Beyond participation, toward disparticipation

ABSTRACT

Social movements require participatory dissent. Facing tensions between ideological purity and mass popularity, movements that desire to be politically effective and act in the interest of their participants need dissent that leads to revision instead of conflict that devolves to dissolution. Using three examples from the 2017 and 2019 Women’s Marches, this essay theorizes “disparticipation.” Building from José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, I define disparticipation as participatory, disidentifying dissent. While disparticipants may be seen as not participating, or even counter-protesting, I reframe their participation as a “diss” of a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Disparticipants dissent from binary oppositions of popular/pure and reformist/radical and disidentify to promote coalition-building. Women’s March disparticipants dissed white feminist racism, cissexism, and antisemitism. Disparticipation generates discourse that can expand the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• Women’s March
• disidentification
• dissent
• digital participation

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at: the Northwest Honors Symposium, Pacific Lutheran University, November 2017; Camp Rhetoric, Pennsylvania State University, March 2019; the Alta Conference on Argumentation, Alta, UT, August 2019, and a small portion was published in its proceedings, Local Theories of Argument; the National Communication Association Conference, Baltimore, MD, November 2019; and, finally, in my dissertation Living a Participatory Life: Reformatting Rhetoric for Demanding, Digital Times, supervised by Damien S. Pfister at the University of Maryland, April 2023. I would like to thank the many people who—whether by assignment in reviewer portals or by attendance at panels and talks—have participated in the development of this article, especially the anonymous QJS reviewers and editor Stacey Sowards.

Notes

1 Jenna Wortham, “Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March Matters More Than Who Did,” New York Times, December 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/magazine/who-didnt-go-to-the-womens-march-matters-more-than-who-did.html.

2 Angela Peoples, “Don’t Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us,” New York Times, December 16, 2017, sec. Opinion, para. 2, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/black-women-leadership.html.

3 Charles Conrad, “The Transformation of the ‘Old Feminist’ Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67, no. 3 (1981): 285.

4 Barbara Ryan, “Ideological Purity and Feminism: The U.S. Women’s Movement from 1966 to 1975,” Gender and Society 3, no. 2 (1989): 239–57; Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality,” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2013): 1–24; Alyssa A. Samek, “Violence and Identity Politics: 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse and Robin Morgan’s 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference Keynote Address,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2016): 232–49.

5 Brooke A. Ackerly, “‘How Does Change Happen?’: Deliberation and Difficulty,” Hypatia 22, no. 4 (2007): 10.

6 Robert L. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 50.

7 Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” 50. In a companion essay, Kendall Phillips emphasizes this point. “But the invention that occurs within spaces of dissension seeks to disavow the available means, to disrupt the mechanisms of judgment, and to turn the common places decidedly uncommon. Thus, at the emergence point of dissent is not the forging of a new common sense but a divergence from the common and a daring step into the unconsidered and previously unspeakable.” Kendall R. Phillips, “The Event of Dissension: Reconsidering the Possibilities of Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 64.

8 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4–5.

9 Anjali Vats, “Marking Disidentification: Race, Corporeality, and Resistance in Trademark Law,” Southern Communication Journal 81, no. 4 (2016): 238.

10 Ashley P. Ferrell, “‘Righting Past Wrongs’: Rhetorical Disidentification and Historical Reference in Response to Philadelphia’s Opioid Epidemic,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 22, no. 4 (2019): 535–6.

11 Alyson Farzad-Phillips, “Huddles or Hurdles? Spatial Barriers to Collective Gathering in the Aftermath of the Women’s March,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 3 (2020): 247–70; Jessica Gantt-Shafer, Cara Wallis, and Caitlin Miles, “Intersectionality, (Dis)Unity, and Processes of Becoming at the 2017 Women’s March,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 221–40.

12 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 164.

13 Kenneth Rufo and R. Jarrod Atchison, “From Circus to Fasces: The Disciplinary Politics of Citizen and Citizenship,” Review of Communication 11, no. 3 (2011): 202.

