ABSTRACT BROWNING, ABIGAIL PERKINS. Forward Together?

ABSTRACT

BROWNING, ABIGAIL PERKINS. Forward Together? Politicized Identities, Collective Action, and the Emergence of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. (Under the direction of Dr. Jessica Jameson).

In only 72 days, the 2017 Women’s March on Washington and Sister Marches (WMOW) grew from an idea (or more precisely, many ideas, people, things, environments, and relationships) into a transnational process and phenomenon with over three million participants in over 800 separate locations around the world. This dissertation studies the Women’s March via nonhuman actors (i.e. PussyHats), human motivations, and quantitative survey results of

March participants. An assemblage of data emerges to describe the political ecologies of collective action.

The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to provide information and analysis of the

March’s emergence and 2) to transgress the boundaries of survey work in favor of providing feminist scholars with alternative modes of engaging with data. To the second point, building a dissertation that spans disciplines and methodology is a disruptive and destabilizing process; it is an action that challenges expectations and boundaries that appear firm within academic genealogy. As an intersectional feminist researcher, it is particularly important to worry teleological boundaries in the same way that social action and social movements aim to reshape the norms and fabrics of our realities. In particular, this dissertation provides a roadmap to support the messiness of many methods of data collection (survey, interview, content analysis, ethnography), as they each offer a broader access to perspectives.

The findings contend that concerns regarding the intersectionality of the March from many observers were astute and valid. Even inclusion of diverse leadership was unable to change the perception, as a whole, of the March being one centered on White feminism. As a result, the group identity that emerged was White, Cis-Female, Liberal, Feminist, and American. Four core motivations (identity, morality, emotions, and efficacy) interacted to drive participation in collective action. From thematic clusters, I provide two models (personal salience and incongruity) to show how the 2016 Election politicized individuals.

Analysis of similar quantitative data found a tendency for participants to rate political issues related to the Women’s March “Unity Principles”, on average as having a strong impact on their decision to march. However, issues more explicitly salient to [middle-upper class]

White, cisgender, and feminist, American women identities were rated relatively higher as motivating factors. The rating hierarchy in both qualitative and quantitative analysis and highlights the problem of issue abstraction as a function of the tendency for White people to universalize and collapse concepts outside of race and sexuality to the detriment of intersectionality and coalition-building. Optimistically, the high ratings of all liberal issues

(especially those outside of the dominant group identity) are a potential starting place for further activism and more specific education outreach. Such outreach may be successful, since participants left the March with a high level of perceived political efficacy—a strong indicator of continued activism.

The 2017 Women’s March on Washington is a useful locus for observing important factors regarding collective action: the ways that affinities form between things, environments, and people, and notably how group consciousness reifies dominant cultural ideologies. Activists and organizers, particularly White women, can learn from this research how to think more deeply about intersectionality and the problematic ways privilege universalizes and ironically others and marginalizes people of difference. Finally, a multi-form, multi-actor and embodied approach to studying social movements is essential for dismantling the way in which scholarship often excludes non-verbal rhetorical forms and cultural vernacular due to a Western or colonizing lens.

Different forms intersect to create new meaning, and social movements have always existed beyond textual rhetoric and human bodies. This dissertation provides the reader with not only a mediated understanding of emergence of the Women’s March, but also more generally, a model for critical employment of methods, whether quantitative or qualitative.

by Abigail Perkins Browning

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media

Raleigh, North Carolina

2019

APPROVED BY:

______Dr. Jessica Jameson Dr. Helen Burgess Committee Chair

______Dr. Elizabeth Craig Dr. Emily Winderman ii

DEDICATION

To the participants of the Women’s March survey, thank you for your support and generosity; to my mother, Lyn Browning, grandmother, Martha Briggs, sister, Anne Walker, and partner, Adam Speen; and to my father, Marc – I am humbled to share the title of Dr. Browning.

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BIOGRAPHY

Abigail Browning is a research scientist and communication scholar with an interest in critical media studies, social movements, collective action, crowdfunding, and activist behavior.

A native of Winston-Salem, NC, Browning received her BA in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2006. In 2012, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the University of

North Carolina at Greensboro, where she continued as a full-time lecturer in the English department. In 2014, Browning started an online literary blog (tatestreet.org) and subsequent podcast, “In the Margins,” an interview show she both hosted and produced. She also consulted for Lowe’s Home Improvement’s Innovation Labs, where she researched and collaborated with a team of artists, engineers, and industry managers to produce internal communications that imagined a long-term future strategy. Her interest in digital media studies lead her to join NC

State University’s doctoral program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Studies in

2015, where she taught courses in English and technical communication, until she joined the

Laboratory of Analytic Sciences (LAS) for a graduate research internship. At LAS, Browning’s work has been integral in developing terminology for the anticipatory thinking (AT) domain, as well as operationalizing narrative tasks for AT. After LAS, Browning was offered an editorial assistantship with Deanna P. Dannels for the National Communication Association’s journal,

Communication Education. Dr. Browning is currently a Research Scientist at Applied Research

Associates, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A dissertation is an immense collaborative effort. Although it is bound to my name, this project is a product of many relationships, wherein things, such as my garden, and people, all contributed to its emergence. First and foremost, I want to thank my committee, Helen Burgess,

Elizabeth Craig, Emily Winderman, and my chair, Jessica Jameson. Each of you challenged and directed me to follow through with my ideas, and offered precise and thoughtful engagement with each chapter—from conception to completion. In particular, Jessica, thank you for being the first o believe in the concept and for offering your support and guidance.

I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues and collaborators who helped me throughout, particularly Meghan Rebuli, Krystin Gollihue, Katreena Alder, Jeonghyun Lee, and

Mai Nou Xiong-Gum, Kendra Andrews, Desiree Dighton, Alex Hammond, and Judith Darling, who have come to my aid in crafting chapters and ideas—and for Meghan, the tireless hours working on quantitative analysis. To Tharaa Bayazid and Meghana Shivanandacharya, thank you for your contributions to the original survey design, analysis and completion; and of course to all of the participants who chose to take and share our survey.

Additional sage advice from mentors kept me grounded, my work in Professor Sarah

Stein’s class lead to an investigation into PussyHats, and my experience at the Lab of Analytic

Sciences and Applied Research Associates, Inc. with Chris Argenta and Adam Amos-Binks was integral to the project. Further, CRDM alumni peer mentors Adam Gutschmidt and Brent

Simoneaux kept me looking towards the future, while still focusing on the task. Additionally, I am thankful for CRDM’s administrative staff, particularly Jeffrey Leonard, who always had spent precious time making sure my paperwork would go through, and who always was ready to help me solve what often seemed impossible problems.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, some who have already been mentioned above, for their kindness, encouragement, and understanding. Thank you to Elly

Bookman, Gregory Brown, Mike and Sandee Lawless, Jeanne Lemkau, John Mallard, Jaclyn

Nesbitt, Joe Troop, T.J. Wignall, Jonathan Williams, as well as the Klinepeter and Prieto families for your enduring friendships. To my mother and father, who raised me as a curious philosopher and life-long student, to my sister, Anne, and grandmother, Martha, who participated in this project not only on the page but in conversations and visits throughout. To my in-laws, Justin

Walker, Mary Jane and Larry Speen, I felt so supported by your optimism. And, finally, to my partner, Adam Speen, who, when our plumbing broke the night before my defense, shampooed my hair outside with a garden hose, when I needed groceries, bought bread and mac and cheese, and, when I was exhausted, energized and inspire me.

Let this dissertation be a celebration of relationships.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ...... x

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xii

Prelude: Welcome and Introduction ...... 1

The Women’s March on Washington ...... 3

Research Foci ...... 6

Chapter 1: Expanding Research Epistemology...... 11

Part I: Knowledge and Reality ...... 11

Epistemology and Ontology ...... 12

Post-Positivist Paradigm ...... 13

Critical Paradigm ...... 14

Centering Epistemology in Methodology ...... 16

Part II: Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed Methods ...... 18

Feminist Implementation ...... 23

Bridging ...... 24

Part III: Complicating Survey Construction ...... 25

Reframing Survey Design and Utilization as a Feminist Act ...... 29

Disrupting definitions ...... 37

Interlude I: Personal Narrative ...... 39

Part I: Why I Marched ...... 39

Part II: The March ...... 44

Part III: Research as a “Doing” ...... 48

Chapter 2: PussyHats as Collective Actors in the Women’s March ...... 50

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Introduction ...... 50

Human-Thing Relationships: Delegation, Prescription, and Discrimination ...... 51

Confederations of Power: Political, Cultural, and Collective Implications ...... 53

Systemic Thing Power: Political Ecologies ...... 54

Cultural Thing Power ...... 57

Material Histories: Gee’s Bend Quilts ...... 57

Mobile Power: The Porous Boundary of Public and Private ...... 59

Making Private Grief Public: The AIDS Memorial Quilt ...... 59

Reshaping the Body: The Hoodie and Trayvon Martin ...... 60

The Emergence of The PussyHat ...... 63

Human Actors and the PussyHat ...... 63

The PussyHat as Public Action ...... 67

Political Ecologies: Relentless Morality of the PussyHats ...... 68

The Women’s March, PussyHats, and Collective Thing Power ...... 79

Interlude II: An Introduction to the Women’s March Survey ...... 81

The Imperialism of Analysis ...... 83

The Violence of Data Erasure: Data “Cleaning” as Cultural Exclusion ...... 84

Abandoned Surveys ...... 85

Chapter 3: Why They Marched: A Qualitative Analysis ...... 88

Introduction ...... 88

Literature Review...... 90

Identity ...... 91

Emotional Motivations (E-Motivations) ...... 96

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Morality...... 99

Efficacy ...... 101

Integration ...... 104

Framework and Methods ...... 104

The Problematic Nature of Open-Ended Questions...... 105

Frame of Analysis ...... 107

A Bigger Picture: Visualizing the Responses ...... 109

Participant-Provided Descriptive Information ...... 110

Descriptive-Qualitative Data Interaction ...... 118

Thematic Coding Procedure ...... 119

Tagging References to Trump ...... 120

Tagging Emotion and Affect ...... 120

Results ...... 121

Narrative Themes ...... 121

Discussion ...... 132

Identity ...... 132

Efficacy ...... 136

Emotional Motivations...... 140

Morality...... 142

Conclusion and Further Research ...... 146

Interlude III: Relational Analysis...... 149

Chapter 4: Sister Marches and the DC March: A Quantitative Study ...... 151

Introduction ...... 151

Methods and Materials ...... 155

Survey Distribution and Organization ...... 156

Variables and Measures ...... 157

Methods of Analysis ...... 160

Results ...... 163

RQ (a) March Type and Issues that Influenced Decision to March ...... 163

Civil Rights...... 164

RQ (b) Post-March feelings ...... 167

Discussion ...... 169

Intersectionality and Coalition Building ...... 171

Expectations of Political Efficacy ...... 172

Conclusion ...... 174

Limitations and Future Study...... 175

Chapter Five: Mediated Understanding ...... 195

From WMOW to Intersectional Feminist Activism ...... 198

Toward Critical Survey Making and Analysis...... 199

Direction of Future Research ...... 200

REFERENCES ...... 201

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Participant Distribution by Gender...... 113

Table 3.3: Participant Distribution by Birth Decade...... 116

Figure 3.2: Participant Distribution by Birth Decade...... 116

Table 3.4: Participant Distribution by Formal Education Level ...... 117

Table 3.5: US Citizen Participant Distribution by Political Party Affiliation...... 117

Table 3.6: Participant Distribution by Yearly Household Income in US Dollars...... 118

Table 3.7: Coding Example of Primary and Secondary Motivations ...... 119

Table 3.8: Coding Example of Affect and Emotional Interpretations ...... 121

Table 3.9: Theme Exemplars for Reactions to the 2016 United States Election Outcome ...... 123

Table 3.10: Theme Exemplars for Protesting the 2016 Election Outcome ...... 124

Table 3.11: Theme Exemplars for Demonstrating/Expressing Solidary for a Cause ...... 124

Table 3.12: Theme Exemplars for Protecting Human Rights and Freedoms...... 125

Table 3.13: Theme Exemplars for Demonstrating/Expressing Solidary for a Cause...... 126

Table 3.14: Theme Exemplars for Using Privilege to Protect Vulnerable Populations...... 127

Table 3.15: Theme Exemplars for Desire for Social Connection ...... 128

Table 3.16: Theme Exemplars for DO SOMETHING...... 128

Table 3.17: Theme Exemplars for Combatting Identity Erasure and/or Silencing...... 129

Table 3.18: Theme Exemplars for Modeling Activist Behavior ...... 130

Table 3.19: Theme Exemplars for Too much for one sign ...... 131

Table 3.20: Personal Salience Model Exemplars...... 141

Table 3.21: Incongruity Model Exemplars ...... 145

Table 4.1 Issues that influenced decision to march (Sister March, n=453)...... 186

Table 4.2 Issues that influenced decision to march (DC March, n=265)...... 187

Table 4.3: Issues that Influenced decision to March: Dunn’s Multiple Comparisons Tests...... 188

Table 4.4: Post-March Feelings Responses by March Type...... 194

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I.1: Political Origins ...... 41

Figure I.2: 2017 Raleigh Sister March participants wait for the procession to begin...... 45

Figure I.3. Raleigh Sister March participants rally at Moore Square, 2017 ...... 46

Figure I.4: Y’all Means All poster at 2017 Raleigh Sister March, 2017 ...... 49

Figure 2.1: Pussy Hat Project official pattern cover page ...... 65

Figure 2.2: Screenshot of Kat Coyle’s Ravelry Site for the PussyHat Project ...... 72

Figure 2.3: Independence Avenue in Washington, DC at peak Women’s March crowd density. 74

Figure 2.4: TIME cover featuring photograph by Danielle Amy Staif for TIME (right); The New

Yorker Cover featuring knitter and March participant Abigail Gray Swartz’s

illustration, “The March” (left) ...... 75

Figure 2.5: Screenshot of the PussyHat Pattern with instructions for transferring hats ...... 78

Figure 3.1: Automated Word Cloud of top 20 most frequent words found in responses ...... 109

Figure 4.1: Issues that influenced decision to march (Sister March) ...... 165

Figure 4.2: Issues that influenced decision to march (DC March) ...... 166

Figure 4.3: Post-March Feeling responses stratified by March Type ...... 168

Figure 4.4: Participant Distribution across March Locations ...... 185

PRELUDE: WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

Welcome. As you read through this dissertation, I want to thank you for joining me through the process. You, as an audience, are part of the shape and ultimate production of the knowledge within this document on the Women’s March on Washington. I am grateful for your presence, perspective, and voices. Together we as scholars broaden the scope of social movement literature to reinforce the understanding that it takes many relationships to produce action.

Prior to a multi-vocal approach taken in this dissertation, rhetorical scholarship in the mid-twentieth century relied on concept of the “great orator, ” or a single (human) rhetor, through which the lens of Aristotelian logic offered a means to understand and appraise a written text or speech (Morris & Browne, 2013). However, the conventions of a single-orator approach proved a challenge when scholars turned towards more complex, multi-personed [and –thinged] rhetorical events. Over the past sixty years, research around political collective action has broadened significantly to not only a multi-vocal approach, but also a multiplicity of disciplines that have contributed their expertise and observations. As a result, an important feature of contemporary social movement research is the turn away from individual actors to multiple intentions, constituitive forces and relational processes (Cox & Foust, 2009).

Similarly, a multi-form, multi-actor and embodied approach to studying social movements is essential for dismantling the way in which scholarship often excludes non-verbal rhetorical forms and cultural vernacular due to a Western or colonizing lens. Different forms intersect to create new meaning, and social movements have always existed beyond textual rhetoric and human bodies. Thus, critical cultural scholars remind us to take our analysis further, as Enck-Wanzer (2006, p. 227) writes, “it is important to try and shift our critical optics (at least

2 slightly) about street movement rhetoric so that we might see beyond how /function, and begin seeing how /intersect to form (an)other rhetoric of resistance that is qualitatively different than a critic might have assumed.” By moving towards these intersections, we can better understand how collective action emerges from things

(including people) and their contexts.

Even though the 2017 Women’s March on Washington (referred to here as WMOW or the March) is a recent performance of activism, scholars in a range of fields have already started to grapple with its positioning within our broader culture. Because of its multifaceted nature,

WMOW enters the conversations in communication, mobilization theory, political science, critical cultural studies, media studies, disability rhetoric, feminist studies, sociology, and memory studies. Methodologically, a majority of the articles contain qualitative approaches wherein the researchers focus on interviews, profiles, or ethnography. Yet, these located narratives are mostly centered around the main site in Washington, D.C., effectively excluding hundreds of Sister Marches around the world. Further, the sole study that provides quantitative analysis on the March participants was facilitated in D.C. only. My dissertation not only adds our knowledge of the collective properties of the WMOW as a whole, but also localizes, describes, and adds depth to knowledge about individuals (including myself) who marched outside of

Washington, D.C.

While it benefits from a broader understanding of movement literature, the ontological question of WMOW’s position of in women’s liberation, feminism, or other progressive movements is not the focus of this dissertation. Experts with more training in women’s studies have already complicated the March in relationship with historical movements. Instead, the

3 focus of my research centers around questions of how the WMOW emerged as a relationship and process of individual and collective actors.

One of the challenges to studying relationships and processes is deciding ways to bound the project. Honestly, the question of how to constrain the timeline to suit the dissertation has been a thorny authorial conundrum. Contrary to how it is written, history does not flow longitudinally; it circles back and interacts with the past in surprising and unwieldy ways.

Ultimately, my research observes the WMOW and Sister Marches from Trump’s election,

November 8, 2016 to the day of the March, January 21, 2017, and through the responses to my survey, in April-May of 2017. This analysis of time hinges on several key events in order to establish an overall context to event.

One inevitable outcome of including a timeline is the way it inevitably prioritizes and simplifies a narrative. Often, if not always, the production of history is reduction. Certain relationships of actors replicate and sediment themselves through journalistic repetition. The desire to categorize and temporally streamline “what happened” ends up reifying dominant cultural narratives. That being said, the WMOW’s historic timeline is a helpful partner, one that can guide researchers towards those nexuses of power: places of certainty are places for scrutiny.

The following account is one that resonates with contemporary reporting on WMOW from 2016-

2017, and thus is a starting place for our investigation.

The Women’s March on Washington

The 2017 Women’s March on Washington was an “historic” event (Farris, 2017, p. 4), described as “the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history (Presley & Presswood, 2018, p. 61), “a transnational protest event” (Kitch, 2018, p. 119). Despite the March’s massive scale, it is possible to trace a timeline from idea into a global collective action. According to New Yorker

4 reporter, Jia Tolentino (2017), the point of conception twists back to the night after the Trump election. Retired attorney and grandmother Teresa Shook started a page for a “Million Women

March" in Washington, DC from her home in Hawaii (Cusumano, 2017). At the same time, Bob

Bland, a fashion designer from New York City also suggested a “Million Pussy March” on

Facebook (Agrawal 2017, Carney, 2017). By the next morning, November 11, 2016, even though Shook had only invited 40 friends, over ten thousand people had responded positively, and Bland’s fans and friends were equally ignited by the idea (Cusumano, 2017).

In the first week, Bland had to consolidate many Facebook protest pages, all of which had their own personally and geographically located ideologies and goals (Agrawal, 2017).

However, since two White women on opposite ends of the United States initialized these calls for collective action without a clear message of intersectionality, controversy and questions of inclusion quickly grafted on to the Facebook event. Within the first few days, Facebook users pointed out that Shook’s early-named “Million Women March” was appropriation of “a name originally claimed by the enormous protest for black women’s unity and self-determination held in Philadelphia, in 1997” (Tolentino, 2017, n. p.). More to the point, the 1997 Million Women

March was specifically in response to the ways in which White feminists had consistently ignored issues communities of color (Dejean, 2016). In response, before the end of the week, three women of color co-chairs were added to the team to offer their organizational expertise:

Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour (Ruiz-Grossman, 2016). Unlike Bland,

Shook decided to join the March as a participant, not as an organizer.

All of the co-chairs were working on the March as a second, full-time job. Mallory grew up attending rallies and protests, and was an organizer for the 2013 celebration of the 1963

March on Washington (Carney, 2017), a civil rights march famous for Dr. Marin Luther King,

Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. When it came to an official name for the event, Women’s

March on Washington (WMOW), Mallory and the co-chairs were able to gain Bernice King’s

“blessing of the name” with the promise that the event would ensure rights and justice for Black women and their communities (Ruiz-Grossman, 2016, n.p.). Perez and Sarsour also had prodigious backgrounds in organizing. Carmen Perez was a bilingual probation officer from

Santa Cruz, California, known for her work as executive director of Gathering for Justice, whose co-chairs included well-known activists Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem, Doris Huerta, and

LaDonna Harris (Ruiz-Grossman, 2016). Linda Sarsour was a Palestinian-American Muslim and the executive director of the Arab-American Association in New York (Cusumano, 2017).

And, as the potential for participation grew, so did the organizing team, with 50 national representatives (Cusumano, 2017).

The early missions of WMOW tried to support the broad participant base: “We welcome vibrant collaboration and honor the legacy of the movements before us—the suffragists and abolitionists, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the American Indian

Movement, Occupy Wall Street, Marriage Equality, Black Lives Matter, and more” (Cauterucci,

2017, n.p.). Yet, the early controversy on inclusion circulated and proliferated regarding

WMOW’s commitment to its values. For example, Brewer and Dundes (2018, p. 53) ethnographic study points to a “disjunction” between the objectives of the March and the concerns of African American Women. One study participant remarked, “Women of different races had different reasons for partaking in this march. Once racism, prejudice, etc. are no longer a serious problem, then maybe women of different races can come together and fight for the same goal” (p. 51). Others in the study were not convinced, as one said, “Trump was the cause of the Women’s March. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, I don’t think the Women’s

March would have happened” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 51). Within the divide squarely sat the issue of reproductive rights—the WMOW organizers chose not to include abortion groups among their 400 partners (Fisher, Dow, & Ray, 2017). Such a decision in a Women’s March is particularly interesting, as it chose not to build a coalition with the anti-abortion constituents, or as Presley and Presswood (2018) point out, “one out of six women who voted for Hillary

Clinton” (p. 65). The March gained and lost endorsements as the presidential inauguration approached.

Even with the controversy, on January 21, 2017, people crowded the streets in hundreds of cities. Experts estimate Women’s March participation included 3-5 million; the most populated site in Washington, DC drawing over 500,000 participants (Frostenson, 2017). Even at the event, participants identified and challenged the March’s commitment to its intersectional mission, with signs such as “I’ll see you nice White ladies at the next #BlackLivesMatter march, right?” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 50). A majority of participants attended as many as 900 anticipated “Sister Marches” across the US and internationally, including a virtual cyberprotest, the Disability March, which hosted 3000 profiles of individuals who could not physically participate (Agarwal, 2017; Presley & Presswood, 2018; Kitch, 2018; Mann, 2018).

Research Foci

In only 72 days, the Women’s March on Washington grew from an idea (or more precisely, many ideas, people, things, environments, and relationships) into a transnational process and phenomenon. Throughout the dissertation, I aim to deepen and explore the relationships within a trajectory of how the Women’s March came to be; yet remind my readers that this is not the complete story, nor could I provide such a product. As a whole (or many wholes), the Women’s March on Washington is messy; or as journalist Cusumano (2017, n.p.)

7 wrote, “tough to describe without modifiers, lists, and lengthy explanations. There’s no concise way to express its founding principles, aims, its organizers’ extensive backgrounds in various arenas of social justice.” Thus, my position in an interdisciplinary program across

Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State offers me a unique vantage point to explore, theorize, and expand the realm of social movement research.

Building a dissertation that spans disciplines is a disruptive and destabilizing process; it is an action that challenges expectations and boundaries that appear firm within academic genealogy. And, as an intersectional feminist researcher, it is particularly important to worry these teleological boundaries in the same way that social action and social movements aim to reshape the norms and fabrics of our realities. Yet, one of the challenges of a multi-actor and interdisciplinary approach is the opportunity for disjointed or unsettled arguments. I argue for

“opportunity” because my role is one not of totalizing knowledge, my role is to leave room for coalition building with the unknown. The dissertation is not an ending, it is a beginning. I frame the project with two overarching questions:

RQ1: How can feminist scholars make research a disruptive, political act?

RQ2: What can individuals and organizers learn about large-scale social movements for the future?

These two questions speak to the role of feminist research, but more specifically, they speak to audience. RQ1 is an underlying conceptual driver of each chapter, with the goal of providing a multidisciplinary roadmap to feminist academics to orient new research practices.

Concurrently, second question is essential for me as an activist as it grounds my work in its practical usefulness outside of higher education. Together, these foci frame my approach and findings, with the goal of moving knowledge through, backward, forward, onward, and outward.

As such, each section in this dissertation has “movement” as with a musical score; actors enter and disappear as they follow a thematic narrative. Or, as Chávez (2011, p. 371) explains,

“Using social movement in its verb form, as in a process of people coming together to create meanings and potentially make progress toward a particular social change, reduces the possibility of limiting social movement studies to the investigation of things.” The end result is a networked approach to the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, with the goal of producing multiple situated and potentially conflicting perspectives that uncover processes and relationships of power.

In order to stay within the confines of the dissertation genre, I encourage my audience to consider each chapter as its own movement in an orchestral composition; each chapter moves with and through the construction of knowledge. Interludes are shorter, more personal, autoethnographic compositions; and, as part of the larger musical score, they call into question ontological and epistemological foundations of feminist data analysis. The interludes call back to the ways in which women’s liberation relied on the personal stories of women’s experience to unify and move them towards raising consciousness about their subjugation. These often unpublished, or personal stories contained pathos that alienated them from traditional methods of logical rhetoric, but that demonstrate shared experiences contingent specifically on dynamics of gender and power. This embodied, affective knowledge blurs the spheres of political and personal, and is a key interrelationship to this document as an active participant in disrupting systemic forms of oppression. The overall effect in the dissertation of chapters and interludes is one of call and response, wherein both are actively pressing against each other and the expectations of knowledge production.

In Chapter 1, I situate the overall dissertation methodology with the goal of incorporating mutiple research modes. I argue that a feminist epistemology constructed around standpoint theory is essential for framing mixed-methods work on the Women’s March because it a) questions the nature of knowledge construction across qualitative and quantitative methods, b) it frames the results as positional and constructed, and c) it makes room for messy and contradictory analyses that are necessary for such a complex event (of converging human, nonhuman actors across digital and public spaces) situated in structures of power.

Interlude I: Personal Narrative of a March Participant. As an enaction of my methodology, providing an my background as a feminist and activist is important to include because it provides some grounding and transparency for my biases and influences as a White, cis-female, able-bodied person of American citizenship and European heritage, and importantly for this dissertation, a participant in the Raleigh Women’s March in 2017.

In Chapter 2, I demonstrate the power of nonhuman actors in the assemblage of the

Women’s March. More specifically, I utilize Bennett’s theory of vibrant materiality to trace the ways in which the PussyHat emerged as a vital actor in the WMOW. Finally, using Latour’s terminology, I make the argument that the PussyHat, as a collective actor, developed and enacted a distinct morality that shaped March participation.

Interlude II: The Development of the Women’s March Survey. In this section, I narrate the way the survey emerged from a collaboration in a graduate level course. The story of the survey’s development is essential for providing a critical look at the ways humans and things interact and combine to create opportunities and boundaries regarding origination, style, and implementation. Ultimately, I discuss the thingness of analysis, how it prescribes, and inscribes its morality and ethics to the data.

In Chapter 3, I examine the question of personal motivations for collective action using a grounded theory approach to open-ended survey responses. After a literature review that includes psychological and political science approaches to motivation studies, I identify clusters of narrative themes that comprise answers of why participants attended WMOW. These themes offer insight into patterns of collective identity formation and group consciousness, all interacting with core motivations of identity, efficacy, emotion, and morality.

Interlude III: Relational Analysis. In order to provide a more positional look at my quantitative methods, I describe my process of interpreting the data. I introduce Dr. Meghan

Rebuli as a key collaborator.

In Chapter 4, I provide a quantitative analysis of the survey data. My results are in conversation with previous findings in the dissertation regarding the role of politicized identities, nonhuman actors, perceived political efficacy, longitudinal activism orientation. I also add to the previous findings by focusing specifically on the differences between Sister March participants and those of the DC March.

In Chapter 5, I conclude with a summation and meditation the ways in which knowledges, like identities, are inherently contingent and intersectional.

This dissertation provides the reader with not only a mediated understanding of emergence of the Women’s March, but also more generally, a model for critical employment of methods, whether quantitative or qualitative. The goal is two-fold: 1) to provide information and analysis of the March’s development and limitations as to replicate or improve for future large- scale collective action and 2) to transgress the boundaries of survey work in favor of providing feminist scholars with an alternative mode of engaging with data.

CHAPTER 1: EXPANDING RESEARCH EPISTEMOLOGY

Part I: Knowledge and Reality

In my research, I was faced with complex questions, not simply about the tools through which one gathers, creates, and understands knowledge, but also with questions that excavate the relationship between knowledge and power. Such is the challenge of methodology; it is the tenuous relationship between epistemology and method, the way of knowing and the way of collecting and illuminating knowledge(s). From a feminist perspective, I found that the prevailing techniques for collecting and analyzing data did not fully serve my goals as a researcher, nor did they depict the depth of my participants’ identities. As such, the function of this chapter is to highlight my approach, an approach that calls into question ontological and epistemological foundations of feminist data analysis.

To clarify, my theoretical positioning is feminist, a designation Sprague (2016) classifies by the following postulates: 1) gender, in interaction with other forms of social relations such as race/ethnicity, class, ability, and nation, is a key organizer of social life; and 2) understanding how things work is not enough—we need to take action to make the social world more equitable.

Thus, as a feminist scholar and researcher, it is imperative for me to be critical and creative with my methodological strategies, to reflect on and carefully select and shape research practices that offer the best opportunity to provide a situated, thoughtful standpoint through my privileged access to the academic arena. With such a charge in mind, it is valuable to understand the ways that interdisciplinary scholarship approaches research positions in greater detail, particularly in terms of post-positivist and critical approaches, and how feminists can extend and expand the ways in which methods and methodology interact with epistemology and ontology.

Epistemology and Ontology

Before defining the current state of post-positivist and critical approaches, it is important to clarify that they are enmeshed in epistemological and ontological assumptions, with their own heuristics. Tracy (2012) describes epistemology as “the nature of knowledge” (p. 38) More fully, Anderson and Baym explain epistemology as “the inquiry into the character of knowledge, the nature of acceptable evidence, and the criterion of validity that enable one to distinguish the false from the true, the probably from the actual” further, “the term is used more broadly to refer to the processes, conditions, and criteria by which one legitimately can be said to know” (2004, p. 603). Ultimately, this project is concerned with not only what we know, but also more importantly, how we know. Further, social scientists have tended to stratify that nature of knowledge into several categories, with two in particular at the poles: foundationalism, or that knowledge is “the correspondence between mental impression and the true shape of the independently existent actual” whereas social constructionism “holds knowledge as simultaneously enabled and constrained within social achievement” (Anderson & Baym, 2004, p.

590). In other words, there is a question of the nature of reality separating foundationalism and social constructionism.

However, the nature of reality is the realm of ontology (Tracy, 2012). Anderson and

Baym explain: “In ontology, we divide over whether the objects of our analysis have an independent or socially determined existence” (2004, p. 590). Ontology itself is can be separated into a continuum of foundationalist, communicative, and discursive approaches, which then in turn orients back to epistemology (as well as axiology and methodology).

Post-Positivist Paradigm

The post-positivist paradigm itself is an evolution of the positivist paradigm—the latter assumes that “a single true reality already exists” and is discoverable through observation and measurement (Tracy, 2012, p. 39). In the communication sciences, post-positivism, however, moves slightly away from this foundationalist ontology to concede that despite our best efforts at triangulation, “humans’ understanding of reality is inherently partial” (Tracy, 2012, p. 39). Still, the effort of post-positivist inquiry is to make generalizable inferences about the events and relationships in the world (identified as reasonably stable and knowable), to make claims that describe causal aspects and patterns of behavior. With this perspective in mind, post-positivist researchers ultimately ground themselves in ontology that their research, and they, too, can apprehend at least a limited, “partial” reality. As a result, post-positivism’s relationship to epistemology is one that must operate within the scope of objectivity and discoverability.

Post-Positivist approaches prioritize research questions primarily that are “deductive and incremental” (Tracy, 2012, p. 49) and able to be tested against existing knowledge (i.e. an epistemology that is in essence foundationalist). The end result of the post-positivist research is one of causality, reliability and generalizability to the world, “building knowledge through analysis of objective behavior (behavior that can be measured, counted, or coded)” (Tracy, 2012, p. 48). The strength of this approach in social science is to have the power to essentialize and contribute a tacit understanding of how the world is constructed. Knowledge of such empirical evidence has the power to change policy, perspective and process—and post/positive research is regarded in Western society as a clear way to define the world.

As a feminist researcher and an activist I am drawn towards the post-positivist ability to produce empirical evidence as an artifact. Knowledge, especially when it assumes a clear version

14 of reality, has force and is accessible. But in terms of limitations, the post-positive approach is reductionist, often dependent on building previous (western, White, male-dominated) theory and method, and its view is often limited to the researcher’s objective reality. The embodied, multivariate positionality of the subject is necessarily reduced and erased and objectified through inherent power constructions. Thus, my goal in this dissertation is to utilize the critical paradigm to both complicate and strengthen my quantitative approaches.

Critical Paradigm

The critical paradigm is one that, in contrast to the post-positive paradigm, is ideologically focused. Researchers in this tradition aim to use power as a lens for understanding relationships. Interestingly (and usefully for the research in this dissertation) the critical paradigm occupies a boundary-spanning space that holds in tension both positivist and postmodern approaches. Tracy explains: “Research from a critical paradigm asks not only ‘what is?’ but ‘what could be?’” (2012, p. 43). In response, modern (positivist) or postmodern methods can both be useful in destabilizing sedimented theoretical scaffolds, and also providing tactical, discrete knowledge for social change. More explicitly:

Critical researchers view cultural life as a constant tension between control and

resistance, and they frame language as a type of power. Thus ideas and knowledge can

both control and liberate. (Tracy, 2012, p. 42)

From the modern side, positivists (and to a different degree, post-positivists) make an assumption about the nature of power’s existence, and then test their hypothesis of that constitution. The ontology and epistemology here (reality is knowable, knowledge is empirical) relates more directly to the discussion of post-positivism above.

In contrast, on the postmodern side, critical researchers are open to the fluid, dynamic ways in which power circulates and constitutes. Epistemologically, knowledge is mediated and contingent, dependent, multi-layered. Ontologically, the nature of reality is similarly multifaceted, embodied, partial, assembling, and reassembling. The critical postmodern paradigm, of course, is limited by its inability to commit to a “truth” as a priori. And, as such it operates as explorative and iterative, and deconstructs power structures through its process.

