of power where being represented, and thus made visible, can also be a disadvantage to collective struggles for freedom. While platforms offer one a kind of spotlight, they also demand that bodies occupy this spotlight in a particular way. As the four cases in this chapter show, there are different ways to be visible and

41 we must acknowledge the diverging goals of visibility as a practice. The visibility that comes with occupying the platform isn’t necessarily a solution. Visibility hides as much as it reveals. In his article “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” Herman Gray argues that a struggle for mediated visibility has become an end itself (2013). Gray importantly asks, “Will seeing more frequently and recognizing more clearly and completely members of excluded and subordinate populations increase their social, political and economic access to life chances?” (2013, 773). This, we might say, is the current tension that underlies calls for feminist representation that has long been charted by media and cultural studies theorists too. For instance, Joshua Gamson traces the politics of queer representation in Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (1998). Gamson questions what is at stake as the representation of queer folks in popular media increases, and asks “As we make ourselves visible, do those among us with less status get to speak just as anyone else (increasing the risk of further stigma as the price for democratic diversity) or do the more acceptable get the upper hand (reproducing class and racial hierarchies as the price for gaining legitimacy)?”(1998, 221). Likewise, Larry Gross notes that “When groups or perspectives do attain visibility, the manner of that representation will reflect the biases and interests of those elites who define the public agenda” (1994, 143). Gamson and Gross’ work shows that even when groups of people begin to see themselves represented in popular media, this is always something decided by those who have a degree of power. In Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (2011) Radha Hedge considers questions of visibility and representation from a global perspective. For Hedge, through “the mediated global terrain on which sexuality is defined, performed, regulated, made visible and experienced,” Western ideas of sexuality and gender politics get reproduced transnationally (Hedge 2011, 14). The result is that again, representation is controlled by hegemonic power. As this chapter will show, even beyond questions of mediated representation, platforms can be dangerous. We have to reckon with the variable relationship that different people, who experience life as intersectional, have with the platform in order to intervene in an understanding of today’s platforms as a tool for feminist empowerment. The aim of this chapter is therefore to draw from histories of feminism’s other platforms to illustrate a more complete relationship between feminism and mediated visibility.

Soapboxes: Makeshift Pulpits

Platforms are often framed as necessary for a kind of empowerment; they are spaces and places to amplify one’s voice, to have a speaking part in a narrative, and to display power even in limited ways. In popular discourse, to be given a platform is synonymous with being given a voice. For instance, we often hear calls and accolades for celebrities and athletes who “use their platforms for good.” The construction of a platform as an authorizing, open, and empowering space certainly shaped (and continues to shape) the framing of digital media as liberatory. It is often imagined and argued that users are empowered by digital platforms as they afford users a voice by lowering barriers of entry. In Networks Without a Cause (2011), Geert Lovink describes early understandings of digital platforms and their political utility. He writes, “platforms such as blogs, discussion forums, and participatory news sites fostering ‘citizen journalism’ were considered a new frontier of free speech, where anybody with an internet connection could participate in political communication” (Lovink 2011, 2). Indeed, since at least 2011, when Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring gave rise to what was then referred to as “the Twitter revolution” (Bennett and Segerberg 2011; 2013), these sites have often been celebrated for their political visibility. The widespread protests of 2011 were of particular interest to media studies scholars because they showed the potentially revolutionary power of digitally mediated political participation. For example, Manuel Castells, in his study of the Arab Spring, argues that the movement was sustained in Tunisia over a period of time because of a precondition whereby Tunisian youth were using blogs and social media in spite of and in response to authoritarian government regimes. Castells writes, “the communicative autonomy provided by the Internet made possible the viral diffusion of videos, messages and songs that incited rage and gave hope” (2012, 28). Likewise, in Tweets and Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (2012), Paulo Gerbaudo suggests that social media platforms were important for helping the 2011 movements expand and become “truly popular” (154). In all of the above work, platforms figure as media that have been vital in facilitating new forms of political participation.

Equally, there have also been significant critiques of the democratic potential of digital platforms (Lovink 2011; Casemajor et al 2015; Carpentier 2016). Tarleton Gillespie points out that the discourse of the platforms offers a “comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness” but argues that digital platforms are not as egalitarian as their name suggests (2010, 360). Commenting on platforms too, Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform (2014) offers a useful

43 critique of the platform as an equalizing space. The title of Taylor’s book refers to the over optimistic imaginary of the platform as democratizing. At the same time, Taylor refutes the notion that social media sites enable democracy. She argues instead that the Internet amplifies offline inequalities. As Taylor puts it, “instead of making our relationships horizontal and bringing prosperity to all, the gap between the most popular and the practically invisible, the haves and the have-nots, has grown” (2014, 232). Taylor is drawing on this trope of the platform as an object that should make way for democratic participation. This is, of course, assuming that the right person has mounted it.

In both those theories of social media which celebrate it for its democratic potential, and in Gillespie and Taylor’s work which questions these celebrations, the platform represents the potential for resistance and a more equal politics. That is, whether digital platforms are being celebrated or critiqued, the idea of elevating media as politically useful is never questioned. This might be because platforms considered as tools for empowerment have a longer history that predates social media. We can look to the soapbox as an example of such a platform, an object created to literally help raise a person from the crowd to increase their visibility and amplify their voice and one which begins that long tradition of platforms which eventually leads to an unquestioning belief in the political usefulness of such media. If we were to create a genealogy of platforms, then, we might begin with the soapbox. In what follows, I show how soapboxes originated as a rudimentary media that enabled a new form of political participation. From the soapbox, we are granted an imaginary of platforms as democratizing media.

Whatever the ultimate view of social media, they initially provided newfound political participation, just as the soapbox historically served as a platform that newly empowered its users with relative ease. Since at least the early twentieth century, the practice of soapboxing has been an important social and political practice, used as an impromptu method of articulating politics to a crowd (May 2013). Whether it be a wooden crate, a curb, a small step ladder, or even a freshly cut down tree stump, soapboxes have always been rudimentary media amenable to spontaneous oration. It was around the beginning of the twentieth century that the soapbox became a popular mode of oration. At the time, most soapbox oratory concerned labour rights in the United Kingdom and in the United States (Walker 2006). But even before labour movement activists took to their soapboxes, it was preceded by the act of “stump speaking” in the United States - thought to date back to as early as 1806 (Trasciatti 2013). Stump speaking is a term that

44 describes the act of people literally climbing on cut-down tree stumps to make public declarations. Whereas access to halls with stages and other formalized speaking spaces was closed off to those without political power, the stump provided a convenient stage. When soapboxes followed, it was because they were readily available, cheap and light enough to carry around to different public spaces (May 2013; Trasciatti 2013). Thomas Walker (2006) explains that soapbox oratory caused a radical and enduring rupture in public speaking at the start of the twentieth century because with the use of makeshift platforms came “the self-assumption of the right and authority to speak up” (2006, 66). The soapbox as a technology for amplified oration was popular, then, because it was accessible and borne out of the need of marginal speakers to be heard.

The Speaker’s Corner, which has origins in London, is referred to as “the home of free speech” (Coomes 2015). Starting in 1872, the Speaker’s Corner occupied the northeast corner in London’s Hyde Park. Members of the public began standing on soapboxes, wooden stools and other homemade pulpits to make political and religious declarations in a space where they were sure to draw an audience and be free from fear of persecution (McIlvenny 1996, 30). The small plot of land in Hyde Park that was designated for speakers to make whatever declarations they deemed important was visited by well-known men like Marx, Lenin and George Orwell and thousands of other orators across the political spectrum from Marxists to Suffragettes (Wolmuth 2015). Surrounding histories of Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner is that real debate, and by extension a true manifestation of the political is facilitated by the soapbox. Paul McIlvenny defines Speaker’s Corner as “a non-consensual domain of popular public discourse” (1996, 9), arguing that the relationship between soapboxer and audience is unique in Hyde Park because the soapboxers are often heckled by the audience and passersby.

Through this back and forth dialogue between speaker and audience, Speaker’s Corner became a participatory political space. Hyde Park, along with other street corners where people could raise their temporary pulpits, are celebrated because we imagine that they are public spaces where those who were without political power could make space for themselves. Some theorists have argued that the introduction of a soapbox, a crate, was a small step that transformed an ordinary place into a space where the circulation of politics was made possible (Trasciatti 2013; McIlvenny 1996). Where formalized governmental spaces were inaccessible to many, especially those with marginal political views, Speaker’s Corner emerged as a space for lively political

45 debate. The broader implication is that soapbox media altered the political by supposedly introducing a more democratizing means to speak up.

Figure 3: Man on Milk Crate at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, 1993. Source: Philip Wolmuth.

7.1 Crates for the People

In the episode “Crate” of the T.V. show VEEP, Julia Loius Dryefus’ character Selina Meyers, an American presidential candidate, makes an attempt to become more likeable to voters. She procures a wooden crate with the intention of invoking an old-time folksy image of soapboxing. Meyers’ campaign managers are drawing on the history of soapboxing as a participatory tactic of the marginal that I presented in the section above. The soapbox figures as a quick and easy fix for making her politics more accessible. Throughout the episode though, we watch as Selina’s personal assistant Gary lugs the heavy soapbox between various speaking engagements. For a while, this method of appealing to votes via a wooden soapbox works- people respond to Selina’s ‘for the people’ approach until it is made known that the crate is reinforced with titanium and cost the campaign $12, 000.

This episode of VEEP was inspired by a real-life instance of a British politician, John Major, who became well known to the British public in 1992 as a “modern-day soapboxer”. Major, a

46 former British Prime Minister used a soapbox rather than “high-tech audio equipment” to appeal to smaller audiences during his campaign in the early 1990s (Rosenbaum 1997). Famously flanked with a low-tech megaphone and mounted atop a crate, Major used the old practice of soapboxing to reinvigorate his lack-lustre campaign (Haigron 2009). In these two instances, the soapbox is an effective tool for those in power because it implies a modest approach to engaging the public and thus enhances authenticity and credibility. Where original soapboxes were empty crates repurposed, were light and were a technology of the powerless, in the cases of the Meyers and Major, the soapbox is appropriated by power. This appropriation serves to reiterate the function of the soapbox as an elevating media of the people and is effective only because soapboxes and other homemade platforms are symbols of a particular way of engaging in politics: both the fictional Selina Meyers and former British Prime Minister John Major are made to appear more like the powerless than the powerful.

This notion of soapboxes as democratizing platforms that I have presented above is somewhat oversimplified. With the soapbox comes a perception that there is an ease and relative simplicity in speaking up and making your politics known. All you need is an old crate. Indeed, while this was true for some and especially at the turn of the twentieth century, these earlier histories of soapboxes leave out that qualifiers of difference, like race, gender, sexuality and ability mean that people have more complicated relationships to media that elevate their bodies than this. For some, standing up on a soapbox doesn’t feel safe because more visibility heightens the risk of violence. As discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, media theorists who have written on visibility (Birchall 2011; Browne 2015; Hall 2015; cárdenas 2016; Benjamin 2019) trouble the assumption that visibility is liberatory. These more recent theories develop a politics of visibility by showing how technologies that make bodies knowable are most often wielded by power. They tell us that we must reckon with the fact that there is a limit to the political capacity of mounting a soapbox if its primary function is to raise the person who uses it. As I move through other examples of platforms in this chapter, I will show that the relationship between platforms and visibility is not so easy as the soapbox example makes it seem. But it is also useful to situate soapboxes in this study of different platforms to show how ideas about being raised and empowerment originates within the public sphere or configurations of the politics of public space.

Platform Shoes: Fall, Pause Rise 8.1 Apparatus of Elevation: The higher the heel the closer to God

It’s Paris Fashion Week, 1993, and designer Vivienne Westwood is debuting her newest pair of platform shoes. The shoes are bright blue and made of leather fashioned to look like crocodile skin. They lace up the front with blue silk ribbons. Most notably though is the platform sole that measures an abnormally high 30.5 cm on each shoe. On the catwalk in Paris the British supermodel Naomi Campbell, at the peak of her career as a runway model, is wearing Westwood’s platform shoes. When it is Campbell’s turn to walk and show off Westwood’s signature piece in the collection, she takes a couple of steps down the runway before her left ankle and then her right buckle in the obviously too high shoes. She crumples to the ground. Campbell sits on the runway for a few seconds then laughs in embarrassment as people lining the runway lean in toward the runway trying to catch a glimpse of the once towering woman taken down by her own shoes. In a matter of seconds Campbell gets back up and keeps walking. Campbell’s fall, pause and rise only lasts about 10 seconds but this moment was so widely circulated by photos and videos that after the show Campbell was asked about her fall in multiple interviews in the weeks and even years following. On the David Letterman Show two years later Campbell is forced to watch clips of her fall again while Letterman gleefully laughs at the clumsy woman. A decade later on The Johnathan Ross Show, Campbell was presented with the shoes and challenged to walk in them again. Watching a super-model try not to fall made for great television. The Westwood platform shoes now sit in the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art and Design in London. Naomi Campbell, on the other hand, became known soon after her fall as an angry and difficult person to work with. There are countless articles written about the model that talk about her as an “angry black woman” or patronizingly applaud her for keeping her cool despite her anger issues when asked annoying and often racist questions by reporters (Lawson 2008; Schmidt 2010; Iqbal 2019). Naomi Campbell’s fall in a pair of too-high platform shoes interrupts prevailing popular discourse on high-heeled shoes and empowered women. Beyond this specific fall, Naomi Campbell’s stumble might also point us toward a broader reconsideration of what it means for women to be elevated. In this section, I will rewind Campbell’s motions in the platform shoe, her fall, pause and rise, to look more closely at how shoes have come to mediate femininity. Below, I extend my analysis of platforms to shoes that

48 serve as apparatuses of elevation. I include both platform shoes proper, which are shoes that have a chunky heel, and high heeled shoes more broadly in this analysis. Shoe historians might scoff at the conflation of these two varieties of shoes, as each has its own specific history. But, because the politics of elevation is my analytic, I use examples of both high heels and platforms in what follows.

Figure 4: The Vivienne Westwood platform shoes that Campbell wore for Paris Fashion Week, 1993. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 8.2 Rise

The high heeled shoe has occupied, and continues to occupy, a venerated place in Western cultural imagination: a woman in heels is a woman in power, in control of her body and sexuality. This imagination is animated in popular culture: think of Sarah Jessica Parker and her endless discussion of shoes as an independent woman writer in Sex and the City, or of films such as Working Girl, Charlie’s Angels, and of countless others where female protagonists, on their way to corporate power and success, or to fight an evil villain, weaponize their heels as a clear symbol of power femininity. We might also look to those films and television shows that trace the rise of a female protagonist as she slowly and deliberately slips high heeled shoes onto her stockinged feet and heads to the office with a take-no-prisoners kind of attitude. Even beyond

49 popular culture, there is a recent academic interest in high-heeled shoes as an apparatus of empowerment, especially in the field of Media Studies (Brennan 2019; Zundel 2019), despite the historical feminist scholarship that has theorized the platform shoe as an obvious impediment to women’s empowerment (Bartky 1990).Without question, a woman elevated has become a marker of empowerment today. The affective relations women are expected to have with the platform shoe—empowerment, confidence, self-assurance, sexiness—resonate with the discourse of empowerment of popular feminism that circulates on multiple digital platforms. For example, as discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, some of the modern-day neoliberal popular feminist heroes, Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Michelle Obama, are all proponents of a feminist politics that sees women successfully climbing the corporate ladder as the key to empowerment (Rottenberg 2018). It matters here that neoliberal feminism is equated with being high-powered: verticality stands as a marker of success. It’s no wonder then that shoes which will literally raise a woman from the ground are also linked to empowerment: Mike Zundel (2019) has argued that heels signify power in the boardroom. Summer Brennan (2019) argues that the very purchasing of shoes is also sometimes presented as a mode of feminist liberation. She writes, “Modern shoe consumerism, especially, is often presented within the politically feminized language of choice. A woman’s right to choose becomes a ‘woman’s right to shoes’” (Brennan 2019, 5). As such, there is a connection between what popular feminism and high heels both signify culturally and politically.

There is also a history of platform shoes as symbols of wealth. Chopines were a 15th to 17th century version of the platform shoes with heels that were up to 22cm high. Servants were required to help the people who wore the shoes balance as they walked. This kind of footwear was therefore only worn by very wealthy people who could afford both the shoes and the required servants (Mulvey 2013, 122). In eastern parts of the world, elevated footwear helped to keep wealthy people and their expensive garments clear and dry from the filthy streets below (Small 2014, 53). In Japan, the geta, a sandal with tall wooden teeth kept women from sinking in rice fields and helped wealthier women remain “unpolluted” (Small 2015, 54). Platform shoes therefore have a long-standing position as a marker of difference - where being elevated signifies a sort of financial success or at least an aspiration for wealth. In the case of the platforms, or high heels more generally, the shoe is a technology that literally facilitates a rise to power.

8.3 Pause

There are some quite obvious reasons to give pause to the notion that high heels are empowering. Perhaps most obvious is that heels are hard to move in. Platform or high-heeled shoes make a woman physically vulnerable and unstable—they elevate a body on an insufficient platform that is typically limited in its capacity to support body weight. Starting in the 1970s, during the resurgence of platform shoes in popular fashion, health concerns related to wearing the shoes began appearing in scientific journals. For example, Dr. Michael Whitehouse wrote to a British medical journal in 1974 warning of what he called “Platform Shoe Syndrome” where he noted the connection between his female patients wearing platform shoes and an increase in knee pain and “tenderness over the patellar ligament” (Whitehouse 1974, 274). It is obviously difficult to run in platform shoes, making fast escapes from any situation difficult (Mike, Oleksy, Kielnar, Swierczek 2016). And, as natural gait will be dangerously altered in platforms (Schulze and Joebges 2001), ankle sprains are more likely in platform shoes, (Furman 1992); driving in a platform shoe will slow braking response time and increase the chances of car accidents (Warner and Mace 1974).

Heels are so difficult to maneuver in that straight men have made walking in them a self- sacrificial activity for charity. The “Walk a Mile in her Shoes” fundraiser is an international men’s march where men put on bright red heels and walk a mile in support of various charities surrounding sexual assault and gender violence. Men in their regular business suits, or police uniforms, or sweat wicking quick dry shirts can be seen teetering down the main streets of major cities at these events. Not only do these events raise some money, but finally men can understand how hard it is to be a woman, even if only for a little while! At least this is how the story goes in all of the lighthearted reporting on the “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” events. For example, Canadian news outlet CTV News covered a 2019 “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” fundraiser in Montreal, reporting of the men who participated, “They were uncomfortable and a little unsteady, but for more than 80 men the long walk in four inch heels was a price they were willing to pay” (CTV News, July 6, 2019). This example of able-bodied men struggling to walk even a few blocks in heels should give us even more reason to pause if equating heels and empowerment

Others have taken pause and questioned high heels as empowering along different lines. In her book high heel, Summer Brennan grapples with one key dilemma: whether high heels celebrate a woman’s sexuality or make women sexual objects (2019, 147). For Brennan, this is a difficult question because on the one hand, a woman in heels might feel more confident and empowered, but on the other hand, it is hard to walk in these shoes and sometimes wearing them feels like it is done for the benefit of the male gaze (2019, 140). Sandra Bartky (1990) has also argued that high heeled shoes are part of a disciplinary practice that controls and hinders the movement of women (1990, 68-69). Even some of McLuhan’s observations, although from a notably less feminist perspective, echo this sentiment. Analysing a “Phantom Pencil Seams Nylons” ad, McLuhan writes of the woman’s legs on display:

To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip with masculine drive and confidence. She knows that "a long-legged gal can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car. They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience (1951, 93).

McLuhan’s analysis of the Phantom Pencil Seams Nylon ad highlights how women’s legs are managed by advertisers in order to draw and keep the male gaze. Indeed, McLuhan (1951) would consider platform shoes alongside other garments that restrict a woman’s ability to move in the world as an example of her “mechanization.” In The Mechanical Bride he theorizes what he calls “the interfusion of sex and technology” (1951, 94). For McLuhan, the connection between sex and technology is twofold. First, there is a masculinist drive to make sex mechanical, and second, man wants to “possess machines in a sexually gratifying way” (1951, 94). McLuhan imagines that those objects which alter a woman’s natural body are part of man’s project to mechanize women. McLuhan moves us beyond a debate about the shoe as empowering and instead is useful here in thinking about platforms and heels as media of elevation. Taking McLuhan’s idea of mechanized women then, we might argue that heeled shoes figure as an apparatus of elevation, visibility and as a way of structuring a particular kind of femininity.

8.4 Fall

Following McLuhan, my interest in platform shoes is not centred on an argument about whether the shoe is empowering or not. I do not think it is useful here to think about shoes as tools for empowerment. This idea of shoes as empowering exists in the first place because of a

52 contemporary white and popular feminist imperative that sees visibility and elevation as vital to feminist liberation.

Platform shoes and the women who wear them while inhabiting offices on the top floors of office buildings highlight how a particular popular feminism has an attachment to the platform. This popular feminism is usually white, heterosexual and dedicated to corporate capitalism. The platform which elevates some women is a requirement for white feminist power to operate and maintain its dominance. Liberating or not, this apparatus of elevation mediates popular feminism. Banet-Weiser explains the link between what she refers to as an economy of visibility and popular feminism when she writes:

In a capitalist, corporate economy of visibility, those feminisms that are most easily commodified and branded are those that become most visible. This means, most of the time, that the popular feminism that is most visible is that which is white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and heterosexual (Banet-Weiser 2018, 13).

The platform shoe, when considered as a technology of popular feminism, can only ever be empowering for those that are already poised to be most visible. It therefore doesn’t matter if a platform shoe is empowering. What is significant here is that there is a perceived need for a technology, in this case a shoe, as a way of mediating empowerment.

Witch Hunts and Gallows

Amid allegations of Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulting numerous women and the subsequent rise of #MeToo movement, Hollywood director Woody Allen warned of what he called “a witch hunt atmosphere where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself” (Chow 2017). Allen has long been suspected of sexual assault himself (Orth 2014). His comments about witch hunts put him in the company of other misogynists, like US President Donald Trump for instance, who has called requests for the release of his tax returns a witch hunt too. Margaret Atwood has also compared the sexual assault accusations that saw Steven Galloway, former chair of UBC’s creative writing program, removed from his job, to the Salem witch trial. In an opinion piece printed in the Globe and Mail, Attwood defended Galloway by arguing that because he had been proclaimed guilty without proof, he was getting the same treatment as women unfairly killed in Salem because they were thought to be witches (Atwood 2018). Allen, Trump and Atwood reference witch hunts in these instances as if it is men

53 in positions of power who have to fear the violent persecution that thousands of women across the world have been subject to since at least the mid-1400s (Cawthrone 2004). These examples of purported witch hunts against males invert the history of witch hunting. Where once women accused of being witches were put on various raised surfaces so that they could be killed publicly, now those who take to media platforms to call out the violence of men are the ones doing the hunting.

While men have also historically been the targets of witch hunts (Rapley 2007), women have primarily been persecuted globally when they were thought to be witches. Silvia Federici makes this point in both Caliban and the Witch (2003) and Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018). Federici writes that “women were the main target of this persecution because it was they who were most severely impoverished by the capitalization of economic life, and because the regulation of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity was a condition for the construction of more stringent social control” (2018, 2). Federici attributes women’s persecution as witches to the threat they posed to the power of the church and state (Federici 2003). Other literature on witch hunts also highlights the sexual nature of the violence done to women accused of being witches (Ward 1992; Barstow 1994). This work is important for highlighting how fear of witches and their subsequent persecution has always been linked to the fear and persecution of women more broadly.

The gallows serve as platforms that literally erase difference when women thought to be witches were hung from them. If we look to the examples of the proofs that a woman was a witch and thus should be hung this connection between platforms and erasure is made clear. In Germany during the late 1500s, mostly poor women were accused of witchcraft. The result was the burning of over one thousand women at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Barstow 1994, 59). In Salem, those who were absent from church and unable to recite bible verses were often accused of witchcraft (Hill 2000, 129). Another proof that a woman was a witch is often referred to as “The Devil’s Mark.” These were physical markers like moles or birthmarks that were found on women who, accused of witchcraft, were stripped and searched for whatever evidence could be found (Cawthorne 2004, 18; Federici 2003, 31). Federici also points out that old women were often accused of being witches too (2003, 32). No longer useful reproductive subjects, these women posed more of a threat than a potential benefit to the communities they lived in. Locating

54 difference in women and then erasing them by way of the stake or gallows was thus the purpose of witch hunting. Again, Federici is useful here. She writes that:

The witch hunt instituted a regime of terror on all women, from which emerged the new model of femininity to which women had to conform to be socially accepted in the developing capitalist society: sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination to the male world, accepting as natural the conformed to a sphere of activities that in capital has been completely devalued (2018, 32).

The witch hunt as a way of erasing difference was therefore a system for disciplining women. Putting non-conforming women on trial for witchcraft meant that that, as Federici puts it, “at the stakes not only were the bodies of witches destroyed, but so was a whole world of social relations that had been the basis of women’s social power (2018, 33).

The gallows in Salem, where nineteen people were hung in 1692, are further proof of how witch hunts were designed to discipline and how platform visibility served this end. The site, known as Proctor’s Ledge, is in what was at the time of the Salem Witch Trials, a wooded area at the base of a hill that was visible to people who lived in houses below. The spot was purposefully highly visible because the public execution of witches was meant to prevent others from practicing witchcraft (Crimaldi 2016). Understanding the gallows as a platform makes clear that raising women on them is an exercise of power through violent disciplinary action.

Auction Blocks

The platform has also figured as a site in the service of violence, persecution and perverse capitalism through time. This is exemplified by the blocks that Black men and women were forced to stand on at slave auctions. Auction blocks serve as an example of social and economic power exercised by putting abject bodies on display. Saidiya Hartman names the slave auction block a “scene of subjugation,” where the block mediated the “coerced spectacl[e] to enforce the trade in black flesh, scenes of torture and festivity” (1997, 22). Bodies forced onto the auction platform – like those forced onto the gallows platform– disrupt the idea that visibility is necessarily empowering. Put simply, when Black people are put on platforms in the American South to be sold to white slave owners, that visibility is not just dis-empowering, but is a violent and dangerous tactic of the powerful. Failure to question if the platform today and its mediation of visibility are always a source of empowerment is to forget the differential relationship to elevation and power that race, gender and class have had through time.

In so many accounts of slave life, the auction block is an object that appears again and again. The block is significant in part because it figures as the location of the traumatic separation of families as people are bought and sold to different slave owners throughout the American south. (Kramer 1859; Randolph and Bassard 2016; Bailey 2017; Jones-Rogers 2019). Anne C. Bailey recounts how auctions were referred to as “the weeping time” because slaves understood that after they climbed on the block they would be displaced from their homes and from their families (2017, 3). Black people were elevated by the platform so that their bodies could be observed and evaluated for their capacity to do labour in the service of economic power but at the cost of their own social and personal power.

