Femen and assemblage politics of protest in the age of social media

Transgressing norms and barriers of mundane digital spaces to seize spotlight in the name of social change is breathtaking. Such are modern-day protest groups as they utilize a special mix of skills, tactics, and resourcefulness to become forces of disruptive tensions in the spectacular seas of image-whirls, sound-waves, and incredible storyscapes in which we live. "Femen and Assemblage Politics of Protest in the Age of Social Media" examines these disruptive tensions as created by the topless female activist group Femen. Specifically, I am interested in how human and nonhuman elements in Femen activism create lasting impressions in the fleeting everyday life of the millions of internet-connected individuals around the globe. I conceptualize these processes under the name of media-activism assemblage and illustrate the work of Femen protest politics through three different case studies. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we see the dynamics of the Kiev 2012 cutting down of the crucifix by Femen,

FEMEN AND ASSEMBLAGE POLITICS OF PROTEST IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA by Mariam Betlemidze A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2016 Copyright © Mariam Betlemidze 2016 All Rights Reserved T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f U t a h G r a d u a t e S c h o o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Mariam Betlemidze has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Kevin DeLuca , Chair 05/31/2016 Date Approved Marouf Hasian , Member 05/31/2016 Date Approved Leonard Hawes , Member 05/31/2016 Date Approved Sean Lawson , Member Date Approved Lien Shen , Member 05/31/2016 Date Approved and by Kent Ono , Chair of the Department of Communication and byDavid B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Transgressing norms and barriers of mundane digital spaces to seize spotlight in the name of social change is breathtaking. Such are modern-day protest groups as they utilize a special mix of skills, tactics, and resourcefulness to become forces of disruptive tensions in the spectacular seas of image-whirls, sound-waves, and incredible storyscapes in which we live. "Femen and Assemblage Politics of Protest in the Age of Social Media" examines these disruptive tensions as created by the topless female activist group Femen. Specifically, I am interested in how human and nonhuman elements in Femen activism create lasting impressions in the fleeting everyday life of the millions of internet-connected individuals around the globe. I conceptualize these processes under the name of media-activism assemblage and illustrate the work of Femen protest politics through three different case studies. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we see the dynamics of the Kiev 2012 cutting down of the crucifix by Femen, Facebook censorship of Femen in 2013 and 2014, and the Copenhagen 2015 terrorist shooting at a free speech event featuring a Femen speaker. Because of the primarily digital nature of media-activism assemblages of Femen, I provide close-textual audio-visual analysis of multimodal artifacts such as images, videos, user comments, social media posts, and traditional media stories. I argue that processes of media-activism networks of Femen unveil emerging horizons of transformative activism that simultaneously bridge the divides and create new divisions. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………..iii Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGE POLITICS OF PROTEST…………………...… 1 Catching a Glimpse …………………………………………..……………..……….. 1 Foundational Assemblages …………………………………..……………..……….. 3 Methodology: Ways, Modes, and Styles of Seeing ………………..…….………….25 Overview of Chapters ………….…………………..……..……..………….……….28 2 SCREAMING NODES OF FEMEN: ENTANGLING IN VISUALLY AFFECTIVE MEDIA-ACTIVISM NETWORKS ASSEMBLAGES ….…………………………...…34 ANT and Multimedia Activism ……………………………………………..………37 Controversies and Networks…………………………………………………..……..42 Rupture ……………………………………….………………………………..…….45 Connection ……………………………………….……………………………..…...49 Translation/Transformation ……………………………………………………..…..53 Implications ………………………………………….…………………………..….58 3 SPECTACULAR CENSORSHIP: FLEETING TRACES AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF ABJECT, AFFECT, AND ACTIVISM ……………………………………………..61 Affect and Censorship Online …………………………………………………….....65 What Do Activists and Jeans Have in Common? ………………………………..….70 4 LAYERS OF EVENTAL ACTIVISM OF @FEMENINNA: WITNESSING, SOUNDS, TWEETS, AND SOLIDARITIES……………………….…………………..87 The Theoretical Framework of Event and Its Multiple Layers …….……………….92 Tracing Sounds and Movements ……………………………………………...…....104 Tracing Tweets, Fears, and Solidarities ………………………………………...….110 Tracking Traces of Nomadic Ripples ………………………………………..…….120 5 THE ROAD SIGN "KEEP ON GOING": DIGITAL WAYS OF PROTEST..