With that in mind, it is difficult to see how post-positivist and postmodern scholars could resolve their research ontologically and epistemologically. Yet, utilizing a critical lens, their methods are both oriented towards tying knowledge to power relationships (Tracy 2012). Many would argue that their goals are incommensurate, and in many ways I understand and agree. As a counterpoint, I would like to risk a potentiality: the critical paradigm operates as a potential bridge through and between positivist and postmodern perspectives. Haraway hints towards this when she writes, “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (1988). In other words, in order to explore “deliberate political action” we have to reflect on alternate ways to approach research. Baym and Anderson (2004, p. 608) argue: “one has to step out of the institutionally declared territories of communication to read the action.” Joey

Sprague and Diane Kobrynowicz (1999, p. 28) clarify:

Haraway agrees with Positivist arguments that it is through our sensory experience, our

bodies, that we have access to the world, but that very grounding is both the basis of valid

knowledge and a limit on it. She coined the term ‘embodied vision’ to emphasize that

our vision is located in some specific place, that our knowledge is ‘situated’ and thus

partial.

Thus, it is imperative to acknowledge the “embodied vision” as a means of collecting data, however partial. I would like to add further, that “Creating knowledge is revealing the ways practical activity to meet human needs is shaped and constrained by social relations of domination, particularly those that go beyond the immediate context” (Sprague & Kobrynowicz,

1999, p. 29). This dissertation, through its use of multiple methods and analyses, attempts to expand the context into further ripples of connected (and sometimes discordant) embodied vision.

Centering Epistemology in Methodology

First, let me clarify, more deeply, my approach to the definitions of methodology, method, and epistemology. I empathize with Sprague’s claim: “We tend to assume that a method and an epistemology are identical, and many even use terms that inappropriately elide the two, like ‘positivist methods’” (2016, p. 5, emphasis added). A method is a “process or technique for gathering and analyzing information,” while methodology is comprised of a researcher’s

“choices of how to use these methods” (Sprague, paraphrasing Harding, 1987, p. 5).

Epistemology, then, is a main logic or means of approaching the world (Tracy 2012). As a whole, the interweaving of method, methodology, and epistemology point more directly to a comprehensive theoretical position, and ultimately how to express that position in method.

Joey Sprague and Diane Kobrynowicz’s (1999) “A Feminist Epistemology” offers a helpful road map for orienting methodology in terms of my dissertation research. The authors explain that methodology is an argument about how method and epistemology are linked or “the implications of an epistemology for the practice of research” (1999, p. 25). Beyond a criticism of positivism and its antithesis, radical constructivism, they claim that there must be an alternative to the two polarities for feminist scholars (Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 1999). As a result, they

17 offer Feminist Standpoint Theory as a way for social scientists to construct a view that embodies the subjects while also deriving collective knowledge as a result. More specifically, Standpoint

Theory from a feminist epistemology claims that

[…] all knowledge develops out of specific social contexts and sets of politically relevant

interests, and that mainstream social science, like mainstream knowledge more generally,

tends to assume the position of privileged groups, helping to naturalize and sustain their

privilege in the process. To create knowledge that is more complete and less

systematically biased toward elite views, therefore, we need to ground each view of the

social world in the standpoint from which it is created and foster dialogue among those

developing the picture from different social positions. (Sprague, 2016, p. 2)

In terms of scholars, Sprague and Kobrynowicz point to Hartstock and Haraway as pioneers of Standpoint Theory, as “a mediated rather than immediate understanding” (Hartstock,

1985 as quoted in the text, p. 47). Haraway adds that we must stitch together (1988) a partial picture from situated knowledges to “build some collective, if provisional, agreement on the whole” (Sprague, 2016 p.43). As such, feminist researchers have to assemble and support the messiness of many methods of data collection (survey, interview, content analysis, ethnography), as they offer a broader access to perspectives not alienated from social life.

Given my interest in vital materiality and feminism, my decision to situate my scholarship with Standpoint Theory is a valuable intersection. (For example, I extend the observation of situated knowledges to non-human actors as an additional standpoint from which to contextualize my research.)

Part II: Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed Methods

Further, my goal for this dissertation project aligns with Sprague and Kobrynowicz’s assertion of feminist research: “the goal of research must be to help the oppressed understand and fight against their oppression” (1999, p. 35). Both quantitative and qualitative methods offer opportunities and limitations to this goal. Thinking about them in collaboration, as an assemblage, both strategies provide the rigor that supports my feminist epistemology.

Briefly speaking, qualitative methods have traditionally offered opportunities to support multivocality, reflexivity, and positionality. Through ethnographic approaches, for example, we see thick descriptions of scenes (Geertz, 1973, cited in Tracy, 2012), access to individual narratives, and a prioritization of context for sense-making. Qualitative scholars, depending on their research, embrace emic and inductive approaches (necessary for grounded theory) as well as etic/deductive approaches. Tracy explains: “Most social science research involves both inductive and deductive reasoning. Furthermore, qualitative research can work with both approaches” (2012, p. 22, emphasis original). The litany of qualities is useful and corresponds with constructing a body of knowledge for the Women’s March. However, there are important limitations of qualitative research to consider.

Qualitative research, due to its nature, has a difficult time truly producing multivocality in a way that supports Standpoint Theory. As Sprague and Kobrynowicz describe, qualitative research tends to “draw on small, homogeneous samples and is unlikely to represent people with inflexible jobs, heavy domestic responsibility, and less verbal confidence” (1999, p. 37). With a movement like the Women’s March that had millions of participants, it simply is not enough to rely on interview data or content analysis.

Ethnography, in particular, demonstrates the limitations that bound the qualitative approach for multivocality. For example, Juris (2012) offers an autoethnographic method of documenting to the #Occupy movement (in the vein of participatory action research), where he joins the #Occupy Boston camp. In his detailed account, Juris uses the framework of cultural logic to claim that social media (not just Twitter, but also Facebook and other social network sites) have moved the 20th century protest from a logic of networking—where the internet primarily was a means of discussion and connection with ideas—to a logic of aggregation. The latter, Juris claims, “involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces” (2012, p. 259). Juris’ knowledge is embodied and performed: he offers images and figurative vignettes to constitute the reality of his experience. As a narrative on its own, it offers the valuable ability to diversify and enrich the knowledge about political protest participation. In contrast, the ethnography centers his experience over those of others in 1500 concurrent #Occupy protests across 82 countries.

On the other hand, Brewer and Dundes (2018) ethnography research on perceptions of the Women’s March on Washington is essential to this dissertation in the way it is able to offer insight to the voices of African American women regarding the event. Their work, like Juris, reminds us that individual stories are also shared experiences. Importantly, Brewer and Dundes

(2018) note that despite the fact their participants were recruited through convenience sampling

(mostly friends), not one of the 20 participants felt comfortable being recorded during interviews. Interviews like theirs are essential for including populations who have long-been maliciously abused through research practices and do not feel comfortable participating in institutionalized methods (DiAngelo, 2011). In short, it is unlikely that Brewer and Dundes’ participants—or the many like them—would even feel comfortable taking my survey, as it asks

20 them to be on record. As such, I am in great debt to Brewer and Dundes’ work for helping me center questions of inclusivity in context with WMOW.

In spite of the challenges, an equally important issue at the heart of why qualitative research can only provide one part of my research goal arises from its accessibility to power.

Qualitative research must acknowledge “the constraints of collisions among institutional review boards, an audit culture, and the politics of evidence” (Tracy, paraphrasing Cheek, 2007, p.34).

Ultimately we need both empathetic revelations and operationalized, numeric assessments in concert to be persuasive in discourse. Tellingly, Juris (2012) includes empiricism as a means of triangulating his experience by citing another Schoen’s 2011 survey of a separate #Occupy camp in Zuccotti Park: “a survey of 198 individuals at Zucotti Park on October 10-11 found that just under a third of respondents identified as Democrats and another third did not identify with any political party. […] On the basis of my own observations and interactions, I would say that

#Occupy Boston exhibits a similar level of political diversity…” (p. 265). Zuccotti Park is a 4- hour drive from Boston Common; and whether or not that helps in solidifying the truth of his claim as generalizable, it demonstrates the desire to connect the experienced with the measured as testing against another construction of reality. Juris is only one of many examples of the limitations posed by qualitative research in regards to power, positionality, and multivocality.

Access to quantitative data, in concert with qualitative data, can offer a tactical advantage in relating our findings to those outside of academia.

Quantitative methods offer the corresponding piece to the aim feminist scholarship described as “the goal of research must be to help the oppressed understand and fight against their oppression” (Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 1999, p. 35). As implied above, our Western culture has been organized, and continues to be organized around knowable, communicable,

21 generalizable, objective “facts” and empiricism. To that end, Sprague and Kobrynowicz remind us that “reporting the numbers can be socially empowering, indicating degrees and/or pervasiveness of inequality” (1999, p. 38). Reports of women’s salaries in comparison to men’s have been essential in removing biases in the workplace, surveys of publication practices in the literary world through the VIDA Count (an organization that studies the lack of gender parity in publishing) have demonstrated a clear bias toward White, male authors, and as a result, publishers are reexamining their publication practices.

In an example related to political action research, Oser (2017) analyzes data from the US

Citizenship, Involvement and Democracy (CID) survey from 2005—over 1000 interviews regarding American adults’ political behavior (both electoral-oriented and non-institutionalized forms) over the previous year using Bayesian Information Criterion and Latent class analysis.

The survey is interesting in context with data collected from the Women’s March survey—they both examine types of participation (voting, petitions, campaign, internet, protests, etc). Latent class analysis (LCA) offers a means to separate the participants into broader typologies according to how they score on number of political actions taken. In particular, Oser argues “the probabilistic estimation method used in LCA ameliorates a main drawback of traditional cluster analysis, however, because LCA yields objective goodness of fit indicators that provide reliable criteria for determining the optimal number of latent classes” (2017, p. 244). This analysis offers a useful framework for separating the types of participants at the Women’s March – and offers an interesting counterpoint by portraying a population who, as our preliminary data shows, nearly all voted (if they were of age and citizenship to do so). To place the March survey in context with the CID survey may help, support, transform, or offer a counterpoint to Oser’s findings, particularly in the way that we can compare our participation measures with theirs

22 across age and education parameters. Longitudinally, I would also be interested to see the ways in which the populations have changed as a means of predicting and theorizing future behavior patterns.

An additional focus on the quantitative elements of the survey is useful and interesting; it has potential for political change. Such change is worthwhile. Working within and breaking away from systems of power and knowledge-making has always been the fulcrum that feminists explore: “The researcher’s goal is to give voice to women who have been denied it, to express their experiences in their terms” (Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 1999, p. 32). The success, risk, and inevitability of the survey is its goal of operationalizing behavior outside of context and effectively separating the participants from the full nature of their experience. Or, more eloquently:

Among the prevailing ways of organizing observations, the most problematic are the

reliance on logical dichotomy and the tendency to conceptualize individuals in

abstraction from their social context. Taken together, these conceptual practices facilitate

a third frame: objectification. (Sprague, 2016, p. 16)

If I chose to separate my survey report on the quantitative as typologies and functional data only, I would run the risk of disembodying the women who participated and objectifying them into generalities, out of context from a broader discussion to which they contributed.

Another problem with surveys arise from the ways in which categorical data can exclude or intimidate participants. A well-known quantitative tool, the U.S. Census survey, wields great power in our democracy to allocate funding, representatives, and judicial presence for each town in the country. However, one question regarding citizenship – proposed for the 2020 US Census

– has garnered great concern. The fear is that undocumented inhabitants may refrain from

23 accurately noting their presence; which then would lead to incorrect reporting for the infrastructure needs in the area, ultimately causing all citizens to suffer. Subsequently, there is a clear need for a new approach to methodology for approaching quantitative and qualitative methods, one centered in a feminist epistemology.

Thus, as a feminist scholar and researcher, it is imperative for me to be both critical and creative with my methodological strategies, to reflect on and reconstruct practices. Mixed methods, as Creswell (2013) explains, “provides a sophisticated complex approach to research that appeals to those on the forefront of new research procedures” (n.p.). This is an opportunity to bridge qualitative and quantitative research through feminist epistemology and standpoint theory.

Feminist Implementation

As I was researching feminist methods, I was surprised to read Sprague’s statement that

“there is virtually nothing written on feminist ways of implementing experiments or surveys”

(2016, p. 96). Certainly feminist researchers have, in their situated knowledges, made particular choices on how to engage with the power structure while building their surveys? I believe one way to contextualize the findings of the data would be to be more transparent regarding my method of making the survey as a feminist act (both its successes and limitations). Such an practice of describing the method of the Women’s March survey as a process and rhetorical act of feminist construction has rich potential for furthering interdisciplinary theory and contributing to “help the oppressed understand and fight against their oppression” (Sprague & Kobrynowicz,

1999, p. 35). As feminist scholars, we, too have to reconfigure the methods often created by those in power (typically White men) to include a broader entrance to knowledge building. My

24 dissertation serves as a means for modeling new ways consider the research process and share some of our findings.

A theoretical and critical analysis of the Women’s March survey construction, and the limitations of a sole quantitative report still instantiates a sense of primacy to the data as object.

For example, post-analysis, to what extent has/does our survey through its use of typologies/clusters then deny the individual voices of those who participated? The data needs to be supported thick descriptions with analysis of participants’ open-ended questions and further interviews that provide a more intersectional and situated knowledge of participants (and nonhuman actors, of course) in the March. The dissertation itself offers the opportunity for such a mixed method approach—it offers the space and time (that the medium of a research paper may not) to provide a multi-vocal, embodied, iterative, emergent, approach to knowing, the value of which offers voice to those who participated and offers empowering knowledge to the study social movements and their participants, of which I am one.

Bridging

In the next section, I will demonstrate the ways in which I applied a feminist standpoint epistemology to survey construction. As a researcher, I take responsibility in advance for my partial perspective, and invite the reader to challenge and improve my process of methodological transformation. Sprague and Kobrynowicz explain:

Feminist standpoint epistemology transforms both the subject and the object in the

epistemological relation. The subject is a collective one, strategically built on diverse

experience. The object is a socially constructed one: the meaningful, coordinated activity

of people in daily life is what is real. The relationship between the subject and object of

knowing is historically specific and dialectic. The metaphor for feminist methodology is

bridging. (1999, p. 38)

So, as this section concludes, let me extend this metaphor to us, in a meditation. For this research, I am asking us to bridge the knowledge in this dissertation. I am asking us join our disciplines and perspectives as humans and scholars on a wavering methodological structure that is being and continues to be built. I am asking us to be empathetic to the fear we each have of the heights, the vulnerability of risk-taking in the ivory tower of academia because so much institutionally and culturally has been put in place for us not to bridge. I am asking each reader to come with me on the ledge because together we can build stronger foundations upon which to walk; I am asking us to move across the discomfort of and stay as much in the present that allows us also to keep the goal of completing the bridge in mind, and I am asking us to be kind to ourselves in the process. Our bridge is one path towards situated knowledge construction; rich, exciting, and terrifying—yet much, much, much less so, having many of you to support, challenge, engage with, and share with me.

Part III: Complicating Survey Construction

“Vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in

our visualizing practices” (Haraway, 1988, emphasis original, p. 585).

A survey is a tool with which researchers attempt to “see” the world. Problematically, in an effort to separate the defining features of qualitative and quantitative methods, Tracy (2012) claims the research occupies distinctly different roles: “In quantitative research, the research instrument and the researcher controlling the instrument are two separate and distinctly different entities,” whereas “in qualitative methods the researcher is the instrument. Observations are registered through the researcher’s mind and body” (p. 25). Such polarizing statements arise

26 from a post-positivist epistemology, unable to account for a posthumanist, assemblage-theory, cyborgian approach to research. In the latter, human’s co-evolution with tools (such as paper, pens, spreadsheets) render the line between a discrete researcher and the tool itself as blurry at best. Technogenesis, as described by Hayles (2012) and assemblage theory (Latour 1988, 1994,

2005) render our agency as researchers diffused through systems, technological objects, and ideas.

To clarify, by selecting a survey tool to collect data, a quantitative researcher is influencing the agency of the data collected; likewise, by coding a series of open answers in a spreadsheet, a qualitative researcher’s connection to the data is mediated through the tool itself

(size of spreadsheet cells, for example, may limit the types of descriptions the researcher makes, or if handwriting, the tool of a pen on paper, or amount of paper, or size of paper may limit what notes are taken at all). As researchers, our methods of data collection are always embodied and diffused into and through the collection technology we use.

That interface – between survey software and researcher, or audio-recorder and researcher shoulders a portion of the agency as controlling instruments in the collection of data.

Whether that makes a quantitative researcher into a qualitative researcher or vice versa would not be the final argument here. Ultimately, quantitative/qualitative boundaries are a convenient way to silence the role of tools and our own bodies from both “types” of research (most probably because qualitative practices tend to denigrate use of empiricism which is confounded with “tool use” whereas quantitative research comes from a positivist, realist operational state that denies the participation of the human body of the researcher in the research itself). All research is embodied with technical and embodied practices.

Certainly, separating methods into the two tropes offers a clear signal of values, which is why instead of suggesting a researcher is using mixed-methods, quantitative scholars often prefer to say they triangulate with a subset of data that is distinctly qualitative (Tracy, 2012). However, there is a deep reticence to accept that by using two methods, they are in fact using a mixed- methods approach. Gatekeepers (editors and well-respected scholars) in academia certainly play a role in this continued line in the sand, reinforcing the semantic separation of quantitative and qualitative approaches. However the power structures that value the discrete nature of two ways of thinking about methodology exist, my role as a feminist researcher is to choose to, through my research, challenge and deconstruct the constraints.

I agree with Tracy (2012, p. 39), when she writes, “I still wonder, even today, whether all the time we spend defining, differentiating, and fighting about paradigms really matters that much. And, since that time, increasingly researchers have made explicit arguments about blurring their boundaries.” My research on the Women’s March is uniquely positioned to blur such boundaries, bridging them in a way that offers new agency to mixed methods research.

Situating myself as quantitative and qualitative in my field is important to sustain my view of a feminist epistemology. My research is empathetic, embodied, and positional; and accepting that a patriarchal society demands empiricism, its “audit culture, and the politics of evidence,” (Tracy, paraphrasing Cheek, 2007, p. 34) I realize that my work, in the current historical moment, will most likely have the added potential to change policy if it is reported in a way that appears to prioritize traditional quantitative values. This is a struggle, one that Haraway adeptly explains: “Struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see” (Haraway, 1988, p. 587). And, in that struggle, I ask us to see survey construction as a potential place for disruption, for feminist action.

As a part of my attempt to share my biases with the reader, I am certain elements of my background and privilege influenced, either knowingly or unknowingly, my language and approach to writing the survey questions. And, I, as a cisgender White woman born in the United

States, struggle with how to see. My vision is partial, influenced by growing up in North

Carolina, being raised by my grandmother, orphaned in as a pre-teenager, a soccer player, a liberal, feminist woman going to Vanderbilt University, never feeling deeply the fear of debt or food insecurity. I am privileged in so many ways that influence my vision and that are important to divulge. At the point of writing this dissertation, I am 35 years old, married, and have no children. I vote. I have a car. I have mortgage payments. I work several jobs in addition to my

PhD, out of curiosity and pleasure, not professional necessity. While this is only a short paragraph outlining some of my experiences, it is important to acknowledge my background as part of the implicit lens in my research. (This is still a very shallow introduction—one that I expand in relationship to the Women’s March in Interlude I: Personal Narrative.)

Also, I was not alone in developing the survey. The context for the survey construction was a required course in my PhD program on quantitative methods, and two other incredible women, Tharaa Bayazid (Saudi Arabia) and Meghana Shivanandacharya (India), contributed to the survey’s purpose, direction, and final form. We met in a classroom to develop a project that would speak to all of our research interests. Tharaa had studied the rise of women’s activism in

Saudi Arabia and was curious to understand the types of activists involved, and Meghana was

“particularly interested in knowing the socio-economic strata the participants belong to, how settled they are in life and what are the priorities in the participants' lives” (Shivanandacharya,

2017, from our class notes). Ultimately, the three of us deliberated which questions to include based on these topics, coming from different life experiences. I can only speak retrospectively to

29 my thought process for the survey development, and how we implemented some of my suggested approaches.

This is all to say that the tool—a survey, interview, or observation—is inseparable from its developer, as a painting is influenced completely by the experience of the artist who places the brush on the canvas. Similarly so, the creator is influenced equally by the tools involved in the creation. Certain constraints (i.e. the edge of the canvas, types of brushes,) reshape the possibilities for the artist, and in fact prescribe their actions (Latour, 1988). It is important to remember the agency of nonhuman actors in knowledge production and action (i.e. Chapter 3). I am not entirely certain of all of the ways in which the survey itself influenced my actions, an important caveat to include, and to that end, I will do my best to explain my relationship to the survey construction.

Reframing Survey Design and Utilization as a Feminist Act

In most quantitative research, the goal is to observe a phenomenon and through measurable, defined variables, where the analysis of these variables points to some objective knowledge or truth (Tracy, 2012). Yet, from the critical paradigm, we must understand that there is no way to separate data from ideology (Sprague, 2016). Further, Sprague explains, “Each methodology is founded on either explicit or, more often, unexamined assumptions about what knowledge is and how knowing is best accomplished; together these assumptions constitute a particular epistemology” (2016, p. 5). I would like to explore both the explicit and “unexamined assumptions” that underpin traditional survey creation, and how I have challenged these assumptions in our survey of the Women’s March.

In particular I would like to argue more deeply that the elements of survey design are a place for important feminist intervention in quantitative methodology. This is counter to the

30 current academic precedent, as Kelly, Regan and Burton (1992) remind us that traditionally the academic community has viewed “quantitative methods as antithetical to feminist work” (p.152, emphasis mine). Certainly, as it has nearly been thirty years since this proclamation, our scholarship has moved beyond a firm line, however the historical precedent and expectations of how to perform feminist research remains, particularly with the scrutiny and/or preferred exclusion of quantitative methods. Instead, I can relate to Kelly, Regan and Burton (1992) as they argue, “It is epistemology which defines what counts as valid knowledge and why. If we begin from this position then it is possible to bring feminist standpoint to a range of methods; we do not have to accept the ‘scientistic’ model of surveys or reject surveys as necessarily ‘non- feminist’” (p. 159). More simply, to reject the survey as completely flawed is akin to, please forgive the metaphor, throwing out the champagne with the cork.

I think it is useful practice to also address my survey in regards to Shulamit Reinharz’s chapter “Experiential Analysis: A Contribution to Feminist Research (1983, pp. 170-2)” as

Kelly, Regan, and Burton did with their self-report questionnaire of sexual abuse during the late

1980’s. In their assessment, the researchers assess their survey construction against conventional/patriarchal or alternative/feminist lenses in terms of the Reinharz’s key elements:

(1) units of study, (2) sharpness of focus, (3) data type, (4) topic of study, (5) role of research, (6) implementation of method, (7) validity criteria, (8) the role of theory, (9) data analysis, (10) manipulation of data, (11) research objectives, (12) presentation format, (13) failure, (14) values,

(15) role of reader. Ultimately, Kelly, Regan, and Burton demonstrate the ways in which a survey does not implicitly fall within the defined objectivist borders of traditional quantitative research. Instead, a survey is a communicative and act of communion (Reinharz, 1983) with the participants, researcher, and instrument.

However, I would challenge feminist scholars to interrogate how their surveys will be disrupting the status quo prior to implementing them. So, below, I will offer the ways in which the survey Tharaa, Meghana and I created endeavors to challenges limitations of its genre. I will focus on Units of Study, Sharpness of focus, Data type, Topic of study, Role of Research,

Implementation of method, Validity criteria, and the role of theory.

Units of Study. First, it is important to remember that “hypothesis testing is an epistemological issue” (Kelly, Regan and Burton, 1992, p. 152), which ties back to the beginning of this chapter. From feminist standpoint theory, regardless of the research questions we offer, the answers will only be partial. Language itself operationalizes, our biases operationalize, and interpretation operationalizes.

To that end, our survey had research questions, such as “How does this survey characterize the March participants” or “What is the relationship between distance traveled to the march and the household income of the participants in this survey”? The important thing about these questions is that they firmly ground the findings within the context of the survey, and acknowledge there is a reality beyond the survey findings that may contradict or intersect with the empirical findings. Further, as researchers we did not assume that there would be any correlations between variables; instead, we were curious to see what correlations and patterns emerged from the data. By looking at the data, we were able to create interesting questions.

Sharpness of Focus. According to Reinharz (1983), an “alternative or feminist” approach to sharpness of focus is “broad, inclusive” instead of “limited, specialized, specific, exclusive” (p. 151). For our survey, we were limited by language (in that our survey was exclusively available online in the English language) despite encouragement for global participation. Admittedly, this is an arbitrary barrier that narrows the field of participants and

32 types of answers. Outside of this, our survey was an incredibly complex mixture of question types.

There are two main strategies we used to help create an inclusive focus: 1) most questions (after request for consent) were optional to all participants and 2) alternative and open- ended write in options were available for some of the operationalized questions. To the first, responses to survey questions are often required in order for the participant to complete the survey. As researchers, it is impossible to know what questions in particular could be to triggering or exclusive to the participants. In our survey, we addressed this by allowing an individual to skip one or many of the questions, while their participation would still be recorded and read. To reinforce this, we included a reminder during the last section of our survey, “If at any time you would prefer not to answer, you do not need to fill out the answer to move forward, however, your responses are valuable elements of our research.” The prompt does encourage participation implicitly, by valuing the responses (and failing to value non-responses). A non- answer is provides useful data for examining our instrument and our biases around the language of each question. We could have rephrased that prompting more inclusively. Another way we attempted to reinforce inclusivity and agency was by providing a space for write-in answers, even on more operationalized questions. For example, in the question “How do you identify your gender,” we randomly presented the following options: “Male, Female, Non-binary, Prefer to self-identify as______and Prefer not to say.” Of course, offering several defined and perceived socially oppressive categories may prevent a person from filling out a blank. Perhaps providing only the open blank would have better encouraged openness and inclusivity. Another option such as “I reject the framework of this question,” might even further allow the participant to challenge the researcher’s premise. In addition to the open-ended

33 options for questions like the example above, we included “prefer not to say” as an answer choice to be inclusive of those who might feel threatened or exposed should that data become public. For example, when asking about residency and citizenship an undocumented immigrant in the United States may not want to divulge that information. It is important to note that the survey participants did engage with us on the failure of one of our multiple-choice questions: when asking about citizenship, there was no space for a person to select “dual/multiple” countries. This was a systematic error, a limitation of my lens as a person of single citizenship – it also may implicitly deny those who feel like citizens, such as Dreamers in the US to be able to claim their effective home country.

Data Type. Our survey included a range of open-ended, Likert-Type, and multiple- choice questions. The multiple-choice questions, as noted above, often offered an open-ended option where the participant would write in their own answer. Despite the limitations of the quantitative side, qualitative questions provided spaces for more depth and inclusivity, particularly in questions about behavior, feelings, memories, and their decision-making processes. It is the conversation between these two partial ways of seeing that provide a nuanced approach to the dataset. As Kelly, Regan, and Burton (1992) explain, “Survey research is one way of expanding our understanding of the dimensions and complexities of the issues that concern us” (p. 153). And, the data that will be represented throughout this dissertation will not be limited to the survey. Artifact analysis, historical analysis, and personal narrative are integral contributions to the findings of the dissertation.

Topic of Study. I, like Kelly, Regan, and Burton (1992) feel that any topic with a specific lens could identify as a “socially significant” problem (p. 151). If I look at the millions of people who participated in marching and consuming media about the Women’s March in

2017, I believe many would agree that it was a historically and socially significant event regarding issues of social justice. With the development of Women’s and Gender Studies alongside social movement research, there is a direct tie with this topic of study to active scholarly work.

Role of Research. In relation to environment/implementation of method. With a mixed- method approach that includes auto-ethnographic components (I, for one, attended the NC

Women’s March in Raleigh, a Sister March to the national phenomenon), the dissertation research as a whole provides a contextual and immersive environment that offers a “soft” or messy depth to the survey. The latter demonstrates the conventional/patriarchal goals of controlling the environment, or an “attempt to manage research conditions” (Kelly, Regan, &

Burton, quoting Reinharz, 1983, p. 151). However, one could argue that since the participants could complete the online survey from their own choice of computer environment (i.e. home, work), or even on a mobile device (commuting, outside, etc), and at any time of day, from any location in the world (that had a connection), implementation is inherently open to the surrounding environment of the participant.

In relation to subjects. As a fellow marcher, a feminist, a voting American, and an activist, I feel deeply involved with the subjects. Often, when having a difficult day listening to the news, I would feel camaraderie as I read and coded responses to the open questions in the survey.

As a person. Most memorably, my friend Joe Troop, of the Latingrass band, Che

Apalache asked me to edit a song about the immigration crisis at the United States border with

Mexico. He was writing about the “Dreamer” generation, and particularly about a friend of his who crossed into the US when he was one year old. When I spoke with Joe’s friend about his

35 concerns, I went to my research to think about the language of action that the participants shared in the question, “What made you decide to go to the 2017 Women’s March?” For the final stanza, I was inspired by their experiences:

Now, you and I can sing a song

and we can build a congregation

but only when we take a stand

can we change our broken nation

In particular, the themes of having to do something (i.e. “take a stand”) and participate in a group of voices (i.e. “build a congregation”) and being heard (“sing a song”) alongside the dissatisfaction of the political climate (“broken nation”) all resonated with me as communicative elements of collective action I saw in the responses. In short, the responses helped me underpin the foundations of the song1 in social justice communication I saw exhibited in the survey responses.

Impact on the researcher. Like Kelly, Regan, and Burton (1992, p. 155), I “anticipated that [I] would be affected by the research process” but also found that my role impacted how others interacted with me. White women would express their own decisions to March or be excited to tell me about friends who were able to go; on the other hand, women of color often regarded the March with a lens of suspicion and coolness, and tread carefully (it seemed) with how involved they got in the discussion. This personal experience was reflected in the responses to our survey; we had an overwhelming response from White participants (approximately 90%, n=641) in comparison to those who identified as non-White or of multiple ethnicities. Only two

1 “The Dreamer” is on Che Apalache’s second album, Rearrange My Heart (2019), produced by Béla Fleck on the Dirt Cheap Record label.

36 participants identified as Black or African American. I was struck with the ways in which our sample demonstrated the disparity I noticed in conversation, and as a result, I hope to focus my research to explore non-White March experiences as I continue this project.

Validity Criteria. Overall, the polarity of conventional/patriarchal vs. alternative/feminist is itself a construct that is incapable of describing the messiness of a constructed reality. “Proof” for example, as definitively “patriarchal” is problematic; in fact, the goal of feminist literature is to expand the meaning of proof to include other forms of knowing, such as narrative, understanding, and feeling. Whether the data is empirical or open, the truth that comes from the survey is both partial and real simultaneously. Ultimately it is the lens of knowing, the epistemology behind the validity criteria, that offers an alternative analysis. The polarity in context, the research offered in this dissertation offers both statistical significance and illustrativeness, rejecting the idea that such validity criteria (Reinharz, 1983) are mutually exclusive.

The Role of Theory. Research design is implicitly influenced by the originator’s approach to theory; it is written into the language chosen, questions written, and means of circulating the instrument. To suggest that theory “emerges from the research implementation”

(Kelly, Regan, & Burton, quoting Reinharz, 1983, p. 151) and not vice versa is therefore another problematic and arbitrary polarization. My feminist background in concert with the theory I had been reading prior to the survey construction had affects on my choices, some profound, some imperceptible, yet still there. On the other side, the role of theory “emerges from research implementation” as well. My interpretation of the data has contributed to my seeking literature about emotion and survey construction overall; the data have been a generative force. This approach is in sharp contrast to typical quantitative methods, wherein identifying a theory is the

37 primary driving force of developing hypotheses, operationalizing variables, and scoring results based on deductive logic (Creswell, 2013). Instead, my implementation of the survey had theoretical implications, and my analysis was interactive and emergent, allowing for the responses to direct my approaches to theory.

Disrupting definitions

Instead of spending further time contrasting my survey to conventional/patriarchal prescriptions, one can see how the pattern that emerges with this assessment of values (Kelly,

Regan, & Burton, p. 151, using Reinharz’s 1983 table) for any type of survey design goes back not to method, but methodology. If the way of knowing—the epistemology—is oriented towards an “alternative or feminist” way of knowing, then the instrument (i.e. survey) is a place for critical assessment, but is not implicitly patriarchal.

In fact, it can be entirely damaging to researchers to suggest that “meaningful patterns” could not be supported by statistical analysis, or that a story is in some way more emergent than a research report, as Reinharz categorizes. The latter becomes an issue of genre, and given my work and education as a creative writer, I do not believe genres are inherently beholden to certain systemic archetypes. A story is a report, albeit often told with a different style. The question is always of context. If instead of looking at a survey as a sterile tool of empirical means we as scholars consider the survey an ethnographic event, then we open ourselves to a broader view of method.

I understand, however, that surveys can uphold conventional/patriarchal post-positivist research and further alienate ethnography or inductive analysis as valued sources of knowledge.

It is not my desire to hold up one method over the other, instead, the goal of the dissertation is to provide ways in which survey construction can change our expectations and support a messier,

38 more positional way of thinking of data. Ultimately, a feminist epistemology is essential for framing mixed-methods work on the Women’s March because it allows for the methodology to question the nature of knowledge across qualitative and quantitative methods, it frames the results as critical and constructed, and highlights the inevitability of messy, partial, and contradictory findings. And, as I move into the next chapters, I will provide a deeper discussion of feminist techniques I utilized when approaching research questions in each method.

INTERLUDE I: PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Historically, ethnography emerged as a method that elevated the tradition of narrative as important, culturally-located data. Autoethnographic methods explicitly trouble the boundaries between object and subject in order to highlight the “innumerable ways personal experience influences the research process” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, p. 274). This Interlude is not strictly ethnography but more of a contextual autobiographical narrative with similar goals. My decision to include a personal portion stems from the desire to demonstrate more complexity in my findings, and importantly give my readers more data with which to interpret my lens as a researcher. These two goals reach toward the dissertation’s intent to center a feminist epistemology.

Part I: Why I Marched

On January 21, 2017, I attended as a participant at the Raleigh, North Carolina Sister

March. If I had been smarter, I would have taken the survey my colleagues and I created a few months later and saved the answers for a retrospective. Unfortunately, I did not. It has been two years, and is impossible for me to answer with the temporal fidelity of my dataset. But, as a means of remembering and contributing to the survey data, I will answer and analyze the open- ended question featured in Chapter 4:

In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women's

March.

As a person who has been an activist for issues under the banner of the intersectional,

anti-racist feminist agenda most of my life, I felt it was important to protest the

conservative and polarizing politics of the election, and to be counted in the resistance

against hate and inequality.

As I respond to this question, I find myself mediating my answer to contain the most meaning in the fewest words. Importantly, I am thinking about the reasons the participants of my study included—they have already reframed the way I remember deciding to march. If I were to analyze this answer the way I did the other responses, I would probably categorize this answer as “Model political activism,” “Express issues,” and “protest conservative/Trump administration” What this answer doesn’t say, though, is that I also felt both curious and uncertain about going to the March.