Dr. John Theophilus Kramer attended a slave auction in New Orleans sometime around 1859. His short book The Slave Auction is an ethnography of this auction that describes in great detail the auction hall set in the upscale St. Louis hotel:

There is a broad hall, situated in one of the most frequented streets of a large and well- known city in the South. You will be astonished when you shall find, in place of a lion’s den or a man-trap, a nicely fitted up refreshing-place. Nothing formidable is presented to your eyes. Several corpulent and richly dressed gentlemen are helping themselves to fine liquors and delicacies, profusely spread out before you, and placed upon an elegantly shaped bar. Beautiful pictures, ornamenting the walls, attract the eyes of some amateurs of art; while others preferring nice lots and buildings, are studying the designs of several hundred large maps, showing various city lots and splendid buildings, advertised ‘for sale at auction.’ In the vicinity of said maps is a platform, whereupon a table is placed, together with a writing desk and a few chairs, two colored waiters are busy placing several hundred commodious chairs, facing the platform (1859, 5).

This depiction of a slave sale– and especially the focus on the setting, the platform and the seating for the audience that surrounds it– is astounding in its detail. Here, the auction is described as lavish and as much a social function for the white and wealthy as it is an efficient logistical moving of humans being sold as goods. Jones-Rogers (2019) notes that the slave and in particular the slave block that Kramer describes is out of the ordinary for its opulent and sanitized space. More often slave auctions included “a scantily clad slave up on an auction block in the centre of a male audience of perspective buyers, usually in an auction house located in an obscure auction of a city’s commercial district” (Jones-Rogers 2019, 129). What is consistent between Kramer and Jones-Rogers’ accounts of slave auctions are the platforms that centre the attention of the audience. Feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick notes this too when she writes on the geography of the slave auctions. McKittrick’s research on auction blocks shows

56 that the media of an auction block was varied, it was a table, a stage, a cement block, a stump, but regardless of media form “ the human-commodity is put on display and the auction block serves to spatially position Black men and women as objects ‘to be seen’ and assessed” (2006, 72). Here we see that platforms become necessary to selling slaves because they mediate elevation and therefore the visibility of the human-commodity.

In his description of the slave auction at the St. Louis hotel in New Orleans, Kramer goes on to describe the elegantly dressed men and women in attendance to buy, sell and trade slaves, who enter the hall and wait for the auction to begin. One by one, men, women and children are called up to the auction block where their name, age and skills are read out before the auctioneer. At the auction Kramer attends, 149 people are sold in total. Kramer, who is an abolitionist, describes each sale and makes known his discomfort with the ways in which the people who climb up on the auction block are crudely categorized and sold. For example, he describes three siblings who are put on the auction block together and sold to separate buyers:

I will not attempt to imagine the anguish and horror that my fair female readers would have felt, if they could have witnessed the picture of that poor distressed family the despairing features of those three innocent girls upon that slaughter-bench, like three faultless lambs offered for sacrifice! (1859, 25).

While human tragedy is obvious in Kramer’s account, it is also striking here how Kramer describes the efficiency of selling humans. Displayed by the platform they are forced to climb onto, the men and women being sold seem to be part of a well-organized system. In this example of slave auctions, the platform figures as a technology that amplifies bodies in the name of logistics. As different people for sale mount the slave auction block, their physical attributes are made more visible to buyers who need workers to fulfill specific roles. Visibility on the block therefore facilitates the efficient sale of humans. Anne C. Bailey, in her book The Weeping Time, which describes the largest slave auction in American history and its multi-generational aftermath, explains that the appearance of people on the block was essential to showcase value (2017, 15). People were evaluated on whether they appeared to have a desirable body composition and if were in good physical health and would likely be able to work well on a plantation. But people were also evaluated for indicators of obedience– posture was a good indicator of this. If a slave was standing on the block with a straight back and puffed out chest, this might be read as a defiant stance. If they had markings of a whip from being disciplined, an

57 owner could assume the slave was likely to mount some sort of resistance or try to escape in the future.

Slave auction blocks thus functioned as media that made people more visible in order to render them legible to power and make transactions easier. In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Deborah Cowen illustrates the ways in which violence is inflicted on any bodies that “threaten the smooth circulation of stuff” (2014, 214). Slave auction blocks are media that facilitate this smooth circulation of people being sold as labourers. In the case of platforms that put bodies on display, then, we have to understand media that increase visibility as variably dangerous especially when they are tied to the logistics of moving human capital.

Figure 5: A Slave Auction in Virginia. February 27, 1856. Illustrated London News. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Conclusion: Lessons from Feminism’s Other Platforms

Having brought forth disparate examples of soapboxes, shoes, gallows and auction blocks, the question now is: how do these other platforms help us understand the politics of platforms in a digital context? The study of feminism’s other platforms makes clear that mediated elevation is not experienced uniformly. This chapter has revealed that throughout history, women, queer

58 folks and Black people have mounted platforms and experienced the dangerous consequences to dangerous effects. These examples interrupt prevailing understandings of the platform as a medium of feminist empowerment. I end the chapter by restating the logic of each of the platforms I have presented above to suggest how these logics extend to digital platforms.

Soapbox media ushered in a new way of thinking about one’s authority to speak. So long as you had something to stand on, your voice could be heard. This is of course the underpinning logic of social media platforms and their ties to digital activism today. Since 2011, when the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street used Facebook and Twitter, digital platforms have been celebrated because they supposedly make public participation more democratic. We see this too with more the influx of feminist politics reliant on digital platforms, highlighted especially by the recent #MeToo movement. As I showed at the start of this chapter, some communications theorists have been critical of the notion that social media platforms are democratizing (Taylor 2012; Gillespie 2010; Casemajor et all 2015; Carpentier 2016). In recognizing how digital platforms are not neutral, this work brings into question early conceptions of the internet as an equalizing space. But, in extending our historical understanding of platforms past more recent contexts, it is clear that we need not have ever assumed digital platforms were egalitarian. In other words, a history of soapbox platforms has shown us that soapboxing is a process that has been co-opted by power too. Soapboxing has always required a base level of power the individual to stand and become more visible.

Platform shoes reveal a history of apparatus that have been thought to mediate both femininity and power. Drawing on McLuhan’s observations in The Mechanical Bride (1951), we see that platform shoes function as visibility machines, designed to elevate those who wear them and by extension, make their wearer more salient. Platform shoes, for this reason, often get tied to women’s empowerment. But we also know platform shoes have historically been the footwear choice of the wealthy, that they have been a source of limited mobility and that they have caused tragic falls for even the most fit to walk in them. Isn’t this the way that white and popular feminism functions as it circulates on digital platforms? Those already in a position to be made visible by social media platforms will benefit from using them the most. Consider here how it was white celebrities that made an already existing #MeToo hashtag spread. Social media platforms, like platform shoes, structure a particular kind of femininity and feminist

59 empowerment that relies on elevation and visibility. They make no room for a feminism that relies on opacity, laying low, and staying safe.

Gallows and stakes have been used to persecute people, mostly women, accused of witchcraft. People were thought to be witches when marked, both literally and metaphorically, by difference. In some cases, a marking on a woman’s skin, like a birth mark, was considered to be an indicator that she was a witch. But more often it was a person’s non-conforming behavior that made them subject to fatefully mounting the gallows. Gallows functioned as media that elevated a body and put it on display and as a technology to discipline unruly people during witch hunts. The raised gallows thus served to literally erase difference. Here again there is a clear politics of elevation at hand. In the case of witch hunts, being raised becomes a technology of power used to punish women.

This shows us again the differential effects of being made visible. Might it be the case that digital platforms are also disciplining media? Consider for example, how Platform Feminism has come to discipline those who refuse to speak up on the platform. When one makes a decision to not take up the platform or arrive on the scene, digital or otherwise, there is a palpable accusation that silence is complicity. It is not uncommon to log on to Twitter and be greeted by tweets that interpolate all the other feminists with “all of you who are silent right now are complicit.” Under the logic of the platform, different histories of visibility are rendered illegible (Singh and Sharma 2019). Platforms can have the effect of disciplining users who do not use them ‘properly.’

At slave auctions in the American South, auction blocks were media that put Black people on display in order to facilitate their efficient sale. The platform is a logistical tool to make the buying and selling of humans more efficient since buyers could easily view the physical – and even psychological – attributes of the slaves they wanted to purchase. When a body is put on display, there is less risk of making a bad purchase. Slave auction blocks are an example of a platform used as a violent technology of power. Media Studies’ scholarship on digital technologies that capture their users (Browne 2015; Beauchamp 2018; Benjamin 2019) show us how the control functions of these contemporary platforms is tied to that of the slave auction block too. When digital platforms function as surveillance technologies by capturing the data of those who use them, they make the biopolitical management of certain individuals more efficient while simultaneously reducing the risk to those in power.

I have argued that we need to cast a wider net in our conception of what the platform is in the first place. In an age of amplification, where we celebrate digital platforms for reinvigorating feminism, we must also look at the lessons learned from other elevating media. The differential effects of elevation, which have been historically mediated by the platform, offer us a better understanding of how platform logics come to bear on feminism. In the next chapter, my analysis shifts from an historical perspective on platforms to a contemporary context. Given the differential effects of elevation by soapboxes, high heels, gallows and auction blocks established in this chapter, I turn to and consider how contemporary feminist activists who resist from the margins respond to Platform Feminism.

Chapter 3- Convening on the Margins: Spatial Strategies and Platform Logics

Spatial acts can take on many forms and be identified through expressions, resistances, and naturalizations. Importantly, these acts take place and have a place - Katherine McKittrick, xix

With its pink knitted hats and witty signage, the Women's March on Washington emerged in 2017 as a symbolic grand counter-narrative to the Trump administration. Women’s Marches have been denounced by feminist scholars for reinforcing the very universalizing and essentialist perceptions of ‘women’ that have historically excluded most non-white middle-class women, trans, and queer people. Pamela Moss and Avril Maddrell note that despite the organizers of the Women’s March framing it as inclusive and intersectional, “criticism arising from feminist activists, bloggers and scholars about the way in which intersectionality and inclusion were taken up by organizers, protesters and marchers eclipsed the glow of solidarity experienced by many participants” (2017, 615). Geographers Cindy Anne Rose-Redwood and Reuben Rose- Redwood’s reflections on their own attendance of the Women’s March in Victoria, British Columbia reflect this feeling of the Women’s Marches’ whiteness specifically. In their article “‘It definitely felt very white’: race, gender, and the performative politics of assembly at the Women’s March in Victoria, British Columbia,” (2017), Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood write about feeling at once invisible in the midst of the many white women at the march and hypervisible as a number of people took their photographs without consent (651). Prior to the marches, Black writer and activist Jamila Lemiux wrote that she would not attend the marches, stating, “I don’t know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn’t have my back prior to November” (January 17, 2017). Aureille Marie Lucier is a Black journalist who reported her experience at San Francisco’s Women’s March. She described the whiteness of the marches too. Lucier writes, “I realize somewhere between being pushed into a trash can by an oblivious “Nasty Woman,” and being racially profiled by an elderly feminist, that white women marched yesterday for themselves alone” (2017). Angela Peoples, who directs an LGBTQ equality organization showed up to Washington March wearing a hat that read “Stop Killing Black People,” and a sign painted with the words “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted For Trump” (Obie 2017). A photo of Peoples at the march that went viral shows her holding her sign amid a sea of mostly white women wearing pussy hats (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Angela Peoples at the Women’s March on Washington, 2017. Source: Kevin Banatte.

Months later, the #MeToo movement went viral on Twitter when women began sharing their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of powerful men. In an op-ed for Al Jezeera, feminist scholar Catherine Rottenberg argues we might consider MeToo as corporate and neoliberal because they disarticulate systematic violence and seem blind to other forms of oppression beyond middle class white women’s experience in public space (Rottenberg 2017). And in September 2019, people all over the world took to the streets for the Global Climate strike. I attended the Women’s March in Toronto, followed #MeToo discussions in the news and tracked responses by Feminist Media Studies scholars closely. Filled with optimism that our dying planet might be saved as young activists led by Greta Thunberg led international climate strikes, I marched with the climate strikers too. I shared the feeling of the scholars, journalists and activists who have been critical of these major popular feminist movements – all of these events felt very straight and very white.

But it wasn’t just the megaphones, Patagonia down-filled jackets, expensive granola bars and pussy hats that straightened and raced these recent popular movements. Nor was it just the fact that #MeToo gained popularity only when white celebrities started tweeting that they too had been subject to sexual abuse in Hollywood, even though the hashtag was first used by Black civil rights activist Tarana Burke more than a decade earlier. In fact, the #MeToo movement was met

63 with similar critiques about its overwhelming whiteness as the Women’s March. Even Burke, notes that #MeToo has privileged white celebrities and not minority voices (Time Magazine April 23, 2019). Instead, as this dissertation has argued so far, it was the role of the platform, an object that mediated all of these events that structured these popular movements. Significantly each of these recent feminist mobilizations rely on digital media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Such social media platforms lend themselves to making feminism visible and accessible. The digital platforms circulate news of upcoming marches and they serve to re- elevate the celebrities and feminist heroes who stand on stages and make speeches to rally the crowd. Feminism through the platform becomes digestible. What these recent popular examples also show is that the platform reduced feminist politics to simply showing up and making your voice heard.

In this chapter I argue that platform mediated protest organizes social space in such a way that is at odds with intersectional feminism. Platform Feminism is not attuned to the safety and survival of people who resist on the margins because it too often assumes a uniform relationship to space. My contention in this chapter is that in order to account for the feminist politics of those who are Black, brown, Indigenous, queer and disabled, we must consider resistance that does not rely on platforms in the first place. This strategy, I argue, is more effective than trying to include more racialized and queer folks in Platform Feminism. In this chapter I examine the strategies of feminist activists who subvert the platform logics of amplification and elevation, specifically focusing on examples from the past decade. I begin this chapter with an investigation of the Women’s Marches’ approach to organizing social space. Drawing on participant observation from the Toronto Women’s March, critical discourse analysis of Women’s March news coverage and maps of the routes used in various North American Women’s Marches, I show how these events relied on an assumption of safety and privilege in space. I argue that the Women’s Marches are an example of Platform Feminism that uphold existing structures of racism and misogyny because they operate at centers of power. I then move on to contrasting these Women’s Marches with examples of resistance that employ what I call marginal spatial strategies. These spatial strategies are modes of organizing in space that feminist activists who live on the margins employ in their efforts to survive racist, misogyny, homophobic and ableist conditions. I call on interviews with activists as well as critical discourse analysis of news coverage of protests from around the world to show how those without political power resist.

The first marginal strategy is dancing; I suggest that dancing is a way of both convening and collectively expressing joy. The second marginal strategy concerns the formation of socio- political scenes. I suggest that certain spatial strategies, like kneeling for the national anthem for example, have the ability to structure scenes in particular ways, providing a mode of resisting and making struggle visible that have to be read differently from other masculinist resistance tactics. In all of these examples, no singular voice, tweet, or hashtag is presented as a marginal spatial strategy. Instead the focus in this chapter is on the commons and the marginal strategies used to sustain them.

Spatial Strategies

In the context of Platform Feminism, the dominating spatial strategy is to elevate and amplify at sites of struggle. Stages, mics and social media sites show us how feminism is mediated by these platforms in order to make politics seen and heard. As discussed already, Lisa Parks argues that the vertical is a high-stakes political field (2018, 9). To be elevated is a politically powerful position because it extends visibility– you can both be seen and see more when you are elevated. Contemporary and popular feminism’s reliance on the platform is thus concerning because its dominant spatial strategies are based on an assumption that platform mediated elevation, and by extension platform mediated visibility, are experienced uniformly. In other words, under the logic of the platform, different histories of visibility are rendered illegible. The logics of the platform foreclose other resistant strategies more attuned to factors of care and survival in the digital age.

Feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1993) describes how people have differential relationships to space and mobility where the freedom to move in space is not experienced or distributed equally. Massey argues that there are “power geometries” (61) where “different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movements, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it (1993, 61). In Space, Place and Gender (1994), Massey develops this analysis by arguing that relationships to space are gendered. As Massey puts it, “space and place, spaces and places, and our senses of them (and such related things as our degrees of mobility) are gendered through and through. Moreover, they are gendered in a myriad of different ways, which carry between cultures and over time” (1994,

186). Here Massey identifies that gender informs the ways in which people are free to, or are comfortable to, move in space. In this chapter I turn my attention to spatial strategies that are borne out of the differential relationships to space that Massey identifies. I draw on examples of feminist protest from the past decade that highlight the corporeal demands of people who are women and Black, brown, queer, trans and differently- abled. These examples are notable because while they run in parallel with more popular feminist movements (both geographically and temporally), they are not instances of resistance that are bound to the platform. This chapter illustrates the contemporary marginal spatial strategies of feminists who seem to evade the platform in their efforts to survive. The examples of spatial strategies that I call on in this chapter take place across various temporalities and locations. From the streets to night clubs, from city squares to football fields to City Hall, city spaces are fraught with very specific politics of access and safety. But, as I have learned from conducting interviews with activists and doing participant observation at feminist protests over the past three years, these are spaces which also become sites of resistance.

Spatial strategies of marginalized people include everyday methods of negotiating space and moving through the world. These are strategies that emerge out of people’s uneven relationships to social space that result in the need to develop ways of negating mobility. This might include things like travelling in groups, choosing to walk the streets only at specific times of the day, setting up protests in places that are proximate to particular locations like police stations or hospitals or practicing self-care. As I show in this chapter, for some, the spatial strategies that emerge are focused on factors like safety, escape, concealment and care over that of amplification and popularizing resistance movements. For example, in 2016 members of the Black Lives Matter movement camped outside of the Toronto Police Headquarters for two weeks in protest of the police shooting of Andrew Loku. Andrew Loku was a 45-year-old refugee from South Sudan who lived in an apartment complex in Toronto. Just before midnight on July 4, 2015, Loku and his neighbours began arguing about noise complaint and police were called. Loku was holding a hammer during the dispute and when police arrived, they yelled at Loku to drop the hammer before shooting him two times. In multiple reports about the incident and according to other residents who witnessed the shooting, Loku’s arms were by his side when he was killed by a Toronto police officer (Warnica July 17, 2015). As journalist Richard Warnica reported for The National Post, Loku was shot within a year of Michael Brown being shot by

66 police in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner being killed by police in New York City, which were two events that sparked the Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States. When Loku was killed by police, Black Lives Matter Toronto responded by demanding an apology from the Toronto police before they began camping out at Toronto Police headquarters in protest (Warnica July 17, 2015).

For those who camped out, the space became one of “community healing and building” according to BLMTO’s co-founder, Alexandria Williams. At what became known as the BLM Tent City, the critical concerns of protestors were taken into account by organizers. This meant that organizers ensured the inclusion of prayer, yoga and meditation spaces at the encampment as well as volunteer medics and supporters bringing supplies to those who camped out (Battersby April 3, 2016). In considering how to provide sustenance for protestors, the BLMTO camp evaded the logics of the platform. In other words, unlike a focus on visibility that has become characteristic of popular feminist movements like the Women’s March or #metoo, these other spatial considerations are borne out of an investment in the survival of those who unduly struggle to survive. The BLM Tent City protest highlighted how the platform is a culturally dominating media form that is limited in its capacity to register and account for intersectional feminist forms of resistance and refusal. The material platform of protests and marches is quite often a media that is refused by Black, Brown, queer and disabled folks because it impinges on other more pressing modes of survival. However, before discussing the refusal of the platform, I will first focus on the normative spatial order that has come to dominate popular feminism.

Platform Feminism and It’s Roving Centre

In her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower (2018), Brittney Cooper calls the Women’s March a mobilization of white women’s tears. Cooper, who is a cultural critic that writes on Black women’s political organizing, writes of the Women’s March, “On the day after Trump’s inauguration, white women took over America, to the tune of more than three million protestors. It is the biggest feminist action ever recorded. But it was hard to see the outraged cried of all those white women, many of whom had failed to get their people, as anything other than a public profusion of white-lady tears” (2018,172). White-lady tears, Cooper explains, are the tears white women cry after they are called out for their implicit and explicit displays of racism (172). Cooper refers to the Women’s March as a display of white-lady tears

67 because it was white women who overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the 2016 US election (O’Neal 2016). Cooper recognizes how the Women’s March seemed to centre a very particular version of white womanhood, noting that it was also white women who were largely responsible for voting for Trump in the first place (2018, 174). Cooper offers a critical description of the Women’s March which reveals it as a protest that maintained white women’s political power rather than a marginal strategy. Cooper reads the march as a demonstration of shame and regret by women who have been central in upholding existing structures of power.

Indeed, as Cooper argues, despite the fact that the Women’s March, and contemporary movements like #MeToo, are feminist movements, they are not necessarily marginal movements. I turn to a media theory of margins and centres to show how this matters for an analysis of Platform Feminism. Here I draw upon Harold Innis’s communication theory of centers if knowledge as well as Jody Berland’s extension of Innis to discuss the cultural politics of margins. Innis argues that “the economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between centre and margin of western civilisation” (1995, 5). Innis points to the emphasis put on the production of staples (fur, fish, lumber) and technologies that facilitate the production of staples (transportation, marketing, production facilities) as the reason that the power discrepancy between centre and margin in Canada is so significant (Innis 1995, 5). Innis goes on to argue that in an effort for centres of power to maintain their control over staple goods, such as fur, fish and lumber, they developed activities of “the government, the church, the seigniorial system, and other institutions” (1995, 11). This history of the trade of Canadian goods is important to Innis’ communication theory because it shows how an investment in exporting commodities organized the formation of centres and margins. Centres become the locus of power and margins are the areas that supply centres. In North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, Jody Berland argues that margins are peripheral spaces in terms of economic and political power. Drawing from Innis, Berland writes:

Innis’s principal contribution to the history of culture is his insistence on the crucial role of communication and transportation technologies in forming such spatial configurations of power…. technologies facilitate the ongoing production of centers and margins; that is to say, spatially differentiated hierarches of political economic power (2009, 66).

Spatial configurations of centre and margin are thus mediated by both the economic benefits of these staples and the technologies that produce them. Berland allows us to consider how

68 marginality is too often thought of more as a metaphorical than a spatial term (67). In other words, too often the margins are imagined in terms of representation. Likewise, outside of media theory, others have written on the concept of margins too. Patricia Hill Collins and Katherine McKittrick both argue that to cast margins and centres as marginal is to make the terms universal and ahistorical (McKittrick 2006, 57; Hill Collins 1998, 129). For instance, Katherine McKittrick argues that “we need to pay attention to the ways in which the margin stays on the intellectual, disciplinary, and geographic borders because it is simultaneity empty and non-white” (2016, 58). This critique of margins is that when the term is used theoretically, it flattens the experiences of people who do live and survive on the periphery. Berland points this out as a flaw in Innis’ theory too. She argues that “the technologies that produce his centres and margins never encounter the everyday lives, the complexly mediated power dynamics, the lively vestiges of myth and memory, the diverse imaginative activities of real men and women” (1997, 96). However, as Berland suggests, by thinking with Innis’ margins, we can give attention to “any site which requires and enables communities to employ cultural technologies and counterhegemonic tools” (2009, 97). It is in this spirit that I develop a theory of marginal strategies which subvert the hegemonic logics of Platform Feminism in this chapter. Marginal strategies for resistance cannot be about personal practice. Thus we must spend time at the margins. It is there where people are pushed for more instructive examples of feminist politics oriented towards difference. bell hooks has perhaps most famously positioned margins as sites of resistance (1989). hooks describes the margin as “a profound edge,” one that is not safe and where people who inhabit them are always at risk (1989, 19). But, importantly she goes on to write, “ As such, I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose– to give up or surrender as part of moving into the centre– but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist” (1989, 20). Where hooks’ call to cling to the margins is predicated on their potential for resistance and radical transformation, Berland and Innis also suggest that marginality holds the possibility to destabilize information flows and controls.

These theories of margins and centres are particularly useful when considering the spatial organization of the Women’s March. In the case of the Women’s March, thinking about material marginal spaces is also revealing of hierarchies of power. In Washington DC, the march started at the southwest corner of the Capitol building and the route continued alone the National Mall. The march was two miles long and ran through one of the Washington’s busiest tourist areas. In

New York City, marchers moved through Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. It was Michigan Avenue that was flooded with pussy hats in Chicago. At the Toronto March that I attended, protestors convened at Queen’s Park in the green space outside of Ontario’s Legislative building. The march proceeded to move through University Avenue, Queen Street West and ended at Nathan Phillips Square. These locations are all major arteries in some of North America’s largest cities. Notably, the Women’s Marches were all organized in city centres rather than in marginal spaces. We might also look to the way that people tend to arrange themselves at mass demonstrations like the Women’s Marches.

At the Toronto event that I attended there were certainly observable power dynamics linked to safety, survival and normative spatial arrangements. For example, it was the able bodied, white women who took to the middle of the streets, holding signs over their heads and chanting. Those people less comfortable in the space, who are more used to assuming marginal space are the ones who inhabited the sidewalks, quietly standing by or moving slower trying to keep pace. We might consider how these marches looked more like roving centres blind to their margins. At the marches, normative spatial arrangements prevailed.

Figure 7: A Map of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington DC route.

Figure 8 (left): A Map of the 2017 New York Women’s March route Figure 9 (right): A Map of the 2017 Toronto Women’s March route.

Under the logics of Platform Feminism, heroes are made of the women who mount the stage at pre-march rallies or who take to Twitter with their hashtags. Recall, for instance, that the celebrities who made speeches at the Women’s Marches on Washington were given the honorary title of “mothers of the march.” Or for another example consider how following a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, teenage survivor Sam Fuentes took to the mic in Washington at a March for Our Lives Rally and became a national hero after she vomited on stage and then finished her speech (Burch 2018). What gets privileged is a dominant relationship to the platform and to space more broadly. Black geographer, Katherine McKittrick frames this relationship well. She writes:

Dominant geographic patterns can often undermine complex interhuman rules and regulations. More than this, ‘normal places and spaces- of comfort, wealth, peace, safety- are hopefully seductive: the allude to the idea that finding and living the “normal” within existing spatial hierarchies is a geographic achievement, a fulfilling geographic story (2006, 145).

The platform mediates what McKittrick would call “a dominate geographic story.” The result is that the movements that arise out of Platform Feminism expand the centres of power instead of making space for those who live and resist from the margins.

To point this out is not to dismiss the collective action of the millions of women who showed up for the Women’s Marches across multiple cities. These gatherings have had a remarkable and immediate impact on creating, at least temporarily, a spirit of hopefulness following Trump’s inauguration. Communications and Cultural Studies scholarship has long been invested in showing that the right to public speech and assembly has been struggled for and in exploring what the role of media and communication is in these movements. For instance, we see this in studies of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Jack Bratich argues that even if “Occupy was prone to decay and disarray,” we might focus on how “each visible tempest brings with it this history as well as contributes to the strength of that milieu for the future” (2014, 2). Lillian Radovac’s research on the human mic used in Zuccotti park, in light of megaphones and other amplification media being banned, shows us that there has also long been a “spatialized struggling over noise” and by extension “a right to amplify speech” (2014, 40). Sarah Sharma argues that Occupy’s assembly in the “spaces of everyday life” signaled a “return to politics” (Sharma 2014, 5). As Sharma puts it, “Coming together to occupy is an intimate act, a way for my problems and responsibilities to become your problems and responsibilities (2014, 5). More recently, Jayson Harsin has written on the Nuit Debout social movement in Paris, France which began in 2016. Nuit Debout was a movement that French protestors held nightly assemblies to protest French labour reforms (Harsin 2018, 1821). Harsin’s research on Nuit Debout outlines how “technology and communications [was] a space of struggle” within the movement” (2018, 1833). From this important research that has focused on how people have fought to assemble, and the ways in which communication technologies have played a role in these struggles. We also see that assembling en masse and making often marginal politics heard and seen continues to be a significant strategy for the Left.

