Carrie Rentschler / 56. #safetytipsforladies 581

in Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care, edited by Jane Banaszak-Holl, Sandra Levitsky, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, verta, and Nancy Whittier. 1992. “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobili- zation.” Pp. 104–129 in Frontiers in Social Movement The- ory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carole McClurg Mueller. New Haven: Yale University Press.

valenti, Jessica. 2007. Full Frontal Feminism. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.

van Dyke, Nella, Sarah Soule, and verta Taylor. 2004. “The Tar- gets of Social Movements: Beyond a Focus on the State.” Pp. 27–51 in Authority in Contention, Vol. 25, edited by Daniel J. Myers and Daniel M. Cress. Oxford: JAI Press.

van Laer, Jeroen. 2010. “Activists ‘Online’ and ‘Offline’: The Internet as an Information Channel for Protest Demonstra- tions.” Mobilization 15(3): 405–417.

Wall, Melissa A. 2007. “Social Movements and Email: Expres- sions of Online Identity in the Globalization Protests.” New Media and Society 9(2): 258–277.

Warner, Russ. 2013. Who Wastes More Time at Work: Mil- lennials, Gen X’ers or Boomers? New York: AOL. Retrieved July 3, 2014 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russ-warner/ who-wastes-more-time- at-w_b_2618279.html).

Williams, Ray B. 2013. Do Facebook and Other Social Media Encourage Narcissism? New York: Sussex Publishers. Retrieved July 3, 2014 (http://www.psychologytoday.com/ blog/wired-success/ 201306/do-facebook-and-other-social- media-encourage-narcissism).

White, Robert W. 1989. “From Peaceful Protest to Gue- rilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” American Journal of Sociology 94(6): 1277–1302.

Whittier, Nancy. 1995. Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Yaeger, Taryn. 2012. Who Narrates the World? The OpEd Project 2012 Byline Report. New York: The OpEd Project. Retrieved August 2, 2013 (www.theopedproject.org/index.php?option= com_ content&view=article&id=817&Itemid=149).

READING 56

#safetytipsforladies: Feminist Twitter Takedowns of Victim Blaming

Carrie Rentschler

#safetytipsforladies: A hashtag about how tired women are of being told to do stupid, ineffective, unrealis- tic things to avoid being raped. (Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013a)

HILARY BOWMAN-SMART started #safteytips- forladies on March 21, 2013 out of exaspera- tion with dominant victim blaming anti-rape

advice-giving after reading yet another article advising women how to take a risk management approach to their own safety. As she explained on her blog,

I am absolutely sick to death of being told what to wear and what to do and how to be, as though any of that will somehow save me from being raped. It’s not a woman’s responsibility to prevent sexual assault. How about we teach men not to rape instead? ( Hilary Bowman-Smart 2013b, emphasis in original)

Before March 2013, Twitter hashtags like #SafteyTips- ForWomen shared traditional self-defense tips that

focused on potential victims’ (usually women’s) bodies and behaviors. While women can develop resistance strategies and knowledge of how to fight back against violence, most rape prevention work still places pri- mary responsibility for stopping rape on those who are targeted for this violence (see Rachel Hall 2004; Car- ine Mardorossian 2002; Martha McCaughey 1998; Carrie A. Rentschler 1999). Tweets using #safetytips- forladies called out the victim-blaming focus of most rape prevention, shifting attention from the issue of women staying safe, according to a source at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), to how to stop rape (“Stop Rape” 2013).

After Bowman-Smart’s tweet, others followed suit, humorously tweeting with the hashtag to mock the advice-giving tropes of traditional rape prevention

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582   Part IV: Social Change

a “symbolic rerouting” of anti-rape discourse, an “event marked by … a change of direction” in how we talk about and politicize sexual violence and its prevention (2013, 156). Today, #safetytipsforladies and other feminist hashtag generation around victim blaming responses to sexual violence, like #YesAll- Women (Samantha C. Thrift 2014), provide particu- larly visible examples of how social media can be used to redirect attention in feminist responses to sexual violence from campaigns rooted in the behavior of the survivor to those that target the actions of those who might rape.