My curiosity stemmed from being a woman in North Carolina who as a child I remember thinking our state was relatively liberal, only to learn that my neighborhood was a space for liberal ideology and multicultural inclusivity. My parents both spent most of their childhoods living in Tustin, southern California, and were raised by non-southerners. Instead, I was a first- generation southerner—and the only one in my family, as my older sister was also born on the west coast. As a child, my parents held advanced degrees and both worked full time. My father was a pediatric nephrologist and my mother was a financial advisor. They both were active parents, and my earliest memory of participating in the political process was attending a rally for

Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election. Pictures from that day show me as a smiling four-year- old wearing a dress and sash with a political button supporting the Democratic candidate:

Figure I.1: Political Origins. Ticket to the 1998 Presidential Debate at Wait Chapel, Wake

Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC (top) and photo of Lyn Browning, Abigail Browning

(age 4), Anne Browning (age 6) waiting at the local airport to see Michael Dukakis arrive for the debates (left to right).

I remember telling adults when they asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” that I planned on being president—my parents valued gender equality and encouraged my sister and me to pursue any vocation. After my father died, my mother continued my liberal education. She taught economics, legal and political systems for junior high students

(along with French and Spanish), and at night worked on her masters in Education, transcribing

42 oral histories of Black activists in Sit-Ins during the Civil Rights Movement in Winston-Salem,

NC. I can’t remember a time where I didn’t identify explicitly as a feminist or a democrat.

I was twelve when my mother died of cancer. My maternal grandmother stepped in. She grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, and her family eventually sought a better economic future in California. Her mother, my great-grandmother, had volunteered for FDR. As part of the

Great Generation, her husband had served in World War II, part of the second wave of soldiers who sailed in Normandy. While she was more reserved regarding politics in our house as she raised me, she made a point to read the newspapers, vote in all elections, and support my goals.

Although the loss of my parents was tragic, my grandmother, sister, and I did the best we could to maintain our family’s politicized identity. When a high school teacher selected me to be a student representative for a Women’s Action for New Directions (formerly Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament), my grandmother made sure I got on a plane and went to D.C. to attend. As part of the conference, I participated in political networking, lobbied my state and local representatives, and Marched on Washington against the impending war in Iraq. I attended the conference for several years—and started a student-lead coalition called STAND (Students

Taking Action for New Directions).

After high school, I decided to go to college at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee knowing I was an outsider with a liberal agenda, only to uncomfortably watch George W. Bush be elected in my first Presidential vote. Years after, I lived in in our nation’s capital and watched

Obama win in 2008 with updates on my smartphone while riding the DC metro home from an election party at a bar. I remember the crowds of his inauguration and the cold weather—I decided to watch the historic moment on TV from my rented room in Arlington, Virginia.

By 2017, I had been living back in my home state for seven years. As the Women’s

March approached, I felt curious because as an adult, I had only known North Carolina through my visits home and my graduate school experiences in UNC-Greensboro (Masters in Creative

Writing) and NC State University (my doctoral program). During that time, North Carolina had gone red for Trump, passed a bathroom bill discriminating against transgender people, failed to take down Confederate statues, and approved an amendment requiring marriage between a man and a woman. Not the greatest legacy of our state regarding human rights. With that in mind, would anyone March? Who would be there? Would it be empty lip service for grieving White folks who have never felt their liberty threatened?

This final question fueled my uncertainty. While I had lobbied and marched before in

Washington, DC, I had never done so in my home state. I knew that going was a risk— collective experiences have agency of their own, and by participating I would be implicated in the outcome. I remember conversations in classrooms about whether or not so-and-so would be attending, and each time I had a hard time deciding how to answer.

Now that it is two years later, honestly I do not exactly remember a moment of catharsis when I decided to go. I do remember feeling compelled both by curiosity and the desire to be present. I felt my lineage of being an activist trace my decision and prepare me to go. I wanted to witness and demonstrate my investment in resisting racism and misogyny as I had the privilege, means, and ability to do so: as a graduate student, I had a flexible class schedule; as a member of the middle class, I had access to a car and money to fuel it; as an able-bodied person,

I had physical strength with which I could march; as a White person, I didn’t fear the police presence; as an activist, I had prior experience to guide me; as an American citizen, I did not fear consequences of being visible in news images; as a person from a liberal-leaning family, I would

44 not need to explain or hide my participation to maintain my relationships; as an atheist, I did not fear my clothing would make me a target of religious prejudice, as cisgender person, I did not worry about proving my womanhood. With these many privileges, I could walk comfortably down Davie Street and participate with as much vitality as I chose.

All of these identities vibrate as indelible parts of my life. Thankfully, writing, reflection, and research provide the space to simultaneously untangle and complicate our understandings of ourselves. Decisions are motivated through integrated cost-benefit analyses; core motivations of emotion, morality, efficacy, and identity (as discussed in Chapter 3). We are made of so many identities that it is hard to keep track of the way they vibrate and assemble; my individual politicized consciousness assessed that my identities aligned with the March, I felt morally bound to participate, and knew that going would produce the answer to my curiosity. Certainly I was disgusted with the Election cycle, fearful of the politics suggested by the incoming administration—but I marched both to serve my curiosity and my sense of moral obligation towards social justice.

Part II: The March

The morning of the March, my partner and I put together a backpack of snacks and water, and were met by a friend to carpool from Chapel Hill to Raleigh, which is about 35 miles. We anticipated anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour for the commute, as it was overcast and drizzling outside. On the drive, I remember seeing packed cars of people on the same route: wearing and not wearing PussyHats, sitting calmly, or waving, singing, holding signs, occasionally with painted slogans on the side of their cars. We waved to those who were on our shared journey, and most waved back (it is the South, y’all).

Since NC State University is near downtown Raleigh, we decided to park near the campus and take a bus to the city center, in order to save money and time on parking. At the bus stop, we huddled together, a high temperature expected in the mid-fifties (Fahrenheit). I attempted talking with the women around us, and befriended a woman who was holding several posters. We caught the GoTransit bus along with a full bus of mostly women; some holding signs, some with PussyHats, some wearing Raleigh’s official Women’s March color (turquoise) but all strangely quieter than I expected. I was able to talk with the person from the bus stop a little more about her experiences, and as we got off the bus, she asked if we wanted three of her extra posters—one for each of us. We thanked her and carried them as we followed a river of people towards the main route.

Figure I.2: 2017 Raleigh Sister March participants wait for the procession to begin.

People crowded the sidewalks five-to-eight across, and despite knowing that several other friends would be there, it would be difficult to find them, even with help from our smartphones.

The buildings of the Raleigh skyline receded into gray mist above us, making organizers’ orange vests and participants’ pink hats seem brighter. We waited on Davie Street for the action to

46 begin, all while people sang, chanted, hugged, and took pictures of slogans written across posters, hats, shirts, and bodies. Black Women Savvy Voters. Time to Embrace Intersectional

Feminism. LGBTQ Deserve Anti-Discrimination Laws Too. Make America Think Again. Pussy

Grabs Back. You Can’t Comb Over Women’s Rights. My Body, My Choice. Let’s Support Each

Other. Y’all Means All.

The buzzing procession moved slowly down the curb-lined streets, the low-hanging clouds threatened rain. I remember either starting or joining in chants: What do we want? Equal

Rights! When do we want it? Now! and Hey hey! Ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go! I held up the sign that our friend gifted us. I scanned the crowd for other faces I might recognize, making sure to keep eyes on my two friends so that we would not get separated. We made it to Moore

Square and found a spot on the grass to stand behind the stage, as the area in front of the platform was packed with a growing crowd of people.

Figure I.3. Raleigh Sister March participants rally at Moore Square, 2017.

While the speakers were energetic and diverse, the most engaged I felt was as part of the collective body moving through the Raleigh streets. I was anxious to keep moving when we stopped at Moore Square. After a few speakers, I encouraged my co-marchers to join me as we visited a range of informational tables and tents around the perimeter of the rally. Eventually either due to hunger or the need of a restroom, we left the rally and got a Lyft to take us to get some lunch at The Player’s Retreat, a sports bar near the university where we left our car.

As we ate, we saw people around the dingy restaurant who were also at the march, and shared knowing nods and smiles whenever in proximity. For my partner, it was his first time participating in a march. We explained our feelings—the way that being in a group of ideologically similar people felt empowering and invigorating. I remember feeling tired and thankful that we went; cautiously optimistic that the collective action would at least encourage people to be more engaged in social justice. The sense of communion and community was intoxicating.

I use the word “intoxicating” deliberately. With activism, there is danger of conflating elation with success. More often than not, elation is not part of the activist’s journey. The desire to “feel better” centers a person’s goal in the individual instead of in the institutions of power.

Comfort has a creeping ability to lead complacency. If we only do enough to satiate our discomfort, then we are not acting in the interests of justice.

I confess, I was comforted by the Sister March in NC. I felt pride watching fellow North

Carolinians stand against injustice. I felt honored to share a person’s first march experience. I felt humbled to be present. I also knew that I needed to keep working.

Part III: Research as a “Doing”

For me, being an activist is a perpetual state of action—of doing. As a graduate student, struggled with core coursework dominated by White male professors; I spoke out as a finalist list for a new hire failed to have any people of color or women; I experienced harassment, which I reported but was ignored. I sought counsel and individual courses from professors who I felt I could trust, and thankfully found a committee who could challenge and grow with me.

Also, fortunately, I have a therapist. She and I have been working together since I moved to Chapel Hill in 2014, but I have seen counselors for almost thirty years now. My mother taught me when I was six that therapy was a valuable type of healthcare. My older sister and I started going to group therapy after my father died, there we learned that grief was not shameful but inevitable and challenging part of losing. That foundation of therapy was particularly useful, as my local therapist and I had built a long history of discussing my identity as an activist. The spring of the March, we talked about the energy of being both activist and graduate student as separate but tethered identities. As an assemblage, we decided that I could leverage my anxiety and time in graduate school to focus on producing knowledge as an activist. This research is my attempt to keep learning and working towards social justice.

Figure I.4: Y’all Means All poster at 2017 Raleigh Sister March, 2017.

CHAPTER 2: PUSSYHATS AS COLLECTIVE ACTORS IN THE WOMEN’S MARCH

Introduction

On their official page, the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington cited “the rhetoric of the past election cycle” as the galvanizing force for action. However, as we study the convergence of culture and technology across disciplines, the March is an articulation of an assemblage of innumerable connections. Technologies such as mobile phones, social network sites, websites, email, telephones, and mass media contributed to the vitality of the movement— as did the negative rhetoric of the United States Republican Presidential candidate and chants of

“Build that wall.” So, too, did the online activism of Pantsuit Nation, capitalism,

#blacklivesmatter, the death of Sandra Bland, Aleppo, terrorism, pollution, the DC Metro, and the Pussy Hat Project figure into the culmination of millions of people assembling in collective action. Is it possible to backcast such a broad assemblage from its point of articulation? One way to re-assemble the articulation is to find points of kairos (moments of opportune time and measure) through historical and personal narratives (Prelude and Interlude I), another is to research participants about their motivations for attending the March (Chapters 4 and 5).

However, these two methods center on the primacy of human determinism; they leave out the things, the nonhuman actors that also influenced the event’s emergence.

While one could easily start from other nonhuman actors (i.e. weather, public screen, metro stations), the construction of this chapter centers the PussyHats (typically pink, crafted cat- styled hats that were made in connection with the March) in the analysis as a means of understanding technological politics. My focus on the PussyHats is strategic since they are often considered the most rhetorically and symbolically documented nonhuman actors in regards to the

Women’s March (Kitch, 2018), and therefore a useful entry point into the conversation.

As a researcher, I will be working my way not only backward through the digital-cultural trail, but also through the data with Bennett’s (2010, p. viii) goal of observing nonhuman

“vitality” -- how the PussyHats “act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” That being said, there is no way to disentangle an actant from its context, which is made up of other actors. As such, there is no way to separate the PussyHat from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington (WMOW). However, this chapter will attempt to discern in what ways that “thing power”—the process in which the actant and vital, vibrant part of the assemblage—is able “to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett,

2010, p. 6). The following section will introduce how theorists use terminology to situate material agencies in relationship to humans.

Human-Thing Relationships: Delegation, Prescription, and Discrimination

When humans and things interact, we see an interactive co-production of meaning and action. Overall, scholars across disciplines have had a difficult time (myself included) managing the teleology and nomenclature of things given the tangle of relationships. Sociologist Bruno

Latour is particularly helpful for utilizing terminology that bridges the human-object divide for both Bennett’s and my analysis. In his writing, Latour separates things from humans implicitly by describing actors as either “human” or “nonhuman;” the latter in this case refers in particular to the “purely ‘technical artifact’” (1988, p. 298). However, both are capable of shaping action— they are “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman […] has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events”

(Latour, emphasis Bennett’s 2010, p. viii). Things, in a way, as machines of ideology, are not without ethics (Latour, 1988) as a part of their vibrant materiality. For example, Latour argues that a door can delegate (or translate) behaviors of humans, prescribe certain behaviors to

52 humans (make them push hard to open it), it can, in turn, discriminate against human those too weak to open the door. These three terms are essential for making sense of the interactions of nonhuman actors. Latour’s use of linguistic anthropomorphism, Bennett argues, can “catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations” (Bennett, 2010, p. 99). To clarify, I will give examples of the PussyHat taking on some actions of delegation, prescription, and discrimination in the context of the Women’s March.

Delegation. There are many ways that an object like the PussyHat is able to take on

(translate or delegate) human tasks. While a door solves the problem of breaking down a wall and rebuilding it to go inside a building, the Hats themselves solved dilemmas of transportation and presence. Co-founder of the PussyHat Project, Jayna Zweiman could not attend the March in

DC, and therefore wanted to give her PussyHat to someone to wear as a representation of her presence. In her stead, the PussyHat traveled to Washington, DC from Los Angeles and was able to “march.”

Prescription. As a garment, a hat “asks” a person to wear it: it prescribes the physical action of placing it atop one’s head. Consequently, at its simplest prescription, the PussyHat’s main demand (or conative nature, in Bennett’s assessment) of its wearer was to put it on.

However, the context interacts with the prescription of such an action. For example, if the weather is cold, a person is even more encouraged to acquiesce to the hat’s request. Since the

March was scheduled for as day in January, in Washington, DC, the collaboration between location, weather, and human comfort made a strong argument for the PussyHat’s use.

Discrimination. In these intersections of multiple actors (weather, location, human comfort), one witnesses conjoint action (Bennett, 2010). A different assemblage, such as hot

53 weather at the March in Los Angeles, might encourage someone not to wear a PussyHat. Or, a

PussyHat made of heavy wool yarn, when interacting with warm weather, might dissuade its’ wearer from taking the action of putting it on. Also, the PussyHat may discriminate against people who have hair that would not fit neatly into the cap itself. For example, the PussyHat’s design easily accommodated certain hairstyles of its designers. For bigger, curlier, or braided hair (often associated with African American women), the hat was more discriminating.

Confederations of Power: Political, Cultural, and Collective Implications

As such, the PussyHat, like any quasi-object in relationship with an ecology of things, was able to discriminate not only with the actions of individuals, but also affinities that make up humans (race, gender, age, etc) and nonhumans (hair thickness, weather, geographical location, hat size, fabric/material). We as humans are composed of not-us, for example, microbiomes are foreigners that comprise us and defy our sense of self, an array of bodies (Bennett, 2010 p.112).

On a larger scale, the PussyHat was able gather groups of wearers together and similarly exclude those who had chosen not to (or could not) wear them. To put it in quantitative terms, everything is a dependent variable. There is a constant and interactive loop between our effects on one another and the assemblage as a whole (or many wholes). In this way, Bennett argues that we, too, are nonhuman; we are part of the assemblage of things.

Up to this point, however, I have framed the PussyHats in a more limited sense of human use versus their own thingly power. To argue that a thing (such as a PussyHat) is an actor as influential as a person, I am reframing the solitary role of the human subject in knowledge, identity, and world creation. In the following sections, I describe the ways that other objects in their ecosystems engage politically and culturally. The objective is two-fold: first, I would like to situate PussyHats within a series of examples that demonstrate how things interact with us to

54 form confederations with political, cultural, and collective agency; second, I follow Bennett’s example of providing a scaffolding that will “generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology” (2010, p. 4). In the final section of this chapter, I will describe the ways in which the PussyHats’ conative force prescribed a sense of collective ethics to the participants at the Women’s March.

Systemic Thing Power: Political Ecologies

Our confederations with nonhuman objects, when amplified on a systematic scale, create forms of political power. In particular, Langdon Winner’s examples are useful for demonstrating the enmeshed agency across human and nonhuman actors. Albeit from a human-centered point of view, in Winner’s theory of technological politics demonstrates the ways in which nonhuman actors such as bridges and nuclear power form affinities to create types of political power.

For his strategy, Winner (1980) demonstrates two types of political artifacts: 1) those that

“settle” a social problem through their invention/arrangement/design, or social determination of technology, or 2) inherently political artifacts—such as atom bombs—that necessitate a certain type of power structure to even exist, technological determinism. In the case of the former,

Winner (1980) points to city planner Robert Moses, who deliberately designed overpasses to be too low for busses on Long Island, systemically preventing lower-income (mainly people of color) from visiting parks and public beaches. In this example, Winner provides a dynamic ecosystem: bridges, Long Island, public beaches, race, transportation, busses, prejudice, and

Moses. The bridges delegated pathways for transit, they prescribed a type of access (no busses), and they discriminated through who could utilize access (fewer people of color). Such is one

55 political ecology in which institutional racism became enmeshed in the transportation system through a confederation of human and nonhuman actors.

On the other hand, Winner inherently political artifacts by describing the atom bomb as an example of a technology that necessitates a certain type of hierarchical, institutional system.

Nuclear power requires centralized intellectual and resource-intensive collaboration. A nuclear power plant organizes confederations of scientists, builders, city planners, financiers, consumers, and politicians around its construction. Alternatively, solar energy might be an example of a technology that could be more or less compatible with (but not predicated on) a decentralized system (Winner, 1980). Depending on the geographical region and weather patterns, any actor

(human, animal, plant, nonhuman, etc.) can utilize solar power separate from a city grid. Weeds do not need to call a power company to receive their daily light allowances—I know this because

I have NOT provided my weeds with sun, yet they still found a way to contently grow around my home. And yet, my lovely weeds also prescribe my action: alternately admiring or routinely pulling them. As such, nuclear and solar power processes are enmeshed in and organize distinct political ecosystems, with the power to determine broader centralizing or governmental processes. Ultimately, I would argue that Winner’s polarization is a somewhat false dichotomy, since I am in agreement with Bennett’s assessment that one cannot ontologically separate nonhuman/human actors) (2010). I concede that Winner’s theory of technological politics does provide insight into the ways that humans organize around the technological objects of society.

Therefore, when studying the emergence of the PussyHat as a social relationship between things, it is useful to consider Winner’s two-pronged analysis for considering the technical artifacts that participated in the March itself – a physical act, located in space.

Certainly the availability of planes, subway systems, cars, road infrastructures, sidewalks, hotels,

56 houses, restaurants, and so forth contributed to the viability of a march in Washington, D.C. In fact, Kitch (2018) argues that the March’s “communicative power owed much to cyberspace but also much to physical space, conduits that worked together, rather than oppositionally, in constructing the event’s lasting meaning” (p. 125). Had the subway systems not been working, certainly there would be an impact on the turnout. Yet, the metro system acquiesced to the needs of the PussyHats and their Marchers. The DC Metrorail system logged 1,001,613 entries on the day of the Women’s March, which is approximately 500,000 people taking round-trips— breaking the record for Saturday ridership in its 40-year history, and the second largest daily volume every (President Obama’s 2009 inauguration was slightly larger) (Duggan, 2017).

Subway systems participated by “allowing” Marchers and PussyHats to arrive at their destinations (at least Marchers and PussyHats with the means and accessibility to use them).

Thankfully (although they often do), the trains chose not to go on strike (i.e. break down or stop running) and prevent or discriminate against metro-riding Marchers. Washington, D.C.’s infrastructure, its roads and physicality, was an important actor (and collective actor) in providing access for objects and people to interact.

Confederations of things can organize, structure, and participate in our political systems.

They prescribe how to move, act, and where we can be, both implicitly and explicitly. As a result, objects influence cultural attitudes, such as racism in the case of Robert Moses bridges, or supporting democratic the right to assemble in the case of DC’s metro system. Would that suggest that the architecture of Washington, D.C. was inherently political, or even “democratic” in January 2017 for the Women’s March? Only to the extent to which the roads continued to be open, the subways worked, and people had access and felt safe participating (which, for many

57 people of color, they did not; see Brewer & Dundes, 2018). Such social relationships are infinitely complex, intractable, adaptive, and co-constitutive.

Cultural Thing Power

As with political power, material artifacts shape social practices. In particular, crafted objects and specifically textiles have been important material actors for recording less dominant, marginalized, or alternative cultural traditions. In some cases, material histories have been “the only path to reconstructing the history of some women’s lives, especially women for whom writing and its preservation was not an option” (Goggin & Tobin, 2009, p. 3). Without strained access to written literacy, the act of recording is delegated to alternative making practices and embodied in textiles such as quilts.

Material Histories: Gee’s Bend Quilts

The long tradition of quilt-making in Gee’s Bend, Alabama has produced incredible pieces of art that are composed out of the creativity imposed by poverty, with different needs, access to materials and techniques, and time to create them (Sohan, 2015). Among a myriad of essential cultural practices, Gee Bend’s quilts recorded family history and social values.

Family History. For the isolated African American community, their handcrafted quilts constituted a visual and tactile history and a map, a literacy to the place and relationships. As usable objects, they contained physical pieces of the past (a family member’s old shirt), with its inclusion, became concrete “evidence of one’s place in a social network” (Csikszentmihalyi as quoted in Sohan, 2015, p. 309). A quilt was re-embodied with the clothes that a family history inscribed. Best articulated by Gee Bend quilter, Mensie Lee Pettway, (quoted by Arnett, 2015, in

Sohan, 2015, p. 294), “A lot of people make quilts just for your bed for to keep you warm, but a quilt is more. It represents safekeeping, it represents beauty, and you could say it represents

58 family history.” As a textual “scrap” book, it reflected the conditions of the body, the inscriber, the place, the networks around it and that history could travel not only from room to room, but inside to outside, and through time.

Social Values. For those in Gee’s Bend, the quilting process was a rehearsal and record of social values and identity expectations. Mary Lee Bendolph explains her effort to teach her daughter: “Quilting ain’t easy. It takes work. It takes time. It takes faith. It takes a mind to do it.

It takes practice […] Quilting teach all of this to her.” (Sohan, 2015, p. 309). The physical and mental exertion embodied in the practice of quilting is one prized for its ability to teach those in the small town how to survive, improvise, and believe. The individual, personal creativity and additions to each quilt show the ways in which growth and change are part of the fabric of the community. By the end of finishing a quilt, one had a testimony of life, as it is, as it was, and as it can be. Quilting was an act of identity creation. The testimony, a history, can protect, guide, and wrap itself around many people. With its mobility, the quilt communicated ideas, patterns, ideology, and values, which then traveled and circulated within the social relationship of the community. Over time, the object’s interaction with others had power to affect and transform personal and societal relationships.

Given the example of the Gee Bend quilts, the dichotomy between “inside” and “outside” or inherent to/imposed upon an object by humans as put forth by Winner (1980) comes across as dictatorial. Instead, it is more useful to return to Bennett’s theory, with the goal of finding a more

“horizontal representation of the relation between human and nonhuman actants in order to be more faithful to the style of action pursued by each” (2010, p. 98). I argue even more so, to consider the ways in which confederations of things and humans (i.e. bridges, solar power, metro systems, quilts, hats) are performative, along the lines of Karen Barad, where “matter is not a

‘thing’ but a doing” (paraphrased by Puar, 2012, p. 57). The primacy of process in assemblage informs us that power is not stable, static, or discrete.

Mobile Power: The Porous Boundary of Public and Private

In the section on political power, I offered examples of public infrastructures. In contrast, with cultural power, I focused on a domestic scene in Gee’s Bend. The de facto separation is a deliberate commentary on the way humans tend to separate private from public spheres. The separation is mainly semantic; all objects have the ability to travel via imagination, replication, or representation—if you happened to be reading this paragraph at home, you have brought the infrastructure of the DC Metro to mind and into your room. Yet, objects that are physically able to travel are uniquely positioned to trouble the boundaries of public and private. For example, quilts have a mobility that bridges do not. That physical mobility in turn is traced back to the fact that we, as human bodies, are (typically) mobile. For example, in Gee’s Bend on laundry day

(weather permitting), the quilts would travel from inside to outside. And, because mobile objects carry with them their local cultural and political ecologies, textiles (such as the PussyHat) are uniquely situated to influence the way humans interact with the world, particularly in social movements. The next section describes the ways in which textiles—the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the hoodie—have shaped public discourse and activism.

Making Private Grief Public: The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a collection of quilts that challenges public and private discursive practices through collective action (Blair & Michel, 2007). As a political piece and a memorial, it is a terminally unfinished multi-authored work. Each three-foot by six-foot panel that builds the quilt is made as a memorial to the life of the person who died from AIDS. To get a sense of the scope, as of 2006, over 80,000 names were represented: “A number of the earliest

60 panels carry only the first name, protecting the individual’s legacy or his surviving partner or family from the stigma of the disease or from being outed” (Blair & Michel, 2007, p. 599). The entire project is massive.

But the AIDS Memorial quilt is more. The panels hold personal items of the deceased— hats, hair, leather, hose, flip-flops, cremation ashes, corsets, wedding rings—to name a few, placing their personal lives on public display. Many of the quilts include the signatures of their creators. Like the Gee’s Bend quilts, it provides a material history; the installation is a public memory of not only the dead, but those who made the panels as well. This personal display of relationships, and through commemoration, grief, troubles the boundary of public and private.

The AIDS Quilt, in its materiality “new institutions, procedures and concepts able to collect and reconnect the social” (Latour, 2005, p. 11). Private grief becomes public grief. Public memorial becomes private memorial. Grief becomes material. Material guides the grieving process.

Reshaping the Body: The Hoodie and Trayvon Martin

Like other textiles, wearables (human-worn items) are mobile; however they do even more to confront the boundaries of our environments and ourselves. Nguyen (2015) explains,

“Because clothing is both contiguous and not contiguous with what it covers—skin, flesh—it is a mutable boundary that asserts itself within a field of matter, forcing us to confront the intimacy between bodies and things, and the interface between their amalgam and the environment” (p.

792). Certainly, histories of garments in collective action (i.e. the hoodie, as a contemporary example) are an essential part of that lineage, and would take several books to begin to understand all relationships (see Goggin & Tobin, 2009). Such work is fruitful and necessary, and I hope that my contemporary history of the PussyHat in relationship to the Women’s March will add to that lineage.

The hoodie is an example of an essential precursor to the PussyHat. Both hoodie and

PussyHat resurface the body, they act as political and cultural symbols of collective action, emerging from significant historical events. In February 2012, civilian George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black man. Nguyen (2015 p. 791) describes the hoodie as a “central player” in the narratives of Martin’s murder. That day in Sanford, Florida, Martin’s friend, Rachel Jeantel, had encouraged him to cover his head not only because it was raining but also because Martin was being followed in a truck (and then on foot) by an unknown man. To

Martin’s killer, the hoodie was a characteristic noteworthy for describing to the 911 dispatcher— an identifier of criminality—despite Martin’s innocence. The hoodie, as an object, quickly became a cultural representation of the ways in which systemic racism creates violence against people of color.

Given its multifaceted cultural interpretations, the hoodie “populated the landscape of protest and punditry” (Nguyen, 2015, p. 791), and quickly became an object of power within collective action. Protesters organized Million Hoodie Marches in solidarity with Martin, public figures questioned the risk of the hoodie for their black and latinx children (Nguyen, 2015) and some legislators drafted bills that criminalized wearing hoodies in public spaces (Unsicker-

Durham, 2018). But a hoodie is more. Because of the hoodie’s individual and collective ability to manipulate culturally dependent perceptions, it is able to “heighten anxieties about epistemic surety” (Nguyen, 2015, p. 793). In context, such anxieties, emotions, motivate our decision- making practices (see Chapter 3), and in the case of the innocent young Trayvon Martin and his friend, Jeantel, the hoodie meant protection; whereas with Zimmerman (Martin’s assailant), the hoodie meant danger.

In response, thousands gathered in Union Square, New York City on March 21, 2012 for the Million Hoodies March. The creator of the event, Daniel Maree, encouraged participants to share pictures of themselves wearing hoodies to demonstrate that “a black person in a hoodie isn’t automatically ‘suspicious’. Let’s put an end to racial profiling!” (Maree, D., Paleno, S., &

Blank, A., 2016). Within days, over 300,000 pictures flooded Twitter (Million Hoodie March

Founder Cites Power of Youth, 2012, n.p.). The hoodie is a complex actor individually and collectively as it interacts with power structures. As Nguyen (2015, p. 792) explains, “Thus does fabric—as a possible surrogate for flesh, where flesh is the overdetermination of metaphysical substance— participate in the racial mattering and sovereignty of bodies in world-shaping ways.” Protesters who chose to wear the hoodie in protest of Martin’s death aimed to reshape the collective assemblage in which the hoodie existed, they aimed to create new vibrations and vitality, as a means of resisting the pathways of racial profiling.

With such examples of the vitality in textiles and wearables, the PussyHat offers a rich space to examine our relationship with wearable objects as co-producers of collective action. As a wearable, the PussyHat is both object, nonhuman, but interacts with the human as it resurfaces the body. It is an image (a sea of pink PussyHats) that comes into being through drone footage

(object to object) and then is remediated on the public screen. It is constituted of material (often yarn), color (often pink), and these performances are active with their contexts (the weather, the people). The hats travel, physically and digitally, through image, video, people, and mail carriers. PussyHats belong, yet do not belong, to the maker and sometimes a different wearer.

They perform virtue signaling, ascribing different virtues to different audiences (often separate virtues from their wearers). And, of course, they are hats.

Culturally, the PussyHat is such an actant, one that delegates, translates, and prescribes behaviors as part of its “life” in the world, and it is valuable to observe the ability for tools— such as the PussyHat—to shape human interaction as much as humans shape tool interaction.

There is no way to separate an actant from its context, which is made up of other actors. As such, there is no way to separate the PussyHat from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington

(WMOW). As a part of the collective action, it is useful to investigate in what ways the

PussyHat’s “thing power”—the process in which the active and vital, vibrant part of the assemblage—is able “to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett, 2010, p. 6). In the case of the PussyHat, we see thing power manifest as a garment for a winter protest, a mobile unit of representation, an expression of creativity, an intergenerational prayer, a “sea of pink” (Mehta, 2017, n. p.), a meme, a symbol of strength, oppression, restitution, love and despair.

The Emergence of The PussyHat

How did the PussyHat develop its agency in the Women’s March? Like us, nonhuman actors derive power from their contexts. While thousands of people created, shared, gifted, and bought pink hats as a symbol of their participation in the Women’s March, Hayles (2010) cautions us that agency is “distributed among both human and non-human entities” (p. 97); that ultimately, self-determined agency is an illusion. Instead, the PussyHat’s entanglement with agency weaves through a loom of human and nonhuman networks.

Human Actors and the PussyHat

As a textile, the PussyHat has its roots in a local knitting class in California. Owner, Kat

Coyle opened The Little Knittery in downtown Los Angeles in October of 2012 (“Kat Coyle’s

Ravelry Store,” 2017). One election cycle later, friends Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman became

64 beginner knitting students at Coyle’s store, a place where they had the “time, and breath to really have conversations” (Hamasaki, 2017, n.p.). After Trump was elected, November 8, 2016, the focus of their conversations turned towards the fear and concern over potential loss of gender equality and women’s rights under a conservatively held senate, house, and presidency.

Suh decided first to go to the Women’s March on Washington in D.C., and Zweiman, determined to show her support there too despite being unable to fly to the Capitol, brainstormed an idea. The two women approached Coyle with a concept—a plan to “visually show someone what’s going on” (Metha, 2017, n.p.), they wanted to knit a garment that would make a statement at the March. A convergence of both weather (D.C. is colder than L.A.) and ideology lead their knitting teacher, Coyle, to develop the pattern for the “Pussy Power Hat”—later shortened to

“PussyHat”—a simple folded-rectangle pattern with corners that stick up like cat ears when placed on one’s head. By November 22, the Pussy Hat Project (PHP) was up and running, launching a website (PussyHatproject.com) and sharing on Instagram with the hashtag

#PussyHatProject with the help of artist and zine community member, Aurora Lady

(PussyHatProject, 2016) who designed the cover art and interior messages for the pattern PDF.

Figure 2.1: Pussy Hat Project official pattern cover page. Design by zine artist, Aurora Lady,

2017, from the PussyHatProject website.

These four women all brought divergent and necessary elements to the assemblage. Kat

Coyle offered her expertise with the “Pussy Power Hat” pattern as a seasoned knitter, specifically considering the ease of the pattern (she made it as simple as possible) and the warmth it would provide. Krista Suh planned to go to the Women’s March, and Jayna Zweiman, wanting to show her support, initiated the PussyHat concept. Finally, Aurora Lady’s artwork

66 offered a backdrop to legitimize the pattern and the project itself. At this moment, out of their hands, the PussyHat, imbued with affect and vibrancy, began to “manifest traces of independence or aliveness” --a vital materialism (Bennett, 2010, p. xvi)--the pattern itself was downloaded by over 100,000 people (Garfield, 2017, n.p.). While this human-centric history helps provide a timeline, it only obliquely demonstrates the ways in which nonhuman actors (i.e. the Election, Los Angeles, The Knittery) inevitably participated in the ecology of the PussyHat’s emergence.

However, before it became a pattern, the PussyHat relied on the ways that the word

“pussy” had already traced histories of violence and prejudice. Pussy, slang for “vagina” is often used as a means of demeaning and objectifying female-identifying people. Conversely, when used in reference to those who are male-identifying, it is meant pejoratively to belittle and ridicule them as weak. In the case of the Hat’s name, the use of pussy is a direct rejoinder to a leaked 2005 Access Hollywood interview during which Donald Trump casually bragged to the host, Billy Bush: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. [...] Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything” (Bullock, 2016, n.p.). Even though this interview was published a month before the Election, Trump’s words were still dismissed as “locker-room talk” by many and his support remained intact, and as a result, Trump’s derogatory use of “pussy” from the video quickly became a thing of power that elicited outrage from artists and activists. Within a day, Amanda Duarte and Stella Marrs’s viral image of a cat baring its teeth in defiance became a viral Internet meme. The image included superimposed words, “NOV. 8 PUSSY GRABS BACK”: a call to action for those with female genitalia (and their allies) to “grab back” power through voting in the presidential Election

67 against Trump. Soon after the hashtag, #pussygrabsback, followed, along with protest music such as a song by Kim Boekbinder -- another response to Trump’s interview, “triggering for

[Boekbinder] as a survivor of sexual assault” (Puglise, 2016, n.p.). With the gathering momentum of things (misogyny, memes, hashtags, songs), the PussyHat acted within a landscape of thingly micropolitics. As a result, the PussyHat’s ethics were and are enmeshed in a complicated “set of relays between moral contents, aesthetic-affective styles, and public moods” originally as way to respond and reclaim language (Bennett, 2010, p. xii). Thus the term

“pussy” was already a potent actor in the assemblage; it was a nonhuman actor that guided decision-making when Suh and Zweiman asked Coyle to design a pattern for the hat that would march with them on Washington.