Instead, I note that the very structure of Platform Feminism, as evidenced in recent popular movements, straighten and race the movements because they privilege spatial tactics like rising up. The logics of the platform then, which has feminist politics march through both metaphoric and spatial centres, might not be the destabilizing spatial strategy we need. The issue is that taking to the stage naturally signifies a new position of power. It is the sign of having

72 accomplished the task. Rising up, speaking up, takes up much more room than the quiet collective and communal forms of resistance that emerge instead out of survival, rather than out of choice or even political commitment (Singh and Sharma 2019). In our article Platform Uncommons, Sarah Sharma and I have argued that platform logics make us believe that feminist politics might be a matter of individual practices like sending a tweet or making the wittiest sign at a march. Platform logics privilege individual action. In its collective form, Sharma and I have argued that these logics contribute to the “uncommons.” We argue that “the ‘uncommons’ speaks to the core of neoliberal feminism—a type of feminism focused on the self that not only leaves many uncared for but depends upon the fact that so many are uncared for” (2019). The problem with Platform Feminism therefore becomes is strategy of dispersed and individual practices of rising up.

Marginal Strategy 1: Battle Dancing

Keep to the rhythm and you’ll keep to life… Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won’t get weary. Keep to the rhythm and you won’t get lost - Ralph Ellison

In Dancing in the Streets, American writer and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich shows how dancing has historically been a threat to power in Western culture. Groups of people united by dancing ecstatically together even through hardship, stands directly in contrast with modern projects of discipling bodies. Discipline in this sense is both a Christian imperative and a masculine one. To illustrate this, we might think of the contrast between military drills and dance. As Ehrenreich shows, the military trains and disciplines men en masse to move together and to never step out of line (2006, 125). The aim of this discipline is of course to ensure the efficiency and productivity of soldiers. While military drills communicate uniformity and discipline, dance on the other hand, is an expression of communal joy.

It is no coincidence that dancing has historically been an expression of joy shared by those who live on the margins. As Ehrenreich puts it: “This is the real bone of contention between civilization and collective ecstasy; Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when the build it among subordinates– peasants, slaves, women, colonized people– the elites call out its troops” (2006, 252). As a spatial strategy, dancing is a politically loaded symbolic act. In particular spaces, dancing disrupts normative corporeal regimes of order and productive movement. But dancing is also about expressing a communal sense of joy. Under these conditions, I suggest

73 dancing as political strategy be extended to include communal organisation that goes beyond the act of moving to a rhythm in unison, to other ways that people convene joyfully in space. I suggest that dancing is both literally and metaphorically a resistance strategy that functions by expressing communal joy.

Much has been written on how joy, pleasure and eroticism can be meaningful for feminist politics specifically. This is work that has been taken up most significantly by feminist scholars. For instance, in Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (2018), Lynn Segal traces how feelings of love, joy and desire have historically fostered activism. Segal argues that joy has the potential to “unleas[h] collective action” (2018, 94). Relatedly, the topic of pleasure is taken up by Audre Lorde who shows in “Uses of the Erotic,” that the erotic is grounds for struggle. Lorde positions the erotic as a resource which we are taught to supress, despite its potentially liberating power (1979, 87-89). Much like dance, eroticism is at once an expression of pleasure and a threat to power. Lorde goes on to argue that when women are operating under a European-male tradition, it is difficultly for women-identified people to recognize and share in the power of the erotic (91). Following Lorde, adrienne maree brown identifies herself as a “pleasure activist” and argues that pleasure is a measure of freedom (2019). In this way, pleasure is positioned as something to fight for and not as something frivolous. In Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, brown describes “pleasure activism” as “the work we do to reclaim our whole and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (2019, 13). Joy as a resistance strategy has been taken up more recently in the context of digital culture too. Jessica H. Lu and Catherine Knight Steele argue through their study of the way that Black people use Twitter that “adapting strategies of song, signifying, and storytelling online, Black users affirm that joy, too, is a meaningful way to subvert oppression and extend the resilience of Black oral culture” (2019, 830).

Importantly, communal joy as resistance is a departure from what Sara Ahmed calls “the promise of happiness” (2010). Ahmed is critical of the imperative to be happy, arguing that “happiness functions as a promise that directs you toward certain objects, as if they provide you with the necessary ingredients for a good life. Happiness involves a form of orientation: the very hope for happiness means we get directed in specific ways, as happiness is assumed to follow from some life choices and not others” (2010, 54). For Ahmed, the right to be unhappy is a feminist expression of free will. But under the canopy of seeking pleasure, the marginal spatial strategy of

74 dancing is also one that is inherently feminist. Not just attending to, but also building movements that use joyfulness as a strategy, can extend the capacity of feminist politics. Building spatial strategies based on sharing pleasure outside of the strictures of patriarchal authority is also a means of evading platform logics of singularly rising up and amplifying.

14.1 Round Dances and Un Violador en Tu Camino

Across different movements, dance has been a way of convening in space that serves both as a way of making a movement visible and as an opportunity for protestors to move joyfully together. For example, the “Idle No More Movement” invaded malls, streets and highways across North America in 2012 and 2013 where they performed round dances. Idle No More has become one of the largest Indigenous mass movements and was led by young Indigenous women Sylvia McAdam, Jess Gordon, Nina Wilson and Sheelah Mclean (idlenomore.ca). The movement was a response to the Canadian government’s mishandling of land ownership claims, inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women, the poisoning of water, defunding of education and housing for Indigenous people, among a myriad of other transgressions of the state that are due to a violent history of colonialism. In The Winter We Danced (2014), the Kino-nda- niimi Collective gathers writing from the Idle No More movement, specifically centred on the round dances that took place across Canada. Round dances include a number of drummers and dancers arranged in a circle dancing together to a beat. The Round Dance is a traditional healing ceremony that was used by the Idle No More movement as an act of political resistance. In December 2012 for example, hundreds of Indigenous people and allies took to the West Edmonton Mall and performed a round dance amid the throngs of Christmas shoppers (the Kino- nda-niimi Collective 2014, 71). The dances continued to spread so that people convened downtown Edmonton, at Toronto’s Eaton centre and later in Yonge and Dundas Square, in Sarnia Ontario, in Saskatoon, in the North West Territories, and in Vancouver (the Kino-nda- niimi Collective, 2014).

In the early months of 2020, in protest of the Coastal GasLink pipeline which would cut across traditional Wet’suwet’en land, Indigenous folks and their allies set up railway blockades and took part in mass round dances at multiple sites in Canada. Courtney Clemons, who organized a demonstration in Winnipeg importantly pointed out that the recent Wet’suwet’en protests are not “just about groups of people wanting to be disruptive” (Feb 26, 2020). In a piece on the recent

75 protests, Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes that love and care “emanat[e] throughout the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protest sites even in the face of state violence” (Feb 21, 2020). For Simpson “blockades are both a negation destruction and an affirmation of life” (Feb 21, 2020).

The contrast between the spatial organization of people at the Women’s March and each of the Idle No More and the Wet’suwet’en round dances is stark. The circle of dancers does not have margins and centres by design. Nobody is centred, no one voice or dancer rings louder than another. From the example of circle dances, what emerges is a protest that is borne out of traditional methods of healing which look different than those that are informed by the platform where mediated elevation dominates spatial tactics.

Another example of dance as resistance occurred in November 2019 when a feminist dance mob broke out in Chile. In the days that followed, feminists across Latin America performed the dance in major city centres. First in Santiago, a large group of women gathered to perform a choreographed dance while chanting the words to the song “Un Violador en Tu Camino” which translates in English to “A Rapist in Your Path.” The protest was a response to the Chilean judicial system which has historically failed to prosecute men for the countless acts of violence against women. By early December, thousands of women took to the streets of Mexico City, San Paulo and Bogota. Later, the dance was performed in Barcelona and Paris and some American cities too. You can find illustrated video guides that teach each step of the choreographed dance online, a way of ensuring that nobody is out of sync. Many of the dancers are dressed in black and wear green bandanas over their eyes and mouths, in effect making the identities of protestors harder to discern. This was not only a symbolic gesture but one that helped ensure the safety of the women who showed up to dance.

In observing these dances, we are also reminded of the quasi-official uniform of the Women’s Marches. Pink hats with cat ears, later adoringly referred to as pink pussyhats were hand knitted by many of the Women’s March protestors across North America. The pattern for the hat was posted online in November 2016 by a group which called themselves the “Pussyhat Project.” Women’s March attendees were encouraged to make their own hats in the hopes of creating “a unique, collective visual statement” (Sobo 2017). This is again an illustration of the very structure of Platform Feminism. Recall here that Platform Feminism is a term used to describe a

76 mode of feminism that is bound to platforms and privileges elevation and amplification as its political strategy. When the goal is just to make a “visual statement” the political potential of the movement becomes limited. Pink pussy hats are in part an extension of the platform in that they help obscure attention from other forms of protest that are focused on safety and survival.

In contrasting these examples, the uniform itself embodies the feminist politics they come to stand for. The green and yellow bandanas obscure the identities of those who wear them- providing safety and camouflage. The pink pussy hats reveal, and in many ways draw attention to identifiable features. In other words, since pink pussy hats made participants at the Women’s March hypervisible, while the bandanas at the Un Violador en Tu Camino protest helped to obscure the faces of the women who protested, what is revealed in these two spatial strategies is an uneven relationship with and to the politics of visibility.

14.2 Making Space to Dance: The Medina Collective, Why Loiter and BBQ Becky

In some cases, dancing is public is an act that in itself has to be fought for. This is something I learned from interviewing a community organizer in Toronto who was part of a Muslim women’s collective focused on the task of making space for women to dance. My participant, who preferred not to be named in my research, is a Muslim woman living in Toronto and was a founding member of the Medina Collective, then known as the Medina Mentorship Program. The Medina Collective began with five women who organized in 2003 around a shared goal to “create space for women in Toronto’s hip-hop scene” (Personal communications, November 14, 2018). At the time of its inception, a group of Black and brown women organized informally, sharing information about hip-hop events in Toronto through the use of Yahoo groups and phone calls. Together the women involved would travel together to various dance venues in Toronto in order to “take up space” (Personal communications, November 14, 2018). As the member of the collective told me in our interview, at the time of the Medina Collective’s inception, hip-hop was a male dominated space, so the group hoped to intervene and make it possible for women and queer folks to organize events in Toronto’s hip-hop scene. The Medina Collective was working with an understanding that while women were often at these events, they were not usually in the middle of the dance battles, or MCing, DJing or promoting events. The idea was to try and create

77 new spaces for Black and brown queer women that were based on dancing together, rather than for, as the interviewee put it, “the male gaze” (Personal communications, November 14, 2018).

Most importantly, the Medina Collective member and I discussed the concept of safety. I asked her if part of the struggle to make space in Toronto’s hip-hop community was about feeling safe in these spaces. She told me that in the early 2000s when the group was operating, the idea of “safe spaces” was not explicitly discussed by organizers but that this was certainly an undertone. In fact, even though the group did not have the language to talk about safe spaces at the time, they all understood that, as the member I interviewed told me “You could not fully surrender and enjoy space without being in the presence of other women” (Personal communications, November 14, 2018). What this research with the member of the Media Collective showed me is that for the group, dancing become the battle ground that feminist organizing was centred around. The very presence of particular people, often women, queer folks and people of colour in space can upset normative spatial order and thus occupation can be a politically significant strategy.

Much like the Medina Collective’s fight to make space, the Why Loiter Movement, which began in India in 2015 was based on a feminist struggle to convene, joyfully, in space. Feminists based in Mumbai began a campaign that encouraged women to loiter in groups in public space. The call to loiter was based on a 2011 book by the same name. In Why Loiter, authors Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade position the act of loitering as a political strategy. Here, the claim is that safety in public space, which seems to dictate discourse about women and feminism in India, needs to be refigured. Phadke, Khan and Ranade argue that “we need to redefine violence in relation to public space– to see not sexual assault but the denial of access to public space as the worst possible outcome” (2011, 60). The Why Loiter movement is a response to what the authors read as patriarchal solutions to preventing sexual violence against women in India. Rather than trying to figure out a systemic solution around growing concerns of women being brutally raped throughout the country, fathers, husbands and politicians simply advised Indian women not to loiter in public spaces (Phadke, Khan and Ranade 2011). This Indian feminist movement’s strategy was simple– women intentionally gathered in space and just hung out. They chatted, walked slowly, laughed together. Here, the Why Loiter campaign, although notable more subtle, has a similar aim to other more literal examples of resistant dancing– that people inhabit space and experience collective joy together.

In addition to the joyful inhabiting of space, the authors of Why Loiter, Phadke, Khan and Ranade point out that “loitering also disrupts the image of the desirable productive body– taut, vigorous, purposeful moving precisely towards the greater global-good” (2011, 186). Again, it’s clear how these marginal spatial strategies are antithetical to masculinist, and neoliberal imperatives for productive movement. This idea of loitering was also played with in Oakland when people held a series of barbeques in a Lake Merritt park (Connor 2015). The events were in response to a white woman, Jennifer Schulte, later turned into a meme and given the title “BBQ Becky,” who called the cops on two Black men who were grilling in a public park. BBQ Becky’s call to police was recorded and later released. In the call, you can hear her asking for police to respond to a scene where two men are using a barbeque, stating that she is concerned the grill could burn children. The call to police was quite clearly racially motivated and is part of a larger issue of white people calling the cops on Black folks for minor and often not even illegal transgressions (Connor 2015). If for people like BBQ Becky, Black folks simply being in space is a threat, then taking up space and enjoying it, by way of holding barbeques for example, can be a powerful resistance strategy.

Wendy Chun writes about the Why Loiter Campaign in Updating To Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016). She asks what loitering would look like online (Chun 2016, 160). Chun asks, “how might we occupy networks differently? How might we understand publicity not in terms of a need for safety and protection, which is neither safe nor protecting, but rather the fight for a space in which one can be vulnerable and not attacked” (158, emphasis in original text). Chun uses the demand to loiter that feminists in Mumbai called for to suggest that we should inhabit networks in such a way that we do not fight for privacy but rather the right to be in public, safely. Chun argues, “to loiter online, we would have to create technologies that acknowledge, rather than make invisible, the multitude of exchanges that take place around us” (160). Like the Why Loiter Movement the Medina Collective and the Black BBQ protestors in Oakland’s struggle to dance in public space, Chun highlights a need to create relationships with space that allow for the safety to inhabit differently, rather than the creation of new and private spaces for vulnerable populations to live safely. All of these examples show us other avenues for feminist resistance that are not reliant on the platform.

14.3 Platform Joy

While platforms centre singular voices and seem to prop up individualist ways of resisting, joyful resistance is reliant on more communal ways of living. But this is also not to say that digital platforms are not part of the environment that all of these movements exist within. Rather, what is different is how people on the margins tend to approach the platform. For instance, Black geographer and cultural theorist Katherine McKittrick’s reflections on Twitter show Black folks’ approach to Twitter is reliant on communal, and joyful resistances. I conducted an interview over email with McKittrick in January 2019. One of the interview questions I asked McKittrick was if Twitter has a Black geography. In posing the question I was drawing from her concept in Demonic Grounds in which she argues that Black women’s geographies are at once shaped by, and challenge traditional geographic arrangements (2014). Her brilliant answer is so important for thinking about joy as a spatial strategy. First, McKittrick notes how Twitter is limited in its capacity to challenge traditional geographic arrangements. McKittrick started her reply to my question by writing:

I do think the platform has its limits—it is on this and other social media platforms that we must witness the awful move between emptiness and hate. But if we walk through Twitter with this awful movement in mind, and we are also committed to sharing ideas about liberation, the platform itself is revealed to be a limited site through which collaboration is possible (Personal communications, January 18, 2019).

Here, McKittrick notes that as a precursor to thinking about Twitter, and social media platforms more broadly as geographies, we must first recognize that they are spaces saturated with racist, sexist and homophobic users. McKittrick’s observation here is of course not new. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, for instance, have argued that “the Internet and other computer-based technologies are complex topographies of power and privilege, made up of walled communities, new (plat)forms of economic and technological exclusion, and both new and old styles of race as code, interaction, and image” (2012, 17). Jessie Daniels, writing specifically on white supremacy online has argued that “white masculinity is a feature of Internet” (2009, 86). This work on racism and the internet shows that platforms have long uploaded material conditions of racism online. McKittrick’s answer to my question about Twitter having a black geography adds to the well-known fact that the platform is racist because she suggests that Twitter’s limitations come to shape Black women’s relationship with the platform. McKittrick went on to write to me that, “We might think of it as simply a location of momentary

80 potential. So, in many ways, Twitter might have and might be a black geography: it is an online ephemerality and recalls, but does not twin, other forms of resistance that are provisional. This is to say that it is the precarity of the platform that hints of black praxis” (Personal communications, January 18, 2019). Importantly, McKittrick argues that these joyful ways of living on Twitter are shaped by and responses to the platform’s limitations and corporate nature. In noting too that platform resistance is provisional, McKittrick argues that like other resistant practices of Black folks, her use of Twitter adapts and morphs. McKittrick goes on to show how Twitter reflects Black modes of surviving:

Black folks are always inventing and reinventing and reimagining their surroundings as a way to live and find joy in a hateful world; Twitter might be one enunciation—limited and imperfect of course—of finding and sharing ideas about that livingness and joy while also keeping a keen eye on awfulness of this world. (Katherine McKittrick, personal communication, February 1, 2018).

McKittrick does not think of Twitter as a tool or as something people use and then put down as they convene and resist in the digital age. Recall the medium approach to platforms that I suggested in the introduction to dissertation. There, I argued that platforms are media that structure feminist politics and that their infrastructural logics determine how these politics are played out. This is a media theory that lends itself to thinking about platforms’ form rather than the content shared and effects of the media’s content. McKittrick’s understanding of platforms privileges form over content too. She is positioning Twitter as a limiting geography. This terrain is one where Black people have shared how to and practice living joyfully.

I also interviewed technologist and community organizer Ladan Siad, who in our conversation described their use of digital platforms as a sort of “maneuvering.” Siad’s approach to digital technologies is informed by their background as a queer, Somali person living in Canada. They told me that they learned how to use digital technologies as a young person when their single home computer crashed, and they had to figure out how to fix it. As Siad put it, “my aunt and I would try to figure out what the error messages meant on our broken computer. I think of this as the same as maneuvering any kind of institutional structure, it's the same kind of mapping you have to do because you don't understand the language you are being presented with” (Personal communications, March 19, 2019). In our interview Siad likened their use of technology to other forms of navigating normative structures that required, as they put it, “constant trouble shooting” (Personal communications, March 19, 2019). Siad’s language of maneuvering, and mapping

81 echoes McKittrick’s geographic approach to platforms. To think of platforms in this way is to recognize that people have distinct relationships with platforms that are not so easily rendered by a hashtag.

Both McKittrick’s formulation of Twitter as having a Black geography and Siad’s description of technology as something that they “maneuver” escape the digital enclosure of the hashtag that has become so important to Platform Feminism. Mark Andrejevic defines digital enclosure as “as a way of theorizing the forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity. The model of enclosure traces the relationship between a material, spatial process— the construction of networked, interactive environments—and the private expropriation of information” (2007, 297). Andrejevic’s concern is that networked information and communication technologies gather and capture user information and as a result platform “expand their range of control” (2007, 312). While Andrejevic uses digital enclosure as a way of critiquing platforms’ control of users’ information, it is also the case that Platform Feminism actually relies on the very same enclosure. The function of hashtags such as #MeToo, for instance, is to capture and centralize and in this way make feminism more visible. To use Andrejevic’s term, hashtags work because they enclose feminist politics. McKittrick and Siad’s approach to platforms show us that there are modes of using and resisting on the platform that escape enclosure because they are not reliant on centralizing hashtags.

These examples all show us how feminist resistance have often been arranged in space that explicitly resists what I have suggested is a masculinist way of organizing. What differentiates the examples of recent feminist resurgences I’ve identified, is that they see joy as a path to liberation. This joyfulness is notable because it is tied to the survival of bodies who resist on the margins. What is also apparent in all of these examples is that they upset the order that makes life productive. Sara Ahmed would call these examples of joyful resistance “feminist snap” (2017, 187). Ahmed defines snap as “ a moment when the pressure has built up and tipped over, [snap] can be the basis for feminist revolt, a revolt against what women are asked to put up with; a revolt that breaks things, that breaks things up; a revolt that is often understood as intending what is causes: mayhem” (2017, 210). Taken as examples of Ahmed’s snap, dancing, loitering and being joyful do not reproduce social order or normative spatial arrangements. Rather they interrupt order to make something new. Snapping the productive order of things is resistance in itself. As Ehrenreich reminds us, “This lesson is repeated in our lives every day: Resist rhythmic

82 provocation. No matter how tempting the beat, you must stand still or remain in your seat” (2006, 223). The capacity for resistance is broadened when we consider these other ways of inhabiting space. To dance is to refuse the logics of the platform that tell us that resistance requires an elevated stage and privileges speaking up.

Marginal Strategy 2: Making a Scene

As I argued in Chapter 2, the material platforms of witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks force us to reconsider the proposition that platforms are technologies of liberation. I argued in that chapter that it is useful to think about how power has historically put abject bodies on display and made particular people, usually people of colour, women and queer folks subject to various kinds of violence. So far in this chapter I have also argued the marginal spatial strategy of dancing, broadly conceived, is an example of a resistance strategy that does not centre visibility in its approach to political organizing. But this is not to say that visibility is always dangerous. The political function of making ourselves visible is in many ways self-evident; historical protest events have relied on tactics and strategies that call attention to various political issues in order to effect change. For instance, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and climate activists began protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline that would carry oil through North Dakota to Illinois and effect the environment that many Sioux people live in. The mass demonstrations drew in thousands of protestors in beginning April 2016 and resulted in a partial victory when a federal judge ruled that the pipeline was not properly vetted for potential environmental risks (Meyer 2017). Or, we might return to the 2011 Arab Spring protests for an example of the efficacy of mass and highly visible demonstrations. The Arab Spring did effectively show the rest of the world the conditions that millions were living in under autocratic governments (Blakemore 2011). However, what differentiates strategies for visibility is how they are attuned to survival and care. Under the logics of the platform, visibility can often be overdetermined for its political utility, so much so that it becomes the ultimate aim of a movement. However, this is not enough to make real social change. Instead, I argue that making a scene to draw attention to an issue or a particular collective body only escapes the logics of the platform when it is simultaneously a survival strategy.

Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle offers a useful way of discerning between protests that use strategies of visibility as their ultimate aim and those that might use it as a survival strategy. In

The Society of the Spectacle, Debord defines modern society as “the society of the spectacle” (1967). He argues that as a result of mass media, spectacles operate as tools to pacify the masses. Debord suggests that the spectacles that capture and are consumed by populations are presented by power as images of “the good.” He writes, “In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement or direct consumption of entertainment, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption” (Debord 1967, 2). Debord goes on to argue that, “the Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears’” (1967, 12). Debord’s argument is that we only see what is already deemed to be appropriate, and digestible and that spectacles come to dominate how we perceive the world. In part, popular feminist protests that privilege the spatial tactic of rising up and therefore of becoming more visible operate as example of Debord’s spectacle because they present a model of what is already socially dominant life. As I have argued above, the Women’s March used spatial strategies only available to those who already hold the centres of power. Their reliance on spectacle, enabled in many ways by platforms, ensured that the marches appeared as good. Taking Debord’s concept of the spectacle into account then, we might argue that Platform Feminism’s ruling strategy of being spectacular is not so much about survival as it is about maintaining an already highly visible form of feminist politics.

To show the difference between visibility as spectacle and what I present in this section as the concept of making a scene as a mode survival, in what follows I will present three contemporary examples of making scene. But, before I turn to these examples, I will first call upon another interview I conducted with Trinidad-born and Toronto based artist, Michéle Pearson Clarke. Clarke makes it clear that we need to ask about the aim of making people visible in order for it to be a useful political strategy. During our interview, Clarke and I talked at length about the concept of visibility. A central theme throughout Clarke’s work is representation, and specifically about how blackness has historically been represented. Given this theme, I asked Clarke if one of the aims of her work was to make blackness more visible. I was surprised by Clarke’s reply, because she told me that she thought that the concept of visibility was uninteresting. As Clarke put it:

I think it’s a primary thing that artists talk about. Any artist that experiences any kind of marginalization or oppression. Like if you are working in visual culture, visibility is something that people talk about all the time. So, it's like, "we need visibility, I'm doing my work because we need visibility" but it's like I am not invisible. You see me walking down the street. So, I question this idea of visible to who? Right? So, built into this notion that visibility is what we need is this investment in a white gaze or a patriarchal gaze or whatever (Personal communications, November 14, 2018).

Clarke takes the concept of visibility literally. People, even those who are marginalized, have always been perceptible to the eye. The problem with an investment in the concept of visibility, for Clarke, is that it often visibility is presented as a way of ensuring that particular groups of people recognized by people with power. As an end goal, we can certainly see how visibility becomes a tool used against and not for marginalized communities and therefore why the concept might not be particularly interesting to Clarke. But, as I show below, it is also the case that as a tactic, making a scene can be used not just for marginalized groups to gain recognition, but instead to interrupt flows of power. In the examples that follow, becoming visible is not the end goal, but rather gets used as a way of literally halting mechanisms of power.

15.1 Stevante Clark’s Platform

Figure 10: Stevante Clark, brother of Stephon Clark, disrupts a special city council meeting at Sacramento City Hall on March 27, 2018 in Sacramento, California. Source: Justin Sullivan.

Take Stevante Clark, who jumped on top of a desk in at Sacramento’s city hall to protest his brother’s violent death, for example. On March 18, 2019 Stephon Clark, was shot to death by police officers in Sacramento. Clark was in his grandmother’s backyard and holding a cellphone which police have since claimed they thought was a weapon. In the days following his murder,

Stephon’s brother Stevante Clark, along with Black Lives Matter activists, protested the murder. In a striking moment during these protests, Stevante enters the Sacramento City Hall chambers and interrupts a city council meeting while chanting his brother’s name. Stevante hops onto the dais and demands accountability for police violence in the city. Stevante Clark is an example of someone who, when excluded from formalized politics, made a makeshift platform in order to participate, much as the early soapbox speakers did. In this instance, the desk acts as an object of elevation that makes Stevante’s – and by extension Stephon’s – marginalized voices heard. I include the example of Clark’s protest to highlight how visibilizing certain bodies and voices can be an effective tactic for political participation. In the months since Clark jumped onto the desk at Sacramento’s City Hall, he had a brief campaign to become mayor of Sacramento himself, and was then included as an advisor in a city taskforce to deal with police violence (Blades 2019). Equally as important, when Clark jumped onto a desk at the city council meeting, he stopped the meeting from running as scheduled. His body made more visible served not just as a way of bringing attention to his brother’s death, but also as a mode of interrupting the flow of the politics as usual. In this contemporary example of soapboxing, it is hard to write off the potential political possibilities of elevation.