Read as a collectivizing feminist response to rape culture, #safetytipsforladies reveals the femi- nist delight in exposing misogynist, victim-blaming ideas through humor, in ways that resonated around the Internet. Feminist blogs and the online press registered the impact and virality of the feminist hashtag through their “best of” and “favorites” lists. For Madeline Davies (2013) of Jezebel, “the women of Twitter took over something dumb and made it into something awesome.” In this way, the humor of #safteytipsforladies explains both its spread and the memetic remaking of feminist jokes that respond to victim blaming attitudes and slut-shaming rhet- oric (see Limor Shifman 2014, 94–96). In the pro- cess, #safetytipsforladies helped change the terms of feminist debate about sexual violence, drawing broader media attention to feminist rape prevention discourse through the derisive laughter that ener- gizes current feminisms (Susan Douglas 2010, 22). The hashtag activism of #safetytipsforladies illus- trates how humor nurtures a politics of joy and resil- ience in the face of rape culture and its apologists. Alongside the feminist feeling structures of rage and exasperation in the fight against the pernicious vic- tim blaming of so much rape prevention, feminist hashtag humor asserts the value of hijacking spaces of discussion and commentary online, articulating feminist critique in ways that also, importantly, make us laugh.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bing, Janet. 2007. “Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor in All-Fe- male Groups.” Humor 20 (4): 337–366.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013a. “Chronicling the Unex- ceptional.” Tumblr, March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. h t tp : / / pa s y l r ee . tumb l r. com/pos t /45816844116 / safetytipsforladies-a-hashtag-about-how-tired.

discourse. Tweets by Kayla @fangirl124 and FemArm- ChairRegime @femarmchairregime joked that women should don chain mail or three sweat suits, a ski mask, and sleeping bag to avoid rape, using hyperbolic exaggeration to reveal the irrational vic- tim-blaming logic behind the idea that what women wear makes them more susceptible to sexual assault. Bonnie Dean @BonDean deployed a humorous visual meme to suggest that women should leave their vagi- nas at home before they go out, referencing comic Wanda Sykes’ stand-up routine where she jokingly advised the same, while Lesley @jarvgirl suggested that women should have a 404 Error code tattooed around their bikini line. Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia), creator of the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen (2013), called out victim-blaming rape prevention by stating that most advice tells women to “stop being a woman in public. #safetytipsforladies” (March 25, 2013).

That women turned to Twitter to express their exasperation with rape prevention advice is quite revealing, for they simultaneously hijacked typical prevention discourse and repopulated Twitter chan- nels with a different kind of peer-to-peer advice giv- ing. Tweets using the hashtag were quickly generated and recirculated, demonstrating how humor fuels the dissemination of feminist ideas via social media (see Bing 2007). Noting the speed with which the hashtag caught on, feminist bloggers commented on the absurdity of most anti-rape advice directed at women, emphasizing the need to “shift the focus to the ones doing the raping instead” (HarlotOverdrive 2013). While tweets collectivized expressions of fem- inist “fed-upness” (Carrie A. Rentschler 2014), #safe- tytipsforladies also indexed suggestions for solving the problem of rape in ways others found useful (e.g., Kristina Chew 2013). Tweets such as Kate Wood’s @ gimmepanda combined satirical jabs at the individu- alizing, paranoia-producing “tips” format of anti-rape risk management advice while also criticizing the stranger danger paradigm of rape prevention. Rape Crisis Scotland’s humorous 2012 campaign “Top Ten Tips to End Rape,” re-tweeted with #safetytips- forladies, tells men how not to rape by, among other things, advising men to carry whistles to warn poten- tial victims. While presented jokingly, the campaign nonetheless models how to make potential rapists responsible for their behavior.