The PussyHat as Public Action

While the PussyHat itself could have become a one-time creation unique to those at The

Little Knittery, it was uniquely situated to become a symbol for the Women’s March on

Washington. As Bennett (2010) describes Dewey’s theory of public and conjoint action,

“harmed bodies draw near each other and seek to engage in new acts that will restore their power, protecting them against future harm, or compensate for damage done” (p.101). The

PussyHat, as an actor and rhetorical symbol, a public and conjoint action, is “doing” all three things: response, restoration, and protection. Put simply in terms of its creators’ expectations for its values, the PussyHat was a response to the Election, a restoration of ownership to the word

“pussy,” and a garment that could protect the women from winter weather while at the March. In the final sections of this chapter, I explore the following question: as part of the Women’s March assemblage, what collective ethics and morality did the PussyHat express? The inquiry follows my dissertation’s feminist epistemology: our reality is one of “webbed accounts” composited

68 from local knowledges that offer oppositional, interactive, and intersectional positioning

(Haraway, 1988).

Political Ecologies: Relentless Morality of the PussyHats

“No human is as relentlessly moral as a machine, especially if it is (she is, he is, they are)

as ‘user friendly’ as my computer.” –Latour (1988, p. 301)

The PussyHats as symbols, in a way, as machines of ideology, are not without ethics

(Latour, 1988) as a part of their vibrant materiality. In fact, as a response to the two-way relationship, they also prescribe certain values and actions to humans, and reshape the world by doing so. When things are able to delegate, prescribe, and discriminate on behalf of a group, they become symbols with collective force.

Thus, the PussyHats from the Women’s March developed their own morality, sociality, and means of shaping the environment and responding to the environment around them. If the

PussyHats were “just hats,” then there would be no conflict or controversy in their being part of the march. Instead, we see how their shape, their associations to historical moments make them vital, vibrant, and interactive participants in the conversation. Individually, each PussyHat is “a highly moral, highly social actor that deserves careful consideration” (Latour, 1988, p. 298). As a public that was constantly intersecting with humans, PussyHats prescribed and delegated a complex morality that was distinctly anti-Trump, pro-[White, cis]Women’s Rights, open source, visual, and mobile.

Anti-Trump. Suh and Zweiman’s initial desire to respond to the Election of Trump and

“condemn Trump’s admitted sexual aggression toward women” (Kitch, 2018, p. 120) is an entry- point to understanding the PussyHat’s moral agency. The rhetorical event of the Election held a thingly power that motivated the PussyHat Project’s actions. The two women were not alone in

69 such a desire to respond as presidential challenger, Hillary Clinton, won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, and many polling outlets had predicted she would be a landslide winner (Mercer, Deane, & McGeeney, 2016). Further, demographically speaking, 54% of women (total) voted for Clinton (with over 94% of women of color supporting her as the presidential candidate) (Tyson & Maniam, 2016; Vick, 2017). The Women’s March on

Washington, therefore, was an apt initial location for responding to the election result despite women’s majority support of Clinton. For women who felt their votes were invisible after the election, a bright pink hat was a way to enhance and reclaim visibility. According to Suh, the

PussyHats are specifically a response to political invisibility—they are “about women refusing to be erased from political discussion” (Garfield & Robinson, 2017, n.p.). Even the pattern for the hat voices its vibrant materiality—the aim to “make a unique collective visual statement which will help activists be better heard” (PussyHatProject, 2016, n.p.). To take the pattern’s logic further, the creators suggest that without the “sea of pink” hats, that the message of the Women’s march will not be as strong. Even though thousands of people were planning on attending the march, the hat is a response to the concern that the bodies themselves (perhaps like the votes for

Hillary Clinton) will not be enough to “be heard.” The PussyHat through its own agency is a vital member of a public that can “participate in conjoint action,” add its voice, (Bennett 2010, p.

103) and, ultimately enhance the public response.

As a symbolic identifier of a person’s voting record (anti-Trump), PussyHats also can act as a type of virtue signaling (a public expression of righteousness) particularly for White women voters. Since only half of White women voted for Hillary Clinton, the PussyHat is a uniform that broadcasts an anti-Trump political identity. However, as a wearable technology, this type of identity is removable—unlike skin color. In contrast, given the statistics from the Election, one

70 could expect 94% of black women to have voted for Clinton regardless of their headwear. As an assemblage of human and material, the hat embodies skepticism regarding the permanence of values, and the privilege of being able to discard values (or don them) when necessary, appropriate, or useful. Once the PussyHat became a symbol associated collectively with White women, it therefore enunciated the politics of White privilege in activism. Notably, this does not mean that a person of color wearing a PussyHat would also have the same impact; it is to say that intersections (activist + race + PussyHat + gender) form unique alliances based on their own specific agency. Ultimately, the PussyHat co-constitutes morality differently with, to, and for people of color. Collectively, the desire to perform as anti-Trump is a White-centered necessity, and in doing so, the PussyHats model the moral problem of White feminism by providing

“disproportionate attention to the voices of White women” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 48).

Pro [White, cis] Women’s Rights. From an ideological standpoint, the PussyHat, with its distinctive shape and pink color, became an identifier for those who were sympathetic to

PHP’s goal to be “STRONG” and “unapologetically stand for women’s rights”

(PussyHatProject, 2016). As a visible symbol, the hats functioned like other political paraphernalia, to “speak to the overall political discourse” (King, 2016, n. p.), externalizing ideals and as a delegate of political and intellectual interaction. As one knitter remarked, “I wore it to my local women’s march, one of perhaps 600-plus worldwide offshoots of the January 21

Women’s March on Washington in D.C. I marched because I wanted to remind my new president that our government exists to protect the nation’s most vulnerable citizens” (Sobo

2017, n.p.). As a participant myself during the Women’s March on Raleigh, a Sister March to the

WMOW, seeing cars and busses full of PussyHat-wearing people made me feel not only

71 supported, but safer. Like a Hillary Clinton bumper sticker, I knew at least that those wearing the hats valued my rights as a [White] woman, human, and part of our global community.

Further, the PussyHat requires that those who make it and wear it transform the meaning of “pussy” from a word of dehumanization to one of power. While the hat does have a cat-like appearance, the name “Pussy Power Hat” was a direct effort to restore value to the word “pussy” and to those who have female genitalia. On the pattern, the PHP denotes this transformation:

“We chose this loaded word [pussy] for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment.” In addition, they clarify, “Women, whether transgender or cisgender, are mistreated in this society. In order to get fair treatment, the answer is not to take away our pussies, the answer is not to deny our femaleness and femininity, the answer is to demand fair treatment” (PussyHatProject, n.p.) Despite of and in response to the Access Hollywood recording, the PussyHat ultimately, by its name, was able to re-integrate into conversation that had been dominated previously by “pussy” as a means of shame, and transform, hollow out, and recast “pussy” as a collaborating, active, and vibrant force.

Coincidentally, two stipulations that the PHP placed on the hats--that they be pink and that they were called “PussyHats”-- motivated some to protest outright. The dissonance arose from the fear that the color “pink” and “pussy” was too limiting for marchers--it suggested that being feminine was relegated to those who had specifically pink vulvas and vaginas, and was therefore both racist and transphobic (Riddell, 2017). In fact, participation itself became synonymous with the pink hats, “Yet the most effective evidence of the number of participants was the unrelentingly pink color in media images—the sea of hats” (Kitch, 2018, p.123, emphasis mine). While PHP explained later that was not their intention, the thing power of the collective pink PussyHats had already formed a local cultural condition with relentless morality

(Latour, 1988) that excluded transwomen and women of color. As a result, the PussyHats themselves deterred participants and circulated the rhetoric of unequal representation at the

Women’s March (Presley & Presswood, 2018).

Figure 2.2: Screenshot of Kat Coyle’s Ravelry Site for the PussyHat Project.

Open Source. Following Levine and Prietula’s definition of open source (2013, n.p.), the

Pussy Hat Project follows the four principles of open source: “participants create goods and services of economic value, they exchange and reuse each other’s work, they labor purposefully with just loose coordination, and they permit anyone to contribute and consume.” Not only was the pattern for the PussyHat free to download online (on ravelry.com and the PHP), on the website, there are four additional patterns for knitting other than the Coyle’s Pussy Power Hat, four crochet patterns, and four sewing patterns. Further, the “PussyHat Project Knit Pattern” welcomes redistribution and remixing from its participants. While there are a few “loose” guidelines, the pattern encourages craftivists to “make any warm hat -- you can knit it, crochet it, it can have cat ears, it can have a pom-pom, etc.” Finally, the PHP shows the crafters how to

73 send their work with those attending the WMOW--in exchange for representing the knitter’s presence or support.

Open source objects, too, are imbued with a sense of independence and “anti-globalist, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist ideology” often found in craftivist communities (Pentley, 2008, n.p.). The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fiber arts culture has long-been part of the (often paradoxical) craftivist legacy in the United States. In another example of political garment work, in order to boycott British textiles during the American Revolution, women spun their own fabric during the nonimportation movement of the 1760’s (Ulrich, 2009). In the years of the Civil War, escaped slave Sojourner Truth reportedly taught sewing and knitting to refugee camps of freed people so that they might become “financially independent” (Hermanson, 2012, p. 3). More recently, in the early 1990’s the Riot Grrrl movement rallied around the DIY culture as a means of reinserting themselves into the male-dominated punk scene, creating their own “personalized, one-of-a-kind objects” (Pentney, 2008, n. p.). This year, in the tradition of sharing and community building that open-source culture generates, PHP “organized knit-alongs -- where people [could] learn how to make the hats together -- in 100 knitting shops across the country” (Garfield & Robinson, 2017, n. p.). With the Internet as a resource, the international knitting and crafting community also participated (Garfield & Robinson, 2017).

As a result of the open source ideology, every PussyHat had the potential to be a unique artifact that made room for the “multiple and intersecting identities” that the WMOW called for

(Mission and Vision, 2017). But an open source ideology can often prioritize those with power because of its intersection to access. Historically, so-called open knitting circles have had implicit cultural biases. During abolition for example, “most [White] female anti-slavery bees prohibited freed black women from joining” (Sapelly, 2016, p. 2). Even today present-day

74 sewing circles have “tendencies to socially divide” (Sapelly, 2016, p. iii) and lack representation of men. The value of freedom of open source, with all of its cultural complications, was an important ethical boundary that opened the door for a range of ages, skills, and identities to participate.

Visibility. From the beginning, the PHP imagined a “sea of pink” that would create a

“powerful visual statement.” Given the innumerable range of mass and social media outlets, the pink hats valued selfie-readiness. Overall, Kitch (2018) argues that the March’s newsworthiness was due to its “visual nature” and that “media coverage privileged photographs, and those images were vividly pink” (p. 120). As the top-most garment, they would be visible in selfies, drone coverage, and interviews, from every angle. When viewed in aerial or composite photographs, the pink PussyHats “united marchers into a visual formation, which was especially striking on recognizable historic and tourism landscapes” (Kitch, 2018, p. 123). Unlike a lapel ribbon or political t-shirt that might be covered by a jacket due to weather, the PussyHats dominated the march with their pink visual rhetoric.

Figure 2.3: Independence Avenue in Washington, DC at peak Women’s March crowd density. Composite image by Joe Ward based on video from Urdu Voice of America.

While it is difficult to ascribe a number to the hats at the WMOW, crowd scientists

Altenburg and Still reported “at least 470,000 were at the women’s march in Washington in the

75 areas on and near the mall at about 2 p.m. Saturday” (Wallace & Parlapiano, 2016, n.p.).

Preliminary statistics from an ongoing survey my colleagues and I are facilitating note that between 46% of respondents who marched in Washington, D.C. wore PussyHats--which would suggest the “sea of pink” could have contained over 200,000 hats. In addition to news photographers and videographers, approximately 90% of the same survey respondents at the

WMOW took and shared pictures/videos of the March. Overall, the collective force of the

PussyHats was “to make visually indisputable the massive size of the crowds” (Kitch, 2018, p.

120). As a visual phenomenon, the bright color and access to technology had a strong social media and interpersonal presence.

Figure 2.4: TIME cover featuring photograph by Danielle Amy Staif for TIME (right); The

New Yorker Cover featuring knitter and March participant Abigail Gray Swartz’s illustration, “The March” (left).

Ultimately, the PHP and images of the PussyHat were not only featured on, but garnered their own magazine covers for publications that often showcase top politicians, artists, and world leaders such as Time and The New Yorker.

Further, given the mainstream media coverage, libraries and museums started collecting the hats to put on display. Instead of leaving the discarded materials on the National Mall, the

Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History collected the things left behind by the

Marchers. McLaughlin, chief curator of exhibitions and collections at The Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, claims that the PussyHats are the “largest example of craftivism in recent history” (Dellatto, 2017, n.p.). Similarly, Michigan State University Museum is also calling for PussyHats for their collection, as the WMOW “fit several of the museum’s missions to document women’s history, policy history, and popular culture” (Putnam, 2017, n.p.). Across the pond, the Victoria and Albert Museum selected and acquired a PussyHat for their Rapid

Response Collecting project, which holds items that “are evidence of social, political and economic change, and as a group they form a permanent legacy of objects that help visitors and researchers make sense of the world we live in today” (Jones 2017). The PussyHat, with its ability to pose for covers and feature in museums is hardly inert; on the contrary, it is

“vibratory,” a source of action (Bennett, 2010).

Mobility. Finally, mobility comes into play with both open source and visibility values.

According to the Pew Research Center, “the vast majority of Americans --95%--at the time of the March owned a cellphone of some kind” with 77% owning a smartphone (“Mobile Fact

Sheet” 2017, n.p.). We sometimes take for granted the ways in which, “mobile technology suggests the possibility of a constant, fixed expectation about who one is and one’s level of accessibility and engagement” (Dourish & Bell, 2011, p. 118). Further, the PussyHat is able to

77 extend the mobility of the maker--as a representation and an actant for the maker, the PussyHat can “attend” the WMOW even if the maker, like Zweiman, could not. Sheller and Urry (2006) describe wearables within the network model, and argue a case for the decentralization of

“place” into relationships and proximities. Thus, proximity (standing next to someone) or relationships (knowing someone going to the march) operate as motivating factors that help the

PussyHat move--or be more mobile—than its creator. As a result, thousands of Hats were distributed and mailed to D.C. to be handed out for the March. Mobility, whether through the internet or through a crafted PussyHat, was an expectation woven into the cultural fabric.

Mobility is tied to shareability, transferability, and remote participation--values and expectations also supporting the PHP vitality. The practical size, cost, and uses of the hat -- lightweight, foldable, easy for travel, warm, visible, wearable--add to its mobility. Because the

PussyHat has a relatively low cost (a few hours of time, minimal yarn), it has high transferability. Thus, the PussyHat’s mobility added a unique element to the WMOW: remote, but still physical participation. In addition, Pentney (2008) argued “the abundance of online knitting resources has amplified knitters’ access to communities and provided them with a global platform for both virtual and ‘real life’ events planning, interpersonal relationships and outreach”

(n.p). For example, an Instagram post showing a woman wearing an oxygen tube, draped in pink and purple yarn, read, “This old lady, my feisty 83 year old mom just knitted six hats in three days. She can’t physically be at the march with us, but when she looks at the crowds on TV she will know she made a difference in her own small way” (Pearl, 2017, n. p.). Through mobility— donating, mailing, and giving the Hats to marchers, the makers were able to participate themselves in both physical and virtual spaces.

As a mobile technology, from a practical standpoint, the PussyHat interacts with a human need as one travels outside: protection against the elements. One nonhuman assemblage was the combination of the PussyHat with the weather. The pattern reads (image below):

Figure 2.5: Screenshot of the PussyHat Pattern with instructions for transferring hats. The text reads: “If you are a knitter who wants to participate in the Women’s March on Washington

D.C., but perhaps cannot attend yourself, please consider making a PINK HAT for a person who will be there. The weather in D.C. that day will be a high 35-45F and a low of 15025F, so hats will be practically important to keep warm.”

Certainly, there was a chance that “warm weather could relegate PussyHats to the back of a hundred thousand dresser drawers, becoming more of a relic than a signifier” (Walker, 2017, n.p.). But on January 21, the weather was cool, hovering between 43-50 degrees (F) (Rogers &

Fritz, 2017), and the PussyHats performed not only as symbols of strength for women’s rights, but also as shields against the elements.

In addition, the pussy as genitalia, as hidden object, becomes visible as embodied in the

PussyHat. The pussy becomes transferrable, so that those without a vulva or vagina can also have one, which ultimately broadens the world of what is “woman” in the force of collective action, and therefore allows more people to participate. To clarify, with the PussyHat, as with any vibrant matter, “not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief”

(Bennett, 2010, p. 13). More to the point, the PussyHat transgresses borders of language and the

79 human body; it expresses a dualism that contains and permeates boundaries of power where wearers both understand and overturn the expectations of the word “pussy.” In this way the

PussyHats, when worn, are conative bodies able to enhance the power of the activity by forming alliances with other bodies (Bennett, 2010, as described by Jackson & Xiong, 2017). As mobile technology, the hats allowed wearers to support Women’s rights despite their embodied genitalia. However, given the way in which pink excluded, implicitly, people of color and centered cis-women, the PussyHats, even in that mobility, transferred the politics of exclusion within the umbrella term of Women’s Rights.

The Women’s March, PussyHats, and Collective Thing Power

The Women’s March on Washington provides a vibrating ecology of human and nonhuman actors situated in a kairotic moment through which researchers, like myself, can observe specific articulations: symbol emergence and prescription of collective ethics. The

PussyHat’s ability to respond, reclaim, and protect manifest with vibrant materiality--and coalesce as a symbol with political, personal, and linguistic force. There is a sense of aliveness that vibrates from each of the PussyHats--potential energy, they are “vital players in the world”

(Bennett, 2010, p. 4). The pink, handmade, knitted PussyHat demonstrates vibrant materiality, thing power located in its value as a symbol to respond, reclaim, and protect as well as exclude and oppress. As an actant, the PussyHat prescribes ethics emerging from a new mobilities paradigm that is open source and values visibility in social and mass media.

In order to understand the Women’s March, we need to take a cyborgian approach,

“listening” to the actors both human (Bob Bland, Local Organizers, Non-Marchers, Survey

Participants) and nonhuman (PussyHats, polemic speech acts, weather, Facebook, the internet, emotions) to understand how they intersect and assemble into a quantifiable event – The 2017

Women’s March. To one end, the human actors offer a pragmatic approach to understanding motivation and constructing means with which to engage, reconfigure, reflect, and produce new feminist practices to fight systematic oppression. However, that struggle is an empty one without the knowledge of the intersections of nonhuman actors—their actions and strikes contribute and co-evolve with our own identities and social construction.

Objects can galvanize and demotivate populations based on the politics they delegate and prescribe. In a collective effect, that morality is complex and amplified. All objects are affective; thus when they come into contact, they resurface and reshape our affinities. We have to worry the boundaries of our identities with deliberate and continuous interaction with the performance of our values. Importantly, we must continue to interrogate and listen to the ways the objects determine, either individually or collectively, our relationships.

INTERLUDE II: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WOMEN’S MARCH SURVEY

Like the PussyHat, our particular survey is a nonhuman actor impressed with its own values and genealogies. Thus, a description of the survey’s origination and development provides necessary transparency and context to the project as a whole, since survey instruments (and their creators) are part of the assemblage that indelibly impacts the recorded responses. As part of the dissertation’s overall methodology, it is essential to share the story of our research tool’s origination and the acts as a co-constitutive actor throughout analysis.

The Story of the Women’s March Survey

In early January 2017, I enrolled in a quantitative methods course at North Carolina State

University. One required course assignment was to conduct a research study, where the survey method was a suggested template. The graduate student participants (both doctoral and masters’ students in Communication) were asked to pair up with one or more partners for the research, and given some mutual interests, my team included Tharaa Bayazid and Meghana

Shivanandacharya.

I was eager to study the Women’s March (which I had attended in Raleigh two weeks into the semester), and as the extroverted researcher in the group, I pressed the topic. My classmates agreed, and as early as February 2, 2017 (only a few weeks after the Women’s

March), we started a shared document of potential questions. As I look back, I wonder how I could have been more supportive of their interests and goals given our differences in cultures and needs for the program. It is uncomfortable to think about the ways in which my privilege of being the native English speaker and senior graduate student in the group dominated the conversation.

We all contributed sections to the survey and negotiated the wording of the questions, and then I volunteered to transfer them into an online survey using Qualtrics. Meghana and

Tharaa tested and edited my work on the survey, as well as added questions when needed, read literature on activism, and contributed their expertise. This was my first time using Qualtrics and there was a learning curve in understanding the software prior to designing the survey. By no means would I assess the final product as a precisely tuned tool. Our instructor gave limited feedback but was generally distant from the project as we submitted it to the IRB.

A month later, on April 3, we received exempt status from NC State’s IRB and we were able to start recruiting participants to take the survey. That night in April, we sent out a communication to the Women’s March organizers, addressed to “Tamika D. Mallory, Bob

Bland, and Cassady Fendlay and the entire team of the Women's March Board” (emails from their website) with the goal of inviting them to share our Qualtrics survey with their mailing lists and social media outlets. It was exciting—the thrill of having our survey live, finally, and so soon after the March itself. We never received a reply, nor did we see any implication that the

March co-chairs or board shared this email with anyone. While we hoped to inform them and invite their participation, we had low expectations that the email would pass through their spam filters.

Unsurprisingly, we did not have any funding for compensating participants so we relied on our own networks and our research for recruitment. Out of creativity and necessity, we utilized a combination of convenience and snowball sampling with the knowledge that these strategies would limit the diversity of our sample. We did not know if our backgrounds (Tharaa,

Meghana, our classmates, and I) would stimulate a range of participants, or if our survey would not gain any traction. We posted in social networks and emailed personal friends, family, and

83 classmates. However, I also suggested that we scrape all of the Sister March websites linked to the main WMOW page to recruit local organizers. We were able to identify 223 national and 112 international addresses. As part of the recruitment email to Sister March organizers, we also requested that they mention our survey in their newsletters or social media networks (as we did with the DC March organizers). All we could do was wait and hope that participants would generously take our survey and circulate it among their networks.

We started receiving completed surveys not long after launch. And two days later, by

April 5, we received 130 responses. Thankfully, each day we were thrilled to see more completed surveys when we opened our Qualtrics page. By official survey close date of June 3, we had over 700 completed surveys. For the class, made some early assessments of the data in at the beginning of May to prepare a presentation for our quantitative methods class. We focused specifically on the quantitative elements of the survey, as was the expectation of the course presentation. I have chosen not to use those findings in this dissertation the dataset for two main reasons. First, my research includes participants through the official survey close date (April 3-

June 3, 2017). Second, the findings were constrained my limited knowledge of analysis and access to analytical tools. However, it is important to note that early interpretations data gave me insights into the survey participants and started shaping my ideas about future analysis. After the course ended, I chose to investigate the data further as it resonated with my concurrent work on the relationship between actors in the Women’s March, and I am deeply indebted to Meghana and Tharaa’s efforts as inherently part of this dissertation.

The Imperialism of Analysis

While thoughtful research design practices are an important element of survey construction (Chapter 1), modes of analysis provide an equally problematic realm. With any

84 dataset, whether it is a set of articles, images, speeches, tweets, or participants’ answers on a survey, one has to select what is included and excluded. While researchers explain our reasons for constraining the dataset, we rarely acknowledge what is lost or muted in that act of selection.

Instead of stating limitations in the discussion or separate from our results, I contend we need to find ways to challenge our assumptions throughout each step from construction to analysis, and throughout discussion.

The Violence of Data Erasure: Data “Cleaning” as Cultural Exclusion

As we constructed the survey (Chapter 1), we were grappling with how we could limit disenfranchisement of our participants. Our solution was to offer participants greater choice and opportunity to be heard in a way that they desired, rather than the easiest way for us to later analyze. In order to offer as much freedom to answer or refrain without penalty, we decided that many questions would be optional. So, as I looked at the raw data from our participants, I knew I would come across the issue of “missing cases,” or instances when a participant chose to move forward in the survey without answering the question. While in some places we could have of offered the option, “I would prefer not to answer this question,” at the time we thought adding an extra line of text might further burden participants with length and visual fatigue in an already- intensive survey. As a result, for missing cases in the survey, it is unclear whether the participants accidentally skipped or deliberately passed over those questions (or a combination of both). This messiness— “unclean” or uncleanable data—is a direct action on my part, an attempt to deliberately create a survey that problematizes the assumption that our participants would either feel comfortable enough to or need to answer all questions to be seen or counted.

Instead of data cleaning, I would like to recommend thinking critically about the process as data erasure. The systematic elimination of data fundamentally dilutes the context from the

85 story of data collection. At its worst, data cleaning acts as a validated form of cultural data cleansing. Whether in qualitative or quantitative data, I encourage researchers to be more transparent and explicit about the lines of inclusion and exclusion. Limitations of a survey are not only contained in the method itself, but also in the entire process of research, as directed by and created from the investigator. We must take responsibility for and deeply engage with the epistemological and cultural reasons for excluding data that extend beyond our research practices and derive their validity from systems of power.

With that knowledge in mind, as I sat down to look at the data, I went through many types of data management strategies in spreadsheets to identify missing cases, using SPSS, consulting with colleagues in the Statistics Department at NC State, my chair Jessica Jameson and committee member Elizabeth Craig. Of the 987 survey responses, I first filtered ineligible participants (those who did not participate in the march) and removed them from my analysis

(n=14). I also chose to remove trolls (n=1), those who took the survey with what seemed malicious intent in mind (i.e. they used demeaning, explicit, misogynistic language in their answers). Finally, I removed a few participants who submitted their answers after the close date of our study (n=5).

Abandoned Surveys

While ineligible, late, and troll participants were clearer filters in my mind, a more difficult question for me was to decide what to do with abandoned surveys. These differ from surveys with missing cases (as missing cases were a fundamental expectation of the survey design). I define “abandoned surveys” as those that were initiated by the user and completed to some degree, but not all questions were seen and ultimately the user did not submit the survey. I did not know going into the process that Qualtrics would gather information from participants

86 whether or not they pressed the “submit” button on the final page. With that in mind, I cannot be sure whether or not the participants were concerned for their privacy or had other reasons for abandoning the remaining questions. It is impossible to know.

Those who abandoned the survey were not a small handful; in fact, 249 out of 987 total survey takers are in this group. Further, of the 249 people who abandoned the survey, 101 completed and an additional 34 saw, but did not answer, the question that I will be analyzing in this chapter. Thus, I was faced with an important question: Should I include the 135 abandoned- survey participants in my analysis, since they completed the qualitative question? In a quantitative framework, one would categorize the missing cases as either random or systematic errors. Here is where the politics of data cleaning demonstrates the politics of researcher interpretation over empiricism. As a collaborator with the survey tool, my decision of how to read (or “measure”) the results is one of systematic bias. As a researcher, I have the power to willfully exclude, in the pursuit of knowledge, real people who shared their time and experiences with me. These experiences are valuable. And, by doing so, I have to recognize that power of exclusion as an act of violence.

I did not know why these participants abandoned the survey. As a result, I decided to interpret their actions of not confirming their submissions as [assumed] intent also not to have their responses as part of my analysis. Therefore, I do not include those 135 participants in my discussion of the qualitative results. To the 249 people who abandoned the survey, I apologize for whatever barriers prevented you from completing (including the survey itself) and will try to create better research tools in the future. Moving forward, we can learn more from looking at where they chose to abdicate from the survey; their data is useful and informative for further consideration on how to improve research design.

Finally, while it is standard practice to consider limitations of any study after we see our results, a central point here is the importance of considering the limitations of our research tools prior to, during, and after data analysis. Only by constantly following this process of reflexivity, can we reshape research design toward more inclusive participation. The next chapter grapples with these questions both in explicit and unstated ways, while also attempting to produce useful, tangible (inherently fraught) knowledge. The result is not an either-or. It is a relationship, it is an and.

CHAPTER 3: WHY THEY MARCHED: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Introduction

The 2017 Women’s March was reportedly the largest multisite protest in United States history, with a low-end estimation of 3.3 million participants (Waddell, 2017). The organizers of the main March in Washington, D.C. outlined the purpose in a document titled, “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” which they shared online as a PDF. In it, they describe the overview and purpose of the March from their2 perspective (Alotta et al., 2016):

The Women's March on Washington is a women-led movement bringing together

people of all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations, disabilities and

backgrounds in our nation’s capital on January 21, 2017, to affirm our shared humanity

and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination.

Recognizing that women have intersecting identities and are therefore impacted

by a multitude of social justice and human rights issues, we have outlined a

representative vision for a government that is based on the principles of liberty and

2 Further, the organizers and developers sign the document, with their affiliations: “J. Bob Alotta, Executive Director, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; Monifa Bandele, Vice President, MomsRising; Zahra Billoo, Council on American Islamic Relations - San Francisco Bay Area; Gaylynn Burroughs, Director of Policy & Research, Feminist Majority Foundation; Melanie L. Campbell, Convener, Black Women’s Roundtable, President & CEO, NCBCP; Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Interim Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; Alida Garcia, Immigrant Rights & Diversity Advocate; Alicia Garza, National Domestic Workers Alliance Indigenous Women Rise Collective; Carol Jenkins, Board of Directors, ERA Coalition; Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, President, Incite Unlimited, LLC; Carol Joyner, Director, Labor Project for Working Families, Family Values @ Work; Janet Mock, Activist and author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty; Jessica Neuwirth, President, ERA Coalition; Terry O’Neill, President, National Organization for Women (NOW); Carmen Perez, Executive Director, The Gathering for Justice; Jody Rabhan, Director of Washington Operations, National Coucnil of Jewish Women; Kelley Robinson, Deputy National Organizing Director, Planned Parenthood Federation of America; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director and Co-Founder, MomsRising; Linda Sarsour, Founder, MPower Change; Heidi L. Sieck, Co-Founder/CEO, #VOTEPROCHOICE; Emily Tisch Sussman, Campaign Director, Center for American Progress; Jennifer Tucker, Senior Policy Advisor, Black Women’s Roundtable; Winnie Wong, Activist, Organizer and Co-Founder, People for Bernie.”

justice for all. As Dr. King said, “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make

the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

Our liberation is bound in each other’s. The Women’s March on Washington

includes leaders of organizations and communities that have been building the foundation

for social progress for generations. We welcome vibrant collaboration and honor the

legacy of the movements before us - the suffragists and abolitionists, the Civil Rights

Movement, the feminist movement, the American Indian Movement, Occupy Wall Street,

Marriage Equality, Black Lives Matter, and more – by employing a decentralized, leader-

full structure and focusing on an ambitious, fundamental and comprehensive agenda.

With the record-breaking crowds, what motivated individuals to participate? Given the idealistic appeal multiple identities --“all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations, disabilities and backgrounds” were there common themes behind their behavior?

In this chapter, I analyze responses to the open-ended survey prompt regarding motivation: “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017

Women's March.” Using constructivist grounded theory framed with an intersectional feminist critique, I describe intertwining motivations and nuanced themes that emerge from the data that provide a complicated picture of “Why They Marched.” First, I will provide a literature review that overviews research on individual and group motivation, next I explain my methodological process for approaching the qualitative data. Finally, I will describe results through emergent themes, and offer a discussion of how those themes and individual motivations lead to a general group consciousness and models of collective action behavior.

Literature Review

In academic literature, individual and group motivations are often the purview of psychology and political science. The research attempts to integrate three theories of motivation through: 1) identity-based characteristics that explain individual decisions to participate in protests and marches, 2) organizational messaging that facilitates recruitment and action or 3) combination of both through relational interaction (Schussman & Soule, 2005; Duncan, 1999, van Zomeren, 2015). The first two theories can be described more succinctly as “personality characteristics” (i.e. orientation to authoritarianism, political salience, life experiences with oppression, perceived efficacy, and education level) or “group consciousness” (i.e. an individual’s identification with a group’s goals, hierarchical stature, and collective problem- solving). The relational interaction model reconciles the first two approaches with the concept of social identity wherein our relationships (to self and others) motivate behavior. The social identity model for collective action (SIMCA) is “a psychological platform on which individuals can become motivated for collective action in different ways” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 382).

Throughout this chapter, I will approach the question of motivation as relational and co- constructed through social and environmental interactions.

Many studies regarding individual motivation rely on methods that determine relationships between personality characteristic variables with levels of group consciousness. In doing so, these studies use positivist methodology to test pre-generated hypotheses. While quantitative approaches may be better suited for predicting likelihood of behavior based on specific, operationalized variables or clarifying context for action, there is a gap in the literature regarding individual motivations (Duncan,1999).

Over the past twenty years of motivation research, during what has been described as the age of integration and innovation, four core motivations emerged specific to individuals participating in collective action: identity, emotion, morality, and efficacy (van Zomeren, 2013).

In the following section, I will describe each core motivation, and afterward describe how motivations are neither isolated nor context-independent; each motivation interacts with each other and co-constructs the motivational frame for action.

Identity

In a psychological context, personal identity describes the dynamic and multi-faceted memberships to which a person identifies, and the degree to which we resonate with identifiers often determines how closely we attach to group memberships. For example, I identify as a woman, and to some extent I identify with the group “women.” The way we identify with groups is important because they “reflect the basis for development of social (or group) identities. The social identity approach to collective action suggests that individuals can identify with these groups and thus view themselves and their social context in group terms (e.g. thinking of oneself as ‘I’ or ‘we’)” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 380, emphasis original). In other words, our identities can express themselves concurrently as both personal identities and group identities.

Psychological approaches to identity, however, often fail to deeply reflect feminist theory and the multi-planar identity spaces that interact and contribute to power structures. Haraway

(1991, p. 315) describes, “Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity;” in combination, identifiers such as gender and race map our lives disparately to systems of power. I identify as a woman, and I am racially White; while my woman-ness is subjugated under the patriarchy, my Whiteness shelters me from institutionalized racism and offers access to freedoms that women of color do not have.

In contrast, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994) takes another approach, explaining that operationalizing identity into categories such as “race” or “gender” is simplistic and dangerous.

She writes that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences” (Crenshaw, 1994, p. 94). Importantly for social movements, the failure to recognize and address the difference within groups leads to discord and instability within the group itself.

For example, Crenshaw (1994) explains the problem with the example of how a focus on the patriarchy over other factors (i.e. race, class) reinforces oppression in battered women’s shelters:

For example, shelter policies are often shaped by an image that locates women's

subordination primarily in the psychological effects of male domination, and thus

overlooks the socioeconomic factors that often disempower women of color. Because the

disempowerment of many battered women of color is arguably less a function of what is

in their minds and more a reflection of the obstacles that exist in their lives, these

interventions are likely to reproduce rather than effectively challenge their domination.

(p. 96, emphasis mine)

If we only think of domestic violence in terms of patriarchal abuse of power, then we are ignoring the way that classism and racism contribute deeply to the problem (and thus are only helping White women). Crenshaw clearly demonstrates the multi-causal, linked expressions of power that interact with identity approaches to public policy (1994). In terms of collective action, failure to interrogate, include, and bring awareness to the intersecting identities/affinity groups often leads to privileging the dominant cultural group’s needs at the expense of those of more marginalized status(es).

