Bystander intervention, feminist hashtag activism, and the anti-carceral politics of care

ABSTRACT

The bystander is increasingly being touted as a key agent of change for addressing racialised and gendered violence and street harassment. This essay analyses practices of bystander intervention in Black and indigenous feminist activism against racialised and gendered street harassment that are explicitly anti-carceral and transformative in their approach to achieving justice. I argue that the social media tactics of a transformative justice-informed framework on bystander intervention constitute a particular kind of networked feminist witnessing centred by the experiences of women of colour and a model of justice that challenges police violence and incarceration. Through an analysis of an assemblage of hashtags, Storified narrations of hashtag conversations about bystander intervention, and organised feminist campaigns that centre women of colour perspectives on street harassment and bystander intervention, the social media tactics analysed here model social intervention into racial and gender violence via the transformation of feeling bystanders into media witnesses to gender justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Bystander intervention
• feminism
• hashtag activism
• transformative justice
• Storify

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Lena Palacios for the conversations we have had about transformative justice and the important work she does researching and doing transformative justice activism. I thank Ayesha Vemuri for research assistance she provided, and audiences at the annual conferences of the National Women’s Studies Association in 2015 and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2016, and the Affective Encounters symposium in 2015, for their useful feedback. Thanks are also due to Marta Zarzycka and Domitilla Olivier, for their great feedback as editors of the special issue, and two anonymous reviewers for their especially constructive suggestions for improving the manuscript.

Notes

1. I use Julia Sudbury’s definition of the term women of colour as a “strategic invention” which “refers to particular projects of building political subjectivity through naming” (2005, xvii). Rather than a universal experience women of colour share, these projects “point to commonalities that might be used as a basis for shared political agendas” (xvii).

2. New York is the main chapter of Hollaback! It is also the only chapter with paid staff and which can receive donations, according to a former chapter leader (see Britni 2014).

3. Users can “aggregate and organize tweets, videos, blog posts, and other media. Storify is especially useful for compiling media on discrete discussions and preserving tweets before they become archived by Twitter” (see Holly Bik and Miriam Golstein 2013, n.p.).

4. By white feminism, I draw on Cate Young’s definition to refer to feminism that “excludes issues that affect women of colour” and “where middle class white women are the mould that others must fit. It is a method of practising feminism, not an indictment of every individual white feminist” (2014, n.p.).

5. A July 20, 2014 blog post details the writing she has done on street harassment since 2011, and chronicles the specific work she did around the hashtagged conversations that started #YouOkSis?

6. In their explanation, Hollaback! mostly provided support for their website-based activity.

7. The “I’ve Got Your Back” button was the result of collaboration between Hollaback! and the Green Dot bystander campaign out of the University of Kentucky in the US (see Carrie Rentschler 2014).

8. The local Montreal chapter of Hollaback!, for example, has held workshops on bystander intervention into street harassment and other topics. I participated in one of their workshops on bystander intervention.

9. In July 2014 I attended one of their workshops on bystander intervention held free-of-charge in a Washington, DC park.

10. In 2011, the New York chapter of Hollaback! also began work with the New York Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to create a campaign against groping on the city’s subways geared at empowering bystanders to intervene. See Paul DeBenedetto 2011.