……...125 v Fem eni zing Ne tworks ………………………………….…………………..………126 Evolving Avenues and Desired Destination……………………………….……….130 Feminine Ways of Conceptualizing a Multisensorial Future ………………..…….135 REFERENCES ………………………………………………………..…………….....141 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGE1 POLITICS OF PROTEST Catching a Glimpse "No religion!" "Naked freedom!""Topless jihad!" No matter what language you use to search "Femen" on the internet, in seconds, you will be flooded by links to images and videos depicting young, attractive female activists with similarly aggressive slogans on their bare breasts, flower-crowns on their heads, some iconic urban spaces in the background, and policemen trying to subdue them in the foreground. In their protests against "the fundamental institutes of patriarchy - dictatorship, sex-industry, and church" (Femen, n.d.), Femen activists subversively utilize their bodies, iconic urban spaces, and multimedia to create unexpected and highly affective events. A group founded by a few teenage girls from small Western Ukrainian provinces grew into a popular and controversial activist organization, and it still continues to expand from its headquarters in Paris to northern Africa, Latin America, and Canada. Over the past few years, several full-length documentary films, books, and scholarly 1Assemblage is an interconnected decentering system-which proceeds in a nonlinear fashion and "ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). This linking of mediatized assemblages to various entities does not demonstrate spontaneity as much as contingent affirmation of particular flows vis-à-vis an interrelation of times, spaces, and processes. These parts of assemblages are wholes characterized by relations of exteriority and interiority (DeLanda, 2006). Parts of the whole, unlike seamless totalities, are detachable from the assemblage and pluggable into a different assemblage (DeLanda, 2006). 2 articles have been written to explain the Femen phenomenon from cultural, moral, religious, ethical, and activist points of views, but most of them, unlike this project, end up taking for or against stances. I see Femen as a part of a larger trend of social movements around the globe, which are moving from rational, physical, prolonged, concentrated actions, toward transgressive bursts of protest made eternal through dispersed images, social media interactions, and affective drives. The goal of this dissertation is not to provide an exhaustive study of every aspect of the Femen activism and its entwinement with media, but to shed light on intricate catalytic moments that illustrate the work of images, sounds, technologies, objects, and digital crowds of activism-networks in action. Each chapter, except the concluding one, provides specific background information about Femen that supplements the particular case study at hand. The scope of this project does not tether Femen to the issues of morality, identity, and linear progress. On the contrary, the goal is to look beyond rationality and often binary-driven ideas to examine the transgressive tactics of Femen as they transform discourses pertaining to hidden, taboo topics and controversies. The discussion of Femen from this multimedia and posthuman perspective illuminates major shifts in new media and societies that become evident in such discussions. In the following sections of this chapter, I overview the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the project and then provide summaries for the remaining chapters. 3 Foundational Assemblages The entwinement of media and activism in the communication field resonates with the intersection of rhetorical and cultural studies with French poststructuralist philosophy, which share perspectives on image, affect, movement, and transformation. Before delving into the discussion of the main arena of this project-digital networks and activism--I overview the key strands in the literature on rhetoric of social protest. Since the 1950s, social movement scholarship within the field of rhetorical studies has developed in tandem with technological and cultural changes, but it still maintains some of the initial ways of thinking about protest, people, and change. For instance, Griffin (1952) saw public address at the center of the studies of the rhetoric of social movements, which, according to him, were sprawling around its orator. Per Griffin (1952), such studies should have clear temporal demarcations, and should be guided by consistency, patterns, and intervals. Such a framework, quite logical for the time when it was published, addressed the rhythm of 50s society, which was punctuated by sharply delineated spaces and times of media broadcasting, newspaper publishing, and the nuclear family. Later, as the protests rose in the U.S. and acquired radical character, scholars (Haiman, 1967; Scott & Smith (1969) of social movements started