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Dissenting Images: Engaging the Pedagogy of Protest Erica R Dissenting Images: Engaging the Pedagogy of Protest Erica R. Meiners, Therese Quinn Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Volume 27, Number 1, 2017, pp. 65-76 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tnf.2017.0006 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/669836 Access provided by Northeastern Illinois University (12 Nov 2018 18:59 GMT) Teachers Talk Dissenting Images: Engaging the Pedagogy of Protest Erica R. Meiners and Therese Quinn On January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of a new president, over 5 million people gathered in cities across the globe for the Women’s March on Washington. Although the march was originally conceived of by white women and was given the name “Million Women March,” its leadership soon shifted to have women of color in the majority, with Tamika D. Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland as national co-chairs. It was, according to some sources, the largest protest in the history of the planet. Images of sister marches held everywhere from New York City to Sydney, Australia, flooded digital media. Do-it-yourself (DIY) signs hastily constructed with Sharpies, glitter, and cardboard exhorted viewers to “Free Melania” and “Keep Your Politics off My Pussy.” Marchers wore jeans, parkas, and elaborate costumes, and groups conducted tightly choreographed collaborative performances. The march arrived in the wake of many other uprisings, each with its own sights, sounds, and histories, from the crumpled body in the street, military tanks, and “Hands up, don’t shoot!” visuals of Ferguson, Missouri, to the stream of videos and audios of police killing black people—Michael Brown, Lacquan MacDonald, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner. These live images were reworked in real time by art- ists and activists, including Shirin Barghi’s painful, powerful # LastWords series, which presents the last words of black people killed by police: “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting” were eighteen-year-old Michael Brown’s. The pedagogy of protest—emblazoned across protest signs, television screens, and Twitter—is not new. Under pressure and through collaboration, social movements have always created new language—interruptions—and analytical tools to support shifts in power or to enable openings for the consolidation of old forms of power. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2017 Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Published on behalf of New Jersey City University In the spirit of learning from this mobilization and the political moments that wrapped around and infused this women’s march and particularly from the pedagogical power of its rich visuality, we invited a range of people we admire, from a breadth of geographical contexts, to select any image from the day and offer a comment. Here are their engagements. Future Histories? Sampada Aranke, San Francisco, California Two days after the election, my students asked me to take time at the begin- ning of class to help them make sense of it all. Our conversation was both comforting and sobering; for forty-eight hours, my students—many of whom had voted for the first time in this election—walked around like hollow shells, overcome by the shock of recognizing that this nation had fully realized its white supremacist, heteropatriarchial ideal. I, too, was stunned. Even though I have never had any real faith in electoral politics, let alone the structures this process enables, I too was slack-jawed at the November 2016 results. I spent the first twenty minutes of my “Art since 1945” survey course doing a historical read of electoral politics, analyzing the structures of power that keep such processes in place, and contextualizing data released after the results were called. One graphic was particularly telling: the Washington Post had released exit polls that reflected that black women overwhelmingly (92% to 95%) had voted against Trump. I ended our conversation amplifying, “Black women tried to save us.” These data and their implications, to me, are what anticipate this photograph from the Women’s March in DC. Two little girls—one white, one black—stand in Figure 1 Photo credit: Rachel Schreiber. 