In addition, personal identities are not static; they are dynamic and contextually expressed. Events can change the way we perform our identities. While I have considered myself an “activist” and “pro-choice” as long as I can remember, my collective participation in the pro-choice movement is—to be honest—inconsistent. However during 2019 there have been several legislative acts that laws that outlaw abortion after six weeks, and more dangerously, criminalizing the act for both the pregnant person and the abortion provider (Gordon & Hurt,

2019). As a result, my connection to my identity as a person with a uterus of childbearing age is at the forefront of my consciousness. Even for those who are less invested in abortion rights, van

Zomeren (2013, p. 382) explains “specific events can make [an individual’s] social identity salient and thus motivate them to engage in collective action.” Even though I strongly identified as “pro-choice” prior to the recent events, I feel even more threatened, as this part of my identity

(of having choice about my body, and being able to bear children) is even more under attack, and thus I have felt motivated to and engaged in more personal actions to support collective resistance, advocate for public sex education, and protest of the legislation. Thus, events interact with our identities in ways that politicize personal identities.

On the other hand, my partner (who does not have a uterus, is cis-male, and thus cannot bear children) is also concerned about the legislation, and is more likely to act politically to support women’s rights to an abortion. While we tend to think of politicized collective identities in terms of social statuses or demographic frameworks (i.e. women’s rights activism is related to feminist identity), Duncan and Stewart (2007) clarify that that some individuals may develop collective identities outside of their statuses “based on their analysis of the damage done by that social structure, and their rejection of the privileges associated with their position in it” (p.147).

These individuals are often referred to as “allies,” and exist as privileged individuals who work

94 for disadvantaged groups (such as a feminist man or an antihomophobic straight person)

(Duncan & Stewart, 2007). In this way, people like my partner, who have male privilege are

“advantaged group members [who] can undertake collective action on behalf of the disadvantaged” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 379). However, there is a precariousness of allyship; introduction of an “ally” may center their comfort and needs as part of the dialogue for social action, therefore reenacting systems of injustice towards those they are attempting to support

(Crenshaw, 1990).

The current abortion legislation and my (and my partner’s) reaction is an example of an event having personal political salience, or “a personality characteristic that assesses individuals’ linkage of political events with their personal identities” (Duncan & Stewart, 2007, p. 143). In other words, personal political salience (PPS) is the degree to which an individual experiences a political event as having a personal meaning distinct (although not necessarily separate) from political expertise or political interest. PPS can lead to politicized personal identity, as well as politicized collective identity or group consciousness (Duncan & Stewart,

2007). Ultimately, narratives that describe politicizing events are useful for understanding motivations for collective action, because they offer insight into cultural patterns for generating group consciousness (“identification with a group in which an individual recognizes the group’s position in a power hierarchy, rejects rationalizations of relative positioning, and embraces a collective solution to group problems” (Duncan, 1999, p. 612). Group consciousness and group identity, once politicized, motivate and mitigate collective action.

A politicized collective identity is crucial for collective action to take place, and can be described in four components: identification with shared interest in a group, power discontent, withdrawal of system blame, and collective orientation (Duncan & Stewart, 2007). Some

95 examples of a politicized collective identity are the membership bodies of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil

Liberties Union (ACLU), or Women’s Action for a New Direction (WAND), where an individual donates money or participates in events with the membership. Politicized collective identity groups share the “belief that members of one’s group should pool their resources to eliminate those obstacles that affect them as a group.” Personally, I donate to Planned

Parenthood (PP) because I believe it is important to provide access to women’s healthcare, and therefore I send my money to PP in order to achieve that goal.

The Women’s March is an interesting challenge to the question of a politicized collective identity because it was originally a spontaneous, crowdsourced event. The formal organization that ran the event emerged concurrently (and in some ways behind) the March itself—which questions whether or not the Women’s March, as a group, really articulated a cohesive and clear ideology before it happened. Without clear, intersectional goals that privilege the less dominant cultural perspective, White identities can as a consequence, dominate the conversation, as

“individuals can be motivated to protect, maintain, and enhance their group interests or identity

(just as they can be motivated to protect, maintain, and enhance their personal interests or identity)” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 380). It is likely that the lack of clear goals for the 2017 March privileged White feminist aims as a result. Thus, in my discussion, a question outside of individual motivations emerges: Why did “they” march? I will attempt to offer my findings on what type(s) of politicized collective identity emerged, as an aggregate of the individual politicized identities.

Emotional Motivations (E-Motivations)

Until recently, emotions have rarely been included in scholarship on politics, protest, and social movements (Jasper, 2011). Even thirty years ago, Stearns and Stearns observed, “the historical study of protest, indeed, remains dominated by the claim to rationality, to the extent that some authorities argue that emotion enters their subjects not at all” (1985, p. 816).

Thankfully, psychological research has demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of the rationality of emotion. Current research demonstrates that “emotions perform a key role in human functioning; emotion is conceptualized as a dynamic psychological mechanism that guides individuals’ efforts to cope with their environment” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 381). Not only do emotions perform a key role in coping with environment, emotions are part of our cost- benefit calculation processes (van Zomeren, 2013). These rational emotional calculations ultimately frame motivation and action.

Emotions, like identities, are relational and inhabit individual and group identity spaces.

Ahmed (2014) provides more nuance in considering how power reshapes emotion, describing emotions as socio-cultural practices: “We need to consider how emotions operate to ‘make’ and

‘shape’ bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others” (p.4).

Emotions derive from and exist in historical (Stearns & Stearns, 1985) and cultural contexts

(Kleres & Wettergren, 2017). There is a challenge in studying emotions, because retrospective interpretations of emotion do not preserve the fidelity of the cultural context in which the emotion developed and was expressed. Despite the difficulty in studying emotions, such research is key for observing, understanding, and documenting the ways in which they motivate behavior.

The ways our bodies interact with the environment affect emotions, which influence our decisions to take action. There is a convergence of stimuli and response: “the cognitive appraisal

97 of their environment leads to the experience of discrete emotions (e.g. anger or fear) which are associated with states of action readiness that prepare individuals for adaptive action” (van

Zomeren, 2013, p. 381). While I would contest the “discrete” nature of an emotion, as individuals, we are sometimes able to categorize (often erroneously) the emotions we feel. Our feelings are embodied knowledge. Knowledge helps us make decisions, which lead to behavioral responses. To that end, Kleres and Wettergren (2017) “see emotions as both consciously and non-consciously informing and motivating rational action and decision-making. This means that emotion is the driver of action; that merely knowing something is not enough to achieve acting upon that knowledge. One needs to ‘feel’ the knowledge in order to be moved to act by it” (p.

508). In other words, the neurological and cognitive processes involved with feeling an emotion ultimately arouse physiological and adaptive social responses that affect our motivations, including decisions to participate in collective action.

Research regarding climate change activism has useful literature on the impact of emotional motivations (e-motivations) in collective action. Kleres and Wettergren (2017) consider fear, hope, anger, and guilt as “pivotal emotions to climate activists” (p. 507). In their analysis, the researchers found that “fear motivates action by raising awareness of the threat of climate catastrophe” (p. 507) and that activists’ fear management depends on collective orientations. Some groups mitigate fear of climate with hope, whereas others transform fear into anger; both secondary emotions (hope and anger) generate (collective) action (Kleres &

Wettergren, 2017). The propensity to favor hope over anger points to the way that emotions are socially co-constructed; in some communities anger may be more acceptable, in others, optimism is the dominant cultural motivator. Repeated emotional experiences shape morality narratives. In terms of climate activism, Jia et al. (2017) explain “one’s emotional reaction to the environment,

98 particularly to environmental degradation caused by humans, is often a strong motivator of engagement in pro-environmental behavior” (p. 111). Ultimately, exposure to fear, anger, and disgust regarding environments motivate behavioral responses including new integrations of self- concept and self-understanding (Jia et al., 2017) that stimulate collective action.

Notably, shared expression of social emotions can contribute to feelings of inclusion or exclusion from a group identity. In order to maintain motivation cohesion, social groups with similar emotional responses demonstrate “feeling rules” for meaningful and accepted expression

(Kleres & Wettegren, 2017). Being able to connect emotionally is important of successful collective actions, as Kleres and Wettergren (2017, p. 508) argue:

Activism often requires a conscious reorientation from a dominant emotional regime

through a collective emotion management process that fosters alternative feeling rules.

An obvious example is turning shame into pride and anger in the pride movement, to

contest dominant feeling rules about LGBTQ people. However, to mobilize successfully,

alternative feeling rules cannot deviate entirely from dominant ones, i.e. activism also

requires a certain alignment with the dominant emotional regime.

Ultimately, collective emotion is situated in cultural contexts, and the management of the emotion (or outward expression) depends on one’s social status and what is acceptable within the social group. To complicate the matter, emotions are not necessarily discrete; Kleres and

Wettegren (2017) remind us that “we may feel different and contradictory emotions at the same time” (p. 509). E-motivation management is fraught with cultural and individual messiness that are part of our individual assemblages.

Further, e-motivations interact with identity assemblages and social relationships and can explain some reasons why the Women’s March failed to engage many POC, LGBTQIA, and

99 other groups with its action. Ultimately, if the March was focused on heteronormative White

American Women’s emotions, then there was collective emotional exclusion of non-White participants. An excellent example of dissonance with e-motivations comes from the work of

Brewer and Dundes (2018) in their article, “Concerned, meet terrified: Intersectional feminism and the Women’s March.” In their ethnography of young African American women’s perceptions of the 2017 March, some of their interviewees “emphasized that the march was not only more about White women’s anger over Trump’s election, but also provided a chance to re- direct attention to complaints prioritized by White women” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 52, emphasis mine). One participant explains, “I didn’t see much of it on social media. I wasn’t interested in it. I don’t have a feeling towards it. You just saw a bunch of White women marching. It didn’t apply to me—it was White feminism” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 52, emphasis mine). Instead of interpreting the participants’ joy of unity on display at the march as fear transformed into hope, Brewer and Dundes (2018) describe that the African American women were disdainful of the protest’s “carnival-like” appearance. Ultimately, collective emotion is produced in and generates cultural contexts. The management of the emotion (or outward expression) depends on one’s social status and what is acceptable within the social group, acting as another identifier for politicized group identity. In order to provide intersectional spaces of action, the emotional resonance has to motivate non-dominant cultural groups.

Morality

Morality is another core factor that is pervasive in literature on motivation. Psychologists define moral convictions as “strong and absolute attitudes on a moralized issue” wherein “no violation can be tolerated because the moral standard must be defended” (van Zomeren, 2013, p.

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382). Our morality links beliefs to decision-making processes; this combination (personal values

+ cost-benefit analysis) directs behavior. For example, Jia, Soucie, Alisat, Curtin, & Pratt,

(2017) explain, “A moral person should conceivably have a strong ethical value system which translates into an internal motivation to behave in ways consistent with this self-view” (p. 104).

In other words, a person’s morality motivates types of behavior that reinforce their perceived identity. The extent to which an individual internalizes their sense of morality determines likelihood for action— the more/less internalized the values are, the more/less likely the individual is to act.

As with identity and e-motivations, we co-construct morality standards through and within our cultural, political, historical, and geographical environments. In fact, Winderman

(2014) defines morality as “a collective rhetorical craft” (p. 387). Whereas individual moral attitudes often appear more context-independent, collective moral attitudes are dynamic and dialectic—constantly reshaping over time. Prior to the 1970’s, dominant cultural attitudes in the

United States described motherhood as not a matter of choice, but the moral role for women. In her research on the American abortion controversy, Celeste Condit Railsback (1984) describes how pro-abortion arguments in the early 1960’s centered on the immorality of discrimination

(i.e. poorer women didn’t have the same access to abortion as wealthy women) but that abortions were still socially taboo. Railsback (1984) claims that the Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade in

1973 significantly changed the public consciousness toward the role of the woman to allow for motherhood as a choice—and more importantly, the idea that motherhood could even be undesirable. Over time, moral attitudes about women in the pro-abortion consciousness shifted to include motherhood as a choice dependent on the individual, separate from morality.

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Moral motivation, given the integration with fundamental belief systems, could be a key for potential unification between groups. van Zomeren (2013) claims that “any violation of

[moral convictions] could bring individuals together who share these convictions (e.g. defending human rights), independent of the groups they may be part of” (p. 382). As such, moral motivation could be a space for broader coalition building. In "Counter-Public Enclaves and

Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building" (2011), Karma

R. Chávez explores the ways in which two organizations, Wingspan – LGBT community center in Tuscon, Arizona and Coalición de Derechos Humanos (CDH) Tuscon-based “grassroots, migrant rights, and anti-border militarization organization” (p.363) work together to dispel anti- humanist rhetoric that they both face as marginalized groups. Chávez (2011) demonstrates how the two organizations build coalitions through enclaves; their coalition-building is tied to the ways in which rhetoric about both groups is similarly dehumanizing in the media, in laws and legal policy, or through rhetorical acts of the police. Together, Wingspan and Coalición de

Derechos Humanos assume a posture through collective protest that demonstrates their humanity as a moral standard that should be afforded to all people. Chávez’s (2011) work is integral for understanding how shared moral motivations contribute to successful collective action through coalitions, and provides an exciting entry point for future scholarship and organization strategies.

Efficacy

Finally, perceived political efficacy is the degree to which an individual believes that their participation in a political action will make a difference (such as signing a petition, joining a march or protest, or sharing beliefs on social media) (Schussman & Soule, 2005). The higher the level of perceived efficacy, the more likely a person is to join a collective action event. Yet, group efficacy beliefs stem from “individuals’ beliefs that the group is able to achieve group

102 goals through joint effort” (van Zomeren, 2013, p. 380). The tie between individual/group identity affiliations is important—an individual who does not identify with the group consciousness will be an unlikely participant in the corresponding social movement. People who come from identities of privilege may, as a result, feel more inclined that their actions will be more successful; thus lowering the barrier for their engagement in individual or collective action while also raising a barrier to build a coalition with less advantaged counterparts.

Often, privileged people seek solutions through institutional means because they believe

(and have found) these means effective in the past. However, people with less advantage may not perceive these systems as efficacious in the same way, and may use their own cultural rhetorics for efficacy. In the late 1960’s, El Barrio in East Harlem, a Puerto-Rican section of New York

City, was dirty and full of foul-smelling garbage (Enck-Wanzer, 2006). The residents would watch as the garbage trucks deliberately ignored their streets without stopping on the way to uptown. Not only was the smell overwhelming, it was also a sore point of pride and dignity for the individuals. In contrast, I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and am a White woman, and I feel fairly confident that if my trash was not taken out, I could easily make a call and solve the problem promptly and completely (without fear of retribution). For those in El Barrio, however, since NY City was actively ignoring the area’s sanitation service, complaints to the City were futile.

As a result, a neighborhood group emerged called the Sociedad de Albizu Campos

(which later became the Young Lords Organization or YLO), and every Sunday SAC/YLO met to sweep and collect their neighborhood’s garbage—an act of reclaiming their space through the dignity of cleanliness. Two weeks into their campaign, the YLO asked the local sanitation department for supplies (such as brooms and trash cans) but they were denied (Enck-Wanzer,

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2006). At that moment, they needed another strategy, one that was even further outside of the system. As a result, they brainstormed a resistance strategy involving Puerto-Rican sense of jaibería, “a form of subversive complicity” (Enck-Wanzer, 2006, pp. 223-224):

The YLO, together with a variety of community members who had been helping them

pick up garbage, took heaped trash collections and placed them in several busy

intersections, blocking and significantly the traffic coming into and going out of

Manhattan.

The “Garbage Offensive” lasted for several weeks and increased in its visual spectacle— residents lighting garbage on fire and maintaining barricades to slow citywide transportation routes. Ultimately, the NYC officials reinstituted trash pickup—after meeting with YLO leadership multiple times. And while the sanitation issue was somewhat resolved (there were chronic issues with trash pick-up, even afterward), the Garbage Offensive “pointed people to an awareness of politics. It showed people that their political voice could be acknowledged in an era where quite the contrary seemed the case” (Enck-Wanzer, 2006, p. 232). Further, the material use of garbage broke away from colonial rhetorical traditions through which the residents of

Spanish Harlem were voiceless; they physically, visually, olfactually developed new rhetorical methods that would have efficacy given their relationship to power.

Further, efficacy is a motivator that has multiple meanings and values to individuals.

Therefore, it is difficult to operationalize the concept of effectiveness. In their overview,

Hornsey et al. (2006) argue there are four ways that participants might perceive efficacy after taking action: the individuals felt they were effective because 1) they were able to influence outgroup members, 2) they were able to educate or reach third parties in some way, 3) they were able to build momentum for the movement, or 4) they were able to successfully express their

104 values. Experiences of influence, outreach, momentum, and expression are individual and group perceptions; a participant may experience efficacy across multiple categories.

Integration

There are many pathways for mitigating and encouraging behavior given the four core characteristics. For example – e-motivations in response to an event or series of events can trigger a sense of morality, which through a moral narrative becomes part of the identity of the individual, who as a result, acts on the moral motivation as a part of their identity. Further, perceptions of efficacy could encourage or dispel the inclination to act, depending on how entrenched the motivation is in the individual’s sense of moral values. All core motivations (not just efficacy) have the ability to mediate and are difficult (if not impossible, ultimately) to parse.

In the discussion of my results, thematic narrative clusters are present in the responses of the survey participants.

Framework and Methods

In the survey I developed with my colleagues (described in the Interlude: The Story of the Women’s March Survey), we were curious about the question, “What made an individual decide to go to the 2017 Women’s March?” Our goal behind this open-ended qualitative inquiry was to collect and observe, in the participants’ own words, the reasons and motivations behind each participant’s engagement in direct action. In its final form, the prompt states, “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women's March.” The goal of such a prompt is to provide a deeper understanding of context, prior to making assertions, also called thick description (Geertz, 1973, cited in Tracy, 2012). The reason that thick description is an essential form of data is because it allows for each participant to offer a frame, or a view into their perspective for understanding. Previous studies and theories of collective action have

105 centered on group- or societal-level explanations for activism (Duncan, 1999), whereas our prompt focuses on key factors in individuals’ decision making. The analysis of these individual motivations may help explain the gap in literature regarding “a critical threshold, or turning point, where action became inevitable” and subsequently add to literature of the psychological processes of motivation in the context of collective action events (Duncan, 1999, p. 632).

Further, the open-ended prompt “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women’s March” was an early question in the survey because we anticipated it would help participants remember their frame of mind prior to the march, which would be helpful for later questions. We outlined the goal of memory retrieval in the instructions directly preceding, stating: “The survey is thorough and will take approximately 15-20 minutes

(depending on the detail of your responses). Part of the survey design is related to improving memory recall, and therefore is important for producing the most accurate results. With your support, we will build a more comprehensive understanding of the demographics and priorities of those who participated in the Women's March” (emphasis original, see index for full survey).

The Problematic Nature of Open-Ended Questions

While an open-ended question might seem to offer limitless opportunity for a participant, prompts can be intimidating, unfocused, or difficult to understand. Coming from the perspective and privileged class of a person who feels comfortable writing and expressing political thoughts, my own experience in writing answers to open-ended questions has always been an enthusiastic one. Personally, I loved exams in college at Vanderbilt University and UNC-Greensboro that relied on essay and short-answers. I am an English-speaking native with two graduate-level educated parents. My own degrees are in Creative Writing, Communication, and Rhetoric.

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I offer this vignette to demonstrate my comfort with not only writing, but with sharing my thoughts through writing in the academic community to contrast the inherent assumption that an open-ended question is able to offer the same safe space for writing to all of our participants.

We need to recognize the challenges this kind of question brings to non-native writers/speakers and those who are less comfortable with writing. As researchers, we have to accept responsibility that an open-ended question on a survey requires a certain level of comfort with responding to and interpreting the written word.

Further, an open-ended question on a survey operates with political power of Whiteness and Americentrism; the survey is written in a language developed for and used by academia to separate itself from regional languages. The formality of the question, “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women's March” in its own way, demonstrates an expectation of academic logic through its precision. If, for example the question had read “Hi there, why’d you go to the March?” this style would have modeled an expectation of informality in the responses. Style has always been a way to engage audiences, as well as solicit specific, coded responses from audiences, and as a way to exclude audiences, including those remaining in the dataset of 718 participants.

In total, 72 voices who completed the survey saw, but ultimately chose not to answer, the qualitative question. To the 72 participants who did not answer the question, I acknowledge that my survey failed you, in some way, in that prevented it you from answering the question of why you chose to march. As a way to represent their data, I refer to their reasons as “Unknown” out of the total 718 participants’ statements utilized in the analysis. This means that in total, I coded

646 unique answers in addition to the 72 “Unknown” reasons for marching (N=718).

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It is possible that because of the entire academic style of the survey apparatus I was unable to connect to and relate to those outside of the academy—therefore failing many, many people with this project. I take responsibility for these blind spots. As we move forward, I challenge my readers to continually be wary of the ways that academic surveys actively enact and maintain boundaries.

Frame of Analysis

For the qualitative analysis of the 718 participants’ answers, I would characterize my process along the lines of constructivist grounded theory, one of iterative analysis. In my reflexive process of looking at the data, I engage in constant comparison via back-and-forth conversation with previous theory, emerging patterns, and questions (Tracy, 2012). It is important to state that my analyses are second-order observations—one researcher’s interpretation of participants’ written statements (Tracy, 2012), and in that way they are fundamentally impressed with my perspective. Certainly, to the extent that I can, I want to provide spaces for inductive emic approaches; however, any time I make a second-order observation, the position changes to prioritize my perception. Further, as Sprague explains,

“Among the prevailing ways of organizing observations, the most problematic are the reliance on logical dichotomy and the tendency to conceptualize individuals in abstraction from their social context. Taken together, these conceptual practices facilitate a third frame: objectification”

(2016, p. 16, emphasis mine). I cannot emphasize enough the fundamental fragmentation that occurs when a researcher, such as myself, re-codes the response from an individual into a theme.

Only through reading each of the responses and discussing with each participant whether or not my assessment is close to their intention would I be able to come nearer to their truth.

Even then, our negotiation would be a joint interpretation, transformed through conversation.

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But, I do not claim to have interpreted the data flawlessly. As Charmaz (2009) writes, “The constructivist approach challenges the assumption of creating general abstract theories and leads us to situated knowledges (Haraway, 1991), while simultaneously moving grounded theory further into interpretive social science” (p.136). There is an inherent messiness we must embrace in accepting a researcher’s positionality. My goal is to bring these voices forward to the best of my ability.

With qualitative analysis, the research can offer a thick description into the motivations -- individual and collective, with loose boundaries. Ultimately, I hoped to build a set of codes for each participant, in order to develop a series of constructed vignettes, all created out of the exemplars to demonstrate specific thick descriptions of the motivations behind the Women’s

March. The framework that emerges from each response in relationship to others is messy, complicated further with the need to explore and expose my own positionality as a researcher.

For the sake of transparency and to offer insight into my process for the reader, and with the goal of suggesting potential techniques for future researchers, I believe it useful to walk through these iterations. More succinctly, my process is a version of Braun and Clark’s approach for interviews, “becoming familiar with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report” (Jia, Soucie, Alisat,

Curtin, & Pratt, 2017, p.108); however, I include the caveat that my participants and my biases co-produce the report. While the first chapter in this dissertation describes the ways in which a feminist epistemology frames the entire project, I would like to describe, in more detail, the process of my interaction with the participants’ contributions.

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A Bigger Picture: Visualizing the Responses

While I was first thinking about coding, my chair, Jessica Jameson joined me in looking at the data. We hand-coded our perspectives on a handful of the participants’ answers to “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women's March.” I did so to learn from and see how one might go about coding, and get her assurance I was treating the data with sufficient detail. Although we only compared and discussed our coding of a handful of responses, it was a useful process for thinking about how different researchers approach qualitative statements.

Next, I generated a word-cloud based on all of the participants’ responses. I chose this activity in order to think about in-vivo codes that might be in the large sample, as well as to have a visual rendering of the language that was prevalent in the responses. The outcome of that analysis (of the top 20 most frequent words) follows:

Figure 3.1: Automated Word Cloud of top 20 most frequent words found in responses.

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The centrality of the words “women,” “election, “trumps,” and “rights” are a useful shorthand for my findings. However, you will notice that while “equality” is a smaller key word here, “race” is invisible.

Language demonstrates consciousness, and the omission of race is a prominent indicator here. While many participants discussed supporting marginalized people and minorities, there is an absence of an explicit connection to race or civil rights. Even when I did a word frequency visual with self-identified non-White participants only, the word “race” was absent from the top

20 most frequently used words. With this image in mind, it is essential to offer descriptive statistics of our participants.

Participant-Provided Descriptive Information

Since who we are (our race, gender, citizenship, age, etc.) fundamentally frames our experiences, it is essential to offer a brief overview of descriptive participant data prior to discussing the themes that emerged from their responses. Separation of social context from data is another form of erasure that contributes to simplification and ultimately objectification

(Sprague, 2016).

I realize that the order of this descriptive framing will have an impact on how one reads the content analysis. Charmaz (2009) explains, “From a constructivist view, what we see, when, how, and to what extent we see it are not straightforward. Much remains tacit; much remains silent” (p. 131). At this point in the project, I am revealing information regarding March

Location, Gender, Racial Identity, Education, Socioeconomic Status, and Birth Year. I have selected these descriptors because the analysis I perform relies on interaction across these intersecting identities. Juliet Corbin (2016, p. 39) eloquently explains:

Each person experiences, gives meaning to, and responds to events in light of his or her

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own biography or experiences, according to gender, time and place, cultural, political,

religious, and professional backgrounds. To see the validity of this statement, one only

has to turn on the television and listen to a group of people discussing an event, such as a

political speech. There is much discourse and sometimes outright conflict about what was

said, but there is rarely total agreement about the significance or even content of the

event. What a viewer sees and hears are multiple viewpoints on the same topic (but this

doesn’t mean that there are no patterns of response). Add to this the notion that what is

being seen and heard on the television is filtered through the viewer’s interpretation of

the event based on his or her personal history and biography and you get a very

complicated picture, one that can never be fully understood or reconstructed by the

researcher.

Further, the back-and-forth organization of thematic and empirical analysis represents my process. As Corbin (2016) aptly reminds us, “Whenever a writer tries to put into words what he or she [or they] does when doing analytic work, it becomes rigidified and open to unintended uses. Yet, the actual research process is fluid, dynamic, and evolving” (p. 50). As I coded the open-ended responses, I was often looking back at the closed-ended answers and reading the literature surrounding this project.

My goal for the analysis is not totalizing, it is to “aim for an interpretive understanding of the empirical phenomena in a theory that has credibility, originality, resonance, and usefulness, relative to its historical moment” (Charmaz, 2009, p. 139). I offer these statistics not to clarify the image of the marching participants, but in fact, to complicate the picture. These descriptive statistics give more depth to the responses, as our demographics are intimately linked to our motivations and behaviors. Regardless, my ultimate ‘textualization’ is problematic because it

112 erases embodied/material experience so upon proceeding, please remember to locate these numbers in human beings who spent time sitting, standing, reading, thinking about, and choosing to answer or abstain from questions in the survey.

March Location: In what country did you march? A majority of respondents reported marching in the United States (n=694, 96.6%), with the remaining 3.4% marching in Algeria

(n=1), Canada (n=1), Costa Rica (n=3), Germany (n=2), Guatemala (n=1), Italy (n=3), Mexico

(n=2), Norway (n=10), South Africa (n=6) and The United Kingdom of Great Britain and

Northern Ireland (n=4).

In the United States, participants reported marching in 40 states and Puerto Rico, with largest representation in the survey marching in Washington, DC (n=257, 35.8%) followed by

North Carolina (n=119, 16.6%), Tennessee (n=42, 5.8%), Washington (n=28, 3.9%), Montana

(n=28, 3.9%), and New York (n=27, 3.8%) (see Figure 4.4 for complete distribution).

Washington, DC was the site of the main march, which may account for the larger response from that category; and I grew up and also performed this research from NCSU in North Carolina and went to college in Tennessee, which may help explain the higher numbers from those two states.

Gender: How do you identify your gender? For gender, we derived our question using examples from the Human Rights Campaign website (“Collecting Transgender-Inclusive Gender

Data,” 2016) which lead to our choices: a) Prefer not to say b) Prefer to identify as

______c) Non-binary d) Female, and e) Male. Over 90% of the respondents identified their gender as “Female.” I think we could have done a better job explaining why we were asking for these sensitive demographics to get a more nuanced picture. We chose not to use “trans*” as a specific option, as transwomen are women; still, we offered “prefer to identify as” in order to

113 make space for those who wish to use any type of identifier. We do not have statistics on numbers or transgender participants, unless they expressed as much in the qualitative portions.

Table 3.1: Participant Distribution by Gender.

Gender Total Female 657 Male 43 Non-binary 6 Prefer not to say 3 Prefer to self-identify as: 9  No answer 3  Female, but really prefer not to say 1  Genderqueer 1  I have a vagina, if thats what you are asking 1  I identify as female but if people are guessing, I let them so they can better 1 understand the way they feel about gender  woman 2

Race/Ethnic Identity: Please select one or more to describe yourself. For race/ethnic identity, we struggled with how to phrase the question, how to structure the categories, and how the question itself could be alienating, offensive, and problematic to our participants. Race is not a categorical question. It is much more complex than a multiple-choice answer. As one participant argued in their response, “I am an historian of race and racism. Classification is its tool.” We decided to include the question to better understand and frame the qualitative responses in the survey itself. However, in future surveys, it may be more useful to ask the participant “How do you describe your racial identity?” to get more context.

Ultimately, we adopted the US Census terminology for the question of background

(“Race,” 2017). The value here would be recognition or familiarity for the US survey-takers.

Unfortunately, for international takers, the question could be altogether confusing—a bias that my citizenship (US) created. We added an additional category, “Prefer to identify as” where the participants could write in an answer that better suited their self-perception if they desired.

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In total, we recorded 31 racial identities. I am including a full chart of responses below because condensing responses further would be an act of erasure that I find at odds with the goals of the survey methodology. We need a broader, more complicated discussion about race, not a neater, easier categorical one. Notably, zero participants (out of all 718) reported themselves as “Middle Eastern or North African (e.g. Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian,

Moroccan, Algerian etc.).” Given the high tensions regarding the United States’ relationship with the Middle East, including Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, I would like to point to how this population’s absence from the survey could be a larger political causality. Importantly, how could we have made our survey more open to people of color?

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Table 3.2: Participant Distribution by Race. For participants who selected multiple categories, the “+” indicates the combination between one category and another.

Race Total Percent American Indian or Alaska Native (e.g. Navajo Nation, Blackfeet Tribe, Mayan, Aztec, Native Village of Barrow Inupiat Traditional Government, Nome Eskimo Community 2 0.28% etc.) American Indian or Alaska Native + White 7 0.98% Asian (e.g. Chinese, Pilipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese etc.) 13 1.81% Asian + Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 1 0.14% Asian + White 5 0.70% Black or African American (e.g. African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, 1 0.14% Ethiopian, Somalian etc.) Black or African American + Asian + American Indian + White 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as "adopted and human" 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as "American" 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as "Caucasian" 2 0.28% I prefer to identify as "East European Jewish descent chased out of Russia and Lithuania in the early 1900s settled in South Africa - I am not a White Christian, I appear White, but my identity is not German Irish English etc. . . And my family 1 0.14% history of exile means I share an understanding of marginalization that White Christian folks will never understand . . . My family looks middle easter, I am belond - genetics are a hell of a thing" I prefer to identify as "human" 5 0.70% I prefer to identify as "I am an historian of race and racism. Classification is it's tool." 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as "Jewish (and if you included this somewhere you would find 2 0.28% many)" I prefer to identify as “Caucasian with African American in distant past” 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as “Italian/Sicilian American” 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as “Jew (ethnically and genetically different from those listed below 1 0.14% as White)” I prefer to identify as “Jewish American woman” 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as “Jewish” 1 0.14% I prefer to identify as “Montanan” 1 0.14% No answer 2 0.28% Other 1 0.14% Other + I prefer to identify as "a mix, including Hispanic" 1 0.14% Spanish, Latino or Spanish origin (e.g. Mexican or Mexican American, Puerto Rican, 8 1.11% Cuban, Salvadorian, Dominican, Colombian etc.) Spanish, Latino or Spanish origin + American Indian or Alaska Native 1 0.14% Spanish, Latino or Spanish origin + I prefer to identify as "Old White guy" 1 0.14% Spanish, Latino or Spanish origin +White 10 1.39% White (e.g. German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, French etc.) 641 89.28% White + I prefer to identify as "Female" 1 0.14% White + I prefer to identify as “Jewish” 1 0.14% White and I prefer to identify as “(left blank)” 2 0.28%

Age: In what year were you born? In order to take the survey, the participant needed to consent that they were at least 18 years old; therefore, the birth years participants reported ranged from 1932-2003 (average age 51, standard deviation 14.69 years). The most frequently reported birth year was 1957 (n=27), followed by 1979 (n=23), 1984 (n=22), and 1948 (n=21).

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Table 3.3: Participant Distribution by Birth Decade.

Birth year Total Percent No answer 1 0.14% 1930's 3 0.42% 1940's 21 2.92% 1950's 150 20.89% 1960's 168 23.40% 1970's 109 15.18% 1980's 164 22.84% 1990's 102 14.21%

Figure 3.2: Participant Distribution by Birth Decade.

Education: What is the highest level of school you have completed or the highest degree you have received? Over 87% (n= 625) of participants reported having received

Bachelor’s degree or higher.

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Table 3.4: Participant Distribution by Formal Education Level

Education Total Master's degree 275 Bachelor's degree in college (4-year) 238 Doctoral degree 75 Some college but no degree 56 Professional degree (JD, MD) 37 Associate degree in college (2-year) 27 High school graduate (high school diploma or equivalent including GED) 9 Less than high school degree 1

Citizenship and Party Affiliation. All but 24 survey participants listed themselves as

American citizens (n=696, 97%). Of the Americans, 65.9% reported themselves as registered

Democrats, followed in number with non-affiliated voters (15.9%) and Independents (9.8%).

Table 3.5: US Citizen Participant Distribution by Political Party Affiliation.

Political Party Affiliation Total I'm registered with the Republican Party 11 I'm registered with the Democratic Party 484 I'm registered as an Independent 68 I'm not sure 5 I'm not registered with any political parties 111 *Other 17  Berner 1  But I am a democrat..... 1  Democratic socialist 1  Green 3  I registered with Dem party so I can vote in primaries but I am not a 1 Democrat - and certainly not a republican  I was always independent. I registered as a Democrat after the last 1 election.  Libertarian 1  no party affiliation 1  Registered democrat to vote in local elections but an independent 1  Socialist Party 1  Unafilliated in NC 1  We don't have registration in my state, but would be D if we did 1  WFP 1  Working Families Party 2 US Citizens Total 696

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Household Income. While we had representation from every category for household income, 36.9% of participants reported over $100,000 entire household annual income (US dollars, before taxes).

Table 3.6: Participant Distribution by Yearly Household Income in US Dollars.

