“The FEMEN body can do everything”: Generating the agentic bodies of social movement through internal and external rhetorics

ABSTRACT

Recent theorizing recognizes the body’s importance in resistant performances characterizing the streets and screens of contemporary activism. In this essay, we examine how the transnational feminist organization FEMEN constructs embodied agencies through material and mediated means. Rather than focusing only on public appearances, we draw from fieldwork with FEMEN, utilizing participatory critical rhetoric to also examine the internal rhetorics shaping protest activities. Analyzing how FEMEN’s training prepares and produces individual, collective, and entangled bodies extends the communicative study of social movements by attending to corporeal molding behind the scenes. FEMEN constructs a gestural routine that enables activists to reexperience their bodies through rhetorics of powerful vulnerability, challenging gendered discourses while increasing rhetorical agency through enacted resistance and embodied solidarities.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporeality
• body rhetorics
• social movements
• internal rhetorics
• rhetorical agency
• rhetorical fieldwork
• FEMEN

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this manuscript include a presentation from both authors at the 2015 Western States Communication Association conference, and a portion of the first author’s doctoral dissertation. This project greatly benefitted from the insights of Daniel Brouwer, Karen Leong, and Tom Nakayama, and was supported by the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, in the form of a Summer Research Grant. The authors thank Editor Tamara Afifi for her support of this manuscript and rhetorical fieldwork, and the three anonymous reviewers whose remarks have informed our arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Roberta Chevrette is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Using rhetorical and qualitative approaches, her research focuses on processes of belonging and exclusion, examining how ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and empire impact national identities, global relationships, and social movements.

Aaron Hess is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, Languages and Cultures, at the Downtown Phoenix campus at Arizona State University. Using innovative methodological intersections between textual analysis and participatory approaches, his research explores the complex ways digital technology augments rhetorical expression and reception.

Notes

1. DeLuca was not the first rhetorical critic to recognize the importance of the body in movement rhetoric; however, embodied discourses had primarily been treated as a supplement to verbal appeals rather than rhetorics in themselves. We focus our attention on DeLuca (1999a, 1999b) here because of his theorizing of the body in relation to media systems, which is relevant to our examination of FEMEN’s strategies.

2. For further discussion of FEMEN’s use of nude protest see Valente (2015) and Veneracion-Rallonza (2014).

3. FEMEN’s foregrounding of attractive white women at the center of their fight against women’s global oppression has generated critique from women of color feminists and especially Muslim women. FEMEN’s protests frequently enact a form of imperial feminism that positions white, western women as agentic subjects, while exoticizing and Othering differently positioned women (e.g., Mohanty, 1991). For further discussion of this critique of FEMEN’s action see, for example, Ivey (2015).

4. Chávez (2010) importantly theorizes “coalitional subjectivities” as they emerge within and facilitate political alliances of distinctly located queer and migrant activist groups, a process producing what she calls “differential belonging” (p. 144). We recognize that our use of coalition differs from Chávez in this manner, as we deploy an understanding of coalition not to understand the alliance between different activist groups but to unpack the performative formation of a collective body through the coalescence of individual bodies and subjectivities.

5. In fact, we were advised to be as friendly as possible in our interactions with police once out of the sight of the cameras.

6. One interesting source of disagreement came when debating the placement of one of FEMEN’s black activists in the center of the front row of the marching formation; some activists argued that it was tokenism – “it’s like saying, ‘oh look, we have a Black one,’” one woman stated. Other activists from FEMEN France argued that she should be visible for the cameras precisely because she was a French citizen who deviated from the National Front’s vision of the “ideal” citizen. These behind-the-scenes debates offer insight into the ways members plan their actions for the public screen; they also reveal dissident voices within the planning of FEMEN actions, voices that are not reflected in the captured images circulated by the press.