As film scholar Yuriko Furuhata argues, media hijacks like those we see in feminist hashtags represent

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Alicia Garza / 57. A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement 583

Kendall, Mikki. 2013. “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Color’s Issue with Digital Feminism.” The Guardian, August 14. Accessed August 11, 2014. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/ solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism.

Mardorossian, Carine. 2002. “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” Signs 27 (3): 743–775.

McCaughey, Martha. 1998. Real Knockouts: The Physical Fem- inism of Women’s Self-Defense. New York: New York Univer- sity Press.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 1999. “Women’s Self-Defense: Physical Education for Everyday Life.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 26 (1): 152–161.

Rentschler, Carrie A. 2014. “Rape Culture and the Feminist Politics of Social Media.” Girlhood Studies 7 (1): 65–82.

Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“‘stop rape’ dislodging ‘stay safe’ advice on social media.” 2013. CBC.ca Storify. Accessed October 16, 2014. https://storify.com/cbccommunity/both-sexes-boost- stop-rape-answer-to-stay-safe-adv.

Thrift, Samantha C. 2014. “#YesAllWomen as Feminist Meme Event.” Feminist Media Studies 14 (6): 1090–1092.

“TOP TEN TIPS TO END RAPE.” 2012. Glasgow: Rape Crisis Scotland.

Bowman-Smart, Hilary. 2013b. “#safteytipsforladies, or Why vic- tim-Blaming is Moronic.” Hilaroar (blog), March 21. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://hilaroar.tumblr.com/post/45957899437/ safetytipsforladies-or-why-victim-blaming-is.

Chew, Kristina. 2013. “Let’s be Honest: These are the 15 Best Safety Tips for Women.” The Care2 (blog), March 26. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://www.care2.com/causes/ best-15-safetytipsforladies-from-ladies-who-.

Davies, Madeline. 2013. “Women Take Over #safteytipsforladies and Make it 100 Times Better.” Jezebel (blog), March 25. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://jezebel.com/5992329/women- take-over-safetytipsforladies-and-make-it-100-times-better.

Douglas, Susan. 2010. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. New York: Times Books.

Furuhata, Yuriko. 2013. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant- Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hall, Rachel. 2004. “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management.” Hypatia 19 (3): 1–19.

HarlotOverdrive. 2013. “#safteytipsforladies (or why I want you to stop telling me how I can prevent being sexually assaulted).” Harlot Overdrive: Sex, Culture, Nonsense (blog), March 20. Accessed July 11, 2014. http://harlotoverdrive. wordpress.com/2013/03/20/safetytipsforladies/.

READING 57

A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Alicia Garza

I CREATED #BLACKLIvESMATTER with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after seventeen-year-old

Trayvon Martin was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he commit- ted. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are system- atically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this soci- ety, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers, and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastruc- ture for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after eighteen-year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Offi- cer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people. We’ve connected people across the country working

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truth-telling and intellectual activism

by patricia hill collins

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with reason

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage

and Care for their-Being Mari Evans, from I Am a Black Woman (1970)

Mari Evans’ poem invokes the social and political upheaval of the

Civil Rights and Black Power movements in this country. Like others

of her generation, Evans rejected the separation between scholar-

ship and activism, school and society, thinking and doing. She wrote

poems, plays, children’s books, and a musical adaptation of Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Along with other artists,

intellectuals, and activists at the time, she engaged in multiple forms

of intellectual activism.

37WINTER 2013 contexts

I wonder how effec-

tively today’s scholars

and public intellectuals

speak the truth about

contemporary social

issues. New technolo-

gies have opened up

formerly unimaginable

ways for us to talk to

one another. We are swimming in information, but how much

of that information moves us closer to the truths that will sustain

us? Individuals can now see themselves on YouTube and post

their ideas on blogs with blinding speed. Yet for all this talk

and noise, what are we saying that is of value? Where are the

conversations that will spur contemporary intellectual activism?

Breathing life into ideas requires working across differences and

building communities in which dialogue is possible.