14 As Asante clarifies, transformative inclusion means “not inviting people of color to participate in the reproduction of the same form of epistemic violence of erasure and invisibility, but an inclusion that requires a ‘delinking’ from the Western-centered lens through which rhetoric is consistently theorized, and ‘internalizing the thoughts’ of those voices that have been violently excluded.” Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 485.

15 Christopher M. Kelty, The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 15.

16 Robert S. Cathcart, “Movements: Confrontation as Rhetorical Form,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 43, no. 3 (1978): 239, 237.

17 Charles J. Stewart, “A Functional Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Movements,” Central States Speech Journal 31, no. 4 (1980): 304.

18 A. Freya Thimsen, The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 6.

19 Thimsen, The Democratic Ethos, 10.

20 Phillips, “The Event of Dissension,” 63.

21 Lisa M. Corrigan, “White ‘Honky’ Liberals, Rhetorical Disidentification, and Black Power during the Johnson Administration,” in Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric, ed. Stephen J. Heidt and Mary E. Stuckey (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 303.

22 Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 57.

23 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1995): 458.

24 Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 445.

25 Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 462; Cohen’s description aligns well with Chávez’s findings about coalitions between queer and migrant groups. Karma R. Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building,” Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011): 1–18.

26 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1.

27 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 64.

28 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 28. emphasis added.

29 Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” 51.

30 For example, Pezzulo’s study regarding National Breast Cancer Awareness Month positions a radical counterpublic (the Toxic Links Coalition) against a reformist social movement (the NBCAM). Chávez and Against Equality also describe themselves in similar terms, as a radical challenge to the reformist same-sex marriage movement. These radical groups advocate separate from the popular reformist movement. While they remix some dominant discourses (like changing the Human Rights Campaign’s = into a >) they do not advocate from within like the examples I will call disparticipation. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; Karma R. Chávez, “Against Equality: Finding the Movement in Rhetorical Criticism of Social Movements,” in What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics, ed. Christina R. Foust, Amy Pason, and Kate Zittlow Rogness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 175–97.

31 Joe Edward Hatfield, “The Queer Kairotic: Digital Transgender Suicide Memories and Ecological Rhetorical Agency,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2019): 46.

32 Erin J. Rand, “Queer Critical Rhetoric Bites Back,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 5 (2013): 536.

33 Hatfield, “The Queer Kairotic,” 46.

34 The concept and practice of disidentifying can “generate space for the exertion of productive pressures that expose the racial and temporal contingencies” of contemporary hegemonic discourses. Ferrell, “‘Righting Past Wrongs,’” 537.

35 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 23.

36 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 55–6.

37 I borrow hooks’s term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to clearly name interlocking systems of oppression enacted on disparticipants, but it is not intended as a comprehensive list. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (London: Routledge, 1984).

38 Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 462.

39 José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2006): 677.

40 Seyla Benhabib, “Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations: Dilemmas of ‘Just Membership’ and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Federalism,” European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 455.

41 Heidi M. Przybyla and Fredreka Schouten, “At 2.6 Million Strong, Women’s Marches Crush Expectations,” USA TODAY, January 21, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/21/womens-march-aims-start-movement-trump-inauguration/96864158/.

42 Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 11.

43 Cf. Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9–21.

44 Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 27.

45 Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 27.

46 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 18–19.

47 Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black Twitter,’” Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (2014): 229.

48 Geneva Smitherman, Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 26.

49 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 6.

50 José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Amolo Ochieng’ Nyongó, and Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 11.

51 I use topoi to refer to the commonsense notion that there are commonplaces for invention in a given movement’s rhetoric. Casey Boyle details how the rhetorical exercise of topoi involved students compiling notebooks of example arguments that represented a commonplace, and other rhetorical scholarship has used topoi as a tool to understand and critique movement rhetoric on digital media. Casey Andrew Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018), 128–39; Amanda M. Friz, “Technologies of the State: Transvaginal Ultrasounds and the Abortion Debate,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 21, no. 4 (2018): 639.