During his visit to the Sacramento City Hall, Stevante Clark made a scene. In cultural and performance studies, there has been significant scholarship on theorizing scenes since the early 1990s. Will Straw (1991) introduced the concept in relation to music scenes, arguing that musical scene are spaces of social circulation. Scene thinking “drew attention to the field of social relations in which music circulated” (Woo, Rennie, Poyntz 2015, 287). Since these early formulations of music scenes, scene thinking has been extended to any geographical place where people connect and organize everyday cultural phenomena. Common scenes can include sporting events, concerts, nightclubs, or festivals. Social movements, where activists are arranged proximately can also be scenes (Leach & Haunss 2007). Straw, in his more recent work, argues that a scene makes “activity visible and decipherable by rendering it public, taking it from acts of private production and consumption into public contests of sociability, conviviality and interaction” (2015, 484). Drawing from Straw, we can think of scenes not just as assemblages of people, places and cultural objects, but also as embodied actions. I call on scene theory here because it helps elucidate how Clark making a scene functions as a strategy that transforms an illegible struggle for survival into something decipherable to those outside of the scene’s context.

As a marginal spatial strategy, making a scene is significant to political struggle because it has the ability to make power legible. Indeed, Clark’s scene enabled him to extend his community’s struggle from soap-box dais to the organized politics of a Sacramento police violence task force.

15.2 Take a Knee, Make a Scene

A few years prior to Clark’s interruption at Sacramento city hall, professional football player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem at a National Football League (NFL) exhibition game. This was an act that also notably made a scene on a large scale. When

Kaepernick knelt on August 27th, 2016, his refusal to stand was immediately read as an act of resistance. In a post-game press conference, it became clear that Kaepernick was kneeling in protest of the ongoing violence against Black people living in the United States at the hands of American police officers. Kaepernick’s kneeling was a solidarity response to the Black Lives Matter protests going on throughout the US and elsewhere following multiple police shootings of Black men. At the post-game press conference where Kaepernick initially explained his actions, he stated:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder (Kaepernick 2016).

Reactions to Kaepernick were immediate and widespread throughout the US and beyond. Kaepernick’s protest was celebrated by many, as indicated by the massive rise in sales of his NFL jersey. Despite being a second-string quarterback, Kaepernick’s jersey is now ranked number one in sales for his franchise, thanks to supporters of the protest (Heitner 2016). In other quarters, the reaction to Kaepernick was negative and took an accusatory tone as various news outlets (Breitbart, Dec 14, 2016; Houston Chronicle August 27, 2016) called the football player unpatriotic or disrespectful to the state and to the American military and their families.

Jules Boykoff and Ben Carrington (2019), argue that Kaepernick has “undoubtedly changed the parameters and possibilities for sporting dissent” (18). I read Kaepernick’s kneel as expanding parameters for dissent too. While Boykoff and Carrington are interested in the “robust public conversation” surrounding Kaepernick’s protest, I think the political potential lies in how he introduced a different corporeal regime. By kneeling, rather than standing at attention for the

American national anthem, Kaepernick reveals, by subverting, a power relation that orders bodies. Many of the negative reactions to Kaepernick’s protest included complaints about his lack of respect for the anthem and by extension a display of anti-Americanism. While this sort of sentiment is how Kaepernick’s protest was problematized, it is a superficial articulation of what is at stake. Beyond notions of patriotism or respect for the flag, Kaepernick’s kneeling signals a more significant threat– one of reorienting disciplined bodies. Standing at attention for the national anthem is tied to a longer history of military discipline (Ferris 2015). This has become one technique for disciplining bodies and keeping them in place. Foucault shows us that control over how people move in space is a mechanism of pastoral power. As he puts it, “the shepherd’s power is not exercised over a territory but, by definition over a flock and more exactly, over a flock in its movement from one place to another. The shepherd’s power is essentially exercised over a multiplicity in movement” (1978, 125). Control over the orientation of bodies becomes a way of ensuring discipline within the logics of power. So Kaepernick kneeling introduced a new corporeal regime. In this instance, making a scene meant upsetting the normative spatial arrangements of power.

It is worth pausing to point to how the instances of making a scene I have pointed to here diverge from other protests that at first glance are similar for their tactics. For example, there are examples of culture jamming that stand in contrast to the collective will toward survival that these other examples of making a scene are evidence of. Culture jamming uses various tactics to “jam up or block the flow of commercial images” (Delaure and Fink 2017, 7). Understood more widely as subcultural practices tied to leftist politics, examples of culture jamming include altering corporate billboards, flash mobs or pulling practical jokes on large corporations (Carducci 2006). The Yes Men, who define themselves as a duo who “work with progressive orgs to help fight neoliberal polices through humor and trickery” are a well-known example of culture jammers. The Yes Men originate from their “basic compulsion to do mischief” (Delaure 2017, 418).

It is unimaginable that Indigenous women who are missing and murdered, Black people who are being killed by cops, disabled folks who cannot move safely through the streets in the winter time, queer artists who lost everything in a warehouse fire where they were precariously housed, or Muslim people living in India whose citizenship is in question, would think to start a protest out of a compulsion to do mischief. When survival is at stake, spatial strategies cannot only

88 follow the logic of “fucking shit up.” Making a scene has to be a way of sustaining life for it to be a politically significant spatial strategy. Scene making from the margins is also notably not the same as what Tony Perucci calls “ruptural performance” (2017). For Perucci, ruptural performance is an emergent form of protest that includes activists practicing radical civil disobedience and “doing the unnecessary” (292) in order to “disrupt the experience of daily life” (282). For example, Perucci describes a series of protest-performances against Walmart where roughly 15 people would enter a store and line up with shopping carts. The participants would then walk through the store in a line formation with empty shopping carts. When Walmart employees or other shoppers inquire about what they are doing, the explain that they are “not shopping. This ‘protest’ would go on until eventually, security would be called, and the participants would exit the store” (Perucci 2017, 288). In this telling of the Walmart protests, the empty-shop cart wielding participants are celebrated for protesting nothing in particular, although Perucci notes there are a litany of things the group could have been protesting (288). This is another example of a protest that is quite clearly not attuned to the care and survival of particular people. Consider, for instance, what happens when the rows of shopping carts are left in the middle of aisles in Walmart stores, and security guards are called to escort a group of performers out of a store. It is the Walmart employees whose labour is called upon to clean up the mess left behind.

Sarah Sharma makes a similar critique of Occupy Wall Street’s spatial strategy (2014). Sharma suggests what she calls a “temporal insurgency” as a new strategy for resistance. Taking into account that Occupy has been organized around a normative temporal order, dictated by power, a temporal insurgency would develop resistance tactics around differential relationships to time. For Sharma, the normative relationships to day and night have to be upset for movements to break free of the logics of capitalism. As Sharma puts it:

A temporal insurgency offers a political strategy that is based on inhabiting the world in time, to name the political struggles over the contingency of life that have been invisible for far too long. But it also reckons with the fact that life is contingent and there is no politics that can be oriented around its eradication. On a structural level this contingency is experienced differentially and relationally (2014, 12).

For more recent instances of protests that have been less attuned to care we could again look to the Women’s Marches and Climate Strikes that broke out globally. Here, just as the Occupy movement was limited because it did not consider differential relationships to the night, these

89 movements are limited because of their assumption of a particular relationship to protest spaces after a protest ends. Here, we might look at the messes that get left behind after marches that are antithetical to the caring and survival of the commons. Who cleans up the granola bar wrappers and the discarded signs that get left behind after massive demonstrations? In Toronto, following the Women’s March, there were hundreds of protest signs left bound to the fences around city hall following the event. In New York and Washington, signs were deliberately left outside of Trump Tower and the White House. This is a tactic that ends up likely having more effect on those left to clean than it does on the powerful people who the mess was intended for. It’s the city’s cleaning crews who are so often brown and Black folks who are left to remove the soggy, discarded signs in the days following the march.

I will also note that this is a critique that right-wingers have historically mounted against leftist movements (as if they suddenly care about the environment!). After a Climate Strike in London, a photo circulated of piles of trash left in Hyde Park. This photo was later deemed to be a hoax, not actually taken after the march and removed from the site by Facebook as part of an effort to combat misinformation (Fader, 2017). But mess alone is not just the issue here. It isn’t as if the Walmart protest would be more attuned to intersectional feminist politics had the carts been returned, although this would have helped. The Women’s Marches and Climate strikes do not become exemplars of better feminist politics if protesters return to the rally sites to tend to their garbage. Instead, the issue is that these events employ masculinist tactics shaped by platform logics which position showing up as sufficient feminist strategy. What gets lost along the way is consideration for those who have differential relationships with space, some of which involve maintaining it. Feminist politics will be limited without consideration for how the precarious survive. The issue with ruptural performances or other protests that make a scene to make a point isn’t that they are not useful or important political strategies. In the case of ruptural politics and other culture jamming protests, as with the case of the Women’s March on Washington or the Climate Marches of 2019 that leave behind signs and granola bar wrappers, the issue is that these are all tactics that are politically limiting.

15.3 Stopping as Scene

For a final example of scene making, I turn to the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade. The parade took place on a sweaty day in early July 2016. The water gun-wielding, ultra-fit men on the corporate

90 floats that moved through the streets offered a welcome cool down as they fired off streams of cold water on spectators. In 2016, Justin Trudeau walking in the parade in his pink linen shirt was still an exciting attraction too. So, when the parade came to a halt, the hot attendees quickly grew uncomfortable, some visibly angry. Soon, news spread that the parade has ceased because a float had broken down. Then, it became clear this was not an accidental breakdown but rather a deliberate act of resistance. In the middle of the parade, members of Black Lives Matter Toronto, the invited honoured group of the parade that year, sat down in the street with a list of demands for Pride organizers. Most significant were requests for more involvement of Black, Indigenous and trans queer folks in Pride organizing and for the police float to be removed from the parade (Battersby 2016). At the 2016 parade, there was a notable increase in police presence both walking in the parade and patrolling the festival (Mann 2016). The Toronto police’s failure to protect Toronto’s queer communities of colour informed BLMTO’s call to limit their involvement. Also, as Arshy Mann, who reported on the parade stoppage notes, “Pride has historically marginalized the voices and spaces of black, indigenous and other non-white LGBT communities” (Mann 2016). In light of Toronto Pride’s history of centring whiteness, BLM ended up stopping the parade for 30 minutes before Pride’s executive director Mathieu Chantelois agreed to their list of demands (Mann 2016).

In this instance, BLM caused a scene by stopping the flow of the parade. We might return again to Innis to analyze why this stoppage was effective. Innis argues that the critical role of communication and transportation technologies is to create centres of power. Jody Berland calls the creation of these power centres “spatial configurations of power” (2009, 66). She suggests that “Power is obtained through development of the most technically advanced, furthest reaching, and most quickly disseminated technologies. How people relate across distance and history-space and time– is redefined through such mediation. Power over this process is one definition of empire” (2009, 72-73). If we acknowledge how the Pride parade has functioned as a technology of power, communicating a singular and white celebration of queerness, then we might read BLMTO’s protest at pride as a strategy that interrupts the smooth flow of such communicative power. Stopping the flow is a strategy that takes the relationship between power and the flow of information into account. Put another way, if power operates by moving information, it follows that stopping this flow is a way of resisting power. When members of Black Lives Matter stopped the parade for 30 minutes they also in effect, temporarily halted the

91 movement of the power they were resisting. In the next chapter, I return again to BLMTO’s protest at the parade.

Conclusion

This chapter has closely analyzed examples of marginal spatial strategies. I have argued that feminist resistance reliant on the platform reinstates normative spatial arrangements that privilege those who are already hold positions at the centres of power. I started this chapter by showing how protests such as the Women’s March or #MeToo are shaped by the elevating and amplifying logics of the platform. By drawing on Harold Adams Innis and Jody Berland’s communication theories of margins and centres, I showed how recent iterations of Platform Feminism continue to be dominated by white women’s resistance strategies. I have argued that we might locate the platform as the media object that maintains these dominant spatial arrangements. This chapter also put the intersecting fields of Black and Feminist geography and Communications and Media Studies in conversation. When put together, these two fields help develop an understanding of how uneven relationships to space, based on factors of race, gender, sexuality and class, are reified by powerful platform media.

What does it mean to dance and make a scene that goes beyond the logics of the platform? The marginal spatial strategies that I have drawn on in this chapter provide us with a gestural blueprint. Resisting joyfully calls on communal assemblies that make life liveable. Joyful convening provides sustenance to the communities in question. Making a scene requires upsetting normative spatial arrangements. These strategies call for organising in a way that subverts heteronormative and patriarchal order while subsequently considering what those on the margins need to survive. The strategies I name here are only some examples in a massive repertoire of spatial strategies that those on the margins might use to resist. They are instructive though, because they illustrate how we might move beyond powerful platforms and their structuring logics. In the next chapter, I continue to focus on resistance strategies that evade the platform’s logics of amplification and elevation. I shift my focus away from how people convene on the margins and instead consider how radical care, as a resistance strategy, intersects with digital platforms.

Chapter 4 Platform Care: Disconnection vs. Inclination

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture

Resistance, yes, but other capacities too. Like quiet. - Kevin Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet

This is the age of amplification. Being represented, heard, and rendered visible is the dominant and common approach to understanding both offline and online feminist activism. Being heard, standing up, speaking your mind is lauded as a democratic good in everyday political culture and as a defense for free speech in civil society. Media theorist Fred Turner has argued that since the Cold War, Americans have been invested in developing “modes of communication that promoted spontaneous individuality, interpersonal openness, and interracial and international empathy” (2013, 180). Platforms mediate a mode of communication that promote a version of democratic good which relies on speaking up and being heard. As I have argued so far in this dissertation, as part of the amplified stage, digital platforms facilitate increased visibility. But, in this chapter, I argue that the quiet resistance of those who do not take so readily to platforms is also mediated by the digital.

Saidiya Hartman in “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” (2018) gives, what she calls, a speculative history of Esther Brown, a young Black girl living in Harlem in the early 1900s. After working a series of menial jobs, Esther Brown quit working altogether and was charged and jailed for vagrancy. For Hartman, Brown is but one example of the Black women living in emerging American ghettos whose very efforts to survive must be read as radical resistance. Of Brown’s riotous life, Hartman writes: “But hers was a struggle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credos. It required no party platform or ten-point program” (2018, 465). Hartman calls this “a revolution in a minor key” (471). In this chapter, I draw upon Hartman’s concept of a revolution in a minor key to suggest a way of thinking about digital platforms that focuses on care rather than amplification and elevation. I mobilize the notion of care to point to the collective strategies that communities of Black, brown and queer and disabled people use to help each other survive together. This chapter proposes a turn toward a quieter resistance, one that takes into account feminist tactics for sustaining life.

Hartman’s theory of revolution in a minor key stands in direct contrast with the relatively new waves of popular feminist that protests broke out in North America and beyond over the past

94 four years. While popular feminist movements have relied on amplification, minor key resistance does not register so clearly as protest. This is because it is quiet and based on care. In the introduction to a recent special collection of essays on “Radical Care,” Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese offer a useful definition of care. They write that “theorized as an affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world, care constitutes a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others. When mobilized, it offers visceral, material, and emotional heft to acts of preservation that span a breadth of localities: selves, communities, and social worlds” (2020, 2). Hobart and Kneese’s suggestion that care offers “heft to acts of preservation,” is key here because it helps draw a connection between caring for particular groups of people and their survival. In this chapter, I argue that care is a feminist gesture that requires inclining toward digital platforms in a way that looks much different from Platform Feminism’s dependence on the platform. Platform Feminism, because it relies on normative relationships to space that privilege rising up, is organized in such a way that it does not actually resist patriarchy. What I argue in this chapter is that intersectional feminist resistance requires approaching digital platforms in altogether different modes. While still mediated by the platform, care emerges in this chapter, as a specific quiet strategy for survival and resistance.

In concert with Hartman’s “revolution in a minor key,” Kevin Quashie (2012) and Tina Campt (2017) are other scholars who address the notion of quietness as it relates to Black culture and “black feminist futurity” specifically. Campt writes that for her, futurity is not “necessarily heroic or intentional. It is often humble and strategic, subtle and discriminating. It is devious and exacting. It’s not always loud and demanding. It is frequently quiet and opportunistic, dogged and disruptive” (2017, 17). Campt locates what she calls “realizations of such a future” not only in monumental acts of political resistance, but also in the quieter and less celebrated moments of everyday life (17). Similarly, Quashie’s important book The Sovereignty of Quiet, makes a case for quietness that is not apolitical but that at the same time counters an imperative “to see blackness only though a social public lens, as if there were no inner life” (2012, 4). While Quashie’s argument is that quietness is not necessarily about resistance, his work is important here because it suggests that quietness is political. I draw on these notions of illegible, quiet ways of living that are attuned to care and survival rather than to public expressions of resistance in this chapter.

Of course, none of this is to say that the spectacle of a march, protest, or rally are politically insignificant. Instead, I introduce the feminist practice of inclination, which I argue entails bending toward rather that standing up to, against and on platforms as a way of thinking about how feminist tactics of resistance also have to include care. This means that this focus on care as a strategy for survival is not antithetical to organizing protest or the climactic taking to the state. What I am arguing here is that the need to constantly reconfigure ways of convening have to be read as significant practices of political resistance. Forms of feminist resistance not rendered legible by a platform often go unaccounted for. In focusing on hashtags and public declarations made from a stage or holding a mic, the tactics adopted by those who must resist differently are obscured.

This chapter is organized in four parts. I begin this chapter by presenting two opposing approaches to our current age of amplification: disconnection and inclination. Current scholarship in both Media Studies and popular discourse has suggested disconnecting as a response to the age of platform mediated amplification. I start this chapter with a literature review of current discourse on disconnection, which is an act of turning away from digital technologies. I argue that this is an approach that does not take a feminist ethics of care into account and instead suggest inclination as a mode of quiet resistance. Following a discussion of disconnection and inclination, I offer the first of three examples of platform inclination, which draw on semi-structured interviews conducted with feminist activists and community organizers. This first case, based off of an interview with trans community organizer Cayden Mak, uses the example of Amazon’s Wishlist function, which was used to help care for survivors of a warehouse fire in Oakland. Next, I move to an interview I conducted with Sarah Jama, a disability justice activist, whose fight to have snow removed from sidewalks in Hamilton, I argue, is at once an act of care and resistance. Finally, I draw on an interview with Black, queer organizer OmiSoore Dryden to suggest how platform mediated amplification in Toronto’s queer community might be read as careless. In these three examples I locate forms of resistance and protest by groups whose choice to not amplify helps us turn our attention to alternative modes of resisting.

While in this chapter I use examples of Hartman’s minor key and therefore less popular resistances, I will note here that often strategies for survival should remain obscured and illegible to power’s gaze (Foucault 1997; Browne 2015). Not all resistance should be or needs to be

96 accounted for and studied. This is an argument that has been importantly discussed by Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson (2014), and Eve Tuck (2009) who write about refusal and qualitative research. For example, in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Border of Settler States, Simpson argues that refusal is a “political and ethical stance that stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognised” (2014, 11). Simpson troubles the idea that everybody wants to be recognized and therefore brings into question research that highlights communities who remain obscure as a mode of survivance. Simpson goes on to argue that “Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognising: What is their authority to do so? Where does it come from? Who are they to do so?” (2014, 11). Simpson’s questions about who has the authority to recognize subjects are important in the context of work that addresses communities who might be safer by remining illegible. José Esteban Muñoz similarly argues that making queerness legible can be dangerous. He writes:

Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility (Muñoz 1996, 6).

From Muñoz too, we see the value in keeping the lives of marginal communities away from power’s gaze. Eve Tuck argues that in part, refusal entails academic researchers choosing which stories they want to tell (2009). Eve Tuck urges researchers to move from a “damage centred” approach to a “desire centered” approach to doing research (2009). Tuck defines damage centred research as research that focuses on stories of pain, suffering “intent on portraying our neighborhoods and tribes as defeated and broken” (2009,12). Desire centered research, on the other hand, “fleshes out that which has been hidden or what happens behind our backs. Desire, because it is an assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant, necessarily complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance” (2009, 420). Following Tuck, the examples I draw on in this chapter are focused only on generative tactics for survival rather than stories of pain and struggle. These examples have been the subject of at least some media coverage as well and so I am therefore not revealing strategies that would

97 otherwise be hidden. Finally, and most importantly, in publishing the accounts of minor key resistance that follow, I do not put the communities involved at risk.

Disconnection and Digital Tactics for Masculinist Resistance

On June 21, photos surfaced on Twitter and on the news of Melania Trump wearing an army green military jacket, with the words “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” printed across it’s back. The fashion choice that went viral was particularly obnoxious given that Melania Trump, wife of US president Donald Trump, donned the garment amid reports of thousands of immigrant children being separated from their families and held in over-crowded detention centres at the US border. At the hands of the Trump administration, thousands of children have been subject to immense cruelty at these facilities which have at times been compared to concentration camps (Katz 2019; Serwer 2019). American journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s 2019 Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times “Call immigrant detention centres what they really are: concentration camps,” draws parallels between Nazi concentration camps used during the holocaust and Trump’s detention centres. As Katz put it “Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. His mass arrests, iceboxes and dog cages are part of an explicitly nationalist project to put the country under the control of the right kind of white people” (Katz June 9, 2019). So, with or without Melania Trump’s jacket, it is abundantly clear that the Trump administration does not care about the lives of the children and their families being detained across multiple locations on the US-Mexico border.

Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit offered her take on the first lady’s jacket in a lithub article shortly after people took to Twitter to call Trump out for her fashion choice (2018). In “Not Caring is A Political Art Form: On Melania Trump and the Politics of Disconnection” Solnit usefully reads the jacket as symbolic of right-wing politics of the day. Solnit frames not caring with an elitist politics of disconnection. She argues that “the right has a terrible fear of obligation they address by denying it and celebrating its opposite, the laissez-faire social-Darwinist every-man-for- himself and devil-take-the-hindmost scramble. This ideology denies how we are connected, ecologically, economically, socially, emotionally” (Solnit, 2018). Solnit is arguing that to not care is to disconnect from the lives of others. She goes on to write “in the long term our work must be to connect and to bring a vision of connection as better than disconnection, for oneself

98 and for the world, to those whose ideology is “I really don’t care”—whether or not it’s emblazoned on their jackets. Somewhere in there is the reality that what we do we do for love, if it’s worth doing” (2018). Solnit draws a line between care and connection. Following Solnit, this idea that disconnecting can sometimes look like not caring is salient in our current digital culture. Sarah Sharma’s important work on exit brings the relationship between care and connection as a technological problem. Sharma argues that “exit is an exercise of patriarchal power, a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy. It stands in direct contradistinction to care” (2017). For Sharma, exit, much like disconnection, stands in opposition to collective caring. Solnit’s example of disconnection and Sharma’s use of exit both ask us to reconsider these tactics in order to move toward a feminist ethic of caring.

In an age of amplification, disconnection is touted as an answer to being over stimulated and too connected through the use of various digital technologies. For example, in his piece “Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain,” The New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose reports on his month-long breakup with his cellphone (February 23, 2019). In an effort to “repair his brain,” which Roose contends had become damaged from being addicted to his phone, he writes about the methods he used to slowly disconnect from his phone. Roose reports a range of tactics including tracking his phone-use habits, taking pottery classes, and walking around his neighbourhood, paying attention to the architectural details of buildings he had never noticed before. At the end of 30 days, Roose reports he is “starting to feel human again” (February 23, 2019). Roose’s piece is a reflection of the current and dominate discourse that is presented around professionals disconnecting from technology.

The call to disconnect is not just one presented by self-help gurus who encourage a prosaic lifestyle adjustment that resembles life pre-internet. Of course, there are a fair share of these examples too. Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019) or Catherine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone (2018) come to mind as examples of this sort of discourse that offer a reduced use of technology as the solution for better living in the digital age. But the turn toward disconnection is more widespread and so it cannot just be dismissed as another example of a frivolous and temporary DIY strategy to better yourself. There are also political stakes tied to technological disconnection. The politics of disconnecting have been traced by Feminist Media Studies scholars. For instance, Melissa Gregg shows how mindfulness apps are used in corporate settings not so that workers can improve their quality of life but rather so that they can be more

99 effective workers (2018). Gregg uses examples of apps that help workers concentrate by allowing them to disconnect from other workplace distractions which she argues “allow users to track work/life cycles by day, hour, or minute so that energy levels and communication patterns can be identified for improvement or greater discipline” (2018, 90). Gregg’s work is important to account for as it shows how disconnection can be political. Likewise, Sharma’s work on exit outlines the political stakes of disconnecting too (2017). Taking Sharma’s theory of exit into account too, we might consider disconnecting as a form of exit and read logging out as a patriarchal privilege. Despite these important feminist theories of disconnection and exit though, there seems to be widespread agreement elsewhere in the value of using digital technologies, and specifically social media, less. This is exemplified by the fact that people with vastly different perspectives, from app developers to some critical Media Studies scholars are invested in disconnection as a social and political strategy.

For examples from Silicon Valley, we only have to look to the Apple’s app store to be overwhelmed by different phone applications that promise to help users put down their phones. For instance, the app SPACE offers users a renewed connection with the real world for only $2.99. SPACE’s proposition is that it is an app that will “help you take control of your phone life balance” (SPACE “Our Philosophy”). They do this by offering personal statistics on your phone usage in order to “help you think about how you use your phone and how it affects your life” (SPACE “Our Philosophy”). SPACE is thus an example of one of many apps that are designed to mediate disconnection. The app’s website is littered with pictures of the great outdoors and photos of people caught mid-air, gleefully jumping for joy now that they are finally free from their burdensome phones.

The commodification of disconnecting is also exemplified in companies such as Digital Detox (Karppi 2019, 109). As Tero Karppi argues in Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds, Digital Detox is a business that runs camps and retreats that remove people from their phones, as if disconnection “is a simple on-off mechanism” (Karppi 2019, 109). Take, for example, the introduction of digital detox camps like Camp Grounded, where people can spend time in nature, technology free. Camp Grounded runs four-day retreats where people hand in their phones and spend time reconnecting with people offline, practice being silent for hours at a time and engage in group large hugs (Sutton 2017). Similar to apps like SPACE, digital detox retreats are

100 successful (the camps are sold out into 2020), because of a popular understanding that we are too connected, because of digital technologies.