examining nonrational tactics of activism. While doing so, they acknowledged disruptive potentials of radical protest, but maintained their strong beliefs in the power of rational dialogue and communication. Haiman (1967) wrote about "uncivil disobedience" of street protests of Vietnam War and students in the U.S., but when discussing those forms of protests, he used the word "rhetoric" in quotation marks explaining that what those radical protests do 4 is well beyond traditional, civil, and rational rhetoric. As a solution for de-escalating such protests, Haiman (1967) suggested that society should help create conditions for everyone to participate in the deliberative process, and that "we will not attain those conditions by closing our eyes to the realities of the world about us and condemning out of hand the contemporary rhetoric of the streets" (p. 114). Scott and Smith (1969) extended the idea of radical protest further by elaborating on the "use of confrontation as a tactic for achieving attention and an importance not readily attainable through decorum" (p. 7). Simons (1970), who later became one of the largest markers of the functional approach to the study of social movements, also acknowledged radical militant protest tactics. Similar to other scholars of his time, Simons (1970) does not take into consideration the nonhuman aspects that bring radical activism into action. Simons (1970) classified a social movement similarly to a corporation, or a government agency, with the only substantial difference being its "uninstitutionalized" nature (p. 3). For Simons (1970), a social movement is an "uninstitutionalized collectivity that mobilizes for action to implement a program for their constitution of social norms or values" (p. 3). The primary driving force of such a collectivity, according to Simons (1970), is its leader who is being tested on his "capacity to fulfill the requirements of his movement by resolving or reducing rhetorical problems" (p. 2). The use of the male and singular form in regards to the leader is too remarkable to skip over. Such language denotes that at the time of Simon's writing, a radical protest group with multiple and primarily female leaders was hard to imagine. More importantly, Simons' functional approach to social movements is based on "generalizations" about the movement's rhetoric (Stewart, 1980, 5 p. 298), which conveniently reduces incongruous strands of activism under specific strategies, questions, and tactics. Critical change in regards to social movement conceptualizations came with McGee (1980, 1990), who confronted previous theorizations with several piercing points. McGee (1980) acknowledged a social movement as sets of meanings rather than a phenomenon, which is not a pure, clear-cut entity moving on a linear progressivist terrain. According to McGee (1980), "there is a ‘swim of things' which catches each of us in the impulse to demonstrate how secure we can be in the comfortable confines of collectivity" (p. 241). In order to escape confines of reductive views on social movements, McGee proposed the concept of the ideograph, which is an everyday word in political discourse, laden with "high-order abstraction," power, and belief (1980a, p. 15) without a trace of public scrutiny. This tool can be used to study sets of meanings a social movement generates, modifies, or weakens by doing its analysis synchronically and diachronically. Such a shift in the rhetoric of social movements did not yet directly advocate for the inclusion of more than human elements in rhetoric, but strongly hinted at those and opened up new spaces for the later scholars to track and develop further. This shift from the rational and functional, to the irrational and "uncivil" behavior of social movements branched out into explorations of the force of violence (Browne, 1996), images (DeLuca, 1999; Hariman & Lucaites, 2003; Hasian, 2012; Hill & Helmers, 2004; Mirzoeff, 2012), and affect (Abel, 2007; DeChaine, 2002; Massumi, 1995; Ott, 2010). These openings significantly impacted the direction of later social movement studies (Bruce, 2015; DeLuca, Lawson, & Sun, 2012; Ganesh & Stohl, 2013; Goodwin & Jasper, 2004) including this dissertation, which is tuned to the ideas and modes of 6 images, affects, and networks. Before going into the discussion of media studies, it is important to explain my choice of theorists and how that differentiates this project from common approaches in cultural studies and rhetoric. In particular, a consideration of Marxist and humanist influences in cultural studies and rhetoric will highlight this project's emphasis on posthumanism, assemblages, and networks. In this respect, I am moving from Marx and cultural studies to Deleuze and Latour. In making this shift, I am not suggesting that dominant cultural approaches are illegitimate. Instead, I think that while cultural studies approaches influenced by Marx offer certain