52 The unity principles were available on womensmarch.com as recently as June 2020, but as of May 2022, they were no longer available. The list of principles is still accessible on the website for Women’s March Global, a separate Women’s March organization formed at the same original Women’s March on Washington, but focused on supporting local chapters. “Women’s March Global | About Us,” Women’s March Global, https://womensmarchglobal.org/about/ (accessed May 9, 2022); “Mission and Principles—Women’s March 2020,” Women’s March, https://womensmarch.com/mission-and-principles (accessed June 11, 2020).

53 Dana R. Fisher, Dawn M. Dow, and Rashawn Ray, “Intersectionality Takes It to the Streets: Mobilizing across Diverse Interests for the Women’s March,” Science Advances 3, no. 9 (2017): 2.

54 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 135.

55 Carolyn R. Miller, “The Aristotelian Topos: Hunting for Novelty,” in Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 141.

56 Another way to describe the ad situ convention of disparticipation is that it surfaces a “rhetorical form” that “enable[s] the force and effects of discourse.” This is another way disparticipation functions queerly, as per Rand’s argument about rhetorical agency and queerness. Erin J. Rand, “An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 308.

57 Farah Stockman, “Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Anti-Semitism,” New York Times, December 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/womens-march-anti-semitism.html.

58 Wortham, “Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March,” para. 5.

59 Dreama G. Moon and Michelle A. Holling, “‘White Supremacy in Heels’: (White) Feminism, White Supremacy, and Discursive Violence,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 253–4.

60 Toniesha L. Taylor, “Dear Nice White Ladies: A Womanist Response to Intersectional Feminism and Sexual Violence,” Women & Language 42, no. 1 (2019): 187–8.

61 Ashley R. Hall, “Slippin’ in and out of Frame: An Afrafuturist Feminist Orientation to Black Women and American Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 342. Mack and McCann have shown that when “the now” goes unaddressed in (white) feminist praxis, the result is a project that is readily co-opted by the anti-Black carceral assemblages of the state. Ashley Noel Mack and Bryan J. McCann, “Critiquing State and Gendered Violence in the Age of #MeToo,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 329–44.

62 Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).

63 Peoples, “Don’t Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us,” para. 3.

64 In this way, her disparticipation suits what Vats called “prosopopoeic disidentification.” In prosopopoeia, an abstract thing is personified. Vats writes that “Prosopopeic disidentification offers a theoretical framework for understanding how giving face and voice within otherwise constraining contexts can serve as a means of interrupting racist stereotypes, oppressive histories, and assertions of memory and property.” Vats, “Marking Disidentification,” 242.

65 Elliot Tetreault, “‘White Women Voted for Trump’: The Women’s March on Washington and Intersectional Feminist Futures,” Computers and Composition Online, March 2019, http://cconlinejournal.org/techfem_si/01_Tetreault/, n.p.

66 Wortham, “Who Didn’t Go to the Women’s March,” para. 7.

67 Katelyn Burns, “Why I Felt Excluded, Then Welcomed, at the Women’s March,” The Establishment (blog), January 23, 2017, https://medium.com/the-establishment/how-pussy-hats-made-me-feel-excluded-and-then-welcomed-at-the-women-s-march-ef11dae19c54.

68 “‘Pussyhat’ Knitters Join Long Tradition of Crafty Activism,” BBC News, January 19, 2017, sec. US & Canada, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38666373.

69 Shannon Black, “KNIT + RESIST: Placing the Pussyhat Project in the Context of Craft Activism,” Gender, Place & Culture 24, no. 5 (2017): 696–710.

70 Burns, “Why I Felt Excluded, Then Welcomed,” para. 13.

71 Lars Stoltzfus-Brown, “Trans-Exclusionary Discourse, White Feminist Failures, and the Women’s March on Washington, D.C.,” in Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse: Advancing Conversations across Disciplines, ed. Jennifer C. Dunn and Jimmie Manning (New York: Routledge, 2018), 90.

72 Burns, “Why I Felt Excluded, Then Welcomed,” paras 22–3.

73 Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 6.

74 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 191, 193.

75 Burns, “Why I Felt Excluded, Then Welcomed,” paras 30, 37–8.

76 Stoltzfus-Brown, “Trans-Exclusionary Discourse,” 97.

77 Anna North, “The Women’s March Changed the American Left. Now Anti-Semitism Allegations Threaten the Group’s Future,” Vox, December 21, 2018, https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/12/21/18145176/feminism-womens-march-2018-2019-farrakhan-intersectionality.