66 transformations the middle of a crowd of bodies that surround them. One smiles for the camera; one avoids eye contact. One proudly presents her sign; the other holds hers close to her body. They stand together but signal such a historical difference. This image, for me, embodies the knowledge felt from the painful reality of that cold exit poll data. It reminds us to ask What pasts live between these two girls? What future histories does this photograph anticipate? Witches for Black Lives Tara Betts, Chicago, Illinois a cluster of unseen faces heads tipped, pointed beaks of witches’ hats only seen as costumes. They look daunting, their eyes, their faces covered. some hold black posters. white letters etch out RESIST WITCHES FOR BLACK LIVES A TIME TO BUILD/A TIME TO BURN they speculate. which action should we take— do we construct or combust? Peggy Elia (@paraskevie) posted a photo of women dressed as witches during the Women’s March in Portland on Instagram. The photos taken of them at the march were frequently dramatic, but not one revealed their faces. The images were reminiscent of the Guerrilla Girls, who wear gorilla masks and assume the names of notable women artists of the past in public. W.I.T.C.H. began in New York City as a feminist activist project in 1968. The Portland chapter (known as #witchpdx) emerged in November 2016. W.I.T.C.H. has served as an acronym for numerous things, including “Witches International Troublemaker Conspiracy from Hell,” “Witches Invoking Transfor- mative Channels of Healing,” and “Women Inspired to Tear Down Constructs of Hate.” I was intrigued by their desire to represent themselves anonymously as a coven while participating in actions on issues with a broad, intersectional range. The photo was stark and looked like a grim threat to anyone perpetrating an injustice, but I was also drifting into thoughts of lines from Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”: “I have gone out, a possessed witch/haunting the black air, braver at night . ./A woman like that is misunderstood. ./A woman like that is not ashamed to die./I have been her kind.” Dissenting Images 67 Achieving Our Collective Freedom William Estrada and Silvia Inés Gonzalez, Chicago, Illinois We were pleasantly surprised to learn that 250,000 women and their allies gathered at Grant Park in Chicago on January 21, 2017. It felt comforting to know that so many people could gather to celebrate and support what the organizers of the march stated on their website as women’s rights, civil liberties, and diverse issues. As educators and community-based artists working in marginalized com- munities whose resources have been stripped away for decades, we wonder how many of us acknowledge the priv- ilege of gathering for such protests in a police state where we are constantly being surveilled. We wonder how our own privilege manifests itself through the language and images we choose Figure 2 when we march. How do our actions (or lack thereof ) create exclusivity? As Photo credit: Silvia Inés we celebrate our participation in protests, do we notice who is not present? Gonzalez. Whose voices were not invited or are excluded? Do we question if we are generating hegemonic language and imagery that celebrate a marginalized group that has not been invited to share its own stories? Are we reflecting together after these marches in a way that sustains this work beyond a moment in history? How are we engaging in these critical discussions with our loved ones, family, communities, and students? How are we unpacking harmful dynamics of exclusion in our interpersonal relationships so that this work can become a sustainable movement that truly challenges systemic oppression? We are excited about our critical awakening as a nation, of our collective effort to protest against xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist rhetoric. But we have to be conscious of what we show up for and what we fail to support. We have to be critical of what we say and do not say on social media and among our family and friends during protests that support Black Lives Matter, undoc- umented, indigenous, Muslim, and LGBTQ movements. We have to use our privilege when we see marginalized groups attacked; we need to be present and show up to co-create the spaces needed to celebrate and support civil liberties and diverse issues. Our collective liberation can only be achieved when we fight to make sure that every marginalized group has freedom. 68 transformations Unfit, Unkind, Unruly, Unaware, Unhinged, Uninformed, Unprepared, Untruthful, Unamerican, Unacceptable Nicolas Lampert, Milwaukee, Wisconsin A sign that stood out to me amid a sea of signs at the Women’s March in Madison, Wisconsin, was text only: a large sign held by a woman that read “Unfit, Unkind, Unruly, Unaware, Unhinged, Uninformed, Unprepared, Untruthful, Unamerican, Unacceptable.” This sign listed the many reasons why Trump is so dangerous and so offensive. His policies are so extreme and the attacks on the public and the envi- ronment are so intense that a list seems appropriate. I appreciated the word choices. Unkind stood out. I brought my seven-year-old daughter, who has noted to me on many occasions that Trump never smiles, to the march. To her, he is a person who embodies someone who is unkind. Uninformed and unprepared denote someone who is a corporate pawn to the billionaire class and some- one who is being led by white supremacist advisors Stephen Bannon and Stephen Moore.
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