Household Income Participants Percent Less than $10,000 9 1.30% $10,000 to $19,999 33 4.60% $20,000 to $29,999 28 3.90% $30,000 to $39,999 41 5.70% $40,000 to $49,999 42 5.80% $50,000 to $59,999 47 6.50% $60,000 to $69,999 58 8.10% $70,000 to $79,999 58 8.10% $80,000 to $89,999 40 5.60% $90,000 to $99,999 43 6.00% $100,000 to $149,999 145 20.20% $150,000 or more 120 16.70% I prefer not to say 43 6.00% I'm not sure 9 1.30% No answer 2 0.30%

Descriptive-Qualitative Data Interaction

With the lens of descriptive statistics, one informative outcome is to understand that the politically democratic, American White women with a high level of household income are over- represented in this survey. Thus, when reporting on the information in the analysis, I encourage the reader to remember the demographic frame. This does not mean only White women are represented; I do not want to further alienate non-White contributions that directly impact the analysis. It does mirror the concern that “disproportionate attention to the voices of White women and the March exacerbated racial fault lines that were fueled by Trump’s campaign rhetoric” (Brewer & Dundes, 2018, p. 49). By reporting a majority of self-identified White women’s voices, I am contributing to this problem and I emphatically recognize that we need new methods to better collaborate, invite, include, and represent people of color in intersectional feminist research.

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Thematic Coding Procedure

In order to perform my first-level coding, I transferred the participants’ unique ID and qualitative answer into a spreadsheet to separate them from the other data. Part of the analytic technique was to focus my analysis, but it was also to limit the processing strain on my computer memory. I kept the ID numbers so that I could re-integrate the qualitative answers with the rest of the data for further analysis in the future. I decided to use the entire question response as the unit of measure for the content analysis, as the sentence itself seemed too arbitrary of a fragmentation. I wanted a more flexible view into their decision-making processes and instead of limiting myself to syntactical breaks, I looked for conceptual breaks in ideas.

Primary and Secondary Motivations

My first read-through, my goal was to read and reflect on the responses as I attempted to paraphrase their motivations. In the first column, I quoted words that were surprising to me or demonstrated the general idea behind the response, then in the second column, I paraphrased the primary reason the participant gave for deciding to go to the 2017 Women’s March. In the third column, I included a paraphrased secondary reason (see example below):

Table 3.7: Coding Example of Primary and Secondary Motivations

ID In a few sentences, please describe Tags - direct Primary - Secondary - what made you decide to go to the quote paraphrase paraphrase 2017 Women's March. U798- I marched for women's rights and to women’s women's protest 0 protest the election. rights; protest, rights election election

I felt that re-writing the words of the participant helped me transcribe and interpret more closely. More specifically, the decision to re-transcribe was an additional step that required I pay attention and repeat the participant’s words to the best of my ability, as I would in a conversation or ethnographic interview scenario. The process of repeating participant words helped me create

120 both descriptive and in-vivo codes based on the responses. Although I had looked through responses from the beginning of data collection in 2017, a majority of the coding happened in

February-March 2019 – two years after I received the responses.

Tagging References to Trump

“Trump,” “administration,” “president,” and “election” are present in the top-20 word frequency image earlier in this chapter. Given the regular occurrence of these words and the historical context of the March origination (as a response to the 2016 Election), I noted when a response referenced terms regarding Trump and his campaign. In fact, 216 of the participants explicitly wrote the word “Trump” (30%). More broadly speaking, 374 included terminology that referenced Trump and/or the Election in their responses (52%).

Tagging Emotion and Affect

In addition to paraphrasing participants’ motivations, I created a column to track rhetoric of emotion (i.e. fear, sad, angry, outraged, happy, love, hate). Since the question “what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women’s March” is a question of causality, the inclusion of the rhetoric of emotion in participants’ responses demonstrates the ways in which “emotions are a core part of action and decisions” (Jasper, 2011, p. 298). In particular, I was curious how these emotions were related to behavior and identity, as discussed in the literature review. As with the motivation paraphrases, I first quoted the phrase that contained emotion, and then coded the phrase either in its original state as a direct quote: (e.g. “I was angry”  code: “angry”) or as an interpretation (e.g. “Mad as hell about trump”  code: “angry”). However, I agree with Jasper

(2011)’s criticism that “labels for specific emotions are often taken from intact natural language—anger and fear being most common—but actually cover different kinds of feelings”

(p. 286). To that point, I have endeavored to interpret each participant’s words in the context of

121 its origination, and I acknowledge that the coding may not mirror reality. Instead, my goal was to see a pattern of the types of emotions that were at work in perceptions of participant motivation on the survey. Below is an example of my process for tagging emotion:

Table 3.8: Coding Example of Affect and Emotional Interpretations

ID In a few sentences, please Primary - Secondary - Affect - Emotion describe what made you paraphrase paraphrase Quote Interpretation decide to go to the 2017 Women's March. U541-0 Mad as hell about trump and emotional family mad as anger my daughter invited me to go response to invitation hell with her. Trump

Since emotion is a part of all decision-making processes, I hesitate to put a number on the responses that rhetorically included emotion; however, doing so offers context for e-motivations in the group consciousness. Based on my coding, a majority of the respondents implicitly or explicitly included emotion in their responses. Emotion, then, is a very apparent motivating force in the narratives of why the group as a whole marched.

Results

The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language,

of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. – Donna

Haraway (1991, p. 310)

Narrative Themes

In all of the answers respondents gave to our question: “In a few sentences, please describe what made you decide to go to the 2017 Women's March,” the reasons were as unique and diverse as the 718 individuals who participated. Even if their words were the exact same as another person’s (very rare in the data), we have to remember that each person’s life ultimately has much richer reasoning and depth that cannot be fully known through the text. The responses

122 in this survey are statements that the participants felt comfortable providing, given their position in the world and relationship to power dynamics.

Also, while I endeavor to tease out clear themes from the responses, behavior is a complex convergence of activation points and core motivations. The data demonstrate a refusal to be monolithic or single-minded regarding the reason for marching as a whole and even within individual responses. The act of conceptualizing motivations into unique themes may help us understand parts of the collective behavior. Further, the themes I offer in this document are by no means comprehensive; they are my interpretation and excision from the data.

Finally, I report the themes outside of direct respect to core motivations; to do so is an act of additional analysis in relationship to theory, which I leave for the discussion section. Instead,

I will demonstrate each theme I constructed with exemplars, responses that most closely connect to the theme. I will offer more insight with what I call “nuanced themes” (a term for coded material that is similar to but also slightly different from the parent theme). Given my extra attention to certain codes (Trump/emotion), I will note it in connection to the theme, but I will expand on the role of emotion as a core motivation more in the discussion section. The organization of the themes is roughly based on their prevalence in the responses, starting with themes that were most dominant.

2016 United States Election Outcome. The Women’s March occurred the day following

Donald Trump’s inauguration, which was a propelling historical force that was part of the

March’s organization (as discussed in the Prelude). In this category, participants explicitly point to the event as a main factor in their decision to March. Two nuanced themes emerge 1) reactions to the Election outcome, and 2) protesting the Election outcome.

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Nuanced Theme: Reactions to the 2016 United States Election Outcome. The first clear motivator I identified in my coding was that participants were motivated to march in response to the outcome of the 2016 Election cycle. In these responses, participants fell into three types: responses that included a direct or implied emotional context, and those without explicitly stated emotional context. For clarity, emotional context is in bold.

Table 3.9: Theme Exemplars for Reactions to the 2016 United States Election Outcome

Reactions to the 2016 United States Election Outcome Emotional Context Included Shocked and appalled at outcome of election. I was outraged at the subtle and blatant sexism and misogyny throughout the campaign season from many Emotional Context Included sources, and I was outraged at Trump's anti-woman platform and attitude. Concern for the civil rights implications of Pres. Trump's Emotional Context Included election and the GOP agenda. Emotional Context Included Disgust that bigoted misogynist was elected president. Emotional Context Excluded Donald Trump becoming President Emotional Context Excluded The election of Trump. Emotional Context Excluded General response to Trump administration. Because the election of Donald Trump felt like a slap in the Emotional Context Implied face to women and I wanted to show that women are a force to be reconned with and we will resist. As noted earlier in my discussion of emotion tags, just because I did not interpret an emotion as present does not mean it was not there. Further, within this primary motivation, it is easy to see that other reasons are intertwined with the primary motivator—the GOP agenda, sexism, demonstrating resistance—are also part of the reasons that made these participants decide to march.

Nuanced Theme: To Protest the 2016 Election Outcome. In this category, the participants conveyed taking action as their primary goal—to “show” or “stand up”—as opposed to reactive language such as “concern for” or response to the Election as their motivating factor. In contrast to the first motivation, a range of respondents specifically included a desire to protest or resist the incoming president’s or administration’s rhetoric, behavior, policies, and potential impact.

Two types of identities that emerged in this theme were either individual or collective resistance,

124 where the participant invoked either their own participation or conveyed engaging in collective protest.

Table 3.10: Theme Exemplars for Protesting the 2016 Election Outcome

To Protest the 2016 Election Outcome I had to show my opposition to Trump and my support of women and Individual Protest minorities. Collective I wanted to stand up and voice my opposition to the current government Protest with a large group of people.

To Demonstrate or Express Solidarity for a Cause. In the context of social movements, a march is “an organized procession of demonstrators who are supporting or protesting something” (Merriam-Webster, 2019, n.p.); it is not surprising that the responses reflected the motivation to demonstrate support or solidarity for a cause (or causes). These may be moral or identity-driven ideologies, and often, they too, are put in context of the Election. The participants in this category seem to feel that the March could be an effective means for expression.

Table 3.11: Theme Exemplars for Demonstrating/Expressing Solidary for a Cause

To Demonstrate or Express Solidarity for a Cause I felt I needed march to stand up for human rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights, women's rights and for my outrage that the country elected a president that would not respect nor support those rights. I have never marched or contacted legislature representatives before. To express my unwavering belief in the dignity of all human beings! I want to stand up for equality. To support equal rights for women in all walks of life. Standing up for women's equality, our right to govern our own bodies, and feminism in general. I wanted to raise my voice with others to bring attention to proposed and actual changes threatening the citizens and residents of our country, especially women. The number of critical issues at risk made it imperative to take action, and be part of a force demanding attention and making its voice heard. Human rights and the environment are not issues we can afford to roll back on. Expressing Dissent -- opposition to anti-reproductive rights tactics. Felt the need to support the rights of women and a diverse society. To show strength in numbers, and that it isn't just the "radical left" that is angry. I wanted to march in support of causes that affect us (not necessarily to march against Trump, as unacceptable as I find him to be.) It was important to represent queer women and stand up for inclusiveness and intersectional feminism. Living near the primary march location helped. On behalf of Transgender women and to add a Progressive Christian Voice.

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To Protect Human Rights and Freedoms. Similar to the desire for action noted in the motivation to “protest the 2016 Election outcome,” responses in this theme convey a desire to provide protection against threats to rights and freedoms. Conceptually, these responses are often resonant with the American concept of moral freedom, wherein individuals are granted unalienable rights and freedoms under the Constitution.

Table 3.12: Theme Exemplars for Protecting Human Rights and Freedoms.

To Protect Human Rights and Freedoms I marched in response to the 2016 election and national threats to freedoms of all Freedoms individuals. I wanted to go aka a stand against injustice and in support of progressive policies. Public education is also very important to me. It was important to me to stand up for what I believe in and do something more Freedoms than just sitting behind a computer screen. It was important to show a physical united front against all of the assaults on our freedoms. I am a feminist and I felt it was important to take a stand against the hateful Human rhetoric of the 2016 election cycle and show my support for the protection of Rights fundamental human rights. I have an infant daughter and I will fight to protect her rights. I have a mother who Human was fighting for all these same civil rights issues in the 60s and 70s and I fight for Rights her as well as myself. I am Jewish and fear persecution. I wanted to fight for my brothers and sister if color. I wanted to fight for women's rights. And on and on. Human To preserve the rights of women and every individual that does not meet the Rights standards of the Truump agenda. Human I wanted to stand up for women's rights and people's rights that may be trampled Rights by the new government. Nuanced Theme: To Protect or Demonstrate Solidarity with Vulnerable Populations.

This nuanced theme shows the blurring between marching to protect, protest, and advocate. The participants varied in who they defined as vulnerable. Some examples include LGBTQIA+, women, immigrants, and indigenous people, as well as family members. Overall, the tone demonstrated a response to an imminent or future threat, where the participant felt obligated to perform allyship.

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Table 3.13: Theme Exemplars for Demonstrating/Expressing Solidary for a Cause.

To Protect or Demonstrate Solidarity with Vulnerable Populations The newly elected president and his promises/rhetoric that I interpreted as a threat to women, LGBTQ+, immigrants, the environment, affordable healthcare (planned parenthood), science, international relations, education, etc I wanted to stand with all of those that believe we should protect the most vulnerable among us. It was important to show solidarity with the various intersecting groups that will have their rights impinged upon with the new administration. I was furious at the outcome of the election, and scared that the incoming Trump administration would curtail women's right and access to vital health services, including affordable access to abortion. I hated the promises of the incoming administration--it's anti-science, anti-human, and entirely racist. I felt helpless and scared, but at least I could be part of a united front of resistance. To be counted, give the movement numbers. To stand for equality and rights of myself and others (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, immigrants, indigenous, and various women's issues including medical, economical, and security). To feel solidarity with others. To stand against the Trump administration and its associations. To show solidarity with the millions of others opposed to Trump and his anti equality of women , minorities and pretty much anyone who isn't a straight, White, Christian male. I felt the need to support all of those at risk for marginalization and losing their voice with the inauguration of our current president. I wanted to visibly show my dissent and support. Nuanced Theme: Using Privilege to Protect Vulnerable Populations. A majority of respondents to the survey identified themselves as White and female. In context with the 2016

United States Presidential Election, a majority of White Americans voted for Trump (57%) whereas 74% non-White Americans voted for Clinton. A majority of White women, too, voted for Trump (57%) as a whole (Exit Polls, 2016, n.p.). While Whiteness is not always identified as the reason for privilege in the answers, it is present in the demographics of the survey participants. The implication here is that racial identity is at the center of “privilege” in most responses, although occasionally gender/maleness also is present.

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Table 3.14: Theme Exemplars for Using Privilege to Protect Vulnerable Populations.

Using Privilege to Protect Vulnerable Populations After the election, I realized how my privilege had caused me to become complacent about the state of our country. I have always volunteered in the community, but in the days following, I planned several actions to engage in fighting for progress. One of those was to attend the women's march on Washington. I took a sick day on November 9th. I realize how much privilege I have being able to do this. And I just laid in bed all day, incredibly sad that people chose such hateful rhetoric to lead this nation, but also just incredibly sad that people chose a failed businessman reality show host to lead the country. So I took a day off and just ignored the world. But then I realized I needed to start doing something, otherwise I'm just as responsible for his win. Attending a Women's March in my town was just one way I am trying to start stepping up and being visible and call attention to some of the issues. As a White woman, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt as it was empirically my identifying group that voted him into office. This seemed a first step in using my own privilege to educate other White women about how this election would affect them in the coming days. For me, this was the first step in creating real solidarity among all genders and identifying minorities (LGBTQ+, BLM, Undocumented, etc.). For the futureof my children and the planet i prorested the trump and republican regime. I matched for the marginalized, the oppressed and trued to use my privilege for good. Desire for Social Connection. The Women’s March was not only a locus for expressing ideas, it was the center for physical and social interaction. The social-emotional interaction here is interesting in that the March was a way for people to find social relationships to “provide instrumental and emotional support that help one cope with stress […] and buffers individuals from the effects of negative life events” (van Zomeren, 2015, p. 4). While some respondents expressed wanting to participate with friends, others described the desire to find “like-minded” people with whom they could feel ideological connection. In some responses, there was a desire to heal through community-shared experiences.

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Table 3.15: Theme Exemplars for Desire for Social Connection

Desire for Social Connection the unity with other women I felt like I needed to do something. I wanted to stand and be counted. Friends were organizing a group to sing. I wanted to be part of something and show my 3 year old daughter why showing up is important. I wanted to be around women who were like minded. I wanted to stand against the hateful, misogynistic rhetoric in this campaign. The disgusting, hurtful things Donald Trump has said, I decided after he was elected that if there was a mass gathering for women's rights I would be there no matter what. I was upset, felt I needed to do something. Wanted to be with other people I had been very depressed after the election and chose to disconnect from the world entirely. The Women's March was my self-imposed deadline for rejoining society and starting to make a positive impact on my community from Day 1 of the Trump Presidency.

To DO SOMETHING. The desire to “DO SOMETHING” is an in-vivo code echoed throughout the responses. As demonstrated by the capitalization, the participants often convey urgency or an emotional element connected with this theme.

Table 3.16: Theme Exemplars for DO SOMETHING.

DO SOMETHING It was something TO DO to show my displeasure of what is happening to my rights as an American woman, WOC, granddaughter of immigrant, mother of 2 in MY country. It was also my very first march - as well as my husband's, daughter's and son's (something I am very proud of). I felt it was important to show my support. I needed to do something for me, to help me feel like I was making a statement, making it clear that I am not satisfied with the way our country is heading. It was important for me to attend the women's march as a sort of catharsis of emotions that had been building since the election. I wanted to do something that felt more tangible than complaining about current events and I hoped that this march would empower people in the future to continue activism and give people (and myself) hope going forward. I did not agree with the Trump administration and felt that I needed to do something. I felt the need to do SOMETHING, and I wanted to meet others who felt the same way. I decided to go to the 2017 Women's March because I had to do something. I had to stand against the bigotry of the President elect. I was shocked after the election. I felt like I needed to DO something. I felt activated. As soon as I heard about the Women's March forming, I knew I wanted to go to one. Then I saw a quote that said something like.. Do you wonder if you'd have marched in the Civil Rights Movement? Well, are you marching in THIS civil rights movement? There's your answer.I knew I had to go. I decided to go to the Women's March because I wanted to stand up for all people's rights. I felt I had to do something. I knew in my heart if I didn't march that I would miss out on a big part of history and being female I needed to take the baton that has been passed on to the next generation of incredible women and continue the fight that women before me started. We women are not going to take inequality anymore. PERIOD!!!!!!!! When I read the history of what it took just to get the right for women to vote and this was only White women I knew I had to fight for equality for everyone. 72 years it took for the right for women to vote and even longer for all people of color to vote. It infuriates me to no end. I will not bow down, stop fighting, or shut up until the end of my days and I pass the baton to other women or this issue is resolved.

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To Combat Identity Erasure and/or Silencing. Responses often used language such as

“to have a voice,” “to be seen” or “to be counted.” The common denominator with this motivation is a desire to express oneself as a means to combat a perceived erasure or threat of silencing. The motivation, then centers on re-establishing self-determination and personhood or collective identity (particularly American). Often the desire to be heard is in dialogue with the results of the 2016 Elections.

Table 3.17: Theme Exemplars for Combatting Identity Erasure and/or Silencing.

To Combat Identity Erasure and/or Silencing To be seen, even if my voice (or vote) wasn't heard in the elections of 2016. To be visible as a woman It was important to feel that my voice was being heard. I needed a positive way to deal with my anger and frustration over the election outcome. Donald Trump is the antithesis of everything I hold dear. As a mother, and especially as a grandmother of two beautiful girls, I want America to be a place where people are valued for their inherent worth. I don't feel Trump represents me or speaks for me. Our Sister March gave the opportunity to voice those feelings publicly. The election of Donald Trump as president is a threat to the progress women have made during my lifetime. It was important to me to have a voice of dissent. The first reason was to let my voice be heard in opposition to the hateful campaign of Donald Trump. I was particularly disgusted with his denial and/or ignorance? of sexual harassment, climate change, immigration and trade policy and religious bias. His misogyny with his lock her up theme against Hillary was horrible. I voted. I contributed to campaigns and I made get of the vote calls. I was not done raising the hate. I wanted to raise my voice with others to bring attention to proposed and actual changes threatening the citizens and residents of our country, especially women. to find like minded people, to add myself, my body, my voice to this movement instead of just donating money or signing petitions, to join a community and to start to build a resistance The number of critical issues at risk made it imperative to take action, and be part of a force demanding attention and making its voice heard. Human rights and the environment are not issues we can afford to roll back on. I felt at such a loss when the election results came in. I felt I had awaken to a country was just democratic process was now under attack. The wave of hate talk and reckless actions made me feel fearful and I needed to join with others to let my voice and desire for a just, fair and compassionate government be heard. The future of our country after the election. Human rights were at stake. I wanted to let the new administration know I was watching and have a voice.

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To Model Activist Behavior. The Women’s March offered the environment for intergenerational participation, and some of the participants identified the collective action as a locus for modeling activist behavior to the world, their families, networks, and significant others.

Table 3.18: Theme Exemplars for Modeling Activist Behavior

Model Activist Behavior I thought it was important to show my children that some things are worth taking a stand for. I'm a bisexual woman who has always been passionate about equality and inclusion. The Trump agenda attacks all of my values and it was important to stand for those things. It was also important to take my 7 year old niece and show her that we can make a difference and that others support minorites even if it doesn't always feel like it. Rage - at the election and presidency of Trump - I felt I had to stand up and my daughters live in DC and I wanted to show them that is ok to protest and be involved Grief and anxiety over the election results. I wanted to empower my teen daughters who went to the march with me and show them when your liberties as a woman are threatened that you don't stand idly by, you stand up and make your voice heard. Resist. I marched for equality, not just for all people. I marched because the incoming administration showed they didn't care one little bit for women, the under-privileged, people of color, different religions, or genders/sexualities. I marched so my children would see it's important to stand up for what you believe in. I marched because, as a women, I have so much at risk with this new administration and I wanted my voice heard. Too Much for One Sign. The last theme I would like to introduce demonstrates the complicated nature of motivation, behavior, and communication in response to the prompt.

While the exemplars above show clusters of motivations, often within a response one will clearly see many primary reasons for marching, all competing for priority in the participant’s decision to march. “Too much for one sign” is an in-vivo code that resonates with a majority of the respondents who had more than one discrete reason for marching.

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Table 3.19: Theme Exemplars for Too much for one sign

Too much for one sign It was so many things. I was angry and sad that Trump won and felt betrayed by my family and friends that voted for him. I watched him demean women and verbally attack marginalized groups. I felt like silence was the same as giving permission for Trump and his supporters to continue to oppress, bully, and normalize hate. There is so much more, but in keeping with your request for only a few sentences, I'll stop there. Too much for one sign I was one of the organizers of [a Sister March]. I did it for many reasons. First the DC march was too much of a mess from an organizers point of view with no permits or enough planning for many weeks. Also, the hassle of getting there. Also, there was a lot of interest in [our city] for a [local] march, from our [local] NOW chapter meeting in December, to friends who wanted to bring their families to something local and fun and interesting. After the election of a sexist, racist billionaire I knew I could no longer sit on the sidelines and watch all the gains made by women, minorities and the poor be swept away without standing for those who could not speak up because of disability or fear. I did not want to watch insurance coverage for the poor be taken away or rights for the disabled or see education dumbed down by the Secretary of Education without a fight . I was also afraid of what could happen to our earth given the election of someone who does not believe in climate change and indicated a willingness to destroy our environment based on his choice to head the EPA. He won the election by playing to fears of terrorism and empty promises of draining the swamp. I wanted to be part of showing the world what women look like when we stand together. It's way past time for women to unify and stand up to the power structure and recognize the oppression that keeps us from equality. Donald Trump's election reveals that we have been sleeping and letting things slide. For the women that did vote for Trump, I wanted them to see other women, by the millions, standing for them even as they choose to reward our oppressors. Sisterhood is powerful. ~Kathie Sarachild Unknown. Our survey design allowed participants to refrain from answering questions, and 72 participants did not respond to the question. It is important to include their existence here to acknowledge their participation in the survey. Symbolically, the non-responses represent the partial and incomplete inevitability of research.

Concurrent motivating factors. Alongside motivations, the participants stated several concurrent motivating factors such as proximity/easy access to the march, a desire to participate in a historical moment, to keep the government accountable, desire for emotional healing, or a moral obligation as compounding factors for their decision to march. These concurrent motivating factors were rarely stand-alone themes.

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Discussion

From analyzing the data, I have identified the following thematic patterns, which give us preliminary understanding of motivations behind participation. Across all themes, the responses demonstrate the interrelationship between identity, efficacy, emotion, and morality. Since my analysis derived from a holistic interpretation of the data, my contribution to understanding individual motivations is couched within the emergence and interaction with the politicized group consciousness. My findings are specific to the emergence of the Women’s March, and therefore are not generalizable outside of their cultural context. However, they may be useful in understanding certain ways social movements attract or exclude participants in collective action events.

In this discussion, it is important for me to note that the rhetoric of the participants is historically and culturally located. I am an unknown variable; my positionality re-constitutes each response inside my reality. Simply citing statistics of how frequent a word was used is only a bolster for my argument as well as a shadow over it; we must assume, often, that concepts are embedded within answers to which I did not have the cultural sensitivity to understand.

Identity

As I read through these responses, there is a clear sense of the ways in which the concept of discrete identity formation separates and isolates affinity groups instead of including and connecting them. Participants expressed their identities through the groups they either identified with or groups that they felt desire to protect. Overall, the collective consciousness trended towards American White cis-gendered-female liberal feminism (WCLFA), which reflects self- reported demographic statistics from the survey. However, this dataset offers insight into the ways that individual identities resonate to create a distinct group consciousness that motivates

133 participation in collective action. In particular, the analysis provides a historically contextualized insight into the current values of WCLFA.

White Cis-Female Liberal Feminist American Group Consciousness. The dominant attitude represented in the sample from the Women’s March is American liberal in its progressive, anti-Trump, anti-Republican administration, and pro-social programs rhetoric (i.e. health care, environment). Human rights (women’s rights, rights and freedoms) are at the forefront of the WCLFA consciousness, with more vague attributes to “other marginalized or threatened people” such as LGBTQIA+, immigrants, disabled, and Muslim people. Rarely is class or wage disparity mentioned. Importantly, WCLFA consciousness in this sample is also one correlated to more access to more education and higher household income, elements I hope to study further beyond this dissertation.

Whiteness. What is nearly absent from the group consciousness are references to police brutality, wealth disparity, and other specific concerns of racism, and specifically the complex assemblage that constitutes race and gender identity. At the heart of the issue lies the fact that most White people live relatively segregated lives both in terms of representation and information (DiAngelo, 2011). Without daily access to the experiences of people of color, reinforced by algorithmic segregation on social media, White cultural understandings of reality are stubbornly dominant.

The mitigation and exclusion of race from the discussion demonstrates the way that

Whiteness becomes embedded in the group consciousness. In corroboration with this perception, mentions regarding race (Black Lives Matter: 4, BLM: 2, POC: 3, black: 5, race: 6, racism: 11,

White: 14 Latino: 0, Hispanic: 1) are paltry in comparison to gender (woman: 31, women: 246) or even the environment (n=30). This finding is consistent with the perceptions of young

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African American women who experienced the Women’s March as exclusionary, as one participant from Brewer and Dundes’ (2018) study explained that she saw it as “a cardinal example of how the exclusive, predominantly White women’s movement takes to the streets and protests issues that directly affect them [while] many of these same ‘nice White ladies’ are nowhere to be seen or heard at Black Lives Matter protests or any other protest about important race issues” ( p. 53).The rhetorical avoidance of race demonstrates the ways in which White people “have not had to build the cognitive or affective skills or develop the stamina that would allow for constructive engagement across racial divides” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 57). Even with acknowledgement of race existing in the responses, there was only a vague sense of how to be accountable regarding the intersection of race and gender (or any other category) vis-à-vis

“human rights.” As a result, the 2017 Women’s March collective identity emerged as distinctly

White. This microanalysis of individual motivations regarding identity is important for the development of a group consciousness in collective action; and more specifically the analysis shows how Whiteness, in individual politicized identities, becomes a driver of politicized collective identities (DiAngelo, 2011, 2018).

Cis-gendered female. Similarly, the collective consciousness centered predominantly cis- gendered White women in the conversation. Responses tended to generalize LGBTQIA+ into a single category, unless they were speaking from personal experience with themselves or a family member. For example:

 To counter the support #45 received at the Inauguration and support women, POC, and

the LGBTQIA community. To make a stand and show that we are stronger together and

we will fight back.

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 To protest the incoming administration, and to stand up for women, black lives, lgbtqia+,

immigrants, and other marginalized communities. To add my voice to the crowd.

These responses separate identities in the order of gender, race, and sexual orientation. This rhetorical positioning (gender, then race, then sexual orientation) replicates the ways in which race and sexual orientation are pushed further back in the group consciousness. Certainly, the structure of language forces decisions of ordering; however, with more sexuality-oriented responses, there is a difference, still difficult to reconcile by cis-gender women. Take, for example the following response: “‘Women's Rights are Human Rights’ was a huge impact on my attending. I am also the mother of an amazing transgender teenage daughter and I needed to march for her rights as well.” This response highlights the way in which cis-women’s rights are often articulated separately (and firstly) before intersections with trans-women’s rights. There is a struggle to find language that is more cohesive than divisive, yet still honors and respects difference. The first part of the response tries to grapple with that irreconcilable intersection—the participant seems to be attempting to say, “Whether trans- or cis-gendered, women’s rights are human rights.” The cultural logic is difficult to render, the participant feels the need to first argue

“woman” is “human.” Puar (2012) describes this problem of intersectionality as an “ironic othering” wherein the non-dominant identity formation is othered “through an approach that is meant to alleviate such othering” (p. 52). The survey responses repeat ironic othering, wherein the articulation of identity, and group identity, becomes more discrete and inscribed (human, woman, trans) instead of more relational and more interconnected.

Instead of thinking about identities divided into subsets of group membership categories, we need a better way to push against Western dualisms (male/female; self/other; White/non-

White) to include social identity and situated knowledges. Part of the problem arises from the

136 way in which intersectional categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, disability evolved themselves. Puar (2012) argues that the concept of a discrete identity emerged as “products of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence, operative through a Western/Euro-American epistemological formation” (p. 54). In other words, discrete categories function to erase knowledge and narrative of their associations. Since group consciousness tends to distill the most deeply embedded dominant identity articulations, social movements often (or always) fail to articulate the needs of the margins of the social assemblage.

If a majority of group members are defined by such clear, discrete identity formations (i.e.

White, cis-gendered, woman, liberal), there will be a steep challenge in being truly flexible and inclusive in their objectives and an unresolvable tension with the fundamental morality of their goals. However, the process of collective action is a deeply social event in which new identities and affinities reassemble and reify themselves—dynamically changing the group consciousness itself.

Efficacy

Efficacy intersects with privilege. With a group identity of White, cis-gendered female, liberal feminists, they were at a lower risk of incarceration or other types of institutionalized penalties for participating in civil disobedience. Given America’s consistent tolerance of police brutality against minorities (DiAngelo, 2018), Black women have a much higher barrier to attend, as they may experience fear for their safety around large groups of White people and law enforcement. Similarly, their gerrymandered disenfranchisement might also make them feel less apt to even be able to express their voices in a collective protest, particularly if they perceived it to be about White women’s values. The combination of efficacy and emotion here would lead to obvious and rational reasons not to attend. On the other hand, for a group consciousness that has

137 always felt relatively safe in comparison, White women may feel that they would have more ability to achieve their goals of expression simply by attending the March. Given the group identity of WCLFA, the expression goals in the dataset further their collective ideology.

The question of “what made you decide to march” is one that connects decision-making processes and positionality. In order to answer, participants must consider the cost-benefit analysis of the efficacy of attending. In this sample, each individual was motivated to attend because they believed that their participation would do something. As a result, all four efficacy goals are present in the narratives (i.e. expression, influence out-group members, build momentum for the movement, and educate third parties). And, there were responses in the dataset that did not articulate efficacy views at all, explicitly or implicitly. However, the goal of expressing values was one of the most clearly cited motivations in the answers, and is tied to the group identity (WCLFA) of being implicitly able to be heard once they express those values in collective action.

Expression of values. Rhetorically speaking, a march is a multi-faceted word used in social movement contexts to describe an act for demonstrators to protest or support something.

The key terms offered in this definition prioritize expressive efficacy (i.e. demonstrators, support, protest). Survey respondents suggested that they perceived The 2017 Women’s March, to some degree, as an effective platform for expression of values in relationship to the other core motivations: identity-formations, moral values, and emotions.

Expression of Identity-formations:  A protest against the rhetoric and ugliness of the Trump campaign and policies. Let the world know I do not agree with Trump and do not support him.  I wanted to be counted as someone who supports human rights, the environment, immigration, women's rights, and LGBTQIA rights.

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Expression of Moral Values:  I went to the March with my 12 yo daughter because I was appalled that this country had elected such a horrible role model for my children, and I wanted to show them that it was not ok to just stand aside and watch our moral values be trampled on.  There was no decision - it was necessary to go. It was necessary to show the world that we do not accept the GOP's treatment of & disregard for women. Expression of Emotions:  I felt it was important to express my outrage a man who allegedly sexually assaulted at least 12 women was elected president.  It was important to feel that my voice was being heard. I needed a positive way to deal with my anger and frustration over the election outcome.

I have selected these examples because in my interpretation, they seem to be more discretely linked to a specific core motivation. More often than not, however, participants incorporated more than one core motivation in respect to expression (as implied in the responses above). For example, the following participant speaks to all three:

I marched to show how unhappy and scared I was (AM) with tRUMP [sic] in office. I marched b/c I have value and my values are worth defending. I marched b/c democracy is messy.

Not only is democracy “messy” as this participant observes, but also our motivations for engaging in collective action are intertwined with identity, emotion, morals, and efficacy.

The cost-benefit analysis that these Marchers conducted demonstrates that collective action is not only an event resulting from motivational processes, but is also “a constituent part of the dynamic process of relationship regulation through social interaction” (van Zomeren,

2015, p. 3). In participating, individuals are performing, reforming, and reifying their perceptions of themselves, using collective action as effective means for expressing those identity formations.

Additional efficacy objectives. While the desire to express one’s values was the most rhetorically present driver of efficacy beliefs in the dataset, many responses also implicated all four efficacy objectives—expression, influencing out-group members, building momentum for

139 the movement, and reaching third parties. The following response is an example that includes all core motivations and the four types of efficacy objectives:

I am a Woman, I am a senior woman, a mother, grandmother, partner, I have a son, and a daughter, I wanted to show solidarity with other people all over the world. I felt alone and isolated about my feelings that (T) would be our president. I wanted the city in which I live to know that there are people living here that don't agree that he should be president. I felt we should stand for love, honor, integrity and decency, and honesty. I wanted to introduce my 3 yr. old granddaughter on her birthday to resistance at its finest! I felt threatened that as a woman I would lose precious, already fought over rights. I believe that "people in the streets" sends a strong message to everyone that we will not sit by and cave in. I have a strong will for diversity and freedom. My best friend is gay and I want to see that his rights are not taken away and that he is safe to walk the streets.

In this case, the speaker is describing the desire to express identity, emotion, and moral values as a means of accomplishing several goals. These core motivations are bolstered by additional calculations regarding efficacy:

 Influence out-group members: I wanted the city in which I live to know that there are people living here that don't agree that he should be president.  Reach third parties: I wanted to show solidarity with other people all over the world.  Build momentum for the movement: I wanted to introduce my 3 yr. old granddaughter on her birthday to resistance at its finest! […] I believe that "people in the streets" sends a strong message to everyone that we will not sit by and cave in.

However, this woman’s response is a helpful example for demonstrating the complex ways that her dynamic position in the world (a partnered senior White woman) affords her the psychological freedom to have optimism regarding the efficacy of collective action on behalf of others (her gay male best friend). Within that positionality, there is power. With that power, she claims there is a moral imperative: we should stand for love, honor, integrity and decency, and honesty.