Critical Media Studies scholars too, see the benefits of disconnecting. In Media and Communications Studies, disconnection is quite often framed as a resistant political practice rather than as a self-help strategy (Portwood-Stacer 2013; Burbaker, Ananny and Crawford 2016; Hesselberth 2018; Kaun and Treré 2018; Karppi 2018; Syversten and Enli 2019). Abstaining from the use of various social media sites gets positioned as a response to practices of surveillance, privacy and the commodification of user data carried about by social media sites (Karppi 2018). Anne Kaun and Emiliano Treré trace the practice of disconnecting beyond people abstaining from social media and argue that technology refusal and non-use have long been forms of media activism (2018). So, while much recent scholarship on digital activism privilege connectedness where being online is equated with political participation, Kaun and Treré argue that we can also consider the opposite reaction of abstaining from particular social media sites as resistance too (2018). Trine Syversten and Gunn Enli contend that digital detox, which they define as “periodic disconnection from social or online media, or online media, or strategies to reduce digital media involvement” (2019, 2) is often positioned as an example of media resistance and is bolstered by the notion of authenticity. In their study of 20 texts on digital detox, Syversten and Enli argue that the imagined effect of regaining authentic interpersonal relationships, and a nostalgia for the past is what drives popular interest in disconnecting (2019, 12). In their research on the social networking app Grindr, which is used predominately by gay men, Jed Brubaker, Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford show how the process of leaving or disconnecting from social networking apps is both a technical and social act that is often non- linear and not as simple as deleting an app from your phone. Brubaker, Ananny and Crawford argue that “studying technological departure requires more than simply cataloguing technical actions and tracing data flows. It involves understanding a set of subtle, gradual and seemingly contradictory sociotechnical moves (and even the absence thereof) that, taken together, constitute departure” (2016, 386).

Much of the recent scholarship that positions disconnection as an act of resistance has focused on Facebook specifically. For example, Karppi traces the online culture of disconnectivity in the context of Facebook and argues that disconnection can be a tool for avoiding capture that social media platforms are in invested in (2018, 24). In the context of social media platforms,

101 disconnecting therefore gets positioned as a way of social media users exercising agency and effecting a “right to disconnect” (Hesselberth 2017).

But such forms of disconnecting have been questioned by Laura Portwood-Stacer who calls this “media refusal” (2012). She argues that disconnecting is often a matter of lifestyle politics and is better understood as a performance of the political (2012). For Portwood-Stacer, while disconnecting is sometimes done in the name of resistance to social media companies like Facebook, this does not quite capture the whole picture. Instead, she importantly argues that “in any case, we can understand the practice of media refusal as related to the broader neoliberal trend of lifestyle politics, in which individuals want to intervene in what they identify as large problems, but feel best equipped to make their intervention at a personal level, at the site of their own individual behavior” (2012, 1053). Following Portwood-Stacer, disconnection is a choice that only socially privileged groups can make.

In part, both these popular and scholarly calls for refusal or opting out of social media platforms are often in favour of a return to being more present in space and in time. In simple terms then, we might understand the logic of disconnecting as animated by a belief that life not mediated by the digital technologies that take up our time and infringe on our privacy is necessarily better. SPACE’s imagery of mountains and people frolicking in nature and the fact that Camp Grounded is located in scenic parts of Northern California, are not-so-subtle illustrations of this. Tied to logging out is a longing for a better yesterday, when people spent time in nature, talking to each other and making granola over a fire instead of texting and scrolling through Instagram (Syversten and Enli 2019). Or, following the more critical, scholarly arguments about disconnection, the call to refuse digital media is also a call to regain a sense of privacy that is imagined to be lost because of the data-collection practices of different social media platforms. Here, there seems to be an assumption that privacy was once had and is lost because of social media platforms. Of course, this idea has been refuted, for example by those Black feminist Media Studies scholars who note that digitally mediated or not, there is a long history of technologies that have disciplined, surveilled, examined and controlled populations (Browne 2015; Benjamin 2019). Taking these perspectives into account, it’s clear that this logic that centres geographical space through arguments to log off reifies a normative relationship to the material world that assumes safety and command over space that many people, especially women, queer, racialized and disabled folks certainly do not possess.

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Disconnection also forecloses the possibility that sometimes life is sustained via technological means. Survival that is dependent on the technological is especially pertinent for people who have differential relationships to space. Recalling Doreen Massey’s work from the last chapter, we are reminded that space is gendered and mobility in space is not experienced uniformly (Massey 1994). In Spatializing Blackness, Rashad Shabazz extends Massey’s analysis to include Black people. He writes, “It is not a coincidence that poor people, people of colour, immigrants, the sick, disabled and prisoners, women and sexual minorities, and other marginalized groups live in bracketed geographies. The scope of their political power often mirrors their spatial marginalization” (2015, 45). Given geography’s unevenness, Katherine McKittrick imagines, following poet Dionne Brand, what it would be to “give up on land” (2006, ix). To give up on land is to imagine a future that isn’t tied to geography or in other words, a future that is not tied to material space and its unevenness. On Brand, McKittrick writes, “Brand’s decision, to give up on land, to want no country, to disclose that geography is always human and humanness is always geographic– blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, this is your land, you planet, your road, your sea– suggests that the surroundings are speakable” (2006, ix). McKittrick shows us here that when we give pause to the materiality of space, we can recognize spatial hierarchies. She goes on to write that “to give up on land and imagine new geographic stories, geography holds in it the possibility to speak for itself” (2006, ix). From McKittrick and Brand, we are provided with an alternative future that is not tied to spatial inequalities. McKittrick is not suggesting that digitally mediated connection or that some imagined life in cyberspace is an example of giving up on land nor is she writing in response to digital detox camps. Instead, McKittrick’s argument here is that normalized relationships with space “unjustly organize human hierarchies” (2006, x). But, in applying theories and Black and feminist geography to Media Studies approaches to disconnection, we are given yet another reason why logging out is not viable for everyone. In other words, this argument to give up on land comes to matter for Media Studies discussions of disconnection because it highlights why some people who have historically been unsafe in geographical space might look elsewhere when imagining their futures. McKittrick thus sees giving up on land as something liberating. She imagines a space beyond material geophagies that are oppressive, as an important move in black studies. So, where disconnection wants to refuse technology in order to establish some sort of utopic past (log out, disconnect), giving up on land is to image a future with alterable and different geographies.

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This brings me back to Sharma’s argument, that exit “falls too heavily on gendered lines for it to be a feminist political strategy” (2017). The problem with disconnection is that it is a masculinist tactic that makes “more work for mother” or puts “care in crisis” (Schwartz Cowan 1983; Sharma 2017). For people who have differential experiences both of physical space and in their use of digital technologies, disconnection is not necessarily an effective mode of feminist resistance. This is especially true when the very technologies that we think we ought to disconnect from make care possible. While the examples of feminist resistance that I opened this chapter are structured by platforms and therefore left little room for alternative forms of resistance, disconnecting from digital technologies is also not an appropriate strategy today. What then, does a feminist response to amplification look like? The response might be to stay connected instead of logging out.

Inclination

Disconnection is a response to platform mediated amplification that requires turning away from digital technologies. As I have shown in the discussion above, disconnection is also a strategy that forecloses the possibility of care. I suggest in what follows that rather than disconnecting from platforms, maybe we should incline toward them. In Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016), Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero develops what she calls a “new postural geometry” that is useful for thinking further about masculinist tactics of resistance in the digital age. Cavarero contrasts rectitude and inclination – two human postures which she reads as politically significant. Cavarero argues that vertical posture, or the figure of the “upright man” has historically, and especially in philosophy, come to stand for paternal authority and by extension for an empowered subject. Uprightness then, has become normalized as at once masculine and as a necessarily good. By contrast, the image of a body bent over, inclined toward an object is a display of vulnerability. To be inclined toward something also suggests a weakness, or an absence of will to remain upright. The body inclined, Cavarero argues, is also often connected to the feminine body. Cavarero draws on a range of images and the work of political philosophers who address the subject to make this argument but her most astute examples are those of famous works of art in which the mother figure is often depicted as being bent over a child she is caring for. Cavarero shows that a woman inclined is linked to maternal care. For example, she uses da Vinci’s The Virgin and the Child with St. Anne (Figure 11), to show how maternal inclination has historically been portrayed in art. In this image, we see Mary

104 sitting and inclined toward baby Jesus. Cavarero describes the scene when she writes, “The mother here is inclined over her child who, as an emblem of dependent and vulnerable creature, attracts her in a forward motion, in a protrusion beside herself that endangers her balance” (2016, 99). The point here is that the maternal figure is being pulled, against her will toward what she must care for– in this case her child. Care represented by the gesture of inclining is thus at once a feminine trait and a weakness.

Figure 11: Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, circa 1503. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The new postural geometry that Cavarero is proposing though, is one where inclination gets equated with care, and where care is politically revolutionary. As Cavarero puts it, “Maternal inclination could work as a module for a different, more disruptive, and revolutionary geometry whose aim is to rethink the very core of community” (2016, 131). A feminist perspective on inclination as a gesture of care thus calls for reading bending not as a weakness but as a posture that sustains community.

Cavarero’s work on posture, extended to political resistance, lends itself to rethinking feminist tactics. Where rectitude is a masculinist posture, inclination might be a new way of

105 conceptualizing feminist resistance. This would mean that we accept social movements can be built around bending rather than standing up to or against. In the context of digital activism, inclination is developing technologically mediated tactics based more on caring and facilitating safety and survival. So unlike disconnection which could be positioned as masculinist rectitude, animated by standing up to and against the over-use of digital technologies, inclination is accepting the role that the digital plays in sustaining particular communities through care. Kevin Quashie (2012) puts this same idea in different terms. Rather than inclination, he uses the notion of “surrender” which is often used as a passive term in the context of war and domination. As Quashie beautifully puts it: “the quiet subject is a subject who surrenders, a subject whose consciousness is not only shaped by inner life. Quiet is not a performance or a withholding; instead, it is an expressiveness that is not necessarily legible, at least not in a world that privileges public expressiveness” (2012, 45).

In what follows, I present three different examples of inclination. These are examples based on interviews with community organizers from Oakland, California and Toronto, Ontario and Hamilton, Ontario. First, the case of Amazon Wishlists is a technologically mediated example of inclination. The second example draws on how the notion of care has been used in the context of Toronto’s Black queer community. The final example shows how survival and care are played out on a small scale by disability justice activists in Hamilton, Ontario. Although these instances of social and political activism are spatially disparate, they have also all happened within the last five years. They therefore need to be understood together as feminist responses to the current moment—the age of amplification.

Ghost Ships and Amazon Wish Lists: An Interview with Cayden Mak

In November 2018, I interviewed Cayden Mak who is a community organizer based in Oakland, California. Mak is a trans, masculine person of colour. As a community organizer and technologist, Mak has cofounded grassroots media start-ups and is currently Executive Director at an organization called 18 Million Rising (18MR). 18MR describe themselves as an organization that “develop[s] new ways for Asian Americans and our allies to collaborate, create new ways of being and transform the world around us. We utilize digital-first advocacy tactics to elevate the voices of and mobilize our over 120, 000 members to take action on issues that matter

106 to them” (18millionrising.org “About 18MR”). I contacted Mak for an interview because of their role as a community organizer who relies on digital technologies to support the marginalized communities that they work with. This interview revealed to me how differential approaches to the platform are essential for the survival of queer people of colour. Mak and I spent most of our time talking about how their approach to digital technologies, both personally and professionally are centred around the care and survival of marginalized communities.

Mak’s understanding of the internet as a technology that is paramount to the survival for trans, queer people of colour emerged out of their personal experience. For Mak, who grew up in Suburban Michigan, AOL message boards made connecting with people like them possible. As Mak put it “connecting with college kids while I was in middle school helped me find community and gave me a way to talk about my gender identity” (personal communications, November 30, 2018). Mak explained that this was a practice that was life sustaining in their mostly conservative hometown where finding like-minded people seemed impossible. Indeed, the relationship between the import of the internet and queer and transgender identity has been well documented in Media and Communications Studies too. Jessa Lingel notes in Digital Countercultures and The Struggle for Community that “The internet has allowed people, particularly people at the margins, to form powerful social connections in ways that would have been impossible, or at very least very difficult with older modes of communication” (2017, 5). Echoing Mak’s sentiments, Olu Jenzen argues that for LGBTQ youth “internet connection is a crucial lifeline” (2017, 1638). Likewise, Andre Cavalcante’s research on today’s transgender youth and the internet argues that “due to the marginality and precariousness of gender variance, living a transgender life requires reliable structures of care and concern; structures that help to make the management of everyday life possible (2016, 118). Cavalcante’s contends that “in the internet era, these structures have migrated online making them more widely accessible to transgender individuals” (2016, 119). Tamara Chaplin’s research on the Minitel, which was a French Internet based closed networking system, is an example of work that highlights how computer-mediated technologies were being used to building community among queer communities as early as the 1980s (Chaplin 2014). Through a study of a group of lesbians who used Minitel to form chat rooms, educate their community and politically organize, Chaplin argues that Minitel shows us “the relationship between technology, information systems, community and identity” (2014, 471). Together, this work shows that in my interview with Mak,

107 the connection that they identified between queer survival and the internet is well documented by Communication Studies scholars.

Given that the internet is understood to be so important to queer and transgender communities, I also spoke to Mak about how so often, platforms seem antithetical to care and to the survival of those who are most subject to abuse online. On the one hand, according to Mak’s experiences and research on queer life on the internet, social media platforms have been important for forming social connections for those living on the margins. But on the other hand, we know that often these same platforms are populated by racist, misogynist, and homophobic users. Jessie Daniels’ Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights, shows how white supremacy has spread across the Internet (2009). In more recent work on the topic, Daniels explores how white nationalists have taken to Twitter specifically, especially since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Daniels argues that Twitter is a particularly appealing site for racists and misogynists because of its “impartial efforts to systemically deal with white supremacists (and other harassers).” As Daniels writes, “Simply put, white supremacists love Twitter because it loves them back” (Oct 19, 2017). Whitney Phillips has also traced the emergent trend of online trolls who take to the internet to spread racist and misogynist ideas (2018, 16). In a similar vein, internet researcher Joan Donavon’s report for The New York Times on disinformation companies that have targeted Black women on Twitter shows how platform companies have so far failed to stop trolls “who turned a free and open internet into a terrain for information warfare” (August 15, 2019). I asked Mak how they understood this tension between the internet that they understood as vital to their survival also being the site of overt hate and violence for marginal comminutes. Mak paused at this question for a while, weighing these obvious experiences of online abuse against more joyful and life affirming moments online before telling me that they understand “platforms are a voluntary system of care” (Personal communications, November 30, 2018). In framing platforms as a voluntary system of care, Mak recalled how relief efforts following a fire at an artist collective made an otherwise careless platform a site of care. Mak drew on an example of Amazon Wish Lists, a function of the e-commerce site Amazon, which can be used to send goods to people who need them. In this example, the act of inclination in operationalized through the voluntary use of a digital platform.

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The Ghost Ship warehouse was an industrial building that served as a work-live collective for artists in Oakland, California. On December 2, 2016, the Ghost Ship warehouse was hosting an electronic music party when the building caught fire. Thirty-six people died in the fire and many others lost their homes and artist studios. Most of the artists working and living out of the Ghost Ship warehouse were queer folks and black and brown folks. The building’s tenants had reported fire hazards in the building before, but management failed to make living conditions safe. These conditions are common in Oakland where many people have had to look for makeshift live-work spaces in an increasingly gentrified city (Levin and Yuhas 2016). After the fire, the people who survived were left without shelter and were in need of life sustaining goods. In an effort to help provide these things to those who lost their property in the Ghost Ship fire, “wish lists” were set up on the e-commerce site Amazon. An Amazon wish list documents what items a user has searched and needs. It is also shareable. Others can access the wish lists and purchase listed items which will be delivered directly to the user who requested them. Amazon wish lists are increasingly being used by charities that need fast access to specific goods rather than money. For example, hurricane relief charities have made use of the wish lists in recent years (Hecht 2017).

Amazon’s way of operating a major international e-commerce business has been subject to much criticism over the past few years. Recent studies on the labour practices at Amazon have commented on job precarity and the devaluation of identity and dignity of people working at Amazon warehouses globally (Delfanti 2019a). Alessandro Delfanti argues, for example, that Amazon warehouse workers are systematically subject to three distinct phenomena during the process of stowing goods, picking goods, and being managed at Amazon warehouses. Delfanti calls these phenomena “machinic dispossession,” “algorithmic management” and “augmented despotism” (2019b, 3). Delfanti observes that the several thousand workers at warehouses worldwide are made subordinate to algorithmic systems and organizational techniques carried out by Amazon. There are also issues surrounding Amazon’s customer data-collecting practices (West 2019). Amazon’s proprietary digital assistant Alexa has been critiqued as the latest and most invasive surveillance technology deployed by the corporation. For instance, Amazon has reportedly listened in on customers’ private conversations through the Amazon Echo device in order to make tweaks to software (Fussell 2019). Thao Phan argues that while this device is presented by the company as “an idealized domestic servant,” a description she notes is racially

109 fraught, it is best understood as a “new frontier” in the commodification of daily life (Phan 2019, 29). We also know that the e-commerce giant has put smaller brick and mortar stores out of business and that its ultra-fast delivery service is contributing to the destruction of the environment. At almost every turn, then, Amazon is doing something worth protesting against. Although Amazon’s practices and culture are very obviously problematic, it is possible to consider the company’s violent way of operating in the same frame as the use of the site for Ghost Ship’s relief efforts. In other words, the case for Amazon wish lists as a site used for care does not refute the varied and serious critiques of the site. To name Amazon a site of care is not to disavow the fact that it is also the site of violence. Instead we might ask: what does it mean to “incline” toward Amazon?

Returning here to Cavarero’s work on posture, the idea of inclination, when extended to political resistance, lends itself to rethinking feminist tactics and is useful for probing this Amazon wish lists example. Where rectitude – the vertical – is a masculinist posture, inclination might be a new way of conceptualizing feminist resistance. This would mean that we accept that social movements can develop from an inclined position and are not dependent on ‘standing up to’ or ‘against’ something. In the context of digital activism, inclination relies on developing technologically mediated tactics based more on caring and facilitating safety and survival. Indeed, care in this example presents a complicated tension. As many scholars have shown, care is a concept tied to unequal raced, gendered and colonial histories (Sharpe 2018; Sharpe 2016, Murphy 2015; Hartman 1997). Christina Sharpe, for instance, argues that “care is often continued violence, continued limits placed on black life, possibility, education, movement, sustenance, and joy” (2018, 175). What if activating on the margins might simultaneously mean standing up to and resisting companies like Amazon but also being inclined towards its unanticipated life-sustaining functions? In the case of the Ghost Ship fire relief efforts, Amazon was used to facilitate survival. We have to read this example as a feminist tactic that is centred on inclining toward a site that also makes sense to stand against because of the working conditions, dominance in the market and overall nefarious business practices discussed above. We have to embrace bending in an age of amplification that measures who is standing tallest.

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“I don’t give a shit about Viola Desmond on the 10- dollar bill” and how to not care: An Interview with OmiSoore Dryden

When I interviewed OmiSoore Dryden on a snowy Tuesday afternoon in the winter of 2019, I wanted to talk with her about Toronto’s Pride Parade and what it meant to have a police presence in the parade. Dryden and I met shortly after Pride Toronto members held a closed vote to reinstall uniformed police offers at the parade. The members voted to allow police officers to participate in Pride in 2019. That the Pride Toronto organization invited Toronto Police Services (TPS) to apply to march in the parade was contested and met with much anger and frustration from many members of the city’s queer community who recognized that the Toronto police have long had a tenuous relationship with queer and trans people in the city, and especially with people who are Black and brown. I was interested in how Pride’s very apparent anti-blackness was being resisted. In tracing her history as a Black activist in Toronto, Dryden summed up the problem perfectly as she laughed and exclaimed “I don’t give a shit about Viola Desmond on the ten-dollar bill!” (Personal communications March 11, 2019). Dryden recalled the Desmond bill as an example of what it looks like to give surface level support to Black people in Canada while simultaneously upholding structures of oppression and racism.

In 2018 the Bank of Canada released a new ten-dollar bill, printed with a portrait of Viola Desmond, into circulation. Desmond was a Canadian civil rights activist, well-known for being a successful black female entrepreneur. More importantly, Desmond is famous for challenging segregation at a cinema in Nova Scotia, Canada where she refused to sit in the segregated section of the theatre (Bank of Canada, 2018). The redesign of the bill was initiated by the Canadian government who, under the guidance of Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, consulted the public for ideas about which Canadian women should appear on the bill. On the Bank of Canada website, you can read about the features of bill and how they represent a celebration of “racial equality across Canada” (Bank of Canada, 2018). In popular news media around Canada, printing Desmond’s face on the bill was applauded for its representation of Canadian diversity (Cooke 2018; Luck 2018). In an article for the Canadian fashion magazine Flare, Sarah Boesveld writes about her excitement to spend her “Desmond dollars” on a list of items that reflect her feminist politics. Among the list is a box of tampons for a homeless woman and a latte for Viola Desmond’s only living sister, Wanda Robson (Boesveld March 8, 2018). But the representation

111 of a Black woman on a bill does not matter when Black people are still fighting to survive in Canada. The ten-dollar bill toted as an example of equality is a symptom of amplification in this digitally mediated age with its platforms that circulate news of Canadian diversity. The shareable, easily celebrate-able representations of equality overshadow the quiet and consistent work that makes life more livable.

Inclination can also be a response to a digitally mediated age of amplification. To incline toward care is not always a loud gesture. Returning again to Hartman’s idea of revolution in a minor key, we also have to take into account how minor key resistance is often illegible because amplification is not always the goal. A minor key resistance that centres care is not digitally noteworthy and there is no platform for it (Singh and Sharma 2019). In other words, unlike examples of Platform Feminism, where resistance is rendered legible by the platform, quieter modes of careful resistance are not always registered as resistance at all.

Again and again my interview with Dryden returned to examples of what it looks like to care, and even more crucially what it looks like not to care, when visibility and representation are the focus in acts of political resistance. The focus on amplification highlights again how normative relationships to platforms tend to overdetermine their political utility, especially for people who do not always seek visibility. The organization of Toronto’s Pride Parade in 2019 is an another even more dangerous example of this. At the Pride Parade in 2016, members of Black Lives Matter (BLM), who were invited to the parade as “honoured guests” stopped the parade for thirty minutes by sitting in the street with a list of demands. The list, among other things, called for the removal of the Toronto police float at the parade (Khan 2016). The call by BLM to remove police participation was agreed to by Pride Organizers but three years later, as planning was underway for the 2019 parade, the police float was reinstalled, in part to make sure that the parade would continue to be funded by the city. Toronto Police have a history of police brutality that has specifically impacted the lives of Black and Indigenous queer people. As Walcott puts it, “Police marching in Pride parades represents — both symbolically and otherwise — the ongoing colonial project of violently interdicting into the lives of Black and Indigenous peoples by making us less than human” (2017). The invitation for the Toronto police to rejoin the Pride parade made it clear that the maintenance of the parade in its current form was privileged over any commitments to care for the precarious positions of queer and trans folks, many of them Black and Brown. Echoing some of the same sentiments as Dryden, Walcott has argued that the

112 logic adopted by Pride’s organizers that a bigger, more widely attended, and more visible Pride weekend can be equated with more rights is flawed (2018). Although the Pride organization sent out a triumphant email, boasting 2.5 million attended the 2018 parade, this increased visibility through numbers does not actually equate to freedoms won for queer communities.

In our interview, Dryden called the Pride organization inviting the police to march in the 2019 parade “a performance of care” rather than Pride TO doing the work of care. The performance of care at Pride is ensuring that the parade continues to run under the guise that seeing queer folks march is healing for a uniform queer community and that having no parade would be worse than having some people feel unsafe with the presence of the police. But, as Dryden pointed out, Pride started out as a riot, not a parade. The performance of care at the parade also looked like organizers wearing all black and having a moment of silence for the queer men who were murdered by a serial killer in Toronto’s gay village. Most of these men were brown. Historian and Feminist STS scholar Michelle Murphy argues that while care is “repeatedly promised as a source of potential emancipation,” care is actually sometimes “full of romantic temptations that disconnect acts that feel good from their geopolitical implications” (2015, 724). Certainly, this is what Dryden means when she calls Pride’s treatment of black and brown people merely a performance of care. Viola Desmond on the ten-dollar bill, the showy moments of silence for slain queer folks in Toronto, the loud and widely attended pride parades in the city– these acts can sometimes feel good. But at the same time, the emancipatory potential of care, especially for queer folks of colour, is missing when care is reduced to performance and its ethics are absent.

Inclination can stand directly in contrast with amplification and being seen. In part, this also is a question of what Nick Mizeroff calls “the right to look” (2011). For Mizeroff, “the right to look… must be mutual or it fails” (2011, 473). The drive to make the Pride parade bigger, even if it means offering uniformed police officers’ participation in the parade is careless because it centres visibility over the safety and survival of particular queer folks. At the Pride parade, this mutual agreement was not reached and so the increased visibility of many queer folks is more harmful than healing.

So, what does it look like to do the work of care instead? Dryden offered instances that mark a clear shift toward what we might think of as “careful” resistance in our interview too. She pointed to specific examples. There were networks of care that involved queer black women with

113 cars offering rides home from clubs late at night to other queer black women to ensure their safety. Or, she suggested how the example of making the fonts and text used for sharing protest chants and lyrics big enough for people with visual impairments to read them was a careful act. Dryden also used the Black Lives Matter protest at Toronto police headquarters in 2016 as an example of an important shift toward the quiet caring of others. During the protest at the police headquarters in Toronto, where members of BLMTO camped out for over two weeks, Dryden, also a Women’s Studies professor, offered to proofread the assignments of students camping out at the Toronto Police headquarters. The difference between Pride TO’s performance of care and these examples of the work of care hinges on how safety and survival come to be privileged over amplification. Much like the Ghost Ship fire relief, Dryden’s examples of resisting are played in a minor key. They are quiet tactics, driven by an inclination to care for one another.

Caring for one another also comes to matter to feminist politics because it makes movements sustainable. To this point, Dryden and I also spoke about her experience as a student organizer in the early 1990’s at York University, located in Toronto. As an undergraduate student, Dryden began protesting anti-black racism and specifically speaking out against York’s campus security who were racially profiling other black students. In protest of these racist practices, Dryden along with a group of other students occupied the York University president’s office. Dryden told me that with other organizer, she would stay up all night planning and then stage a protest the next day. She recognized, looking back on her time as a student activist, that care was not at the forefront of planning. Dryden, using this example of staying up all night to organize protests, pointed out that when protests were done, people often failed to check in with each other. People never considered who might have been harmed or triggered during protests because care was not part of the vocabulary of resistance in the political organizing spaces Dryden was in during that time. As Dryden explained: “I don't believe we cared for each other. I don't believe we offered care for one another. I believe that the focus was on figuring out the next thing that needs to happen and needs to happen now. Like most things it wasn't sustainable. It burned bright, it burned quick, and then it was over” (Personal communications, March 11, 2019). Dryden noted that it was only years later, and when care work become a common consideration, that she was able to reflect on how careless these organizing practices were.