types of analysis, posthumanist scholarly approaches influenced by the thinking of Deluze and Latour offer new possibilities for making sense of activism and social media. Overall, analysis of activism and social change often drives research through Critical Theory, British Cultural Studies, and Critical Cultural Studies, which share concepts derived from Marxism. These concepts of class, hegemony, ideology, and power are fitted exclusively to the modern human subject and culminate in the identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Marx's explanation of hegemony of the ruling class structures much of Critical Cultural Studies, material rhetoric, and even Media Studies: "The misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands" (Marx, 1844, p. 322). So, according to Marx, people submit themselves to the few empowered individuals, or, in other words the ruling class, who utilize labor in a way that alienates people from the product/s of their labor, the feeling of fulfillment that comes from labor, their own self, spirit, nature, other people, the process of labor, and their own bodies and 7 senses. In Marxist thought, economic determinism appears as the major motivational force for the ruling class to create a disempowered working class. In the Critical Theory of Hokheimer, Adorno, and others, the focus shifts from economic determinism to the dominant ideology, produced and perpetuated by the culture industry, which whips masses into docile consumers of capitalism. With the inception of British Cultural Studies and specifically the Birmingham School of thought of Stuart Hall, the idea of docile consumers evolved into audiences capable of decoding media messages. Hall's seminal theorizations of encoding/decoding, signification, representation, and ideology provided new avenues for developing cultural studies centered on human communication through language and text. Such a perspective divided the study of media according to a production-texts-audiences triangle, grounded in humanistic and moral determinism critiquing the hegemony of dominant code of communication. In rhetoric, too, humanism has long been a canon of scholarly discussion in regards to social change, with charismatic rhetors leading social movements. More recent rhetorical scholarly analyses of social movements are predominantly enmeshed in ideological frameworks and power structures stemming from Marxist moralist critiques (Could, 1994; McKerrow, 1989, 1991; Wander, 1983, 1984). From the linguistic poststructural perspective, Philip Wander and Raymie McKerrow argue that hegemonic ideologies can be demystified via analyses of contemporary language use (McKerrow, 1989; 1991; Wander, 1983, 1984). Cloud (1994) complements this vein by strongly retaining a Marxist influence: …an emphasis on the individual human agent should not obscure the ideological power of dominant economic and political interests in structuring, framing, and 8 setting the limits for rhetorical action. One way for the materialist to acknowledge human action is to conceive of rhetorical acts as strategic deployments of symbolic resources within an ideological frame. (p. 158) This excerpt clarifies the boundaries of a rhetorical subject only as centered on humans, moving along the grid of morals and ideologies pertaining to humans. This boundary is crucial for this dissertation as it intends to challenge humanistic and moralistic ways of thinking by bringing into focus nonhuman elements that destabilize human subjects. in this effort, the work of rhetorical scholar Barbara Biesecker is helpful. Biesecker (1989) utilizes Jacques Derrida's concept of différance and offers to see that the rhetorical subject is "always differing from it-self, is forever in process, indefinite, controvertible… [and] continuously open for change" (p. 125). This unstable nature of the rhetorical subject does not depoliticize it, but on the contrary, entangles the nimble traces of change that are not limited to human actors, but expanded to posthuman assemblages. In other words, the subject is always political and the role of critical scholar is not to unveil and confront hegemonic power structures, as McKerrow (1989) suggests, but to trace the contingent contours, junctures, and knots of political intensities as they are in flux. As mentioned, I do not want to dismiss the dominant cultural studies approach to studying social movements. Such an approach, although not the method of this project, offers useful insights. For example, a dominant cultural studies approach to studying FEMEN might focus on the dominant centers of power that reproduce the patriarchal oppression of women. This orientation would lead the critic to study the political economy of media that reproduces subjugated and objectified images of women as well as the economic structures of Western industrial cultures that overwhelmingly limit women to the private sphere