Today, in our increasingly corporate colleges and universities

and monopolistic mainstream media, we confront a contradic-

tory politics of inclusion and exclusion. Some of those from

formerly excluded groups now occupy positions of power and

authority inside the social institutions that once excluded them.

Many of these insiders engage in intellectual work. At the same

time, as the lyrics of global hip-hop remind us, far too many

people remain excluded.

As an American citizen, an African American woman from

a working-class background, and an academic who has expe-

rienced considerable upward social mobility, I am both an

insider and an outsider. Throughout my professional career, I

have struggled to gain clarity about how ever-shifting patterns

of belonging and exclusion have shaped the

contours of my intellectual activism.

Negotiating the contemporary politics of

knowledge production as an “outsider within”

raises some fundamental dilemmas. In a mis-

guided effort to protect standards, many of my

academic colleagues at different colleges and

universities derogate any work that is “popu-

lar” as less rigorous or scholarly. They see such

“political” work as nonacademic. Such norms

suppress the kind of engaged scholarship

that interests me and that is fundamental for

intellectual activism. But because ideas and politics are every-

where, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

speaking truth to power There are two primary strategies of intellectual activism.

One tries to speak the truth to power. This form of truth telling

uses the power of ideas to confront existing power relations.

On a metaphorical level, speaking the truth to power invokes

images of changing the very foundations of social hierarchy

where the less powerful take on the ideas and practices of the

powerful, often armed solely with their ideas. One can imagine

this process through the David and Goliath story of the weak

standing up to the strong, armed only with a slingshot (as relying

solely on the power of one’s ideas seems to be). A Google search

of the phrase “speak the truth to power” uncovers numerous

hits seemingly focused on confronting those who wield power

within existing social institutions.

My lengthy educational training was designed to equip

me to wield the language of power to serve the interests of

the gatekeepers who granted me legitimacy. My teachers did

not consider that I might choose to use those same weapons

to challenge much of what I learned, at least not as deeply as

I have actually done. While we may think of our educations

as our individual intellectual property, we quickly fi nd out that

powerful groups expect us to place our fancy degrees in service

to conservative political agendas. Power routinely claims that it

has a monopoly on the truth. Yet my education revealed multiple

truths, most of which were co-opted and repackaged to suit the

vested interests of the more powerful. The richness of alternative

points of view remained ignored, neglected, ridiculed, and/or

persecuted out of existence.

Much of my academic writing strives to

speak the truth to power, namely, to develop

alternative analyses of social injustices that

scholarly audiences will fi nd credible. Much

of my career as a sociologist has been spent

speaking the truth to power about race, class,

gender, and sexuality, yet race has been central.

I have focused on anti-racist discourse and prac-

tice that might catalyze people to think about

their worlds differently and, as a result, act

differently within them. My work constitutes

theoretical interventions in what counts as truth

about race and racism.

Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 36-39, 41. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 Temple University Press. Used by permission of Temple University Press. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213476244

Illustrations by Corey Fields

38 contexts.org

This is a difficult time to talk overtly about race; many

American citizens believe that we are living in a post-racial world.

The election of Barack Obama has simultaneously highlighted

the visibility of race and the difficulties of talking about it. In this

context, terms like “family,” “community,” “post-racial society,”

and “color blindness” are invoked by thinkers on both the left

and the right sides of the political spectrum, with racial subtexts

carried within what appears to be a newfound unity across the

historically divisive categories of race and gender. I think that if

we can change our thinking about race, we can do so about

gender, class, sexuality, religion, and citizenship too.

Speaking the truth to power in ways that undermine and

challenge that power is often best done as an insider. Some

changes are best initiated from within the belly of the beast.