Dryden’s point about sustainability also shows that an inclination toward care does not just have to be read as a feminist tactic then. Instead we might also consider that care is what makes

114 rectitude, in other words the more vertical ways of resisting, sustainable over time. Sustainability also makes care important. After speaking with Dryden, it became clear to me that before people were thinking about or at least naming care in their activist projects, achieving a particular goal was not only central, but seemed to be the only thing in frame for political organizers.

Toronto Black Lives Matter Activist Syrus Marcus Ware echoes the sentiment that care is important for the sustenance of activist movements. Along with their work as a member of Black Lives Matter, Ware has fought for prisoner and disability justice and for transgender rights since 1998 (Ware 2019). In their article “How To Fight Activist Burnout,” Ware traces, what they call “activist burnout” arguing in favour of taking breaks and resting in order to maintain the energy requires ongoing fights in the face of growing right-wing fascists in North America and beyond (Ware 2019). Ware, calls on collaborator and fellow Black Lives Matter Toronto member Rodney Diverlus, who adds to this discussion of burnout saying:

‘The life of an activist is a life of perpetual burnout,’” he told me. “Most of us come into our activism already burnt out from living life in the margins. We fight injustice out of a need, we fight each other out of unresolved trauma, a fight that burns what little fire we have left from living. We burn, and we are burned. This endless burning of things and self guts movements of our fiercest warriors. It leaves community ties in tatters, lives shattered and relationships that cease to matter’” (Ware 2019).

Ware and Diverlus both speak to the fact care and the longevity of any movement, whatever form it takes, have to be considered together. This thinking importantly highlights the co- constitutive relationship between rectitude and inclination. That is, in order to be upright in the first place, inclination is necessary. In these cases, care is not the self-care that seems to dominate discourse on the platform today. A normative relationship between care and the platform is a depoliticized one where self-contained habits of care are shared on various social media platforms. For example, Sarah Sharma has argued that “The radical potential of self-care is impeded by the need to document it, publicize it, enclose it in a list. Unlike selfie- care, self- care isn’t about the private domain of the self, but about the maintenance of the conditions of possibility for people to be cared for in common” (2018). Instead the idea of taking care in these examples of sustaining movements has to be considered as a politically significant, even if is it not made legible and amplified on the platform.

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Platforms, Sidewalks, Snow, Survival: An Interview with Sarah Jama

The Disability Justice Network Ontario (DJNO) is an organization based in Hamilton, Ontario. In December 2018, I interviewed DJNO’s co-founder Sarah Jama. Jama and I spoke about how organizing with a focus on disability justice and activism is not just about fighting for accessibility or expanding purchasing power, even though there is a tendency to turn toward these issues when disability justice is being discussed. In Ontario, Canada, for example, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) puts policy in place so that people have greater access to spaces, but the services it provides are predominately accessed by people with disabilities who are white (Jama, personal communications December 21, 2018; Andrew- Amofaw 2018). Disability Studies scholarship also demonstrates that questions of access often result in the implementation of “technological change without addressing underlying prejudices and misconceptions” (Williamson 2015). In our interview, Jama pointed out that she is not much interested in the type of disability justice that ensures access to buildings as its primary function. She argues that this way of thinking about disability privileges whiteness and upholds a focus on productivity. If access to public spaces is only granted so that people with disabilities can be productive, in terms of their capacity to work and to spend money, then any freedoms won are limited. Instead, Jama in her work with the DJNO looks to build political agency and capacity in other people with disabilities, many of whom are black and brown, so that they can better advocate for themselves.

An example of this capacity building work is the DJNO’s fight to demand better snow removal from the sidewalks in Hamilton. In the winter months of 2018-2019, the city saw as much as 40cm of snow fall in a single week. People with walkers, wheelchairs and other assistive devices were unable to leave their homes and travel in the city was difficult. Many people found themselves dangerously stuck because of the city’s failure to clear sidewalks. Thus, organizing to ensure that snow is cleared off sidewalks is tied to the survival of those who have differential relationships to space. Snow removal is not just an issue of access or about better representation for particular communities. Instead, having cleared sidewalks is a matter critical to the safety and survival of those who have disabilities whose demands to be able to move in public spaces are not met.

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The DJNO’s efforts to have snow removed from Hamilton’s sidewalks was technologically mediated. During the winter months of 2018 and 2019, the DJNO’s “Snow and Tell” campaign asked people to document dangerous sidewalks and bus shelters. Many people took to Twitter to post their photos of messy Hamilton streets. But that isn’t the only, or even the main reason why this is a notable example of activism. The DJNO’s project is important because of its insistence on what we can conceptualize as resistance in a minor key. Removing snow is quiet but impactful. Wendy Brown, in conversation with Jo Littler, and commenting on the contemporary political moment, urges us to think beyond the concept of hope. She says: “it is important to ask ourselves what we can do to produce more prospects for hope rather than trying to find hope in order to act.… We can’t go looking for hope in the sky, we have to make it on earth” (2018, 20- 21). We can read snow removal as the production of hopefulness. This example is local and context specific which makes noting the digitally mediated production of hope more palpable. The ‘production of hopefulness’ has to do with the fact that what is being demanded here is maintenance rather than something being built anew. In our interview, Jama called this initiative “winnable.” In other words, it’s a revolution in a minor key.

Once again, our contemporary technological environment matters here. In the case of snow removal as maintenance it is useful to think alongside Media Studies scholarship on repair and maintenance (Jackson 2013; Parks 2013; Mattern 2018). Steven Jackson’s (2013) formative work on the topic of repair offers what he calls “broken world thinking.” Jackson suggests that technology and new Media Studies scholars redirect their attention to how technologies, and by extension the world are sustained. This is a shift because so often studies of technology are “occupied with the shock of the new” (2013, 234). Commenting on the case of mobile phones and computers being repaired in Zambia, Parks urges us to “approach the breakdown of things as opportunities to imagine social fixes as well” (2013, 10). Mattern also asks how we might try to value care in the design and maintenance of the material world and thus achieve “social fixes” (2018). Hamilton’s snow removal is instructive because it extends the technological focus of repair to the streets. Maintaining streets so that people with assistive devices can move freely is also a project of caring for and therefore sustaining life.

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Conclusion: Platform Care

In his piece in the Boston Review, “Big Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements,” Robin D.G Kelly asks us to think beyond the spectacle of recent protests and marches and to consider instead the work outside of these events that make sustainable movements. Kelly writes:

The moral and political arc of movements for social justice is also very, very long. And this is why it is important to think beyond the march, “the speech,” the spectacle. To understand August 28, 1963 is to understand the entire era. It requires following those movements that fall outside the spotlight, the movements organized and led by the very women who were excluded from the mic on that incredibly hot and humid Washington afternoon. The work of social movements is not always sexy, nor is it necessarily inspiring. But they are the engines for change and the incubators of new dreams (2013).

Kelly, using the example of the 1963 March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King famously delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” argues that the work of organizing that happened before and after the march is also significant. Kelly also importantly points out how beyond the spectacle, it was women who made the elevation and amplification at the 1963 march possible. Like Hartman’s idea of revolution in a minor key, Kelly is pointing out how the work of sustaining social movements is not always that which rings the loudest.

In the spirit of shifting my focus to feminist resistances that sustain, endure, and are quiet, in this chapter I offered a theory of platform mediated care. This chapter was informed by interviews that I conducted with community organizers from Oakland, Toronto and Hamilton who offered three examples of what I call resistance in a minor key. I have presented inclination as a feminist response to the more enduring discussions of disconnection within Media and Communication Studies. I have drawn on both Media and Communications scholarship and on popular discourse that has positioned disconnection as a response to our current age amplification. Just as disconnection refers to a move to reduce or quit using various digital technologies, inclination is a tactic that is also very much digitally mediated. Inclination arises as a response to two masculinist approaches to digital platforms: amplification and rectitude. I have argued that uprightness is not just a posture but can also be read as both a white and masculinist tactic that makes feminist inclination toward the digital a point of contention. In a digital age rectitude and amplification are mediated by technology and have accelerated as dominating approaches to platform resistance. But I have suggested that inclination is an alternative mode of intersectional

118 feminist resistance that is also mediated by digital platforms. Here, care and survival underpin intersectional feminist resistances in an age of amplification.

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Chapter 5- Toward a Feminist Platform Studies

In the introduction to this dissertation, I defined platforms as media that both literally and metaphorically raise, elevate and amplify the people that use them. I proposed that within this definition of platforms we need to include both digital platforms and material objects that have functioned as media of elevation. At times, this study of platforms has detoured away from the digital platform completely. Chapter 2 offered a media history of four disparate elevating media. The purpose of that chapter was to establish the longstanding logics of platforms, which I showed are to elevate and amplify the people who mount them. By focusing on the histories of four material platforms: soapboxes, platform shoes, witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks I began this dissertation by arguing that there is a longer history of platform politics that extends well beyond the digital. I showed that power is extended by the platform and argued that we need to attend to the fact that platform mediated elevation is experienced unevenly. In Chapter 3, I further developed the concept of Platform Feminism, which I argued is an iteration of contemporary feminist politics that relies on platforms. In the context of the 2017 Women’s Marches and the #MeToo movement, that chapter focused on how platforms structure popular feminist protests by privileging tactics of rising up and promoting visibility. Again, I suggested we need to consider both material platforms, such as stages at rallies, and digital platforms in order to understand the effects of platforms for feminist politics. In Chapter 4, I argued that an intersectional feminist response to platforms, and specifically to their logics of amplifying and elevating has been to develop modes of quiet resistance that are based on care and survival.

In this chapter, I argue that just as recognizing platforms’ effect on feminism is necessary, we also must consider what a feminist perspective offers to the emerging field of Platform Studies. I begin the chapter by defining Platform Studies and reviewing the central arguments that have been made in the field. I then move on to an explanation of how the field of Feminist Media Studies has so far discussed platforms and end by presenting what a theory of Feminist Platform Studies would look like, and what it would have to offer the field of Media and Communications Studies more broadly.

Scholarship in Platform Studies is useful in helping us understand the labour concerns of those who deliver food through apps like Uber Eats and Foodora (Woodcock 2016). It has also been important for recognizing that the ways in which we communicate are enabled and constrained

120 by various social media mega companies (Gillespie 2010; Gillespie 2018; Roberts 2019). Significantly, the field has brought to the fore the political economic stakes of access and ownership of data too (van Dijck 2013). These are all significant issues and matter for how a lot of people experience daily life. Platform Studies, in general, is concerned with the intensifying levels of power that corporate digital platforms accumulate (van Dijck, Nieborg and Poell 2019). For instance, in their article “Reframing platform power,” José van Dijck, David Nieborg and Thomas Poell argue that “worries about platform power extend beyond mere economic concerns and pertain not just to markets but to society as a whole” (2019, 2). van Dijck, Nieborg and Poell worry that existing legal regulatory frameworks to keep platform power in check do not account for platform companies’ increasing impact on society. They ask, “So how can we address legitimate concerns about power abuse and undue power concentration of platform companies if they reach beyond the current legislative and regulatory frameworks?” (2019, 4). In highlighting this concern of corporate digital platforms’ increasing power and focusing their research on addressing platforms’ impacts van Dijck, Nieborg and Poell recognize that platform companies are continuing to play an important role in structuring social and political spheres today.

But Platform Studies, a field of study that has been growing for the last decade, does not take platforms to be objects that mediate or extend power. Instead what gets focused on are the affordances and new sets of relationships that take place on and through various digital platforms. Significantly, the platform is assumed as a broker of power rather than as an extension of it. The result of the former coupling of platforms and power is that Platform Studies seems to, for the most part, forget that bodies inhabit platforms and that some of the corporeal concerns of those on the platform are longstanding and critical to survival. In this chapter, I present the arguments that have dominated the quickly growing field of Platform Studies over the past few years. This work, I argue, while important for highlighting new sets of power relationships between various large digital platforms and their users has not adequately recognized the ways in which platforms have shaped social and political life. By taking up the idea that platforms are extensions of power, I suggest a Platform Studies that thinks about platforms as extending power rather than as discrete locations where particular power relationships play out. The result of attending to platforms as media that extend power is that the technical specificities of platforms come to matter less.

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One of Marshall McLuhan’s most well-known aphorisms in Understanding Media is that media are extensions of man (1964). For instance, the wheel extends the foot, the pen extends the hand, clothing is an extension of skin and electronic media have extended our central nervous systems. McLuhan maintains that there is a totalizing effect of media when he writes, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand or foot, affects the whole physic and social complex” (1964, 4). In taking up McLuhan, we might read the platform as an extension of man too. As I have shown throughout this dissertation, platforms make people more visible– they amplify voices, elevate bodies and broaden the reach of the political. In reading platforms as media that make people more visible, I have shown that such an effect is experienced unevenly and inequitably. Platform mediated visibility can at once empower some people and hinder the survival of others. This is a point of view that is largely missing from dominating studies of the platform which often do not consider that digital technologies are experienced differentially, especially when factors of race, gender, sexuality and disability enter the frame. Scholars of Platform Studies operate with a conception of technology’s power as a broker of power rather than with a conception of technology as extending power. The result is that platforms as powerful media object, as technologies that alter the experience of race, gender and class, remain undertheorized. This dissertation has been an attempt to contribute to this broadening.

In part, scholarship in Platform Studies has not accounted for difference in its critiques of various digital platforms because it is missing a feminist perspective. This is evidenced in how this subfield of Media and Communications assumes a uniform subject so that interrogations of platform politics are usually not attuned to the fact that people with different identity markers might approach technology in different ways to begin with. But Feminist Media Studies has long been invested in pointing out how gendered, racial, and colonial histories cannot be extracted from our understandings of the technological. For instance, Leslie Shade argued in 1998 that “issues of inclusiveness to the digital environment are crucial because they are issues of fundamental democracy” (1998, 38). Shade has long argued for policy-based considerations of women’s relationship to digital technologies. Likewise, Judy Wajcman proposes “technofeminism” to describe the mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both a source and a consequence of gender relations” (2004, 107). In accounting for issues surrounding race and the Internet, Lisa Nakamura in, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet, argues that we must “remember that while race may be in

122 some sense, ‘virtual’ or at the very least culturally and discursively constructed as opposed to biologically grounded, racism both on and offline is real” (2002, 145). More recently Feminist Media Studies scholars have continued to do the very important work of pointing out how we must consider the bodies, especially those marked by race, gender, sexuality and disability that are often left out of theories of digital technologies. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, which shows “neutral” search engines are embedded with racial and gender biases is an example of this more recent scholarship (2018). Likewise, Ruha Benjamin argues in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019b), that robots can be racist. As Benjamin puts it “social biases are embedded in technical artifacts” but still provide “the allure of objectivity without public accountability” (43). In the same vein, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism (2020), argues that data is a form of power that might be wielded by feminists who are working toward more equitable futures. D’Ignazio and Klein’s work also contributes to a feminist understanding of technology as imbued with unequal power distribution. In order to develop a model for difference, rather than reifying existing power structures, Platform Studies thus needs to more seriously engage with Feminist Media Studies.

However, as I showed in the Introduction to this dissertation, in the field of Feminist Media studies the platform is also overdetermined in its political utility as a tool for empowerment. When online platforms figure into feminist scholarship in Media and Communication studies it is quite often through discussions of the political possibilities that digital platforms offer. For example, through her study of girls’ blogging practices, Jessalyn Keller understands the internet to be “a space of opportunity, public engagement, and feminist activism” (2012, 440). Carrie Rentschler, in her research on hashtags and resistance strategies against gendered violence has shown how “feminist hashtag generation… provide particularly visible examples of how social media can be used to re-direct attention in feminist responses to sexual violence from campaigns rooted in the behavior of the survivor to those that target the actions of those who might rape” (2014, 354). This work is important for highlighting how some feminist activists have used digital platforms for resistance, but it tends to assume a particular boundedness to the platform. This chapter argues that Platform Studies needs a feminist perspective and that Feminist Media Studies needs to rethink how platforms figure in feminist politics. In both Platform Studies and in Feminist Media Studies, platforms get taken for granted as an object of study. A Feminist Platform Studies would pause and take note of how platforms extend power.

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By opening up the definition of platforms to include material and digital platforms too, we might arrive at a shift in thinking about platforms in order to develop a model for treating difference within the field and perhaps more broadly, rather than reifying existing power structures.

Platforms Defined, Platform Studies Defined

Depending on the context in which the word is used, ‘platform’ can mean different things. The word was introduced and adopted in a computing context in the mid-1990s by Microsoft who used platform to describe Windows and Netscape (Plantin, Sandvig and Edwards 2018). In the years since, platforms in the context of digital culture stand in for social media and communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Whatsapp, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, sharing economy platforms like Uber or Air BnB, streaming platforms like Netflix, gaming devices, and other apps that enable new forms of connecting people to each other and to good and services. Delineating types of digital platforms is difficult because many overlap in their functionality and none are static (van Dijck 2013, 9) but the above list points to the dominant ways in which platforms are talked about in the field of Platform Studies. Extend this term past a digital context and the principled goals of a political party, the reach and impact that celebrities or sports figures have, the chunkiness of a heel on a shoe all come to stand in for examples of platforms. As Marc Steinberg puts it in Platform Economy, “the greatest success of platform within our language ecosystem is to have become something of a universal translation device” (2019). The suggestion that the term is universal can also be read as an argument that ‘platform’ is void of any concrete definition and significant meaning because it is utilized both in Platform Studies, in Media Studies more broadly, and in popular discourse so loosely and so often. Others have argued that the term platform is discursively powerful for its several dimensions (Gillespie 2010; Jamieson 2016). Despite this suggestion that the word platform is universal (which would also suggest is does not need to be explained) most scholarship in the field of Platform Studies begins with an attempt to define platform. These definitions vary slightly but often overlap. In what follows, I offer a collection of these definitions of the platform from the field. I do this to give a sense of what it is that Platform Studies centres in its research. I also compile and present these definitions to point out how the platform as a powerful media object, even in a field dedicated to it, remains undertheorized.

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23.1 Metaphor

At its root a platform implies an elevated and level surface that props up or raises whoever is standing on it, separating a speaker from the voices in the space below. A handful of Media Studies scholars have usefully taken up this platform metaphor. Tarleton Gillespie (2010) was the first and is perhaps the most well-known theorist to draw connections between material and digital platforms. Gillespie is critical of ‘platform’ as a descriptor for digital media, suggesting that the word implies a sort of neutrality online that in reality does not exist (2010; 2017). Gillespie takes issue with the fact that various forms of digital media have been called a platform in the first place, arguing that the term misrepresents how information is distributed online. Rhetoric around the platform, that positions different digital media as neutral ground where anybody can speak on equal footing, is challenged by Gillespie. He argues that the problem with calling some digital media ‘platforms’ is that it obfuscates the fact that technology is not neutral and that such an illusion prevents progression toward actually developing technical neutrality (2010, 360). Gillespie, commenting specifically on how YouTube has been advertised as a platform, writes:

It is the broad connotations outlined earlier– open, neutral, egalitarian and progressive support for activity– that makes this term so compelling for intermediaries like YouTube as a way to appeal to users, especially in contrast to tradition mass media. YouTube and its competitors claim to empower the individual to speak– lifting us all up, evenly. (2010, 352).

Using YouTube as an example, he points to how the word platform gets used by major corporations in such a way that infers a raised surface is equally raised for everyone (2010, 352). Gillespie has since updated this work– arguing that while his widely read 2010 piece warned that the term platform needed some constraints, but it is now “too late” because the platform metaphor has been accepted widely by users, the press, regulators and platform providers (2017, 3). In his updated piece “Is ‘platform’ the right metaphor for technology companies that dominate digital media?” (2017), Gillespie spends more time thinking through what the metaphor hides. It’s not just that platform wrongly implies a meritocracy where everyone has equal footing. For Gillespie, the word platform also obfuscates difference, questions about platforms’ responsibility to the public in the context of the spread of misinformation, and the labour done to maintain a platform (2017, 6). In both his influential 2010 article and in his updated 2017 piece, Gillespie’s main complaint is against the use of the word platform as a

125 descriptor– his suggestion is to swap the platform metaphor for something that does not downplay aspects of digital platforms.

Likewise, in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin H. Bratton offers the etymology of the word platform:

The etymology of platform refers to ‘a plan of action scheme, design’ and from the middle French, platte form, or literally a plateau or raised level surface…By at least 1803 platform takes on a more explicitly political meaning, as in a ‘statement of party policies.’… One is a set of instructions, one is. Situated place where action is played out according to plan and ones is a framework for a political architecture. (2016, 43).

For Bratton, it is because so many systems can be understood as platforms (he uses urban street grids and Google to depict this array) that we have to think about platforms metaphorically to capture their power as contemporary governing systems (2016, 42). Tracing the history of platform allows Bratton to make his argument that platforms, although ‘formally neutral,’ are also ideological in how they organize their publics (2016, 46).

Jonas Andersson Schwarz is another scholar included in a small handful of Platform Studies theorists who write about the platform as a metaphor. Like Bratton, Andersson Schwarz argues that platforms are governing systems (2017). In his case, Andersson Schwarz talks about the platform as a “surface” on which social action takes place (2) to make this argument. As he puts it, “In an ontological sense, a platform can be envisaged as a (technologically and materially constituted) “stage” that gives actors leverage, durability, and visibility. A platform is a topos; a place where residence is held, enabling strategic (in contrast to tactical) advantages” (4).

This work on digital platforms as metaphor does a good job of laying out the logics and politics of platforms today. Gillespie (2010; 2017) shows how the word platform gets mobilized to obscure power imbalances between platform users and platform providers. Bratton (2016) and Andersson Schwarz (2017) provide an etymology of the word to help us draw comparisons between material raised surfaces and digital platforms. It is useful to take up platforms in this way because the characteristics of the medium get named. In turn, it is easier to locate how power operates through the platform. I therefore think that a Feminist Platform Studies would do well to follow the lead of Gillespie, Bratton and Andersson Schwarz in connecting and applying the material characteristics of platforms to digital contexts. However, with a feminist perspective attuned to difference, it’s also easy to see how the connections that Gillespie, Bratton and

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Andersson Schwarz are making between material platforms and digital ones are insufficient. Take, for instance, Gillespie’s argument that “‘platform’ emerges not simply as indicating a functional shape: it suggests a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it” (2010, 350). Gillespie’s argument rests on an understanding of platforms that assumes material platforms are democratic. But as I showed in Chapter 2, raised surfaces are historical governing systems that have always been nuanced and complex. For black people who were put on display on slave auction blocks, or women violently mounted on gallows when they were assumed to be witches, being raised has never been a progressive arrangement. So, when Platform Studies consider platforms metaphorically it tends to use it as a way to describe the conditions of digital platforms without considering the histories of difference that have always existed on the platforms that we fail to consider as mediating structures at all.

But I also do not think we should only read material platforms as examples of historical media that carry with them lessons to apply to contemporary digital contexts. It is not just that slave auction blocks reveal a history of mediated elevation that tells us something about digital platforms. Rather, as I have shown throughout this dissertation through examples of contemporary Platform Feminism, material platforms continue to mediate power today. This was the case with the Women’s March on Washington, when Gloria Steinman stepped up to the podium before an estimated 500 000 women. From her platform, Steinman, dubbed by The National Geographic “the world’s most famous feminist” (Karbo March 25, 2019), delivered a 10-minute speech. She thanked the crowd for coming, exclaiming, “Thank you for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are. Sometimes pressing send is not enough” (Steinman, 2017). From her given platform Steinman furthers a key problematic assumption tied to the platform– that everyone is safe to put their “bodies where [their] beliefs are.” In Chapter 3 of this dissertation, I argued that the normative spatial arrangement of the Women’s March was in part structured by the presence of the stage. In this example, we see how the platform continues to organize politics by extending the power of those who already have it. We are not done learning from material platforms. A Feminist Platform Studies must therefore think about the contemporary contexts of platforms alongside considerations of platforms as historically mediating structures.

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23.2 Platforms are surfaces/ structures for mediated exchange

Platforms are often described as digital intermediaries (van Dijck and Neiborg 2009; Gillespie 2010; Andersson Schwarz 2017; Srnicek 2017) or as mediators because they shape how people interact (van Dijck 2013). Jonas Andersson Schwarz writes about platforms as surfaces and is particularly interested in the exchange (between people, between people and business) that happens on these surfaces (2017). As Schwarz puts it, “digital platforms are surfaces for technical innovation, on top of which new actors can develop additional services or products; in many ways they are utilities that generate new societal functions and business opportunities” (2017, 2). This is a definition shared by Nick Srnicek in Platform Capitalism (2017) who defines the platform generally as a digital infrastructure that mediates and brings together different users (2017, 44). Even Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg use this definition of platform as mediator when they describe the platform as “fundamentally, a set of products and services that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets” (2019, 79). Using these definitions of platforms as bringing together various actors makes it clear why platforms are understood as a dominant way of doing business in the digital age (Srnicek 2017). That is, under the assumption that platforms mediate exchange, modes of connecting to each other on social media or to services and goods via app-based economies prevail as the framework through which we understand so much of everyday life today.

This definition of a digital platform as a surface for exchange is utilized by more recent scholarship on what is called the platform economy or the gig economy which describes a new or at least intensified set of relations between computing technologies and casual labour (Delfanti and Sharma 2019; Wood, Graham and Lehdonvitra 2019; Scholz 2016; van Doorn 2017). Here, labour, called platform labour, is digitally mediated service work. Scholars doing this work on the platform take a political economy approach to the platform by presenting the ways in which platforms like Uber, Deliveroo and Foodora, for example, are positioned as the future of work in the digital age (Rosenblat 2018). In this scholarship on platform economies, app-based platforms are critiqued for the ways in which they have created precarious work conditions globally. As van Doorn puts it, under the platform economy “inequality is a feature, rather than a bug” (van Doorn 2017, 908).

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By attaching the word ‘platform’ to economy and labour, these critiques assume that there is something new about the conditions of work today. Again, we might call on Feminist Media Studies scholars who have focused on the history of reproductive labour to intervene in such a contention. Niels van Doorn for example, explains how histories of racialized and gendered work extend into the present platform economy (2017). This work has also been taken up by feminist media scholars. In her study of Uber and TaskRabbit’s promotional material, Leslie Shade has argued that sharing economy companies “exemplify a type of neo-liberal feminism” (2018, 35). Shade writes that, “despite corporate rhetoric that the sharing economy benefits users and workers, at this juncture it reproduces entrenched patterns of inequalities, privileging access for those that can afford to avail themselves of the services and who have recourse to the financial and material prerequisites for using these platforms – smartphone and credit cards”(2018). Also focusing on the gig economy, Sarah Sharma points out that gig apps often highlight and praise their workers who manage to make money as gig workers. She writes:

But the shallowness of this praise is reflected by the fact that it is only doled out to those who are making money from the economy’s apps: this praise has certainly not been showered on mothers or those who give maternal care when they are hard at their work. Nor has the labour of conventional taxi drivers, delivery men, or restaurant dishwashers in jobs analogous to gig services, but which predate the gig economy, ever register as suitable for the hyper-professional, class-mobile discourses spewed by gig apps (90).