and the lower axons of the public sphere. Another important 9 center of power would be dominant religions, so a Marxist inspired cultural studies critic would pay special attention to how women are conceived and represented in Catholicism and other dominant forms of Christianity as well as Islam. This study will not perform such a critique, but will instead unfold the possibilities inspired by Deleuze, Latour, and echelons of posthumanistic networked understandings of the world. Media Studies, wherein the medium is analyzed at least as seriously as content, is important within communication as well as in other disciplines. Emerging from the unlikely trinity of economist Harold Innis (1950/1972; 1951/1964), Joyce scholar Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964), and Jesuit priest Walter Ong (1982), media studies exploded in concert with the transformational impact of the television in the 1960s. Gripped by the question of stability, Innis argued that new media creates new forms of knowledge and therefore new forms of social hierarchy. For him, communication can be biased in terms of control over space or time. For instance, space-binding mediums promote dissemination of stories and messages over vast distances with great accuracy, but they also suppress time-binding media (orality). Since time and space are in a relationship, which allows only one of them to be progressively present at a time, they produce instability in society. If simultaneous preservation of temporal and spatial orientations of societies is impossible, as Innis assumes, then this now-here-and-everywhere presupposition of societies drives them to the "brink of nihilism" (Carey, 1967, p. 14). Salvation is instant if we embrace our technological extensions, suggests Innis' successor McLuhan. Often called a prophet, a poet, and a mythologist of technology, McLuhan (1964) argues that media serve as extensions of humans and that media 10 technologies are complicated vehicles for structuring the way we understand the world. He believed in the biological interdependence of human senses and adds that media functions as the sixth sense. Considering media as extensions of humans, McLuhan compares it to senses such as vision, the loss of which sharpens the senses of hearing and touch. Thus, he argues, media blunts other human senses and makes people overly ineffective without their sixth sense-media. For both McLuhan and Innis, a world of oral tradition, where communication is easily controlled by people, is romantic, and as impossible as the Garden of Eden. McLuhan, like Marx, argues that currently, people are alienated from self, others, and nature. However, for McLuhan, the alienating force is not labor, but the inappropriate use of media technologies. The only way to become the "whole man" is to detach totally from traditions that require submission to automatism, the complete dependence on media technologies. A student of McLuhan, Ong studied how transitioning from orality to literacy transformed cultures and education. According to him, in oral cultures "spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person… at a specific time in a real setting which always includes much more than mere words" (Ong, 1982, p. 101). Such utterances are bound by particularity of time and place of events that cannot be reenacted. The written word, on the contrary, disembodies the speaker and unhinges the text from its spatial and temporal situation. According to Ong (1982), media technologies implicitly structure patterns of human perception and ways of life. Scholars such as Neil Postman (1985), Ian Angus (1984), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1990), and Frederick Kittler (1986), among others, elaborate on ways in which media- 11 specific patterns of perception destabilize beliefs in linear, rational, and progressivist human-centered communication. The concept of human-machine assemblages- cyborgs-by Donna Haraway (1991) opened up new provocative ways of thinking and writing about human subjectivity and communication in the electronic age. The posthuman argument by Kathryn Hayles (1999) demonstrated that "the emphasis now is on the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather than on message, signal, or information" (p. 11). As John Peters (1999) suggests, "meaning is an incomplete project, open-ended and subject to radical revision by later events" (p. 267). Such an open-ended view provides spaces for the closer consideration of more than human elements and their roles in harnessing rhetorical forces of digital communication and social change. The Internet has become the central structuring element (enabler/ disabler /enhancer / mediator) of everyday communication. The advent of the computer and the Internet destabilized the human subject and its relation to texts, contexts, times, places, and intensified media studies. Everyday communication moved to the realms