Standing outside, throwing stones at the beast, and calling it

names won’t change much, except perhaps, to make the beast

more dangerous because now it no longer believes that its

underlings love it. Challenging power structures from the inside,

and working cracks in the system, requires learning to speak

multiple languages of power convincingly.

speaking truth to the people A second strategy of intellectual activism aims to speak the

truth directly to the people. In contrast to directing energy to

those in power, a focus that inadvertently bolsters the belief that

elites are the only social actors who count,

those who speak the truth to the people

talk directly to the masses. The distinction

here is critical. It’s the difference between

producing a memo that documents the

many cases of a boss’s bad behavior and

beseeches him or her to change his or her

ways and having a meeting with the staff to strategize ways

that they, individually and collectively, might deal with the boss

and the lines of authority that put them in the situation to begin

with. The former strategy speaks the truth to power—the latter

strategy speaks the truth to the people.

Mari Evans’ poem exemplifies this second form of truth tell-

ing. Evans demands much from intellectual activists by arguing

that ordinary, everyday people need truthful ideas that will assist

them in their everyday lives. Such truth-telling requires talking,

reason, honesty, love, courage, and care. For academics whose

horizons have been narrowed to preparing for the next reap-

pointment, promotion, and tenure committee meeting, or their

lecture for the huge introductory sociology class that meets at

9:00 a.m. three days a week like clockwork, this conception of

truth-telling constitutes a luxury that may be reserved for only

the most privileged faculty members. Who has time to talk with

every student, reason with the students, give them an honest

assessment of the required textbook, love them in ways that

empower and not demean, show the courage to try something

radically different, and express a level of basic care?

Intellectual activists who devote their attention to the public

can pay a high price. In the United States, scholars and activists

who place their education in service to their local publics are

routinely passed over for cushy jobs, fat salaries, and the chance

to appear on National Public Radio. In some areas of the globe,

speaking the truth to the people lands you not on cable television

but under house arrest, in jail, or killed. Contemporary American

intellectuals must remember that, when it comes to our ability

to claim the power of ideas, we are the fortunate ones. For

our parents, friends, relatives, and neighbors who lack literacy,

work long hours, and/or consume seemingly endless doses of

so-called reality television, the excitement of hearing new ideas

Because ideas and politics are everywhere, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

39WINTER 2013 contexts

that challenge social inequalities can be a rarity.

I am an intellectual whose scholarly work aspires to speak

the truth to power. Yet a sizable portion of my intellectual work

has also aimed to speak the truth to the people. Both forms of

truth telling are intertwined throughout my intellectual career,

with my books, journal articles, and essays arrayed along a

continuum with speaking the truth to power and speaking the

truth to the people on either end. Engaging these two forms of

truth telling within a singular work is challenging.

speaking in multiple registers My book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Conscious-

ness and the Politics of Empowerment is written in multiple

registers, for scholarly audiences as well as non-academic Afri-

can American women. I faced a difficult challenge in crafting

this book. How could I write a book about African American

women’s intellectual production that would be accepted by

scholarly audiences that had long excluded and derogated this

group? How might I write a book that spoke directly to African

American women that they would find truthful, yet avoid the

risk of being dismissed by scholarly audiences (who controlled

publishing resources)? I had to find ways to examine the everyday

creativity and resistance of African American women within the

constraints of an academic discourse that

would not be seen by scholars as being too

popular or political. I also had to consider

how my arguments would be recogniz-

able to and useful for African American

women. And I had to sharpen my skills of

translation.

Because the material at that time was so new and I was

an unknown scholar, I knew that my publisher would recruit

scholarly reviewers to give my manuscript a thorough assess-

ment. Yet to shield my book from the power relations that

made African American women objects of scholarly knowledge,

I also developed ways of including African American women as

reviewers of my material.

I invited a few Afri-

can American women

undergraduates from

my University of Cin-

cinnati Africana Studies

courses to serve as

readers for chapters of

my manuscript. They

were bright, energetic,

primari ly working-

class students whose

childhoods in the Cincinnati metropolitan area had provided

them broad, heterogeneous networks of African American

friends, neighbors, and relatives. I was not interested in my stu-

dents’ ability to correct my English or inform me of how my book

might benefit from additional citations from the top scholarly

journals. Instead, I asked them t

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