Atanasoski and Vora in their important article “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor” (2015), use the tech company Alfred Club to make a claim about how tech start-ups invisible work that has always been invisible. Here, they mean the labour of women, and often racialized women who have “historically preformed domestic work in white homes” (23). Alfred Club is a service that designates an individual to delegate tasks like buying groceries and cleaning the house to other gig service workers. The company designates a single “Alfred” to a user who then interfaces with workers from apps like TaskRabbit. This exchange ensures that a user never has to see the workers they hire. Atanasoski and Vora explain the lure of this service as follows:

Liberal concerns surrounding labour practices and the exploitation of labour can thus quickly give way to the pleasures and enjoyment of services precisely because Alfreds are successful if they completely erase the signs of their presence (one magically finds one’s errands are complete upon returning home). Invisibility makes it possible to remove (and move beyond) initial concerns about the physical bodies tasked to pick up subscribers’ dirty laundry (2015, 22).

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In attending to a feminist perspective of platform labour, Platform Studies could take seriously hierarchies of difference. The relatively new interest in the gig-economy has tended to decontextualize racialized and gendered labour struggles by focusing on platform workers, platform users and platform owners rather than on a longer history of reproductive labour. But, as evidenced by the research of feminist scholars such as Shade, Sharma and Atanasoski and Vora, feminist perspectives lend themselves well to putting platform labour in context. Feminist Platform Studies would thus need to take its lead from those scholars who place digital platforms within a larger history of struggle, with a specific focus on gender and race.

23.3 Platforms are Programmable

The field of Platform Studies began to take shape when Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort wrote Raising the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System in 2009. The book was the first to be released in a new “Platform Studies” series published by MIT Press. Following the release of Racing the Beam, Bogost and Montfort who also edited the entire Platform Studies series, published a short article called “Platform Studies: Frequently Asked Questions” (2009). This article, presented as a list of FAQ, was published in part to respond to a growing claim that any digital media could be read as a platform and therefore that the field was too imprecise (Bogost and Montfort 2009, 3). While Bogost and Montfort argue that platforms are not just “all about hardware” (2009, 3) or “all about video games” (2009, 3), they do set some clear parameters. For Bogost and Montfort, “The key term in the definition of platform is ‘programmed’. If you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you can’t then it’s not” (Bogost and Montfort 2009, 3). This definition of platforms as programmable is based on Bogost and Monfort’s research on the programmability of the Atari Video Computer System gaming console (2009). Early work in the field, like Bogost and Montfort’s positioned Platform Studies as scholarship that took seriously what Aubrey Anable calls “the matter of media devices- their chips, wires, slots, sensors, plastic and anodized aluminum bodies” (2018, 135). Platform studies, at least in 2009, was novel because it drew connections between software and hardware.

As we have seen with the theories around platform labour, explored in the section above, the scope of Platform Studies has certainly expanded past the narrow “platforms are programmable” definition in the last decade. But, the programmability of platforms still continues to be an area of interest in the field. In taking up the concept of programmability, corporate platforms get

130 critiqued because they are too opaque and thus not programmable. The iPhone, which Fenwick McKelvey calls a ‘fixed platform’ is often criticized for being a black box where programming is impossible, and the App Store is understood to be heavily controlled by Apple (McKelvey 2011). For this reason, major digital platforms are often critiqued in Platform Studies for their lack of openness, for being “walled gardens” (Plantin, Lagoze, Edwards and Sandvig 2018, 303). In identifying a lack of control over the technologies we wield, this newer scholarship in Platform Studies usefully points us toward a political analysis of platforms. Here, we see how programmability is tied to power wherein the platform provider has the power to control the platform user’s relationship with specific technologies.

Still though, the definition of platforms as programmable is too limiting to be politically productive. When we think of platforms only as ‘programmable’ objects, they become static and disconnected from the larger social and political contexts that they are a part of. In other words, focus on the technological features of platforms tends to disarticulate the media from the ways in which they come to matter both culturally and politically. Aubrey Anabel, taking a Feminist Media Studies perspective, approaches Platform Studies as what she calls “a bit of a bachelor machine” (2018, 139). Anabel writes: “In identifying platforms as discrete, stable, and foundational objects, Platform Studies runs the risk of mimicking and reinforcing the rhetoric of platform marketing that tells us that these devices are foundational to our work and social lives” (2018, 138). Anabel usefully points how early work in Platform Studies tended to overstate the technological affordances of the platform without focusing on its politics.

23.4 Platforms are a part of an ecosystem

Some theorizing of platforms is underpinned by the base assumption that platforms are “specific kinds of digital environments” (Bucher and Helmond 2018; Helmond 2015). In other words, platforms take the internet as a whole and break it up to make a network of enclosed objects. The framework for understanding platforms as part of an ecosystem implies interdependence and interoperability between various different platform providers. The ecosystem definition also points to the wide reach of single platforms that are connected to other parts of the web. Using iTunes as an example, where the online store concept forced all other platforms to adapt, van Dijck (2013) argues that “every tweak in a platform sends ripples down the entire ecosystem of incumbent and novel media players” (2013, 26). Under this definition, platforms are connected

131 to each other and thus create an ecosystem where a change to one platform has direct effects to another sperate platform. van Dijck explains that:

An online “platform” is a programmable digital architecture designed to organize interactions between users—not just end users but also corporate entities and public bodies. It is geared toward the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data. Single platforms cannot be seen apart from each other but evolve in the context of an online setting that is structured by its own logic. (2013, 5).

This description of platforms as breaking up the internet into enclosed objects while also still being connected is important in so far as it highlights how the circulation of data between platforms has put power and control in the hands of a few corporations. van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, suggest that “the gateways of online sociality” sit with five high-tech companies, often referred to in Platform Studies as ‘the Big 5’- Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (2013, 5). In Platform Studies a central concern is that the ‘Big Five’ infrastructural platforms make it difficult for smaller, independent developers to enter the market with their novel digital platforms (Helmond 2015; Nieborg 2015; Srnicek 2016; van Dijck, Poell, de Waal 2018). Much like the concern I have had about other key tenants of Platform Studies, a focus on who controls which ecosystem flattens the politics of platforms. In the ecosystem definition, platforms are positioned as brokers of power. The effect is that a more democratic distribution of power is imagined as multiple platform developers having a fair chance to create successful games and digital applications in the face of the “Big 5”. While I recognize the importance of more platforms holding less control over digital life that is increasingly becoming enclosed, commercialized and managed, (Hands 2013, 1) this is a politics of platforms that reinstates a singular power analysis again blind to difference.

Feminist Platform Studies could adopt the ecosystem metaphor for its own ends. The National Geographic defines an ecosystem as “a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work well together to form a bubble of life….Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly” (Rutledge et. al 2011). Platforms do indeed create environments that can alter social life totally. In this way, the we might argue that the introduction of a platform into an ecosystem change the way it functions. A soapbox placed in the corner of Hyde Park transformed a public park into space to engage in political debate (Chapter 2). When an auction block was erected at an opulent hotel in New Orleans in 1859, the banquet hall used for parties became a site of the violent

132 exchange of human capital (Chapter 2). The stages built at Women’s Marches in Washington and throughout North America had the effect of changing the nature of the protests so that particular voices were privileged over others (Chapter 3). Platforms can also be generative. For example, in his chapter “Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative,” Jose Esteban Muñoz writes about the queer and punk stages of performance spaces in Los Angeles (2009). For Muñoz, watching performances of what he calls “utopian performativity” on stage produce or reproduce moments of hope and transformation and act as a rehearsal for living in space off the stage that is not marked by unwelcoming cultural logics that are not provided in other forms of popular culture (or on other platforms). The shift to Feminist Platform Studies must to ask how do platforms extend power? Who do they extend power for?

23.5 Platforms are knowledge operators

Ganaele Langlois and Greg Elmer in “The Research Politics of Social Media Platforms” (2013), call for a shift in attention away from what is being said on social media, to “how it is being processed and rendered” (2013, 14). They argue that such a shift makes it possible to identify new forms of power and control orchestrated by social media platforms. Langlois and Elmer’s important take on platforms is that we should read them for how they shape and constrain the ways in which people communicate with each other. Like the approach that I have furthered throughout this dissertation, which argues we must consider platforms as a structuring media, Langlois and Elmer’s interest is not so much in the content shared on platforms but rather on the communicative capacity of corporate social media platforms. Langlois and Elmer argue that “there is no outside to human participatory communication that would be distinct from the corporate logics of social media: the platform itself it what melds these two aspects together” (2013, 8). Mobile apps and other digital have been introduced rapidly, and at a large scale, and the social and political consequences of these media are great in turn. Definitions of platforms as knowledge operators focus on these social and political consequences of media that have rapidly become part of our everyday lives. This final definition of platforms is perhaps the closest we get to a rendering of the digital platform that makes way for thinking through power imbalances and the politics of the platform. That is, when we think of the platform as a knowledge operator, there is at least a possibility to contend with the intersectional because here the ways in which platforms mediate and shape everyday life is the through line for this work.

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There is a widely held belief within Platform Studies that everyday life is shaped by a powerful ecosystem of platforms (van Dijck Poell, and de Waal 2018; Plantin, Sandvig and Edwards 2018). In Platform Society (2018), van Dijck Poell, and de Waal lay out this claim arguing:

Technological and economic elements of platforms steer user interaction but simultaneously shape social norms. Although a platform’s architecture affords a particular usage and users are often met with a finite set of possible options, they are not “puppets” of the techno-commercial dynamics inscribed in a platform. Through its interfaces, algorithms, and protocols, a platform stages user interaction, encouraging some and discouraging other connections…for example, inserting a “like button” in the right-hand corner of an interface activates more “liking” than an insertion in the left-hand corner (2018, 6).

This work demonstrates that features of platforms shape social life. It is a common approach in Platform Studies literature to focus on the seemingly innocuous features in the design of a platform and point to the ways in which they guide a users’ action. We could also turn to Anne Helmond’s work for more examples of this approach in Platform Studies. Helmond writes on the way that Facebook’s ‘like button’ encourages engagement with the platform (2015) and Bucher and Helmond point to Twitter changing the “favourite button” from a star to a heart as orchestrating new sets of relations between users and platforms (2018). In both of these examples, platform features are read for the way that they discipline users. In this case platforms function as knowledge operators because of the ways in which the shape how people communicate with one another and by extension the way knowledge is formed and disseminated.

Following this line of thinking, Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray position digital apps in two ways in their edited collection Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (2018). First, Morris and Murray call digital apps them a “cultural platform” (2018, 1) and later refer to apps as “mundane software” (2018, 8). Here, they contend with the software and devices that are ubiquitous, accessible and ready to use in everyday life (2018, 9). Apps that have become part of the everyday can range from gaming apps like Candy Crush, to Social Networking apps like Snapchat to productivity apps like Evernote. All of these apps, when taken seriously, have to be read for the ways in which they manage and coordinate life. Morris and Murray describe mundane as follows:

mundane software is meant to qualify both a particular kind of software- a program that is simple, has a single purpose or limited functionality, is cheap or freely available, is not particularly remarkable in terms of design or content, etc.- and also the ways/places in

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which it is taken up and used ( e.g. during chores, at the store, before bed, waiting for the bus) (2018, 11).

Platforms are knowledge operators because they shape the ways in which we come to know and operate in the world. This definition specifically references those platforms which are a part of everyday life and which are so often conceived as politically and socially insignificant. Scholarship that defines the platform as a knowledge operator highlights why this is not the case.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan offers another way to connect digital platforms to social relations. He writes, “Lack of homogeneity in speed of information movement creates diversity of patterns in organization. It is quite predictable then, that any new means of moving information will alter any power structure whatever” (1964, 91). Platforms understood as knowledge operators also therefore have to be understood for the differential ways in which they are experienced. This is an approach to the platform that is taken up again by Feminist Media Scholars who think through the varied implications that specific digital platforms have on people marked by class, gender and race. As Patrick Keilty and Leslie Shade argue in the introduction to their special issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, “Traversing Technologies,” “technologies – both social and material – are deployed across a range of infrastructures that are themselves also technically or socially constructed. Implicated therein are issues of equity and social inclusion, race and racialization, intersectionality, the discriminatory impacts of surveillant assemblages, and the fate of feminist and queer techno-futures” (Keilty and Shade 2016).

Such an approach to studying digital platforms specifically is taken up, for example, by Radhika Gajjala and Tarishi Verma. In their 2018 study of WhatsApp’s impact on the lives of Indian women living in India and the Indian diaspora in the United States they show the emergence of what Gajjalla and Verma call a “Whatsappified digital diaspora” (2018, 207). Gajjalla and Verma argue that WhatsApp is a platform that is vital for Indian women who use it for “relational negotiations within close friends circles as well as in immediate and extended family networks” (2018, 215). Sarah Sharma’s work on online marketplace TaskRabbit, which allows people to hire gig-workers to do everyday chores for them such as buying groceries or doing laundry offers yet another way of understanding platform power from a feminist perspective (2018). Sharma argues that TaskRabbit is a platform that “depends upon deepening the sexual division of labour” (2018, 65). Sharma’s work illustrates how the app’s promise to empower workers by allowing them to work on their own time diminishes “care about the labour that goes

135 into producing social order” (2018, 65). This is a theory of platforms that requires being attuned to feminist politics of labour and care.

In their focus on platform design and gender binaries, Rena Bivens and Oliver L. Haimson argue that platforms “play an intermediary role in shaping society’s construction of itself” (2016, 7). Based on their analysis of various different “user facing gender category design strategies” (2016, 1) Bivens and Haimson contend that design features of platforms, such as sign up pages where users are required to identify their gender based on a binary choice, serve the need of advertisers over users. In this work we see how a feminist perspective on platform design is important to better understanding the political and cultural stakes of social media platforms’ power.

I’ve shown so far how Platform Studies might benefit from a feminist perspective. Feminist Platform Studies is not a useful approach to studying platforms if it is only a call to consider how racialized people, or women, or queer people program their platforms. We also don’t just need a feminist perspective to make an argument that more people marked by difference should be able to profit from the apps and games that they develop. Rather, a feminist approach to platforms is important because it approaches the platform differently altogether. Feminist Platform Studies puts the platform in social, political and cultural context. Regardless of the form they take (app, social media site, soapbox, shoe), platforms are powerful media objects precisely because it is when they shape the environments that they are introduced to. Sarah Florini makes a similar argument in Beyond Hashtags (2020). In her study of black digital networks, Florini comes to the conclusion that doing research on culturally specific approaches to technology is not useful because it might help us identify how groups of people use platforms in particular ways. What is useful, Florini contends, is focusing on difference so that we might “imagine different possibilities for technologies beyond hegemonic frameworks and thereby…better anticipate social shifts that shape and are shaped by technical (2020, 184). A feminist approach to Platform Studies does not deny the connection between power and platforms. Instead it suggests that platforms are very often extensions of power and therefore can reify existing power structures.

Stepping Down: Platforms in Feminist Media Studies

Alongside the growing field of Platforms Studies, there is an increasing focus on platforms in Feminist Media and Communications Studies as well. Dominant approaches to the platform in

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Feminist Media Studies are through discussions of the ways in which digital platforms enable and constrain feminist politics. Research of feminism and platforms is very often articulated through discussions of “hashtag feminism” (Berridge and Portwood-Stacer 2015; Baer 2016, Clark-Parsons 2016, Jackson, Bailey and Welles 2020). In this literature, the hashtag is an object of study because of the role it plays in making contemporary feminist movements more visible. Susan Berridge and Laura Portwood-Stacer note that feminist hashtags at once “expose the transnational pervasiveness of gendered violence” and have the tendency to over-simplify complex issues (2015, 341). Hester Baer argues that hashtag feminism has shaped contemporary feminism “by giving rise to changed modes of communication, different kinds of conversations, and new configurations of activism across the globe” (2016, 18). Like Berridge and Portwood- Stacer, Baer also notes that digital activism on the platform might have limited political efficacy especially because digital feminism has emerged “in tandem with the global hegemony of neoliberalism” (2016, 19). Rosie Clark-Parsons, in her work that focuses on feminist hashtags linked specifically to stories of gender-based violence argues that hashtag feminism invites diverse voices to take part in protest online which can turn into collective action (2016, 3). Likewise, in their book #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender, Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles show through a close study of how multiple hashtag movements, that Twitter is a “productive tool for highlight misogynoir, sharing survival strategies and calling both intra and intercommunity members to accounts” (2020, 63).

#MeToo is the most recent and of late has been the most popular site of study for Feminist Media Studies scholars researching the hashtag. But predating 2017, there has been scholarship on other feminist hashtags such as #YesAllWomen (Thrift 2014), #BlackLivesMatter as it relates to feminist activism (Rambukkana 2015), and #safetytipsforladies (Rentschler 2014), for example. In this literature, the platform is mobilized as technology that enables widespread solidarity and helps move personal stories into political conversation. But the efficacy of hashtagging has also been questioned recently, especially in light of the rise of mediated misogyny that seems to be the response to feminists taking to digital platforms (Banet Weiser 2018; Mendes, Ringrose and Keller 2018). For example, in Mendes, Ringrose and Keller’s study of #MeToo, the authors caution that there are “hidden emotional mental and practical factors” associated with feminist digital activism which can make it “risky, exhausting, draining and overwhelming” (2018, 244). There has also been important scholarship delving into how social media has been used for

137 building more private feminist networks, as opposed to those made visible by hashtags. Clark- Parsons, for example, argues that social media sites like Facebook afford the cultivation of online safe spaces but also notes that they are largely created for white, cis-gendered women (2018, 2137).

The research questions that Feminist Media Studies scholar Jessalyn Keller asks in her recent article on feminist activism and platforms, give us a good idea of the questions that seem to dominate the field. She asks: “Why are girls using particular platforms for feminist activism? How do certain platforms facilitate distinctive opportunities for youth engagement with feminist politics? and How might this shape the types of feminist issues and politics both made possible and foreclosed by some social media platforms?” (2019, 2). While the treatment of platforms in much of Feminist Media Studies literature might help us account for how groups have used different digital platforms for activism, it as of yet has not questioned the role of platforms in actually shaping feminist politics. In other words, through thinking about how platforms facilitate engagement with feminist politics, the affordances of platforms are studied, rather than their logics.

In Feminist Platform Studies, the issue alone cannot be how the technological affordances of digital platforms have enabled new forms of political participation for feminists. The issue is how the very structure of Platform Feminism straightens and whitens the movements because they privilege rising up as the dominant spatial tactic. As I have showed in Chapters 2 and 3, in my discussion of the spatial strategies of those who live on the margins, taking to the stage signifies a new position of power, an accomplished task. Speaking up takes up much more room than the quieter collective and communal forms of resistance that emerge quite often out of survival. With the hashtag, liberal feminism casts the self at the centre even when it comes to resisting patriarchy. In this way hashtag feminism is always-already at odds with intersectional feminism (Crenshaw 1989). The presence of the stage (digital or not) casts too much aside by design. In many ways, to truly acknowledge the intersectional and corporeal dynamics of power would strip white liberal feminism of its guaranteed platform. A Feminist Media Studies that takes the corporeal into account can overcome this limited understanding of resistance and the cultural domination of the platform. If feminist resistance continues to be bound to platform logic, a corresponding corporeal regime for the left will be reduced to things like taking a break from Twitter– to disconnecting. Here, the need for the break is itself time consuming and

138 depletes resources needed elsewhere. It also contradicts a feminist ethic of care that requires staying connected (Chapter 4).

Feminist Media Studies has a longer history of looking to the internet as a site of liberation that predates a focus on platforms. The concept of cyberspace was also taken up by feminist media theorists in the early 2000s. Cyberspace also occupied so much of Feminist Media Studies’ imagination– again first as a potentially liberatory space and later as a replica of the material conditions of racism and sexism that exist offline. Wendy Chun (2006), points out that initially, cyberspace was understood to be a place where “users’ actions separated from their bodies” (2006, 37-38). What one did online was therefore not considered to be connected to their physical body. Chun, along with a number of other media scholars interested in the intersection between feminism and the internet have taken up these early ideas of cyberspace as it relates to the body and the shedding of identity. Because women and people of colour supposedly have the most to gain from an opportunity to leave their bodies behind, this promise at cyberspace has mostly been directed at such subjects. In turn, critiques to this first promise of cyberspace are predominantly located in work put forth by Feminist Media scholars.

Before turning to those theories that are hesitant to adopt notions of cyberspace as liberating, it is important to point out how feminist scholars too, were excited about a future in cyberspace. Among those interested in the topic, Sadie Plant (2002), is perhaps most optimistic about cyberspace. Plant argues that gender identities can be blurred online and possibilities for feminist politics are opened up by the digital. She writes:

But cyberspace is out of man's control: virtual reality destroys his identity, digitalization is mapping his soul and, at the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic erections, man confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it is female and dangerous (2002, 335)

Plant’s essay, written in 2002, seems outdated. Since its publication, further thinking on cyberspace and feminism has come to the fore and offers a much more convincing picture of the digital sphere. Judy Wajcman (2004), for example, takes on Plant directly in Technofeminism. Wajcman argues that Plant does not consider how women actually use the internet. She says that “technology can have contradictory effects” and that the “social relations and context of their use” of technology are equally important (2004, 72). Wajcman worries that Plant’s focus on what cyberspace could be, and not on what it is, makes such an optimistic prediction unrealistic. So,

139 because women mostly use the internet for email work, shopping, and visiting health sites, and because Plant does not take such everyday uses of the internet into account, her argument that ‘cyberspace is out of man’s control’ and that online ‘the female is dangerous’ overstates how feminism and the digital intersect (Wajcman 2004, 73). As Wajcman puts it, “there is a risk that the focus on cyberspace as the site of innovative subjectivities that challenging existing categories of gender may exaggerate its significance” (2004, 75).

Radhika Gajjala (2004) situates her research within a cyberfeminist context, much like Plant does. She puts forth that “even though there are several approaches to cyberfeminism, what cyberfeminists share is the belief the women should take control of and appropriate the use of internet technologies in an attempt to empower themselves” (2004, 81). But, like Wajcman, Gajjala also takes note of the limits of digital technologies. Gajjala, whose work explores how South Asian feminists negotiate cyberspace, points out that cyberspace and colonialism are intertwined. She argues that online, there are “implicit class-based, colonial hierarchies and rules and ‘regulatory fictions’… that police online interactions” (2004, 52). The notion that cyberspace is liberating because an internet user can be separated from their race, which may constrain them in real space, is thus challenged by Gajjala. As she puts it, diasporic identities in online communities are “regulated and mediated through historic, political, and religious discourses associated with colonial and postcolonial geographies” (Gajalla 2004, 54).

Along with dealing with theory that addresses how cyberspace does not necessitate liberation via a separation of the body and online action, other feminist scholars have focused on how the rhetoric about cyberspace as freeing Internet users from their races and genders should be brought into question. Lisa Nakamura (2002) does a good job of highlighting the issue. For Nakamura, rhetoric that positions cyberspace as dealing with gender and racial inequality are problematic because the same groups of people who might benefit from being on equal footing in cyberspace do not always have access to it (9). Just as Sadie Plant’s early optimism of cyberspace was challenged by Feminist Media Studies scholarship that took into account and questions of race and class for example, so too does this consideration of difference need to continue to be applied to the platform.

Scholars who are engaged in work on intersectional feminism problematize the democratic promise of digital platforms by arguing that platforms uphold and recreate existing structures of

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misogyny, racism and ableism in the 21st century. In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes suggest that we might develop a theoretical frame called “Intersectional Critical Race Technology Studies (ICRTS) in order to “do a closer reading of the politics of the Internet, from representation to infrastructure” (2016, 3). Noble and Tynes see this as a necessary development to the field so that “concerns about how race, gender, and sexuality often preclude intersectional interrogations of the structure, activities, representations and materiality of the Internet,” might be addressed (2016, 4). Safiya Umoja Noble adds specificity to this argument in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by showing how Google’s algorithm is a reflection of the biases of the people who write its code, which in turn upholds and even deepens pre-existing power hierarchies (Noble 2018). Jessie Daniels (2016) suggests that because white women are the architects of digital feminism, white privilege is embedded in these systems, constraining their accessibility and utility to people of colour and other minoritized populations. Important here too is the work of intersectional and materialist media theorists who look to make visible differentiated bodies and voices that operate on digital platforms. Indeed, this is an argument that Tara McPherson makes in her piece ‘Designing for Difference” (2014). McPherson asks what it means “to design digital tools and applications that emerge from the concerns of cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference” (2014, 178). McPherson argues that digital tools need to be designed “in a mode that engages power and difference from the get-go, laying bare our theoretical allegiances and exploring the intra-actions of culture and matter” (2014, 182). Likewise, André Brock in his work on Black Twitter problematizes “social science and communication research that attempts to preserve a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” (546). In Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), Brock extends his research on Blackness and Internet. He argues that “Black folk have made the internet a “Black space” whose contours have become visible through sociality and distributed digital practice while also decentring whiteness as the default internet identity” (2020, 3). This shift in thinking might help develop a model for difference, rather than reifying existing power structures when the platform is centred.

In light of the treatment of platforms and cyberspace, the questions we might then ask of Feminist Media Studies are: 1. Why, before we can get to theories of difference that move us away from metaphor and back to the material, does a particular brand of white Feminist Media

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Studies welcome these modes of resistance? 2. Why do we look to cyberspace and now to the platform for safety, for new community, and for a chance to equal the so-called playing field? 3. Why are these metaphors so powerful in our imaginations of the future? Perhaps it is easier to grab on to objects than it is to contend with the racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist histories that make it necessary to search for technologic remedies to these problems in the first place. It might be the case that the reason the very idea of cyberspace, and now the idea of the platform can’t die for some people is because they offer an imaginary of new space, a potential, and new possibility of survival. On the other hand, maybe we are returning to these debates in order to think critically about the new dangers that arise for people marked by difference when they are on the platform. How can we close these debates if they are so much based in our survival?

Conclusion: Feminist Media Studies meets Platform Studies

In this chapter, I have provided overviews of two significant bodies of literature in Communications and Media Studies. First, I reviewed the central arguments of the emerging field of Platform Studies. I then explained how Feminist Media studies has accounted for gender and racial difference in its theorizing of technology; and how Feminist Media Studies has treated digital platforms. So far, there has been limited engagement between these two subfields. But, as I have argued in this chapter, putting these approaches in conversation with one another helps us attend to the differential experiences that people have with technology. The merging of these fields would open a new area of study which I have called Feminist Platform Studies. Feminist Platform Studies would consider how platforms actually extend and maintain power by structuring the world. This is an intervention in both platform studies and the current treatment of the platform in Feminist Media Studies because it shifts from thinking about how power is accumulated and represented on platforms towards thinking about how platforms are media objects that extend power. I will end this chapter by illustrating once again what a Feminist Platform Studies can do.