of posthuman networks and their powerful and unpredictable forces of association (Benkler, 2006; Castells, 2013, 1996; Kadushin, 2012; Latour, 1993, 2005). Yochai Benkler (2006) in his book on The Wealth of Networks demonstrates three main types of changes the "Internet Revolution" (p. 1) established. Those changes are noticeable in amplified power of individuals, peer to peer sharing platforms, and the emergence of nonproprietary modes of communication online. Open and free platforms not only enable individuals to speak up/act up, but also to share their thoughts and feelings with others, engage them in decentralized digital interactions, and create nonproprietary content that before the advent 12 of online media was only possible in the much more rehearsed, reductive, and refined way of traditional, centralized media organizations. Such radical decentralization and democratization of media is reflected in Benkler's words that "we are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society" (2006, p. 27). To many, in such a decentralized, fragmented, and prone-to-constant-interruption information society, social media and blogging deserve analysis, as "bloggers have demonstrated themselves as technoactivists favoring not only democratic self-expression and networking, but also global media critique and journalistic sociopolitical intervention" (Kahn & Kellner, 2004). Bloggers and activists are only able to do such sociopolitical interventions through their technological extensions, as McLuhan argued when referring to media amplifying and amputating forces. For O'Reilly (2005), digital media is "a kind of global brain," with the equivalent of "constant mental chatter in the forebrain" (para. 11). Due to "spreadability" (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013) of media, those chatters acquire agendas and agencies of their own and prove in action the fragmentation McGee (1990) was writing about before the "Internet Revolution." There are two main views on new media technologies: optimist - the utopian / technophilic; and pessimist-the dystopian/technophobic. Optimists believe in the power of direct and decentralized communication, where participation and maximum information flow constitute the main components of a more democratic society (Mehra, Merkel, & Bishop, 2004; Rheingold, 1993, 2002). With regard to digital media's probability of reviving direct democracy, what Habermas calls "extension of fundamental rights in the social welfare state" (as cited in Durham & Kellner, 1989, p. 107) remains 13 relevant for some scholars. The pessimistic perspective focuses on how the "public sphere" could not be realized, because of voracious interests of capitalist domination (Brown, 1997; McChesney, 2002; Wilhelm, 2000). Under this analysis, it is hegemony and not democracy that dominates the Internet, which is increasingly fortified by multinational corporations and nation-state actors (Hindman, 2008; Morozov, 2011). Deibert et al. (2010) are concerned about peoples' "implicit (and perhaps unwitting) consent to the greatest invasion of personal privacy in history," which is taking place even in democratic countries where "surveillance systems penetrate every aspect of life" (p. 44). Thus, the dystopian view urges that new media platforms cannot fully promote individuals' autonomous participation in development of civil society, but rather merely uphold commodification, commercialization, censorship, and state ideology. Yet as Benkler (2011), Castells (2013), and others suggest, the decentralizing technologies of the Internet create opportunities for individuals and activist groups to undermine centralized governments' and multinational corporations' power grips: Ubiquitous low-cost processors, storage media, and networked conductivity have made it practically feasible for individuals, alone and in cooperation with others, to create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture in patterns of social reciprocity, redistribution, and sharing, rather than proprietary, market-based production. (Benkler, 2011, p. 462) Cyberspace becomes a place where humans merge with technology to gain abilities for conducting multidimensional transactions in cultural, economic, and social aspects of life. The realm of the Internet becomes a posthuman space of transformation with "no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and 14 human goals" (Hayles, 1999, p. 3). As Jean Badrillard (1983) was urging all along, "whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum," which is based on uninterrupted circuit of interactions through the mediums that favor visibility, spreadability, and hyperreality (Baudrillard, 2001/1983, p. 173). This is the system where "nothing is inert, nothing is disconnected, uncorrelated, or aleatory. Everything, on the contrary, is fatally, admirably connected" (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 185). