Huddles or Hurdles? Spatial Barriers to Collective Gathering in the Aftermath of the Women’s March

Abstract

This analysis attends to the Women’s March Huddles initiative, an aggregate of 5,400 events in February 2017 that aimed to harness the power of the march to build political momentum in local communities. Using digital mapping tools, this article illuminates the logics of space and place embedded in these events. Specifically, I (re)created the digital maps and map layering to illustrate how the locally based Huddles initiative perpetuated race- and class-based exclusion through spatial arguments. This case study shows that scholars not only can analyze the rhetorical messages of maps as they find them but also can create maps and engage in mapping to render previously abstract phenomena visible and analyzable. Attending to both the affordances and critiques of digital mapping as a feminist method, I ultimately argue that digital mapping offers opportunities for rhetorical inquiry.

Keywords:

• Feminism
• women’s march
• space/place
• digital humanities
• mapping

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Women’s Studies in Communication’s two anonymous reviewers and editor Claire Sisco King for their generous feedback. She also wishes to acknowledge the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative at the University of Maryland for providing necessary funding, crucial tools and critical mindsets throughout this project. This article would not be possible without the support of her colleagues Skye de Saint Felix, Misti Yang, and Matthew Salzano, and her doctoral advisor Kristy Maddux, who read, assisted with, and commented on several earlier versions of this article. Finally, she would like to especially thank Carly S. Woods, who amply supported this work from its humble beginnings as a graduate seminar paper.

Notes

1 I base my definition of space and place predominantly on the ideas of Carly Woods (2018), and she herself draws on Michel de Certeau (1984). Woods (2018) clarifies that places are related to the actual built environment that indicate a sense of practice, stability, and the “instantaneous configuration of positions” (p. 214). I build on that conceptualization of place by asserting that places are more physically rooted and recognizable. Space, on the other hand, is more abstract than place primarily in that it is more complexly rooted in the intersecting and constantly in-motion ideologies, politics, and cultures over time. However, rather than argue that “space is place as it has been constituted and shaped by practices” (p. 215), I instead argue in favor of a more agentic definition of space as it relates to space. I side with McAlister (2016) in her scholarly call to see space as more than “a static stage on which changing cultural practices take place—rather than a dynamic dimension of all communicative encounters” (p. 119).