In May 2017, musical artist Solange, performed her piece An Ode To at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Solange sang tracks from her album A Seat at the Table while simultaneously performing interpretive choreography with a group of all Black and brown female dancers. For the duration of the performance Solange and the dancers moved through the

142 building, descending down the famous Guggenheim staircases and then arranging and rearranging themselves in circle and line formations in the lobby of the museum. The dancers’ gestures were slow, controlled and minor, making the performance feel meditative. In her review of the show, Yohana Desta described feeling like the Guggenheim had be transformed into “a temple for Black women” (Desta 2017). In images from the performance it is hard to distinguish the performers from the audience. Recognizing that she had taken over a museum that had historically been unhospitable to women of colour artists, Solange ended the performance by exclaiming, “Inclusion is not enough. Allowance is not enough. We belong here. We built this shit. It’s time to tear the fucking walls down” (in Spanos 2017). Solange’s show at the Guggenheim was radical not just because she had been invited to perform in a space dominated by white artists, but because of the way she organized herself and her dancers in relation to the audience. Even if she didn’t tear the walls of the Guggenheim down, Solange did rearrange the space. In doing so, An Ode To shows us of how the removal of a stage changes an environment. Stages organize space, orienting performers and audiences alike; it is only when it disappears that we notice the normative relationships that the stage was mediating in the first place.

Figure 12: Still image from An Ode To, a performance by Solange Knowles at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY (May 16, 2017). Source: Cary Huws.

I have argued throughout this dissertation that we might mark 2017 as a significant year for the platform. Along with Solange’s notable refusal of the platform, the popular feminist movements

143 of 2017 gave us poignant examples of feminism’s relationship to the platform. The movements and moments from that year are important because they reveal the enduring logics of the platform as that which differentially and unevenly elevates and amplifies different political subjects. Feminism’s reliance on the platform, and movements such as the Women’s March and #MeToo, show us that platforms are powerful media objects that demand to be analyzed as specific media forms which have the effect of instigating and at times demanding normative and exclusionary spatial arrangements. This is the case, in part, because feminism has become oriented by the platform. In Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmed uses the concept of orientation to show how being in the presence of certain objects ensures that you “do some things and not others” (Ahmed 2006, 30). Ahmed argues that how we are turned toward certain objects matters for how we reside in space. Using the example of a table, Ahmed demonstrates that the object “makes certain things available, and not others” (2006, 14). It matters here who, and how they are oriented around the table too. For example, Ahmed considers the table’s presence in a family home. She asks, “who faces the table?” (2006, 31). The table might operate as a desk, where the person who sits at it is oriented toward the task of writing. But, if the writer is also a mother or a caretaker, this orientation to the desk is changed. As Ahmed puts it, “giving attention to the objects of writing, facing those objects, becomes impossible: the children, even if they are behind you, literally pull you away” (2006, 32). Ahmed goes on to write “So whether we can sustain our orientation toward the writing table depends on other orientations, which affect what we can face at any given moment in time” (2006, 32). Ahmed’s theory of orientation is instructive in understanding feminism’s relationship to the platform because it shows how a particular mode of feminist resistance, oriented toward the platform has made a certain kind of politics available. Platforms have straightened and raced contemporary feminist protest. Platforms have extended power and submitted abject bodies to danger by mediating visibility. The over-determination of platforms in feminist politics has obscured attention from illegible forms of resistance and refusal that people rely on to survive and care for each other in the digital age.

Lauren Berlant (2016) argues that these are crisis times, and that in crisis times, “politics [are] defined by a collectivity held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption with a transition, a troubled transmission” (2016, 393). Through Berlant, we could read 2017 as a glitch where platforms played an exaggerated role in feminist politics. This

144 interruption was significant because it revealed feminism’s unstable reliance on platforms for its politics. Over the course of this dissertation I have traced how it is that the platform has come to centre in feminist politics today, and how those who look to subvert, or approach platforms differently, have developed resistant strategies in an environment where platforms mediate our politics. In doing so, I have established a new direction in studying platforms and attending to their mediating power.

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Chapter 6- Feminist Platform Studies and the Pandemic

I have finished writing this dissertation in the midst of a global pandemic. Over the course of the past three months, what has emerged is an intensified relationship between platforms and factors of safety, survival and care. I have argued throughout this dissertation that these are things which need to be accounted for in our understanding of contemporary feminism. The current moment has been telling of how an intersectional feminist approach to the platform has always been oriented toward survival and therefore might provide clues about strategies for living in future, when staying alive becomes more complicated. Now, more than ever, we see how Platform Feminism’s reliance on amplifying singular voices casts aside the more pressing political strategies, based on communal care, that we need.

This dissertation has argued that feminist strategizing needs to go beyond the platform, under it, behind it and recognize the organizing labour, politics of social reproduction, the intertwining demands of care and visibility, and the uneven desires for legibility that are obscured by the actual medium of the platform. I’ve shown examples of how some feminist activists have already taken up this call and I’ve also argued why a Feminist Platform Studies that focuses on the actual medium of the platform might better help us recognize platform power. This is an approach to studying the platform that has become increasingly important over the past few months. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, people worldwide have had to keep their distance from each other. We have therefore come to rely on digital platforms in order to connect, to convene, and to care for one another. It has also been very apparent just how politically limiting platform logics of elevation and amplification are in a time when those who already unduly struggled to survive must juggle trying to pay rent with trying to eat, trying to work safely and trying to stay alive.

In this conclusion I will summarize the arguments I have made in the four previous chapters. I will then move to applying the dissertation’s central claims to the current demonstrations carried out across North America as well as the radical acts of care and resistance that we have witnessed during the last few months of global shutdowns. In this concluding chapter, I will argue that Platform Feminism’s reliance on strategies of showing up and sharing space have been appropriated by right-wing political activists during the ongoing pandemic and further illuminate why we might need to bring these tactics into question. Moving towards a new analytic, what we might call, Feminist Platform Studies, will allow the field of Media Studies to better account for

146 the increasing power of platforms continue while paying attention to the structural politics of platforms while simultaneously acknowledging the technology as a specific media or media- technology which demands attention to its material form. I will end with a brief discussion of this study’s limitations and areas of potential future study.

In Chapter 2, I showed how people have historically had distinct relationships with platforms. Using examples of what I called “feminism’s other platforms” I argued through a study of soapboxes, platform shoes, witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks that platforms mediate visibility. My goal in this chapter was to unsettle assumptions, perpetuated in contemporary discourse of digital platforms, that to elevate is to empower. While some people fight to be made more visible, visibility can also be an impediment to survival for others. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, soapboxes introduced a potentially new democratic method for participating in politics. Furnished with an object to stand on, a speaker could make themselves more visible and amplified in a crowd. The assumption was that since almost anybody could have access to a makeshift pulpit, a soapbox, a crate, a tree stump or even a curb, those without access to formal political spaces could still be heard. I posited in Chapter 2, that this early notion of platform as equalizer seems to resurface when we talk about digital platforms and feminism, and even political participation more broadly, today. What such an approach overlooks are the other material platforms that have not been so liberatory, especially for women, Black and queer people. In popular discourse, platform shoes are also equated with women’s empowerment. Heeled shoes occupy a venerated place in Western culture where a woman in heels is considered a woman in power. I argue that we might actually consider how platform shoes have mechanized women, operating not as technologies of empowerment, but rather, as technologies of white and neoliberal feminism. Witches’ gallows and slave auction blocks are examples of platforms that facilitate violence more overtly than the shoe. Gallows have historically been used to put women on display. During the now-infamous witch trials, gallows served as media that punished any woman marked by difference. Slave auction blocks were used across the American south as logistical media that helped put human capital on display. The platform made it easier for slave traders to evaluate black people’s bodies. In conducting a historical analysis of these four different platform media, this first chapter intervened in the dominant perspective that being elevated and made more visible is necessarily a politically useful strategy.

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In Chapter 3, I focused on the marginal spatial strategies that activists have used in North America, South America and India. This chapter relied on a mixed methodological approach, using participant observation at sites feminist of protest in Toronto. It also drew on material collected from semi-structured interviews with feminist activists and scholars and on critical discourse analysis of media coverage from various contemporary protests. The chapter began by using Innis and Berland’s communication theories of margins and centers which show how communications technologies create centers of powers and their margins. I argued that platforms are media that maintain central control of power by privileging tactics which assume safety and control in social space. I then showed how those who have uneven relationships to space have had to develop resistance tactics that are attuned to the safety and survival of their communities. I used two marginal spatial strategies, which were broadly defined as dancing and making a scene as examples of intersectional resistance that elide platform logics of rising up. Dancing was presented both literally and metaphorically as a marginal spatial strategy. I argued that dancing is a gesture of communal joy and that joyfulness in the commons has been an important political strategy for those living on the margins. I then introduced making a scene as a significant strategy of survival. I argued that activists have used the strategy of making scene to upset normative spatial arrangements rather than to maintain existing structures of power which is often mediated by platform visibility.

In Chapter 4, taking up Saidiya Hartman’s (2018) notion of revolution in a minor key, I pointed to examples of the quiet ways that people care for each other in the digital age. In this chapter, I drew on material gathered from semi-structured interviews with three feminist activists. These interviews showed how quiet modes of caring for queer artists in Oakland California, for Toronto’s queer community and for disabled people in Hamilton, Ontario are often employed instead of more visible and loud modes of resisting. In this chapter I also developed a theory of platform inclination. I used feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s (2016), concept of inclination, which is a gesture of “bending toward,” to argue that rather than logging out of platforms, we might use bend toward them in order to care for each other. I argued that inclination is a feminist approach to platforms that takes care into account and counters more masculinist modes of resistance to digital technology.

In the final chapter of this dissertation, I suggested a feminist intervention to the emerging field of Platform Studies. I showed that the growing field of Platform Studies has so far not engaged

148 with the body of work offered by Feminist Media Studies scholars. Feminist Media Studies has also overdetermined the platform for its political utility. I argued that in both the omitting of feminist perspectives in Platform Studies and in Feminist Media Studies’ assumptions that platforms are empowering, it is difficult to consider how platforms structure feminist politics. Ultimately, in this chapter I argue that the work that a feminist platform studies must take up is developing a better and more nuanced understanding of the variable relationships that people have with the powerful media objects that elevate and make visible people and their politics.

The resistance strategies of people across the political spectrum and with varying wants and needs, have been on display over the past few months. As a result, we have seen again that platform mediated visibility has become less important than ensuring people are properly housed and fed. This shows, as I argued in Chapter 2, that visibility is a differential experience and is not equally desired. We have also seen how Chapter 3’s argument that those in power rely on tactics of platform visibility to maintain their power play out recently, through the demonstrations against shutdown measures that are being carried out by, mostly white, protestors. I argued in Chapter 4 that platforms are used by those living on the margins not to amplify their voices but rather to care for each other. We are witnessing this too as people across the globe set up spreadsheets and Facebook groups and Google Docs to organize mutual aid during this time. Finally, I have argued that a Feminist Platform Studies is needed because it will help us account for the ways in which the platform extends power and structures the political. This is a media theory of platforms that does not remove them from the current context but rather helps us see what role they play as the pandemic and its politics unfold. In what follows, I will explain how we can use some of the lessons learned from my study of the platform and its relationship to feminism to make sense of the ongoing and simultaneous protests against stay-at-home orders and distant acts of radical care.

Proximity, the Politics of Not Showing Up and Platform Care-mongering

One of this dissertation’s key claims is that platforms structure the political in such a way that tactics of rising up and amplifying one’s voice are privileged. As a prescient manifestation of Platform Feminism, the 2017 Women’s March showed us that simply showing up and taking part in a protest has oversimplified contemporary feminist politics. A reliance on platforms

149 makes it seem that as long as one shows up on the platform, digital or otherwise, the political task is complete. This is because visibility has become a political end. However, the past few months of required social distancing have illustrated two things about this overbearing commitment to make politics visible. First, we have seen that normative protest tactics of showing up in space privilege those who are already in possession of at least some political power. Tied to this first revelation is that these strategies are presented as collective action but do not necessarily work to further a politics that is communal and life sustaining. Let me elaborate.

Earlier in this dissertation, I drew on the work of feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1993; 1994) and Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick (2006) who have both shown in their respective texts that people have uneven relationships with social space. The ability for people to move freely in space is marked by factors of race, gender, sexuality class and disability. I argued that the Women’s Marches operated on an assumption that the people who showed up would feel safe to march through the central arteries of major cities across North America. The pandemic has further highlighted these uneven spatial politics. Today, already vulnerable populations cannot convene out of fear of becoming sick. As a result, we are witnessing an exaggeration of my argument that the tactic of convening to make politics visible is a normative spatial arrangement not available to all. It does not always take into account care, safety and survival. In fact, over the last few months, convening in space has become a right-wing tactic during pandemic shutdowns. For instance, in Michigan, a group of armed protestors stormed the Capitol carrying guns and demanded that stay-at-home orders be lifted. The protestors were brandished with swastikas and Confederate flags (Baldas 2020). Since the first protest in Michigan, similar demonstrations have been carried out across the US, as well as in some major Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto. In Clearwater Florida, a group of demonstrators rallied outside of a courthouse, in protest of the state’s ongoing shutdown of gyms. The assembly of demonstrators began doing push-ups and squats and holding up placards that read “Give me gains or give me death” (Noor, 2020). These recent protests perversely overemphasize the products of a politics oriented around the logics of platform visibility. That is, they show us how protests oriented around being in space together and making voices heard and seen eclipse more careful efforts to keep people alive. Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit has argued that these recent protests, carried out by white “maskless men,” are acts of “radical selfishness” (2020). In fact, over the last few months, even when convening is not a political strategy, being proximate to

150 others in social space actually manifests as a willful gesture of not caring. Consider, for example, the thousands of young, mostly white, people who flocked to the Christopher Street Pier in New York City when there was a sunny day in early May (Carlson, 2020). Or, on a hot day in Toronto later in May, thousands of people gathered at Trinity Bellwoods park in Toronto (Venn, 2020). In refusing to keep distance from other people, these gatherings heightened the risk of spreading a highly contagious disease that we know is deadly, and especially for vulnerable populations. As many have noted, this crisis has disproportionately affected those already structurally marginalized– this has been particularly the case for Black, Indigenous, racialized and disabled folks. Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that along with listing respiratory illnesses and compromised immune systems as conditions that make some people more at risk of dying from Covid-19, “Racism should surely count as a pre-existing condition” too (Crenshaw 2020). From these examples we see that convening and being proximate to each other not only becomes an unhelpful political strategy, but it also becomes a way of expressing that one does not care. While earlier in this dissertation I argued that often spatial strategies of Platform Feminism do not take the care and survival of already marginalized people into account, these recent gatherings have shown us that convening with visibility as an end actively limits the capacity for many to survive too.

The demonstrations and gatherings in the time of Covid-19 might also be read as an example of what Sarah Sharma and I have called “Platform Uncommons.” Recall that this is a term we use to describe a type of politics focused on singular voices that, as we put it “not only leaves many uncared for but depends upon the fact that so many are uncared for” (Chapter 3; Singh and Sharma 2019; Sharma 2017). While we use Platform Uncommons to describe a type of feminism that relies on the platform, the collective assemblies that demand lifting stay-at-home measures might be understood as the uncommons too. Despite drawing crowds, these gatherings have centered the singular needs and desires of those who take part in them. As such, the communal modes of living required in the commons are missing in these recent protests.

This is not to say that during the pandemic, people have not found ways to live communally. Silvia Federici defines the production of the commons as “the creation of social relations and spaces built on solidarity, the communal sharing of wealth, and cooperative work and decision making” (2018, 183). The commons is a term originally used describe a relationship to land and property as shared rather than owned but has since come to stand more broadly for an approach

151 to sharing labour, care, and wealth too. As such, Lauren Berlant defines the commons as, “an orientation toward life and value unbound by concepts and divisions of property…. its manifestic function, is always political and invested in counter-sovereignty, with performative aspirations to decolonize an actual and social space that has been inhabited by empire, capitalism, and land- right power” (2016, 397). During this pandemic, we have seen renewed and widespread production of the commons. At the beginning of lockdowns in the United States and in Canada, many noted a failure of the government to take care of vulnerable populations. Due to a massive increase in joblessness, dwindling donations to food banks, and slow responses to keeping already marginalized workers safe, political action felt necessary. In an op-ed for The New York Times, cultural theorist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted that “Under normal circumstances, such wanton disregard from the government might prompt protests. But these are far from normal circumstances. Instead, public demonstrations are almost impossible” (Taylor 2020). As Judith Levine writes for the Boston Review, “collective action never looked or felt more compelling, yet mutual care requires that we stay apart. What does solidarity look like when our bodies cannot come together, in public, to agitate for a better world?” (2020). Likewise, in a recent article for The New Yorker on the topic of mutual aid during the pandemic, feminist writer Jia Tolentino wrote “Physical connection could kill us, but civic connection is the only way to survive” (May 11, 2020). Finding ways to care for each other has become a dominant mode of collective action and has facilitated the production of the commons. Early on in the shutdown, people took to Facebook and Twitter offering to buy food for neighbors. There have also been more formalized coalitions for food service workers who are unemployed to access funds for financial support. This idea of mutual aid had been wide widespread. For example, in my neighborhood in Toronto, I have seen posters for mutual aid (Figure 13) that offer various ways of caring for neighbors.

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Figure 13: A poster advertising a mutual aid network attached to a phone pole in Toronto’s West end. Photo by author.

The use of digital platforms during this time has also been simple and effective. Google Docs and Facebook groups have been widely used to organize mutual aid across the world. For instance, people have organized porch drop-offs of home cooked meals for those struggling to pay for food (Young 2020). The Disability Justice Network, an organization based in Hamilton Ontario and a group that I discussed in Chapter 4 of this dissertation organized a care mongering community support form. The form is a simple Google Doc where people can sign up to assist vulnerable community members with getting access to food, housing and healthcare. On the form, people can sign up to go grocery shopping for or with a vulnerable community member. People can also sign up to text and call with those who might need emotional support. Or we might look to the Pirate Care Collective. Pirate Care is an online collective of activists, scholars and practitioners who research and compile various care initiatives globally and publish them on their Pirate Care website. Using the slogan “Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care,” the group began documenting the ways in which people are organizing and caring for each other during outbreaks

153 in Italy first and now in North America (Fragnito et al. 2020). The Pirate Care website and Facebook group offer practical models for maintaining solidarity from a distance.

Importantly, Jia Tolentino points out, these care efforts have mostly been designed for “communities that the state has chosen not to help” (2020). Communities that the state chooses not to help have been called “the undercommons” by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013). They argue that “in the face of repeated, targeted dispossession,” Black people have had to defend themselves (2013, 7). Harney and Moten write, “we are surrounded, that we must take possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency, on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but an illusory right to what we do not have, which the settler takes for and as the commons” (2013, 18). Adding to and disrupting the concept of the commons presented above, Harney and Moten argue that those already disposed find ways to live without state intervention. During the pandemic, acts of care mongering and mutual aid have made it possible for people on the margins, or in the undercommons, to survive.

But, as this dissertation has shown, radical acts of caring for others has long been a strategy of marginalized communities. The platform has already figured in these acts of care too. For instance, I showed in Chapter 3 how minor key resistances revolving around care are shaped in response to amplifying platforms. This means that while these efforts to care for one another have certainly grown in the last few months and are much more widespread and visible than they have been in the past, those living on the margins were already geared to support each other. Amanda Parris’ recent interview with black activists Syrus Marcus Ware, Rodney Diverlus and Ravyn Wngz on the impact of Covid-19 on Black activism in Toronto is telling of how those who were already marginalized might feel better prepared to resist in ways attuned to survival and care. In the interview, Ware states of Toronto’s Black activist community, “We are a very agile movement. We are an intergenerational movement. We're a movement that is made up of folks who are probably the most marginalized: Black, mad and disabled people, queer and trans people. And as a result, we've had to adapt so we're very agile” (Ware in Parris 2020). In the same interview, Rodney Diverlus, when asked how Black folks in Toronto are resisting during the pandemic replied, “At this current stage we have to make sure we can weather it, then let's go fight this” (Diverlus in Parris 2020). Indeed, as I have argued throughout this dissertation, even as the platform obscures this fact, for many, strategies must emerge that focus on care, safety and survival over that of amplification and elevation.

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Resistance has come in the form of refusal, too. For instance, Beverly Bain writes of the undue toll that Covid-19 has had on Black, Indigenous and racialized folks, noting that often women from these communities are the ones working in nursing homes and hospitals were there have been massive outbreaks globally. As she puts it, “those who have been witnessing, accounting, and writing of Black lives in peril here in Canada during this pandemic are performing a form of wake work, care for those on the frontlines, at risk and/or left to die. This form of care insists on revealing Black and racialized resistance to this enforced death as well” (Bain 2020). Bain suggests that refusing dangerous work conditions is a mode of resistance too. She writes, “this resistance takes form in Black and racialized women refusing to work with Personal Protective Equipment; racialized PSWs publicly demanding that they not be scapegoated for staging shortages in long term care…” (Bain 2020). Once again, in Bain’s example of refusal, we see that those living on the margins continue to resist in order to survive.

Areas of Future Study

This dissertation directly contributes to the fields of Feminist Media Studies and Platform Studies by developing a theory of platforms which evaluates how platform logics of elevation and amplification have come to structure feminist politics. More empirical research is needed as I continue to develop my study of platforms and their relationship to feminist politics. For this dissertation, I conducted a total of six interviews over a year. Five of the six interviews were with participants located in the Greater Toronto Area. Through the process of analyzing the material gathered from these interviews and writing this dissertation, I recognized how rich the interview material I retrieved is and believe expanding this study to include more participants, especially outside of my local context, would strengthen the overall project. This study would benefit, specifically, from interviewing and learning from activists whose voices are limited or not directly accounted for in this dissertation. For instance, while I draw on some of Disability Justice Network’s activism in Chapter 4, further study on the platform’s politics as it relates to disability justice is required. For example, in its current form, my study does not develop an analysis of how and why convening is approached differently by people with disabilities.

Second, future study will require deeper engagement with Platform Studies. I need to further understand the field’s concerns of platforms and their politics. As I have shown, Platform Studies’ offers an important perspective on the specificities of digital platforms even if, as a

155 field, it’s concerns about the politics of platforms differ from my theoretical approach. In order to engage the quickly growing field of Platform Studies, I will need to be in more direct conversation with scholars from the field and track how Platform Studies continues to evolve. A more nuanced understanding of Platform Studies’ literature will strengthen my emerging theory of a Feminist Platform Studies.

In addition, while I have concluded with preliminary reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic and how my feminist theory of the platform might help us make sense of the moment, this is an ongoing crisis that will continue to evolve. This is not the conclusion that I had expected to write as I was completing this dissertation in early March 2020. But after two and a half months of watching protests from across the political spectrum unfold, it seemed impossible not to write about it. However, the way that people are protesting during this time is evolving very quickly and so future work will need to more carefully account for this time. Even as I finish writing, George Floyd, a black man from Minnesota was murdered by police. Black Lives Matter protestors have convened in Minnesota to protest the murder. Photos are circulating of the protestors handing out masks and trying to remain as distant from each other as possible. These are obvious acts of care both for protestors and for other folks in the city who might be in danger if the virus were to spread. There have also been reports that police are using tear-gas on the Black people who are protesting peacefully. Many people who might want to join in the protests, especially as these events are often a way to collectively grieve, must stay at home in order to catch a potentially fatal disease. Then, on May 27, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black Indigenous woman fell from her 24th story balcony in the presence of police in Toronto. I attended a protest for Regis on Saturday, May 30 in Toronto. Everyone wore a mask and organizers again handed out sanitizer and pool noodles so people could try to keep distance from one another. Others were preparing cups of milk to pass out in case police used tear gas on protestors as they had in protests happening across the United States. Organizers of the Toronto march let people know that if they felt unsafe, it was ok to stay home. They live streamed the event for people with disabilities to watch safely. As I write, what is emerging is the kind of careful collective organizing that I have argued is obscured by the platform. This is a moment so pertinent to my theory of Platform Feminism so, future study would spend more time focusing on how the platform and its politics come to bare on feminist politics during the pandemic. I’ve come back to update this conclusion four times in the last week in order to keep the information current. I

156 know that future work will require a more careful account of this time. Conducting more empirical research, through interviews with those organizing during the Covid-19 pandemic and especially following Floyd’s murder, will also strengthen future iterations of this project.

If we take seriously the platform as an object of study, we see the political and social implications that it has as a powerful media form. Making sense of how people are surviving during Covid-19 becomes something that Platform Studies as a field is geared to do when adding the material and feminist perspectives that I have introduced throughout this dissertation. In recognizing how platforms are media that structure contemporary feminist politics, this dissertation has opened up discussions and possibilities for developing Feminist Platform Studies.

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Appendix A: Participant Bios

Michèle Pearson Clarke is Trinidadian-born artist living in Toronto, Ontario. Clarke’s work as a photographer and filmmaker “explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss” (michelepersonclarke.com, “Info”). Clarke is currently the Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto.

Dr. OmiSoore H. Dryden is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University. Dryden researches the politics of blood donation in Canada, focusing on barriers to donation blood for African/Black gay, bisexual and trans men. Dryden is also an activist and has been involved in organizing Black Queer and Trans activism throughout Canada.

Sarah Jama is a community organizer based in Hamilton Ontario and is co-founder of the Disability Justice Network Ontario. Jama is a disabled activist who works at the intersection of disability justice and racial justice, primarily in Hamilton, Ontario.

Cayden Mak currently works as Executive Director of 18MillionRising.org, a digital-first movement-building organization working with Asian American & Pacific Islander communities. Mak is based in Oakland, California. Their expertise is in working with different digital technologies in social movement organizer. Mak identifies as a trans masculine person of colour.

Katherine McKittrick is a professor in the gender studies department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. McKittrick is the author of Demonic Grounds (2006) and is an interdisciplinary researcher that works on topics including geography, black studies, theories of liberation and cultural production.

Ladan Siad is a Black Queer Trans Designer and Creative Technologist working at the intersections of art, design, and technology to tell narratives about the world that is possible when radical visionary change flourishes. Ladan is a natural born collaborator and has used their skills to teach and help in many community-based projects. Siad, who is a self-taught and community supported multidisciplinary creative quilting together global black genres into a visual and audio tapestry of home everywhere. Ladan will be attending OCAD in the Digital Futures Program (MDes). Ladan holds a BA in Criminology and Psychology from York University.

The former founding member of the “Medina Collective” is a part who preferred not to be named in this study. They are a Muslim activist based in Toronto. The Medina Collective was formally known as the Medina Mentorship Program. The Medina Collective began with five women who organized in 2003 around a shared goal to “create space for women in Toronto’s hip-hop scene.

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Appendix B: Sample Interview Questions

- Does your activism have a platform? What is it?

- How have you and other POC, queer, disabled, people made space for themselves in resistance movements you are involved in? What are some barriers to doing this?

- What is the relationship between theory and praxis in your work? What is your connection to activism?

- How does care figure into the way you organize?

- How is care as a tactic for resistance practiced online?

- How does your use of social media and other digital platforms figure into the way you practice resistance?

- How does your use of the Internet facilitate resistance?

- Have you ever felt the need to step away from digital platforms? If so, why? In what ways are platforms limiting?

- How do you think about safety and survival in your approach to activism?

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