Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
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Revised Pages #identity Revised Pages Revised Pages #identity Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, Editors University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor Copyright © 2019 by Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman Some rights reserved This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published April 2019 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 07415- 0 (Hardcover : alk paper) ISBN: 978- 0- 482- 05415- 2 (Paper : alk paper) ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 12527- 2 (ebook) ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 90109- 8 (ebook Open Access) https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9697041 This title is freely available in an open access edition with generous support from the Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Revised Pages Acknowledgments Centering questions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation in this book has been as much a reflection of the topics of scholarly inquiry as it is an intentional way of coproducing knowledge across axes of power and dif- ference. #identity reflects several years of collaboration and community- building among the faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students who make the Color of New Media working group what it is. The book is one outcome of a shared desire to create the scholarship we want to see in the world and an orientation toward collaboration and co-mentorship that we consider foundational to interdisciplinary work. We want to thank all of the students, faculty, and staff who have made the Color of New Media working group their own over the years. UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, especially Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Leti Volpp, Alisa Bierria, and Pamela Matsuoka, and the Center for New Media, particularly Greg Niemeyer, Nicholas de Monchaux, and Lara Wolfe, have generously provided necessary institutional support for this project. We are grateful to the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative at the Library of the University of California, Berkeley for supporting the production of an open access version of the book. Nic Chang, Monica Khachatrian, and Lida Zeitlin Wu demonstrated consummate profes- sionalism and care in formatting our chapters and preparing the final manuscript, and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their time, dedication, and labor. Rachel Nishan at Twin Oaks Indexing was a dream to work with. The team at the University of Michigan Press has been generous and supportive throughout the long gestation of this book. Susan Cronin fielded countless questions from us and helped our manuscript enter the production process as gracefully as possible, and Mary Hashman was an outstanding production editor. Mary Francis saw Revised Pages vi Acknowledgments possibilities in this project in its earliest glimmers and has guided it into the world with patience, enthusiasm, and many excellent ideas. We owe Mary a million thanks for her crucial role in making manifest our dream of a collaborative original publication. (In case anyone reading this is wondering how and why a UC Berkeley working group’s project ended up at the University of Michigan Press, the answer is that Mary first expressed interest in #identity while she was an editor at University of California Press— and her initial input was so crucial to this undertaking that we decided that the book should follow her to her new professional home!) Finally, to our family members and friends—all those who have helped to give this book life by sustaining and nurturing the people whose names are printed on its pages— thank you, thank you, thank you. This book is the product not only of work but of love. Revised Pages Contents Introduction: The Hashtags We’ve Been Forced to Remember 1 abigail de kosnik and keith p. feldman 1. Is Twitter a Stage?: Theories of Social Media Platforms as Performance Spaces 20 abigail de kosnik Part I: Black Twitter Futures 2. #OnFleek: Authorship, Interpellation, and the Black Femme Prowess of Black Twitter 39 malika imhotep 3. “You Ok Sis?”: Black Vernacular, Community Formation, and the Innate Tensions of the Hashtag 57 paige johnson 4. #SandraBland’s Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality 68 aaminah norris and nalya rodriguez 5. Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism 84 grace gipson 6. Ferguson Blues: A Conversation with Rev. Osagyefo Sekou 104 Part II: Mediated Intersections 7. Confused Cats and Postfeminist Performance 123 lyndsey ogle Revised Pages viii Contents 8. #WhyIStayed: Virtual Survivor- Centered Spaces for Transformation and Abolishing Partner Violence 137 julia havard 9. #gentrification, Cultural Erasure, and the (Im)possibilities of Digital Queer Gestures 152 josé ramón lizárraga and arturo cortéz 10. Hashtag Television: On- Screen Branding, Second- Screen Viewing, and Emerging Modes of Television Audience Interaction 165 renée pastel Part III: Disavowals 11. Hashtag Rhetoric: #AllLivesMatter and the Production of Post- Racial Affect 183 kyle booten 12. #CancelColbert: Popular Outrage, Divo Citizenship, and Digital Political Performativity 203 abigail de kosnik 13. #nohomo: Homophobic Twitter Hashtags, Straight Masculinity, and Networks of Queer Disavowal 218 bonnie ruberg Part IV: Twitter International 14. “Is Twitter for Celebrities Only?”: A Qualitative Study of Twitter Use in India 237 neha kumar 15. Reterritorializing Twitter: African Moments, 2010– 2015 249 reginold a. royston and krystal strong 16. #IfAfricaWasABar: Participation on Twitter across African Borders 268 naveena karusala, trevor perrier, and neha kumar 17. Beyond Hashtags: Black Twitter and Building Solidarity across Borders 283 kimberly mcnair Revised Pages Contents ix Part V: Notes from the Color of New Media 18. The Color of New Media Enters Trumplandia 301 19. The Color of New Media Responds to UC Berkeley’s “Free Speech Week” 317 Contributors 343 Index 347 Revised Pages Introduction The Hashtags We’ve Been Forced to Remember abigail de kosnik and keith p. feldman In August 2017 the Bay Area ensemble Campo Santo performed “Ethos de Masquerade,” an original theater and dance work about the HIV/ AIDS crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement, at the A.C.T. Strand Theater in San Francisco. Before the performance began, assistant direc- tor Ashley Smiley led the audience through some breathing exercises as a means of helping us achieve the proper orientation of mind, body, and spirit necessary to receive the experience that was about to transpire. She encouraged us to inhale, to dwell for a moment on “the hashtags you’ve been forced to remember,” and then to breathe them out and release them. This book is about the hashtags that we’ve been forced to remember. Its pages contain our meditations on those hashtags, our coming to terms with them, our processing their contexts and meanings, and our releasing them into the world— not as a means of forgetting or erasing them but as a way of sharing the understandings we’ve come to about what these tags mean, individually and together, and how they have served as labels, metadata, organizing ideas, and rallying cries for the last several years of our lives. #identity was collectively produced by a working group called the Color of New Media, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley, and is sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, with additional support from the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). In September 2013 Abigail De Kosnik, a Berkeley faculty member, and Paige Johnson, then a PhD student, decided to launch the Color of New Revised Pages 2 #identity Media as a response to a question that they had been asking each other for some time: “Is the color of new media studies white?” Both women of color, De Kosnik and Johnson wanted to create a space on the cam- pus in which nonwhite, non- male, non- straight people as well as white, male, or straight people who were seriously interested in difference and inclusion could gather and discuss the multifaceted ways that minori- ties are, and have been, actively engaging with, shaping, and expanding new media, inclusive of desktop computing, the “blogosphere,” mobile culture, social media, UGC (user-generated content), IPTV (Internet Protocol television), gaming, and other emergent or transitional media forms. One of the two dozen or so people to attend our first meeting was Keith Feldman, a Berkeley faculty member in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and soon after, De Kosnik asked Feldman to sign on as the co– faculty organizer of the Color of New Media, to which he agreed. Today the Color of New Media meets monthly in the BCNM Commons (the center’s seminar room), and between five and fifteen people attend each meeting. Anyone who attends one meeting, or emails one of the orga- nizers to express interest in the group, is considered a “member” and is added to the group’s mailing list. As of this writing, our mailing list cur- rently has seventy- six members, with the following demographics: 21 per- cent African American, 32 percent Asian American, 10 percent Latinx, 37 percent white, 70 percent female, 27 percent male, 3 percent nonbinary gender, and 11 percent LGBTQ.