Overall, the focus on expression dominates the responses. For this group consciousness, the March ultimately provided an effective platform for collective visibility (in media, news,

140 communities, with friends, internationally). In return, that expression of group identity advanced its own dominant cultural identities, affinity groups, and values.

Emotional Motivations

Ultimately, the experience of negative feelings in response to the Election played an important role in politicizing their identities, which lead to action. As with Kleres and

Wettergren’s work on climate change activism, the responses from my survey also center around threat response—often with fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, and disgust in context with events.

Despite the fact that our survey question did not prompt the participants to describe their feelings, a majority of the responses included emotional rhetoric. More specifically, the participants described the 2016 Election cycle as a particularly significant event in the way it affected them emotionally. The narrative pattern that describes this emotional motivation is one of personal political salience, and thus is the foundation for the personal salience model.

Since the 2016 election campaign had extensive coverage on traditional and social media, the event was more likely to become personally salient. According to the Pew Research Center,

2016 was the last year that newspapers barely outpaced social media as a place for U.S. adults to get their news (T.V. has been dominating the public’s news consumption, although it is losing ground to news websites) (Shearer, 2018). The change in the way we access news is important; social media such as Facebook and Twitter has an implicitly relational and emotional nature. For example, instead of news being reported by an unknown journalist, news is shared by friends and relatives, with whom the user has emotional connections. I contend that the emotional framing, however imperceptible, intensifies the way we interact with the news, and builds a collective rhetorical affect. Ultimately, the 2016 Election demonstrated a shift in the way people emotionally connected with it as a personal event. While anger is often pointed to as the

141 motivator of collective action, throughout my data, fear and assessments of threat (and protection) dominate the collective narrative.

Personal Salience Model. In order to describe the collective emotional narrative, I expand on the work of Duncan and Stewart (2007) who discuss the ways in which events can politicize identities. In the personal salience model, a participant describes an event, connected with an emotion, which motivates their decision to take action. The personal salience model is particularly useful in describing the ways that emotional motivations interact with events and identity formations to produce action.

Table 3.20: Personal Salience Model Exemplars.

Personal Salience Model Event creates emotional response, identity activates, motivates participation in March The outcome of the 2016 elections horrified me. The current presidents complete disregard for civil rights, equality, science, the environment just infuriates me. Without change we are doomed. I marched in response to the 2016 election and national threats to freedoms of all individuals. I wanted to go aka a stand against injustice and in support of progressive policies. Public education is also very important to me. I was shocked after the election. I felt like I needed to DO something. I felt activated. As soon as I heard about the Women's March forming, I knew I wanted to go to one. Then I saw a quote that said something like.. Do you wonder if you'd have marched in the Civil Rights Movement? Well, are you marching in THIS civil rights movement? There's your answer. I knew I had to go. In all of these examples of the personal salience model, we see an event (“the 2016 elections,” “the 2016 election” and “the election”) in relationship with an emotion as affect or clearly stated (“horrified,” “infuriates,” “doomed,” “threats,” and “shocked”). The micro- narrative here demonstrates the ways in which the 2016 Election event connected with the individuals on an emotional and therefore personal level. These three exemplars express emotion in terms of anger, fear, shock, and disgust. However, these feelings are situated in cultural and social contexts—and for the March, a collective consciousness couched within a White cis- gendered, liberal feminist group identity.

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In their ethnographic study of young African American women’s perceptions of the 2017

Women’s March, Sierra Brewer and Lauren Dundes (2018) open their article with Women’s

March co-chair Tamika Mallory’s quote, “If I see that White folks are concerned, then people of color need to be terrified” (p.49). Mallory speaks to the magnitude to which racism and issues of race are unfelt by White people, particularly in the context of social movements. Our data demonstrates, in particular, the existence of White concern in response to the 2016 Election results, a privileged emotional position that motivated and allowed White women to March without fear of incarceration or other institutional repercussions.

Morality

Since our study asks for the decision point (or a crisis moment) when the individual decided to march, it is asking them to engage in narrative-making. They are remembering the story of their decision-making process. Further, Jia, Soucie, Alisat, Curtin, and Pratt (2017) explain: “narratives are essential to bringing moral values to the forefront of moral actions” (p.

105). Our survey offers a space where some participants choose to narrate the values behind their actions—ultimately the values that motivated them to participate in collective action. Since many of the responses connected emotion directly to the US Election results, it made sense to consider moral emotions, as they “involve feelings of approval and disapproval based on moral institutions and principles, as well as the satisfactions we feel when we do the right (or wrong) thing, such as compassion for the unfortunate or indignation over injustice” (Jasper, 2011, p.

287). Again, core motivations of morality, emotions, and identity interact to motivate action.

Within the context of the 2017 Women’s March group consciousness dominated by

White, cis-gender female, liberal feminism, certain morality narratives started to repeat in the dataset. Ultimately, I developed the “incongruity model” as a means of describing a moral

143 narrative that emerges from a rhetorical event that makes the audience feel a deep internal contradiction (through emotions like shock and guilt), to the extent that they have to break apart or reframe their identity through public action to attain resolution. Kenneth Burke describes this process of conversion as “incongruity,” wherein the individual is shocked into an authentic reevaluation of their fundamental beliefs or sense of reality (Dow, 1994). The internal conflict generated through the rhetorical event is referred to as genuine argument (coined by Maurice

Charland), or as Dow (1994) describes, “an historical moment, initiated by rhetorical action, in which a rhetor and his/her audience become aware of the necessity of and possibility for radical transformation of themselves and their world” (p. 313). Not only must the individual transform themselves—their world, their collective identity is also essential to that transformation. The

2016 Election was a historical moment that forced White women to see themselves as synonymous with the population who elected Trump into office, as well as citizens of a country with an elected President who is openly racist and misogynistic.

There have been similar instances of the incongruity model at work in social movement literature that lead to my findings. Dow (1994) uses Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” to frame Larry Kramer’s article “1112 and Counting” published in The New York Native in 1983 as a means of generating genuine argument to de-construct and re-construct the concept of AIDS and of the gay community. At the time, Kramer used hyperbolic language to shock, anger, and guilt his audience to politicize gay men’s identities making AIDS an issue of “personal moral consequence” so that they would participate in a collective politicized identity. Rand (2008) identifies Kramer’s effect on the AIDS Crisis as one that spurred a new level of activism “not merely to promote acceptance or tolerance, but also to reclaim loudly and forcefully the rights to safety and humanity, and forge identity and end victimization through self-defense”(p. 298).

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Instead of staying closeted in the 1980’s, gay men and women were morally “converted” to politicize their identities as a means of saving themselves.

Incongruity Model and the Women’s March. In the case of the Women’s March, the incongruity model appears in responses of White women participants who describe feeling shocked or guilty with being associated with the majority of White women voters who elected

Trump. Ultimately, their identity as “White women” is in conflict with their political identity as non-Trump voters. Moral emotions of shock, anger, and guilt ultimately forced them to experience a genuine argument in which they had to process more than a change in attitude, Dow

(1994) describes the process as “a re-evaluation and reconstitution of self” (p. 322). These individuals were at an intersection where they experienced an authentic reevaluation of their fundamental beliefs regarding themselves as moral beings—whether or not they had been contributing to White supremacy or helping dismantle it.

As Dow (1994) explains, the role of incongruity is that it “stimulates the receiver to resolve the contradiction, ultimately by developing a new set of meanings” (p. 315). In order to resolve the contradiction (identifies as a White woman but not a Trump supporter), one resolution would be to join the Women’s March and publicly demonstrate opposition to Trump.

While I’m unsure of the depth to which the incongruity model lead to long-term change for these women, at least in the responses in the survey, we can see some of the process of genuine argument taking place, particularly in the nuanced theme, Using Privilege to Protect Vulnerable

Populations. The model follows the core motivations identity -> (moral) emotion -> identity -> action:

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Table 3.21: Incongruity Model Exemplars

Incongruity Model Identity threatened, Emotional Response, Genuine Argument, Identity Reformed, Action As a White woman, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt as it was empirically my identifying group that voted him into office. This seemed a first step in using my own privilege to educate other White women about how this election would affect them in the coming days. For me, this was the first step in creating real solidarity among all genders and identifying minorities (LGBTQ+, BLM, Undocumented, etc.). "-- anger, frustration, and sadness at the current political situation -- A sense of responsibility as a privilege White, woman to be more politically active and embarrassment that I have not been more engaged previously -- recognition of my own ignorance about how to get politically engaged -- desire to be a part of a community of like-minded concerned people who I did not know and to connect with friends who were marching" Whereas Kramer’s publication of “1112 and Counting” was the rhetorical event that called out gay men in America to face the AIDS epidemic, the 2016 Election cycle and the impending presidency of Donald Trump ultimately was what forced many White women to also examine their privilege and implication in the epidemic of White supremacy. The following response is a key example of a March participant’s conversion through incongruity:

I took a sick day on November 9th. I realize how much privilege I have being able to do this. And I just laid in bed all day, incredibly sad that people chose such hateful rhetoric to lead this nation, but also just incredibly sad that people chose a failed businessman reality show host to lead the country. So I took a day off and just ignored the world. But then I realized I needed to start doing something, otherwise I'm just as responsible for his win. Attending a Women's March in my town was just one way I am trying to start stepping up and being visible and call attention to some of the issues.

In short, this individual can point to a specific moment of physical and emotional discomfort, the day after the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, which initiated a cathartic moment of transformation. The participant says, “But then I realized I needed to start doing something, otherwise I’m just as responsible for his win” which signals a moral motivation (responsibility) for action. These conversion narratives are unique to participants who were not cognizant of the ways in which their identity formations were situated inside power structures. To what extent and to what ends these White women “converted” into empathetic, engaged, intersectional activists may be a cultural critique of the March overall, but if this event has some of the impact

146 that Dow claims “1112 and Counting” had on the gay population, then that is a promising, if marginal, beginning.

Conclusion and Further Research

Each response offers a micro-narrative into the decision-making process for the individuals who participated in the March. The experiences are culturally located from 2017, and even a few years removed from the event, our temporal biases provide an additional lens that prevents unequivocal or replicable analysis. What we can find, however, is the way in which individual experiences and motivations intersected and created group consciousness and group identity for the Women’s March.

The themes in this chapter model the interaction of identity, emotion, morality, and efficacy and model ways in which we develop more politicized identities. As a whole, the responses reflect the ways in which White cis-female liberal feminist Americans (WCLFA) responded to the events around the 2016 Election. The group consciousness is consistent in describing detailed and salient issues to WCLFA, whereas there is an ironic othering, obscurity, or absence regarding issues outside of the dominant cultural identity. In terms of efficacy, due to the nature of direct action, it is likely that the March’s traditional structure of civil protest appealed to the WCLFA group consciousness as an effective means for airing grievances to the government. Emotionally, WCLFA were feeling fear, disgust, anger, sadness, guilt in response to the political climate in a way that was new to them but not to marginalized groups (who have always experienced oppression at the hands of the government). By centering WCLFA emotions, the March inevitably alienated potential individual members who might have similar political goals.

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Two models emerge in WCLFA motivations: the personal salience model and the model of incongruity. In both models, a/n (rhetorical) event makes one’s identity more salient, which leads to action. In the first model, the Election is the rhetorical event that leads WCLFA to feel their identity as women (or allyship for women) are threatened, and therefore they must march.

In the second model, the Election also makes an individual’s Whiteness visible, therefore implicating their role in White Supremacy and oppression; therefore the person transforms themself by morally taking responsibility through assuming a new social justice identity.

All of the core motivations interact to form non-linear pathways to direct action. When a majority of individuals with dominant cultural attitudes become the center of a social movement or crowd-sourced movement, they will ultimately manifest in the group consciousness. The group consciousness is key for understanding and developing recruitment and coalition building for sustainable action that reaches beyond those already in power. As such, this information can help organizers approach and combat the totalizing affect of dominant cultural narratives inside movements. For further study, it would be useful to understand how both grassroots consciousness-raising and organized messaging can work together to adapt towards the margins of cultural consciousness. How can long-standing organizations decolonize their ideology through collaboration, coalition building, training, and outreach? What events have the rhetorical power to make identities more salient? What do emotional environments look like that support non-dominant cultures? These are all questions I ask as a White woman who does not have the answers; who cannot have the answers intrinsically as my experiences also predispose me towards finding solutions within my biases. White women must acknowledge our privilege as a benefit, a shield, and a deadly weapon. Knowing this, we must keep listening, working,

148 placing others in the center, and failing graciously if we are going to build coalitions for all people toward justice.

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INTERLUDE III: RELATIONAL ANALYSIS

Despite my best efforts to teach myself statistics and quantitative strategies for dealing with my dataset, I was woefully outmatched to its complexity. The spring after data collection, I learned that an NCSU colleague annually recruited projects for their graduate-level statistics course. I looked forward to what our collaboration might garner, and loved working with two bright and inquisitive scholars. We met several times over the course of the semester in which I described my project, shared the data, provided supplemental materials regarding feminist methodology, and they contributed their ideas of how to work with the data. The two students did an excellent job with what I asked of them. However, what I did not understand at that point was that I really needed collaborators who had the time, patience, experience, hardware, software, and skill to not only run statistical analyses, but to also teach me how and why they were choosing certain tests. I needed to be able to also challenge their assumptions on how they approached data, with the goal of co-creating a new means of analysis.

Another problem was that I, myself, had not fully decided how to approach my data, despite having worked it through Excel for over a year. I felt queasy thinking about excluding any data that had missing cases, as I did not want to silence those who so graciously shared their time with me. So, instead of starting with the numerically-driven data, I returned my focus coding the open-ended responses described in the previous chapter. Over several months, I poured hours into thinking about syntax, word choice, and meaning of each response. I drank coffee and listened to soundtracks from action-hero movies (Wonder Woman and Black Panther specifically). This process was essential to grounding my research and understanding the dataset

(qualitative and quantitative) as a whole.

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After drafting Chapter 3, I was ready to open the quantitative data again. I had a deeper understanding of why my participant group had chosen to attend the March, which meant I was at a point of greater certainty about my findings. But, as I wrote in the prelude, places of certainty are places for scrutiny. My quantitative data had the potential to challenge my newly- formed assumptions.

I needed help, this time from someone who understood me not only as a researcher, but also as a person. Fortunately, my friend and scholar Dr. Meghan Rebuli had been interested in the project since its earliest stages in 2017. Rebuli is a well-published Postdoctoral Research

Associate in the Curriculum in Toxicology & Environmental Medicine at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) who challenges traditional scientific literature by investigating the way in which sex differences in cells of the respiratory immune system react to environmental toxicants (tobacco products, wood smoke, and ozone). Her work requires creative and inductive thinking necessary to identify patterns in data—all integral elements for my approach.

As a team, Meghan and I sat side-by-side over several sessions as we tackled questions on how to engage with the survey results. At points of contention, her expertise from years in scientific research interacted with my knowledge of the survey and larger project and created collaborative solutions. It is essential to introduce Meghan here, as she also is a key actor on this project. I am certain that our collaboration produced a more reflexive and relational approach to data analysis.

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CHAPTER 4: SISTER MARCHES AND THE DC MARCH: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY

Introduction

Throughout the dissertation, I have offered many approaches to connecting and thinking about data; that is the main contribution for feminist researchers. My subjects have been nonhuman (the dissertation, surveys, data, PussyHats), human (March participants, my fellow researchers, myself). Overall, the Women’s March as a case study in conjunction with Bennett’s theory of vital materiality as an extension of intersectional feminist epistemology has offered a fruitful locus for understanding the confederations of human and nonhuman actors. Relationally,

I have demonstrated the impact of things on the ethics of the Women’s March, the interaction of core motivations on collective identity.

Thus far, however, I have mainly described the March as a whole (and from a relatively

American-centric position)—despite its distribution across hundreds of locations. Collapsing the

2017 Women’s March into one ecosystem is problematic because it severely limits our understanding of its participants. A multi-geographical point of view is important for understanding grassroots development of the 2017 Women’s March, especially because WMOW does not reflect a model of top-down organized action. For example, before there was an official

Women’s March leadership, individuals were already planning their trips and buying flights to

Washington, D.C. Such action is not new—particularly in “periods of social turbulence, collective action might be taken in a disorganized manner by a generational unit, without the benefit of an articulated ideology or a politicized group identification” (Duncan, 1999, p. 613).

Initially, instead of marching for an organization or group in particular, many individuals felt compelled to march on their own, often centering their action as a personal event within the practical support of the umbrella March organization.

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Even the formal organization was one of grassroots assemblages. One of the early organizers, Bob Bland, had to combine her Facebook event page with Teresa Shook’s and many other localized Facebook events with similar calls to action. The Women’s March Organization evolved co-constitutively as a response to the political and infrastructure needs of the marchers

(leadership, inclusivity, intersection mission, permits, start and end points, dates, times, travel information, etc.). Once the official Women’s March Organization developed and became more concrete, it is possible that they had an impact on recruitment; however, the messaging was not cohesive in terms of political goals until after a tipping point at which participants had already committed to the event. That being said, it is likely that previous research (including my own approaches in Chapters 2 and 3) has been too myopically focused towards the most newsworthy and well-attended site instead of the collection of local places where a majority of people actually engaged.

To put the problem in perspective, political crowd experts, individuals, and journalists consistently reported that the total number of Sister March attendees (over 3.5 million) far outnumbered those at the DC March (approximately 500,000). In an early crowdsourced estimate in which individuals reported evidence of their locations (informally facilitated by scholars and collected within a week of the March), Pressman and Chenowith (2017) identified over 900 individual Sister March sites. In this way, Sister Marches have their own cultural logics and agency as part of the grassroots WMOW. To clarify the difference, I will refer to the March or

WMOW as the entire global event, with “DC March” constrained to those at the march site in

Washington, DC, and “Sister March” to include all other national and international site locations that identified as part of WMOW. My survey data makes a valuable contribution because it offers extensive documentation of participation at Sister Marches in addition to the DC March.

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The goal of this inquiry is to complicate our understanding of the March ecosystem by using quantitative data to explore motivational differences related to March type (DC versus

Sister March) on the participants. As a result, this quantitative review of data is able to complicate and support findings in the previous chapter and broader quantitative and qualitative studies, while also examining differences between Marchers who attended in DC with those who attended Sister Marches.

Given Bennett’s theory of vibrant materiality and her description of political ecologies

(as described in regards to PussyHats in Chapter 2), I believe this complication will helpfully illuminate the unique ways in which collective action sites manifest their own confederations of political ecologies. As applied to my study Bennett’s theory holds that I would expect March type (i.e. Sister or DC), as an independent variable, to differentiate several dependent variables in the survey. My research question is thus:

RQ: How does March Type interact with participants’ responses regarding

a) issues that motivated them to attend, and

b) post-March feelings?

Importantly, this research question relates back either in parallel or tangentially to findings in previous chapters, as a means of expanding a constructivist grounded theory approach to a feminist epistemology.

RQ (a) is in direct conversation with my results in Chapter 3, in which I use a qualitative approach of open-ended survey responses to contend that the overall identity of the March circulated a White, cis-gendered liberal feminist collective consciousness with a more abstract, contingent understanding of non-identity salient issues in their qualitative responses. The open- ended responses analyzed the Chapter 3 helped provide a sense of rhetorical hierarchy when it

154 came to issues of importance, however, the limited space in the open-ended response may have prevented participants from describing all issues that motivated their participation. The survey data in this chapter allows me to triangulate that question with quantitative data, because it provides a list of 22 issues to rate as motivating their decision to attend the March. In this way, we can learn more about potential issues that motivated March participation, whether or not they were mentioned in the open-ended responses.

In addition, RQ (a) compares similar research with my own on issue salience, group identity, and intersectionality. Fisher, Dow, and Ray (2017) along with a team of eight researchers collected a random sample of surveys from participants at the DC March (N=528) in order to analyze how individual’s identities motivated participation. While they also found that individuals were motivated to attend regarding issues salient to their personal identities (i.e.

“Black participants mobilized for Racial Justice, Hispanic participants mobilized for

Immigration, and women mobilized for Reproductive Rights”) Fisher and her team (2017) contend that “the large turnout at the Women’s March, which organizers and others see as an indicator of success, is the direct result of the effective mobilization of various individuals and organizational constituencies that were motivated by intersectional issues” (n.p.). However, the extent to which individuals prioritized or connected certain issues with others is unclear, and the analysis is limited to the subset of Marchers who were at the DC site.

RQ (b) relates back to Chapter 3 on the role of perceived efficacy and emotional motivation in politicizing identities. Based on the two models I proposed (personal salience and incongruity), I found that the action of participation was enough to provide many of the

Marchers a sense of efficacy, yet I was unable to confirm or describe the degree to which that occurred. The quantitative survey data can describe the effect of the March on participants’

155 perceived political efficacy as well as optimism regarding the United States’ and global political climate.

Accordingly, this final chapter follows the tradition of iterative logic of situated knowledges, in which the results are no less “problematic, relativistic, situational, and partial” than any other stage of my research (Charmaz, 2009, p. 138). Ultimately, the following quantitative phase of research provides a transformative framework for large datasets through which researchers can better approach complicated relational assemblages such as multi-site collective action. Again, whether the data is empirical or open, the truth that comes from the survey is both partial and real simultaneously.

Methods and Materials

Importantly, I have an opportunity to add to and complicate our knowledge of the

Women’s March specifically through use of a survey tool. For me as an individual researcher, a volunteer-participant online survey is necessary to study three particular qualities of multi-site collective action such as the Women’s March. First, the nature of collective action is one of a large population size. A survey provides the means to reflect the scale of the event in its capacity for data collection. Second, since the Women’s March occurred in over 900 sites around the world, an online survey is able to simultaneously gather data from multiple sites. As a graduate student with limited financial means, I would otherwise be unable to travel to or collect this range of answers comprised from multiple places within a two-month timeframe. Finally, the online survey itself is a type of collective action; its results are reliant on the commitment of group members—with the goal of having the net effect of improving the group’s conditions (van

Zomeren, 2013). My charge as a researcher and March participant myself, then, has been to honor that goal through my interpretation and reporting of results of the data they contributed.

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Survey Distribution and Organization

This research draws on cross-sectional survey data collected through an online Qualtrics survey that we opened to participants approximately two months after WMOW from April 3,

2017 and closed June 3, 2017.3 The Qualtrics software was provided for free through NC State

University. Participants could access the survey from a smartphone, tablet, or computer, and we did not restrict any question with time constraints. However, it is important to note that online tools are potential sites for exclusion, as they require consistent, Internet access, and proficiency with software. We did not personally facilitate or offer spaces in which people could take the survey, which means that every survey taker had a unique physical environment (whether at home, on a bus, at an office, or elsewhere).

After an introduction to the research and consent validation, the survey included five sections: March-specific demographics (6 questions), Women’s March experience (8 questions), longitudinal activism intensity (5 questions), descriptive demographics (13 questions) and a final section that measured our recruitment process by asking participants how heard about our survey. For the 33 questions, we estimated a participant could complete the survey between 15-

30 minutes. The length itself could be a limiting factor in this survey, although there are precedents for this survey length in protest research (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012). Of the 987 participants started the survey, 11 abandoned (i.e. did not press submit) the survey after the second question, 232 abandoned the survey having completed less than 45% of the survey, and 6 abandoned the survey despite having completed over 50% of the questions. Also, the survey was

3 For an in-depth discussion of the survey’s initial emergence as a tool for this project and contributions of co- creators Tharaa Bayazid and Meghana Shivanandacharya, please refer to Interlude II: An Introduction to the Women’s March Survey.

157 written in English; we did not have access to translation, so any non-native English speaker may have encountered further barriers with understanding or responding.

Variables and Measures

Previously in the dissertation, I described the development process and recruitment practices regarding the survey. I would like my readers to consider this chapter as the second phase of that study. Additionally, I included descriptive demographics of gender (Table 3.1), racial identity (Table 3.2), birth decade (Table 3.3), education (Table 3.4), household income,

(Table 3.6) and for US citizens, political party affiliation (Table 3.5). I will not include them here. This decision is personal and political; I encourage my readers to re-contextualize the statistical data through moving physically and conceptually between each section’s ways of knowing. That being said, it is useful in this context to consider the frequency and distribution of participants by where they marched, given the research focus of this chapter.

March Locations. A majority of participants marched in the United States (n=694,

96.6%), with the remaining 3.4% (n=24) marching internationally in Algeria (n=1), Canada

(n=1), Costa Rica (n=3), Germany (n=2), Guatemala (n=1), Italy (n=3), Mexico (n=2), Norway

(n=10), South Africa (n=6) and The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

(n=4). In the United States, participants reported marching in 39 states and Puerto Rico, with largest representation in the survey marching in Washington, DC (n=265, 36.9%) followed by

North Carolina (n=119, 16.6%), Tennessee (n=42, 5.8%), Montana (n=28, 3.9%), and New York

(n=27, 3.8%) (see Figure 4.4 for complete distribution).

Washington, DC was the site of the main March, which may account for the large response from that category. Further, I grew up and also performed this research from North

Carolina and went to college in Tennessee, which may help explain the higher numbers from

158 those two states. In addition, larger representation from certain places over others may be due to our recruitment procedure, which asked Sister March organizers to distribute the survey via their channels. Montana is an example of a state with a high participant count. For this group, survey participants explicitly identified that the organizer shared our call on their March Facebook page, which may have encouraged them to participate in greater numbers. Although there were reportedly marches in every U.S. state (Frostenson, 2017), we did not receive responses from participants from the following states: Connecticut, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada,

Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. It is difficult to know why these states are not represented in our participants’ answers, but it is important to mention their absence as to be more precise with what we mean when we separate the findings by March Type.

March Type. For each of the tests that we run on the survey data, “March Type” is an independent variable that stratifies “All” participants (N=718) into the categories of “DC March” or “Sister March.” Overall, 63% (n=453) of the participants reported attending Sister Marches, whereas 37% marched in DC (n=265). I identified the March Type through collapsing answers from two questions of “In what country did you march?” and a follow-up question for those who participated in the United States that asked them to select which state they marched in (the list included Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia). Finally I cross-referenced the answers with

“In what city did you March?” to establish consistency. For example, in cases where a person identified marching in the state of Virginia but input “Washington, D.C,” as their city, we coded their March type as DC March.

Issues that influenced decision to March. In order to assess the impact of certain political issues on participant motivation, we asked the question, “How important were these

159 issues in your decision to march?” (emphasis original) and measured importance on a scale of five items from Extremely important (5) to Not at all important (1). We included 22 political issues for participants to rate in the following order (alphabetical): Affordable Health Care,

Black Lives Matter, Campaign Financing Reform, Civil Rights*, Economic Reform, Education

Reform, Ending Gender-Based Violence*, Environmental Justice (Clean Water, Clean Air)*,

Freedom of Speech, Gender Equality, Gun Control, Human Rights, Immigrant Rights*,

International Peace, LGBTQIA Rights*, Living Wage, Net Neutrality, Nuclear Disarmament,

Religious Freedom, Reproductive Rights*, Worker's Rights,* and Other (a text-based option to include further reasons for marching). Issues identified with an asterisk (*) were all included because they were explicitly named in official WMOW “unity principles” (Presley & Presswood,

2017). The additional issues were selected and agreed upon by the researchers.

Post-March feelings. To measure the effect of the March on participants feelings, we asked survey-takers to indicate the degree to which they “felt that I had made a political difference for my political cause(s),” “felt more optimistic about the political climate in the

United States,” “felt more optimistic about the political climate in the world,” and also the degree to which they felt “better informed about the causes for which I marched” on a scale from strongly agree (7) to strongly disagree (1). These four measures were designed to compare my findings regarding perceived efficacy on March participation.

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Methods of Analysis

Analysis of the data was performed as collaboration between myself and Dr. Meghan

Rebuli4 (with helpful assistance from my partner, Dr. Adam Speen) utilizing Microsoft Excel and Prism Version 7.0. First we separated the dataset into March Types (All Marches, Sister

March, and DC March) so that we could analyze a series of variables across March Type populations. For issues that influenced decision to March the independent variable is the political issue and the dependent variable is the rating. For post-March feelings, the independent variables are perceived political efficacy, optimism about the US climate, optimism about the global climate, and perceived education and the dependent variable is rating.

In addition to measuring descriptive statistics, we performed Shapiro-Wilk normality tests and found that the distributions violated the assumption of normality (alpha=0.05).

Therefore, we utilized nonparametric Kurskal-Wallis tests followed by Dunn's multiple comparison tests to identify differences between groups. Data is shown with Mean ± SEM

**p≤0.01 ****p≤0.0001. The specific values for all tests are with each analysis included in the results section. This method of analysis is looking at the aggregation of issues by average rating instead of across individuals’ rating schema. A latent class analysis (LCA) may be more useful in separating out clusters of motivational issues by individuals. However, from the perspective of

4Dr. Meghan Rebuli is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Curriculum in Toxicology & Environmental Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in the lab of Dr. Ilona Jaspers. Her research focuses on investigating sex differences in response to environmental toxicants, such as tobacco products, wood smoke, and ozone, in the respiratory innate immune system. Dr. Rebuli obtained her doctorate in Zoology from North Carolina State University in 2015 where her dissertation work evaluated the effects of endocrine disrupting compound, Bisphenol A, on neurodevelopment and behavior. Dr. Rebuli’s research has resulted in authorship/co-authorship of 13 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Toxicological Sciences, Hormones and Behavior, and the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and a variety of awards including the Leon and Bertha Golberg Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Advancing Green Chemistry Science Communication Fellowship. Dr. Rebuli is currently a member of the Institutional Review Board at UNC- CH on a Biomedical Committee and is an active member of the science communication and outreach community in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. (Blurb courtesy of Rebuli, 2019)

161 collective consciousness regarding issue salience, the procedure offers an important entry point for understanding general trends in the data.

Missing Cases. While the total dataset includes 718 responses, some participants chose not to answer all questions. Since the survey design allowed for survey-takers to continue without answering questions, item non-response issues are an integral and inevitable part of the analysis. As with most quantitative researchers, this proved an interesting challenge for us.

Ultimately, we decided to run the analyses without the missing cases using the rationale that we wanted to preserve each participant’s choice not to answer. Thus, we included supplemental tables at the end of the chapter that show how many participant answers were included and corresponding descriptive statistics. When possible, we also decided to either represent missing cases in our results by including the number of explicit responses for each question on graphs

(see Figure 4.1). To give some context, however, for question sets regarding a) issues that influenced decision to march (except for the item “Other,” which participants may have read as optional), and b) post-March feelings, response rates were very high, with fewer than 3% item non-response rate.

Despite missing cases being common in quantitative research data, there is not a unified best practice regarding acceptable cutoff percentages (Dong & Peng, 2013). Depending on the context, theorists and researchers have separated missing cases in to three distinct mechanistic categories: missing at random (MAR), missing completely at random (MCAR), and missing not at random (MNAR), and can exist in univariate, monotone, and arbitrary patterns (Dong & Peng,

2013). Interestingly, these categories and pattern descriptions implicitly prioritize datasets with fewer missing cases as less biased. While that ideology may be statistically relevant, it is important to remember that this survey relies on psychological freedom not to respond to all

162 questions, or to deliberately have MNAR. Even with potential solutions (such as principled missing data methods like multiple imputation, full information maximum likelihood, and expectation-maximization algorithm) there is no way to know why individuals chose to answer certain questions over others.

Missing cases, whether MAR, MCAR, or MNAR, are important data points that may indicate important construction information, for example, places where people chose not to answer questions could indicate sensitive or confusing questions, accessibility issues, or survey- taking fatigue. Missing cases are especially useful for reminding researchers of the ways in which our tools, language, and environments have the potential to exclude participants in ways that are both explicit and invisible. Thus, data messiness is valuable if it disrupts the construct of pristine datasets; it is impossible to fully predict (particularly from the dominant cultural position), what questions may be uncomfortable or difficult to answer. The expectation of completeness with the ultimate goal of generalizability may in fact propagate research that further prioritizes participation and findings for those and by those already in positions of power.

The goal, instead, of my survey is to variegate circulated knowledges about the Women’s March and challenge the assumptions of the survey instrument.

Finally, I acknowledge that my proficiency in statistical analysis is limited and I require the support of math-wranglers more talented than I (such as Dr. Rebuli). I can only hope that with more time, practice, and improved knowledge of statistical methods and survey construction, I can provide an even more challenging option for those who need to embrace missing cases in order to reach a broader range of participants.

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Results

Our results aimed to answer the research question regarding the differences and similarities between March Type and a) that motivated participants to attend and c) post-March feelings. By looking at the results, we are able to see distinct affective, political ecologies in the

DC March group in comparison to Sister Marches. Importantly, when results are reported on the entire March population, results are skewed towards Sister March participants, as they comprise almost two-thirds of the total responses.

RQ (a) March Type and Issues that Influenced Decision to March

Across March Types, participants consistently rated the importance of the political issues in their decision to march toward the higher end of the scale of 1-5: Extremely important (5)

Very important (4) Moderately important (3) Slightly important (2) Not at all important (1).

Distribution of the average mean rating across all issues for DC March participants ranged from

3.185 (Net Neutrality) to 4.813 (Civil Rights), and similarly, Sister March average mean rating distribution had a slightly tighter range from 3.508 (Net Neutrality) to 4.82 (Civil Rights). For all descriptive statistics and p-values for all comparisons, please see Tables 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 at the end of this chapter.

To identify significance between issues in both March Types, our analysis followed this procedure: first we performed a Shapiro-Wilk normality test, which found evidence that the data was not normally distributed (alpha=0.05). Since this violated an assumption of normality, an

ANOVA would be inappropriate; therefore we utilized a nonparametric Kurskal-Wallis test

(Sister March, H=1456, k-1=21; DC March H=1019, k-1= 21). We followed the Kurskal-Wallis test with Dunn's multiple comparison tests to identify the differences between the groups.

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Civil Rights. Interestingly, certain groupings of issues emerged as more influential than others on participants’ decision to march. In the both March Types, the highest rated issue,

Civil Rights was significantly different from a majority of issues. For Sister March participants,

Civil Rights was significantly different from a majority of issues except for Human Rights,

Gender Equality, Reproductive Rights, and Affordable Health Care. Similarly, for DC Marchers,

Civil Rights was significantly different from all other issues except for Gender Equality,

Reproductive Rights, Human Rights, Immigrant Rights, Affordable Health Care, and Freedom of

Speech.

Sister March and Human Rights. Of particular interest, in comparing between specific issues, the second overall highest average-rated issue, Human Rights, was significantly different from a range of issues including Black Lives Matter (p<0.0001), Ending Gender-Based Violence

(p=0.0101), Immigrant Rights (p<0.0001), LGBTQIA Rights (p<0.0001), and Religious

Freedom (p<0.0001).

DC March and Human Rights. In comparison, Human Rights had the fourth highest average rating of issues that influenced participation for DC Marchers. Unlike the Sister

Marches, Human Rights was not significantly different from Ending Gender-Based Violence

(p=0.1337), LGBTQIA Rights (p=0.0839) or Immigrant Rights (p=0.3912), but significantly different from Black Lives Matter (p<0.0001), and Religious Freedom (p<0.0001).

Sister March and Gender Equality. While Gender Equality had the third highest average rating for Sister Marchers, it was significantly different from a range of issues, including

Ending Gender-Based Violence (p=0.0424) and LGBTQIA Rights (p<0.0001) but not

Reproductive Rights (p >0.9999).

