‘I stared at him in defiance:’ Hollaback! movement and the enactment of reflexive, resilient countervisuality

ABSTRACT

Hollaback! is an international movement seeking to end street harassment. Its website invites women to share narratives of their experience of street harassment as well as photos of the men who harassed them. We treat Hollaback! as an exemplar of feminist online activism and aim to identify lessons for other feminist online activists and organizations. In particular, we argue that the site’s narrative-image posts provide a powerful means of enacting countervisuality in public spaces. After analyzing 26 narrative-image postings on the Hollaback! website, we identify three collective rhetorical effects of countervisuality: Altering the traditional dichotomy of male/observer and female/observed, enacting feminist rhetorical agency through mobility in public spaces, and generating women’s solidarity through shared experience. We then argue that Hollaback!’s strategy of countervisuality insufficiently enacted the core principles of feminist rhetorical resilience, especially the concept of mêtis. We conclude by offering recommendations for feminist online activists and scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Street harassment
• resilience
• countervisuality
• rhetorical agency
• online organizations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We will refrain from identifying the account in which this narrative-image pair was featured because the harasser could not consent to identification in this forum. We also want to underscore the difference in types of street harassment. Dan Hoyt’s crime, for example, will likely land him on a sex offender registry, which is a different type of digital tattoo – and one that is perhaps warranted in this case, although perspectives vary on the safety-privacy sides of debates about such registries.

2. See, for example: https://redreapropiaciones.tumblr.com/ (Mexico); https://www.facebook.com/AccionRespeto (Argentina); https://www.facebook.com/mihuellaazul/?fref=nf (Colombia); https://www.facebook.com/activistanepal/ (Nepal); http://awava.org.au/ (Australia); http://blog.blanknoise.org/ (India); http://chegadefiufiu.com.br/ (Brazil); https://www.facebook.com/ocacuruguay/ (Uruguay); http://www.ocacchile.org/ (Chile); http://www.whiteribbon.ca/ (Canada); and https://www.ushahidi.com/ (Egypt).