78 North, “The Women’s March Changed the American Left,” para. 5.

79 One classic essay is Jenny Bourne, “Homelands of the Mind: Jewish Feminism and Identity Politics,” Race & Class 29, no. 1 (1987): 1–24.

80 Brooke Lober, “Narrow Bridges: Jewish Lesbian Feminism, Identity Politics, and the ‘Hard Ground’ of Alliance,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 23, no. 1 (2019): 83.

81 Rob Gloster, “Jewish Identity Rings out at Bay Area Women’s Marches,” Jewish News of Northern California, January 21, 2019, https://www.jweekly.com/2019/01/21/jewish-identity-rings-out-at-bay-area-womens-marches/.

82 Dan Pine, “Many Jews Ready to Hit Streets at Bay Area Women’s Marches, Despite Controversy,” J., January 16, 2019, https://www.jweekly.com/2019/01/16/many-jews-ready-to-hit-streets-at-bay-area-womens-marches-despite-controversy/, para. 23.

83 Rachel Sklar, “I’m White, Jewish and Going to the Women’s March. Here’s Why,” CNN.Com, January 19, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/19/opinions/womens-march-antisemitism-why-im-marching-sklar/index.html, para. 11.

84 North, “The Women’s March Changed the American Left,” para. 8. emphasis added.

85 Esther Wang, “The State of the Women’s March,” Jezebel, January 18, 2019, https://jezebel.com/the-state-of-the-womens-march-1831867289.

86 Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman, “The 2019 Women’s March Was Bigger than You Think,” Washington Post, February 1, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2019/02/01/the-2019-womens-march-was-bigger-than-you-think/.

87 Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 8; see Damien Smith Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), for a rhetorical treatment of similar phenomena.

88 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019); Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). This power dynamic has been explored in rhetorical studies under the rubric of technoliberalism. See Damien Smith Pfister and Misti Yang, “Five Theses on Technoliberalism and the Networked Public Sphere,” Communication and the Public 3, no. 3 (2018): 247–62; Damien Smith Pfister, “Technoliberal Rhetoric, Civic Attention, and Common Sensation in Sergey Brin’s ‘Why Google Glass?,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 2 (2019): 182–203; Chase Aunspach, “Discrete and Looking (to Profit): Homoconnectivity on Grindr,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 1 (2019): 43–57; Matthew Salzano and Misti Yang, “Going off Scripts: Emotional Labor and Technoliberal Managerialism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 39, no. 2 (2022): 78–91.

89 Boyle, Brown and Ceraso have declared that “the digital is no longer conditional on particular devices but has become a multisensory, embodied condition through which most of our basic processes operate.” Participation has been intensified by this digital regime—while the “promise of participation” was shaped around modernity and democracy, “today, the popularization of digital media reactualizes the participatory thrust of modernity across the realms of politics, art, and media, as well as beyond,” prompting some media scholars to declare we are in the age of the participatory condition. Casey Boyle, James J. Brown, and Steph Ceraso, “The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 252; Darin Barney et al., eds., The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), xxii.

90 Issie Lapowsky, “The Women’s March Defines Protest in the Facebook Age,” WIRED, January 21, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/womens-march-defines-protest-facebook-age/; Emily Stewart and Shirin Ghaffary, “It’s Not Just Your Feed. Political Content Has Taken over Instagram,” Vox, June 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/6/24/21300631/instagram-black-lives-matter-politics-blackout-tuesday; Delia Dumitrica and Hester Hockin-Boyers, “Slideshow Activism on Instagram: Constructing the Political Activist Subject,” Information, Communication & Society (2022): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155487.

91 See Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), on “data relations.”

92 Damien Smith Pfister, “Digitality, Rhetoric, and Protocological Fascism; Or, Fascist Ants & Democratic Cicadas,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 23, no. 1 (2020): 3–29.

93 Pfister, “Digitality, Rhetoric, and Protocological Fascism,” 25.