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DC March and Gender Equality. Similarly, of interest with this March Type, Gender

Equality as the second highest averaged rated issue was significantly different from a range of issues, including LGBTQIA Rights (p= 0.0488), but not Reproductive Rights (p >0.9999) or

Ending Gender-Based Violence (p=0.0792).

Issues that influenced decision to march (Sister Marches) **** 6 **

2 relative scale (1-5)

0 451 448 448 450 451 449 450 450 447 450 447 447 450 446 449 448 122 449 448 448 448 439 e h e r e t y ts re c ts c c ts er n it h e h ti trol h l Ca enc e atte gh formn t me l p Wage o O Rights Rig Rights o M l Pea Ri a utra n Equalitye lth S s a g s Re C reedom Reformm e a r v a Vi al Juse n in r' ic Reformg N ivil e ti d t v v e on s F in ar t C m d e m of TQIA RigLi Li ti Gun m c is uc s B en atio rk a n Ne Hu en d o k c no r D G o ble HeBa nm rn Wo u a a eed ImmigrantLG Rightslac e e pr rd er- r B Ed Eco Fina l F viro Int Religiou n c Re ffo nd n Nu A e E g G in ampaig d C En

Figure 4.1: Issues that influenced decision to march (Sister March). Issues are presented in descending order of overall mean rating from highest mean rating (Civil Rights) to lowest mean rating (Net Neutrality). Numbers inside the bars on the graph indicate the number of responses out of the total Sister March population (n=453).

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Issues that influenced decision to march (DC March)

**** 6 *

2 relative scale (1-5)

0 262 264 264 262 263 262 260 263 259 262 263 261 262 261 261 261 261 262 258 82 260 259 y h s e e r e e r ts it c c c g ts c m m m rm e ity h hts hts are e n tte h a or o or o ent l g al ights g C e sti g e f d f ra u pe l u Wa P e e ef Oth am t Ri R Rig Ri J Ma Ri l R Re l n lth S l s g R m r Eq ve a f e in r's n Control Fre ic g Neu ti ant e o v Civi c r H onation us m in nde umaig enta Li Gu a o o c Disar du H le m k Liv c n Net m b GBTQIABased Right Vioc rnati igi o an Ge ro m a edomL r- Worke du l n p I e ron E Ec lear rd Fr i Bla Inte Re Fi Re ffo nde gn e Env i Nuc A G a g mp a C ndin E

Figure 4.2: Issues that influenced decision to march (DC March). Issues are presented in descending order of overall mean rating from highest mean rating (Civil Rights) to lowest mean rating (Net Neutrality). Numbers inside the bars on the graph indicate the number of responses out of the total DC March population (n=265).

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RQ (b) Post-March feelings

We also stratified perceived changes in efficacy, optimism regarding US and global political climate, and education by March Type. Overall, the participants from both March Types reported relatively high degrees of difference for all post-March perceptions (the average for all items was above 5 out of seven possible choices: Strongly agree (7), Agree (6), Somewhat agree

(5), Neither agree nor disagree (4), Somewhat disagree (3), Disagree (2), and Strongly disagree

(1)). Notably, the relative score in post-March feelings regarding “making a difference for political causes” was significantly higher among DC March participants than Sister March participants (p≤0.0001). The trends for all other post-March feelings (optimism regarding political climate and perceived education) are similar.

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Post-March Feelings 7.0 DC March Sister March All Marching **

6.5 ****

6.0 relative score (1-7)

5.5

5.0 ) ) ) ) e ) C er C er) er t C ses D ate DC) t a ses (D ( ist m ( s (D sist e i e sister) ( Cau t (s cl ( cau ses l a e at ses t im al al clim u au ses ica ic ate (si c ses o C cl it clim m au l i t cau au ab C olit o cl u c cal P cal p l o t d ti ti al climat ical b u cal li S it ca o me i for ic U ti rld politi a r it po lit li o o Poli e o ut w ed f ol c S o d ab In P p po rm e for U b d e a fo m c for ut US n ifferen t orl about I for en ce ism ut world pol w n n D abo o I fer e im b ut ism f r sm pt a Di fe i tim f m O abo p Di i ism abou pt m sm O O i pti m O Optimism pti O

Figure 4.3: Post-March Feeling responses stratified by March Type. Participants were asked to reflect on the degree to which, after the March, they “felt that I had made a political difference for my political cause(s),” “felt more optimistic about the political climate in the United States,”

“felt more optimistic about the political climate in the world,” and also the degree to which they felt “better informed about the causes for which I marched” on a scale from strongly agree (7) to strongly disagree (1).

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Discussion

Main concerns regarding intersectionality at the Women’s March circulated primarily around the marginalization of race- and sexuality-based issues (Brewer & Dundes, 2018). In

Chapter 3, I analyzed participant’s narratives regarding their motivation(s) to attend the March, which described the emergence of a relatively wealthy White Cis-Female Liberal Feminist

American Group Consciousness. In her work on White Fragility, DiAngelo (2011) explains that

Whites lack the experience, preparedness, and the stamina to “engage with an exploration of alternate racial perspectives, they can only reinscribe white perspectives as universal”(p. 66).

This universality functions as a means of both collapsing and erasing difference (the particular) from general concepts. Correspondingly, participants’ qualitative responses demonstrated this trend of universality: in a rhetorical taxonomy of salient identities, the pattern of human>gender> sexual orientation> race>, wherein race and sexual orientation were often excluded completely.

The abstraction of “human” from intersecting identities of race and sexuality is a key feature of the participants’ responses.

With the open-ended questions, syntactical conventions relied on a hierarchical ordering of language, one that forced participants to choose the organization they would write words to convey logical meaning back to me. The resulting affective product has rhetorical agency, or

“the capacity for words and actions to be intelligible and forceful, and to create effects through their formal and stylistic conventions” (Rand, 2008, p. 299). While there was no time limit, the framework of the open-ended question requested “a few sentences” imposing a de facto request to constrain and prioritize the most important (or retrievable) answers. However, in order to measure salience across a consistent set of issues, we asked participants to rate the degree to which 22 different issue(s) influenced their decision to March. Rating was not exclusive, had a

170 person felt the need to do so, they could have attributed the highest rating to all issues, and in fact 8.9% of particpants, n=64, rated all of provided issues as “extremely important” in their decision to march. However, despite the possibility of equal attribution across all issues, most participants felt comfortable prioritizing certain issues over others. This practice of rating is useful for another perspective on the ways in which the group consciousness performed issue abstraction, or how they prioritized and collapsed categories based on universality. Brewer and

Dundes (2018) explain that “what may be abstract concerns for some white women can be terrifying realities for women of color” (p. 53), wherein the particular intersectional issues are absent from White understandings of general issues.

The results from this survey corroborate my qualitative findings regarding issue abstraction, and can point to specific issues around which universality occurs. The type of collapse often differs across March type because, in American particularly “socioeconomic position and the shared history of a people’s ethnic groups influences the type and intensity of their civic involvement” (Logan, Lightfoot, Contraras, 2017, p. 254). For example, Sister March participants rated Human Rights (universal) significantly higher as a motivating factor than identity-specific rights issues (particular) such as Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA Rights, and

Immigrant Rights—but not Gender Equality or Reproductive Rights. This suggests that in terms of relative importance, Gender Equality and Reproductive Rights have the same salience as

Human Rights as opposed to other identity-specific issues. To clarify, in this case, race (Black

Lives Matter), sexuality (LGBTQIA Rights), and citizenship (Immigrant Rights) are segregated as less important and separate from Human Rights. However, DC March participants rated

Human Rights equivocally with LGBTQIA Rights, and Immigrant Rights; but again Black Lives

Matter was segregated by rating as less influential. In both cases, race is distinctly removed from

171 the concept of humanity; a violation of the basic belief of The Combahee River Collective’s statement on Black Feminism: “To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough” (2014, p.274), and a corroboration of the anecdotal and ethnographic experiences regarding intersectionality at the Women’s March.

The centrality of universal over intersectional and identity-specific issues inherent in

Marchers’ motivations perpetuated skepticism from people of difference regarding the Women’s

March and its investment in intersectionality—and particularly its omission and exclusion of race in group consciousness. In both Sister Marches and the DC March that the one issue that specifically mentioned race, Black Lives Matter was consistently pushed further to the back of consciousness, as measured by mean rating (11th overall for both March Types) and in relationship to other issues. Whether or not the participants were acutely aware of this stratification, the group responses point to the ways in which White feminism circulated as a motivating factor within the political ecologies of the March. In contrast, Black feminists do not have the psychological freedom to collapse issues, but must instead “address a whole range of oppressions”(The Combahee River Collective, 2014, p. 274). As such, centrality of universal over intersectional and identity-specific issues inherent in Marchers’ motivations perpetuated skepticism from and exclusion from people of difference regarding the Women’s March and its investment in intersectionality.

Intersectionality and Coalition Building

Despite the centrality on White feminist issues in the Women’s March, results from

Chapter 3 and RQ (a) also demonstrate an overall desire, at least rhetorically and through relatively high issue rating, to support and protect marginalized groups of people and issues separate from their White feminist identities. This suggests that the survey’s particular list of

172 issues resonated with the marchers, some of which were taken directly from the official WMOW unity principles. Because all of the issues scored so highly, I am optimistic that these issues are places for broader coalition building and educating participants how to be better allies for people of difference. Organizational inclusion of people of difference, as the Women’s March performed, was certainly an important element of demonstrating commitment to non-White political goals (Presley & Presswood, 2018). But from an individual level, White feminists need to educate themselves the connections between issues that are not personally salient, and follow the leadership “minoritized groups” in agenda-setting, as experiences with oppression provide a heightened and awareness of intersectional institutionalized practices injustice (Logan, Lightfoot,

Contraras, 2017, p. 254). When asked, “I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next Black Lives

Matters protest, right?” we (myself a White woman and feminist) need to emphatically answer yes. But going is not enough; we must individually and collectively reflect on the explicit and implicit ways we collapse and prioritize identities around us, and in doing so erase and marginalize. DiAngelo (2011) is particularly useful in summarizing this point: “The continual retreat from the discomfort of authentic racial engagement in a culture infused with racial disparity limits the ability to form authentic connections across racial lines, and results in a perpetual cycle that works to hold racism in place” (p. 66).

Expectations of Political Efficacy

In qualitative responses discussed in Chapter 3, participants indicated that they were motivated to attend WMOW to “do something” (i.e. make a political difference). The quantitative data shows that after the March, the average participant felt that they had made a difference for their political cause(s), and significantly more so for DC Marchers. Consequently,

Civil Rights was the top-rated issue across March types. For White participants who felt that

173 their civil rights were violated when Trump won despite Clinton’s majority popular vote, attending the March was a means of restoring and resituating themselves in a system of power where they feel they were able were to again exercise and observe their political rights of social freedom and equality. However, this perspective of Civil Rights is one of White privilege, one of political entitlement, and free from complications of race or sexuality—wherein police brutality or limited access to civic institutions such as marriage exist. Such high levels of perceived efficacy raise the question: what did the participants feel like they had achieved for their issues?

Is participating for one day at a March capable of making such an impact on entrenched, systemic issues? In-depth interviews and ethnographies may be better suited to answer the question.

In particular, Phoebe Farris (2017, p. 5) describes the March as “electrifying” for her group, Indigenous Women Rise. In collaboration with other indigenous groups, Farris explains that Indigenous Women Rise marched to highlight issues specific to Native people, such poverty, violence, and police brutality, such as being “three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.” In contrast to the list provided on the survey, Farris lists “tribal sovereignty, self-determination, representation, education, healthcare access, violence against women, violence against the Earth, solidarity with all marginalized groups, protection of Native territories, extractive industries, food sovereignty, water, and the protection of sacred sites”

(2017, p. 5). As I read her list, I think about the convergence and divergence the issues included in our survey. I was unable to anticipate Farris’ identity-specific needs because of my psychic freedom from those needs—and how my list was derived, too from the WMOW Unity principles. I participated in replicating a type of systemic exclusion of experience by relegating the top three issues she mentions to a fill-in-the-blank option of “Other.” I made the mistake

174 through arrogance (DiAngelo, 2011) of asking my participants to further segregate and literally other their specific identity-related issues.

Interestingly, however, Farris expresses an energetic sense of optimism for the impact of the Women’s March on a broader movement towards consciousness-building for Indigenous

Women Rise issues, particularly in connection to the US and global climate. One possible reason for the difference among our participants between higher post-March feelings of efficacy in comparison to optimism may trace to issue abstraction; participants might feel better about a cause as long as they did not have to put it in context with the surrounding geopolitical systems.

Since personal connection to issues is a predictor of politicized identities, connecting issues to the broader locations may be a useful way to further complicate perspectives on issues. As described throughout this dissertation, whether in El Barrio or Raleigh, location is an important actor in the production of political and cultural practices, literacies, and collective consciousness and requires further study and for discussions on the intersection of issues with local and global political systems.

Conclusion

Quantitative data analysis is valuable resource for relating stories—it is shaped by the tool, implementation, and construction. While mathematical, statistical analysis is inherently subjective as the researcher both selects the data (and simultaneously excludes), and participants interpret language with a range of meanings. My goal in this chapter is to provide another perspective through which to observe the Women’s March on Washington, not as a definitive narrative, but as an inherently subjective and partial point of view. As a Sister March participant,

I am hopeful that this report will help my fellow participants, activists, and organizers reflect on ways in which we can advocate for and engage in coalition building. My findings demonstrate a

175 need for more education around general issues and how they connect to a broader network of specific causes outside of our own identities.

Limitations and Future Study

Sister Marches had an estimated seven times the participation of the DC March; yet, most of the academic and news reporting focused on the national WMOW organization and the DC

March location. My data shows that there are differences between Sister March and DC March participants. While my research here is limited to general trends, future research using this dataset could include latent class analysis (LCA) which would be able to explore specifically which identities were most politicized post-March based on demographics and political issues.

This information would help organizers understand what variables are predictive and targetable for future coalition building, political efficacy, and collective action.

Finally, I contend that the traditional organization of quantitative (and some qualitative) academic papers does not adequately capture the role of researcher bias and positional limitations. As a long form, this dissertation has offered space for me to include reflexive personal interludes as a means of providing more context to my lens as a researcher. I am not advocating all quantitative studies need an ethnographic component, as some of my fellow scholars could be at great risk were they required to provide more detail about their identities.

However, I contend that it is important to rethink the way we include discussion of the limitations of the research, often as a small paragraph or decontextualized at the end of a paper.

To do so further separates data from context. To foster an intersectional methodology, we need new ways of showing the underlying relationships—the things, places, identities—that interacted to create knowledge.

185

Figure 4.4: Participant Distribution across March Locations. This graph displays the frequency distribution of locations where survey participants reported Marching. Other than

Washington, D.C., specific cities are not represented, and international participation has been collapsed into one category for clarity. The breakout category “Other” represents 4% of all locations, which have three or fewer participants.

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Table 4.1 Issues that influenced decision to march (Sister March, n=453).

Number Std. Std. Error of Issue Name Min Max Range Mean of values Deviation Mean Affordable Health 451 1 5 4 4.641 0.7208 0.03394 Care Black Lives Matter 447 1 5 4 4.295 0.967 0.04574 Campaign Financing 448 1 5 4 3.719 1.266 0.05982 Reform Civil Rights 451 1 5 4 4.82 0.5131 0.02416 Economic Reform 448 1 5 4 3.9 1.064 0.05029 Education Reform 449 1 5 4 4.078 1.078 0.05086 Ending Gender- 449 1 5 4 4.59 0.7449 0.03515 Based Violence Environmental 450 1 5 4 4.413 0.9615 0.04533 Justice Freedom of Speech 450 1 5 4 4.569 0.8042 0.03791 Gender Equality 448 1 5 4 4.792 0.5428 0.02564 Gun Control 448 1 5 4 4.009 1.18 0.05573 Human Rights 448 1 5 4 4.804 0.549 0.02594 Immigrant Rights 450 1 5 4 4.524 0.7525 0.03547 International Peace 447 1 5 4 4.183 1.058 0.05003 LGBTQIA Rights 447 1 5 4 4.454 0.8075 0.03819 Living Wage 450 1 5 4 4.182 0.9844 0.0464 Net Neutrality 439 1 5 4 3.508 1.235 0.05893 Nuclear Disarmament 448 1 5 4 3.545 1.263 0.05967 Religious Freedom 449 1 5 4 3.98 1.249 0.05894 Reproductive Rights 450 1 5 4 4.729 0.6487 0.03058 Worker's Rights 446 1 5 4 4.152 0.9962 0.04717 Other 122 1 5 4 4.008 1.577 0.1428

187

Table 4.2 Issues that influenced decision to march (DC March, n=265).

Issue Name Number Min Max Range Mean Std. Std. Error of values Deviation of Mean Affordable Health Care 262 1 5 4 4.557 0.8898 0.05497 Black Lives Matter 263 1 5 4 4.361 0.8795 0.05424 Campaign Financing 258 1 5 4 3.612 1.304 0.08121 Reform Civil Rights 262 2 5 3 4.813 0.4946 0.03055 Economic Reform 262 1 5 4 3.767 1.112 0.06871 Education Reform 261 1 5 4 3.923 1.114 0.06893 Ending Gender-Based 259 1 5 4 4.525 0.7987 0.04963 Violence Environmental Justice 262 1 5 4 4.389 0.9595 0.05928 Freedom of Speech 260 1 5 4 4.538 0.8304 0.0515 Gender Equality 264 1 5 4 4.788 0.5722 0.03522 Gun Control 261 1 5 4 4.054 1.169 0.07235 Human Rights 262 1 5 4 4.775 0.5992 0.03702 Immigrant Rights 263 1 5 4 4.567 0.748 0.04612 International Peace 261 1 5 4 3.989 1.121 0.06941 LGBTQIA Rights 263 1 5 4 4.536 0.7652 0.04718 Living Wage 261 1 5 4 4.172 0.9869 0.06109 Net Neutrality 259 1 5 4 3.185 1.354 0.08414 Nuclear Disarmament 260 1 5 4 3.358 1.411 0.08751 Religious Freedom 261 1 5 4 3.858 1.255 0.07771 Reproductive Rights 264 1 5 4 4.78 0.6018 0.03704 Worker's Rights 262 1 5 4 4.149 0.9927 0.06133 Other 82 1 5 4 3.61 1.817 0.2007

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Table 4.3: Issues that Influenced decision to March: Dunn’s Multiple Comparisons Tests.

DC March Sister March Dunn's multiple comparisons test Adjusted P Adjusted P Value Value Affordable Health Care vs. Black Lives Matter 0.3614 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Campaign Financing Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Civil Rights >0.9999 0.2408 Affordable Health Care vs. Economic Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Education Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Ending Gender-Based Violence >0.9999 >0.9999 Affordable Health Care vs. Environmental Justice >0.9999 0.3167 Affordable Health Care vs. Freedom of Speech >0.9999 >0.9999 Affordable Health Care vs. Gender Equality >0.9999 >0.9999 Affordable Health Care vs. Gun Control <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Human Rights >0.9999 0.4147 Affordable Health Care vs. Immigrant Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Affordable Health Care vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 0.0768 Affordable Health Care vs. Living Wage <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Reproductive Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Affordable Health Care vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Affordable Health Care vs. Other 0.0066 0.2287 Black Lives Matter vs. Campaign Financing Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Civil Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Economic Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Education Reform 0.0004 0.3633 Black Lives Matter vs. Ending Gender-Based Violence >0.9999 0.0004 Black Lives Matter vs. Environmental Justice >0.9999 >0.9999 Black Lives Matter vs. Freedom of Speech >0.9999 0.0004 Black Lives Matter vs. Gender Equality <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Gun Control >0.9999 0.1411 Black Lives Matter vs. Human Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Immigrant Rights >0.9999 0.3034 Black Lives Matter vs. International Peace 0.0191 >0.9999 Black Lives Matter vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Black Lives Matter vs. Living Wage >0.9999 >0.9999 Black Lives Matter vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001

189

Table 4.3 (continued).

Black Lives Matter vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Religious Freedom 0.0012 0.4523 Black Lives Matter vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Black Lives Matter vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Black Lives Matter vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Civil Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Economic Reform >0.9999 >0.9999 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Education Reform >0.9999 0.0136 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Ending Gender-Based <0.0001 <0.0001 Violence Campaign Financing Reform vs. Environmental Justice <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Freedom of Speech <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Gender Equality <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Gun Control 0.0059 0.0413 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Human Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Immigrant Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. International Peace 0.6195 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. LGBTQIA Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Living Wage 0.0009 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Net Neutrality 0.0514 0.1117 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Nuclear Disarmament >0.9999 >0.9999 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 0.0103 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Worker's Rights 0.0029 0.0008 Campaign Financing Reform vs. Other >0.9999 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Economic Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Education Reform <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Ending Gender-Based Violence 0.0402 0.005 Civil Rights vs. Environmental Justice <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Freedom of Speech 0.161 0.0047 Civil Rights vs. Gender Equality >0.9999 >0.9999 Civil Rights vs. Gun Control <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Human Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Civil Rights vs. Immigrant Rights 0.1279 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. LGBTQIA Rights 0.0242 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Living Wage <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001

190

Table 4.3 (continued).

Civil Rights vs. Reproductive Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Civil Rights vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Civil Rights vs. Other <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Education Reform >0.9999 0.4529 Economic Reform vs. Ending Gender-Based Violence <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Environmental Justice <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Freedom of Speech <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Gender Equality <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Gun Control 0.0256 >0.9999 Economic Reform vs. Human Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Immigrant Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. International Peace >0.9999 0.0002 Economic Reform vs. LGBTQIA Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Living Wage 0.0043 0.0073 Economic Reform vs. Net Neutrality 0.0111 0.0024 Economic Reform vs. Nuclear Disarmament >0.9999 0.1553 Economic Reform vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 0.3638 Economic Reform vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Economic Reform vs. Worker's Rights 0.0133 0.048 Economic Reform vs. Other >0.9999 0.0011 Education Reform vs. Ending Gender-Based Violence <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Environmental Justice <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Freedom of Speech <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Gender Equality <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Gun Control >0.9999 >0.9999 Education Reform vs. Human Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Immigrant Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. International Peace >0.9999 >0.9999 Education Reform vs. LGBTQIA Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Living Wage >0.9999 >0.9999 Education Reform vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Nuclear Disarmament 0.0259 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 >0.9999 Education Reform vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Education Reform vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Education Reform vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Environmental Justice >0.9999 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Freedom of Speech >0.9999 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Gender Equality 0.0792 0.0424

191

Table 4.3 (continued).

Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Gun Control 0.0002 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Human Rights 0.1337 0.0101 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Immigrant Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Living Wage 0.0018 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Reproductive Rights 0.0991 >0.9999 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Worker's Rights 0.0005 <0.0001 Ending Gender-Based Violence vs. Other 0.1055 >0.9999 Environmental Justice vs. Freedom of Speech >0.9999 >0.9999 Environmental Justice vs. Gender Equality 0.0002 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Gun Control 0.0822 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Human Rights 0.0004 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Immigrant Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Environmental Justice vs. International Peace 0.0004 0.0221 Environmental Justice vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Environmental Justice vs. Living Wage 0.3715 0.0007 Environmental Justice vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Reproductive Rights 0.0003 0.0002 Environmental Justice vs. Worker's Rights 0.1438 <0.0001 Environmental Justice vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Freedom of Speech vs. Gender Equality 0.3001 0.0401 Freedom of Speech vs. Gun Control <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Human Rights 0.4818 0.0095 Freedom of Speech vs. Immigrant Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Freedom of Speech vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Freedom of Speech vs. Living Wage 0.0003 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Reproductive Rights 0.3679 >0.9999 Freedom of Speech vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Freedom of Speech vs. Other 0.0392 >0.9999

192

Table 4.3 (continued).

Gender Equality vs. Gun Control <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Human Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Gender Equality vs. Immigrant Rights 0.2412 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. LGBTQIA Rights 0.0488 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Living Wage <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Reproductive Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Gender Equality vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Gender Equality vs. Other <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Human Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Immigrant Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. International Peace >0.9999 >0.9999 Gun Control vs. LGBTQIA Rights 0.0004 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Living Wage >0.9999 >0.9999 Gun Control vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 >0.9999 Gun Control vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Gun Control vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Gun Control vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Human Rights vs. Immigrant Rights 0.3912 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. International Peace <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. LGBTQIA Rights 0.0839 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Living Wage <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Reproductive Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Human Rights vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Human Rights vs. Other <0.0001 <0.0001 Immigrant Rights vs. International Peace <0.0001 0.0013 Immigrant Rights vs. LGBTQIA Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Immigrant Rights vs. Living Wage 0.0004 <0.0001 Immigrant Rights vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Immigrant Rights vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Immigrant Rights vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001

193

Table 4.3 (continued).

Immigrant Rights vs. Reproductive Rights 0.297 0.0044 Immigrant Rights vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Immigrant Rights vs. Other 0.0444 >0.9999 International Peace vs. LGBTQIA Rights <0.0001 0.1066 International Peace vs. Living Wage >0.9999 >0.9999 International Peace vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 International Peace vs. Nuclear Disarmament 0.0006 <0.0001 International Peace vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 >0.9999 International Peace vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 International Peace vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 International Peace vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Living Wage 0.0028 0.0043 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Reproductive Rights 0.0615 <0.0001 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Worker's Rights 0.0008 0.0006 LGBTQIA Rights vs. Other 0.1369 >0.9999 Living Wage vs. Net Neutrality <0.0001 <0.0001 Living Wage vs. Nuclear Disarmament <0.0001 <0.0001 Living Wage vs. Religious Freedom >0.9999 >0.9999 Living Wage vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Living Wage vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Living Wage vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Net Neutrality vs. Nuclear Disarmament >0.9999 >0.9999 Net Neutrality vs. Religious Freedom <0.0001 <0.0001 Net Neutrality vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Net Neutrality vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Net Neutrality vs. Other <0.0001 <0.0001 Nuclear Disarmament vs. Religious Freedom 0.0105 <0.0001 Nuclear Disarmament vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Nuclear Disarmament vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Nuclear Disarmament vs. Other 0.0173 <0.0001 Religious Freedom vs. Reproductive Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Religious Freedom vs. Worker's Rights >0.9999 >0.9999 Religious Freedom vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999 Reproductive Rights vs. Worker's Rights <0.0001 <0.0001 Reproductive Rights vs. Other <0.0001 0.0024 Worker's Rights vs. Other >0.9999 >0.9999

194

Table 4.4: Post-March Feelings Responses by March Type.

Differen Difference Optimism Optimism Optimism about Optimism ce for for about US about US world political about world Political Political political political climate (Sister political Causes Causes climate climate March) climate (Sister (DC (Sister (DC March) (DC March) March) March) March) Number 450 265 447 264 450 263 of values Min 1 1 1 1 1 1 Max 7 7 7 7 7 7 Range 6 6 6 6 6 6 Mean 5.973 6.279 5.541 5.621 5.367 5.392 Std. 1.042 0.9679 1.362 1.417 1.344 1.458 Dev. Std. 0.04913 0.05946 0.06441 0.08721 0.06334 0.08988 Error of Mean

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CHAPTER FIVE: MEDIATED UNDERSTANDING

From the prelude onward, through each interlude and chapter, this dissertation has moved through theory, method, and practice to gain a mediated understanding of the 2017 Women’s

March on Washington. The findings in this dissertation have theoretical and practical implications in feminist research, survey design, collective motivations, and activism.

This dissertation makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of social movements by situating WMOW as an emergent, dynamic, and relational process between many actors.

Relationships with non/human actors (including emotions and environments) reshape our identities, and social movements are an equally part of that dynamic relational interaction (van

Zomeren, 2015). I explicitly expand van Zomeren’s position by including nonhuman actors.

Things are important members in collective action to study because they include and exclude through their participation. In particular, the PussyHat was a wearable technology that emerged as both a symbol and garment of the Women’s March on Washington. On an individual level, the hats resurfaced human bodies, provided warmth, and signaled personal virtues. As a collective, the PussyHats resurfaced the WMOW identity as a whole. With or without the knowledge of their wearers, PussyHats reinforced a group identity that was anti-Trump, pro-[White, cis- gendered] woman, open source, visible, and mobile. As a result, people of difference, particularly women who identified as non-White, nonbinary, genderqueer, or trans* had a higher likelihood of feeling excluded from participation, and thus were less present at the March. The overall effect was one that reified initial concern regarding WMOW’s identity as disproportionately supporting White feminist voices (Brewer & Dundes, 2018).

From a sample of mostly White, upper-middle class, American, women, I was able to cluster individual motivations across a range of themes. Overall, group identity at the Women’s

196

March evolved as exclusionary by the way individual responses repeatedly performed ironic othering. Concerns regarding the intersectionality of the March from many [often non-White] observers were astute and valid. These concerns, which started well before the March occurred, were useful for leading my analysis. In particular, Brewer and Dundes’ (2018) ethnography of

African American Women’s perceptions gave me insight to investigate the subtle and obvious ways in which “the march provided White women with a means to protest the election rather than a way to address social injustice disproportionately affecting lower social classes and people of color” (p. 54). Even inclusion of diverse leadership was unable to change the perception, as a whole, of the March being one centered on White feminism. As a result, the group identity that emerged was White, Cis-Female, Liberal, Feminist, and American.

Four core motivations (identity, morality, emotions, and efficacy) interact to drive participation in collective action. I provide two models (personal salience and incongruity) to show how the 2016 Election politicized individuals. These models are useful for demonstrating the importance of connecting political issues to personal identities—and the need to build more empathetic coalitions with identities outside of one’s own. Even though White participants had a desire to “support marginalized people” or “those under threat because of the new administration,” the WCLFA participants lacked intimate and detailed knowledge of those communities. In his relational hypothesis for individuals’ participation, van Zomeren (2015) describes collective action events not only as an outcome but also “the medium through which individuals can interact” with both ingroup and outgroup members (p. 3). In the case of the

Women’s March, we see motivations of participants include finding like-minded people

(ingroup) and protesting or showing resistance to the incoming administration (outgroup). The

Women’s March also provided a space to redefine ingroup and outgroup identifications; for

197 example, White women who marched (ingroup) desired to show distance from White women who voted for Trump. The March experience demonstrated a bifurcation of two White women identities. And, by participating in the March, White women were able to physically, politically, visibly, and vocally express their difference from the narrative of White women as Trump supporters. However, they were unable to consistently demonstrate inclusivity with people of difference.

In order to deepen my analysis, I was able to compare individuals’ open-ended responses of what motivated them to march with what they rated as the most salient political issues. My analysis found a tendency for participants to rate all 22 political issues, on average as having a strong impact on their decision to march. However, issues more explicitly salient to [middle- upper class] WCLFA identities were rated relatively higher as motivating factors. Further, more general issues of “Civil Rights” and “Human Rights” rated higher than specific issues in the same vein (i.e. BLM, Immigrant Rights, LGBTQIA+ Rights, Religious [non-Christian] Freedom,

Wage Equality, etc.). The numerical hierarchy corresponds to the themes and issues as described rhetorically by the participants in the open-ended question, and replicates issue abstraction as a function of the tendency for White people to universalize and collapse concepts outside of race and sexuality to the detriment of intersectionality and coalition-building.

After the March I found that WMOW helped participants strongly feel like they had made a difference for their political causes (particularly at the DC March). In contrast, participants experienced more conservative increases of optimism post-March about the political climate (in the both U.S. and the world). Given the qualitative and quantitative responses, participants felt as if they had less control over the “political climate” and political process both in the United States and abroad. Since optimism has been observed to motivate individual and

198 collective action (Kleres & Wettergren, 2017), I contend our participants could be more likely to be politicized around specific issues than the political process (or political parties, for example).

From WMOW to Intersectional Feminist Activism

As part of the dominant cultural group (WCLFA) who Marched, I agree that I have a superficial knowledge of issues outside of my personal identity. Despite my desire not to, I participate in acts of exclusion through my ignorance. It is up to me (and those in dominant cultural positions) to seek out and center non-dominant cultural experiences and then, in collaboration, to address those differences as a means of dismantling oppression. Otherwise researchers like myself will repeat the exclusionary tendency of the Women’s March, by privileging my own identities at the expense of people of difference. The findings in this dissertation can offer a starting point for identifying the ways in which individuals implicitly categorize, stratify, and prioritize issues. Potentially, the question of “Why did you do X” or

“Why are you doing X” (where “X” is a type of political action) could be used in activist workshops to help individuals better understand the implicit frames through which they see and interact with the world, and illuminate them gaps in their awareness. Finally, without a focus on people of difference, organizations that follow WMOW’s emergence are likely to transmit the values of the dominant cultural perspective.

Also, this project contributes two models of identity politicization: personal salience model and the incongruity model. These two models demonstrate the importance of education in coalition-building and supports Brewer and Dundes (2018) findings and DiAngelo’s work on

White Fragility (2011, 2018). Without extensive personal experience and training, White people are unlikely to connect as clearly to the emotions, moralities, and pathways to efficacy outside of their identities. A march or rally may be a fine option for collective action for someone who

199 does not fear police brutality; however, such public collective actions depend on trust and civility from the government. On the other hand, while undocumented immigrants and people of color may have felt similarly disgusted with the outcome of the 2016 Election, a public demonstration may not be the best option for collective action. Therefore, people in positions of power not only need to identify what political actions are available to them, but especially what actions will most support those in marginalized positions.

Toward Critical Survey Making and Analysis

In addition to producing knowledge, this project is also a model for critical employment of methods, whether quantitative or qualitative. Like any other technical artifact, a survey is a tool that circulates in cultural contexts. The survey interacts with technological limitations, participants’ perceptions, researcher’s biases, stylistic conventions, and historic precedents.

Using a critical cultural lens, I have found quantitative research most useful as a way to center the feelings and experiences described in ethnographic data. A large dataset of experiences is helpful for illustrating the emergence of systemic types of oppression. Surveys like mine, which have qualitative and quantitative components, can be useful in demonstrating how repetition of behaviors creates cultural practices and ways of thinking.

As we create our surveys, however, we have to continue thinking more critically about how the types of question (and answer) formats encourage participation from some, and not others. Feminist researchers who are interested in survey methodology must grapple with the issues of data erasure, objectification, and missing cases as potential sources of violence and cultural exclusion. They also hold potential as important sites for approaching understanding.

Thus, more work should be spent on theorizing feminist survey design, participant recruitment, and other related quantitative methodology. Long-form and collaborative mixed methods are

200 useful for providing more complex and positional narratives—I hope that disciplines in academia work harder to facilitate cross-departmental and intra-community projects.

Direction of Future Research

The researcher’s goal is to give voice to women who have been denied it, to express their experiences in their terms. -Sprague, 2016 (p. 32)

To the best of my ability, I have endeavored to follow Sprague’s assertion. But at the end of the dissertation I find this goal further away. The nature of research is interpretive and partial, reflecting known and unknowable constituencies in its product. Researchers interested in

WMOW and social movement would benefit from continued research on two groups: those who chose not to attend the March and those with demographic identities different from those I collected who Marched but did not respond to my survey. These voices are essential for broadening the conversation to be more nuanced regarding models of participation, motivations, perceived efficacy, and issues essential to intersectional feminism. From here, my work is only beginning, and welcome collaboration in this ongoing project. Finally—thank you, again, to the participants who shared their stories; I am indebted to your generosity and will hold your gifts beyond academia and throughout my life.

201

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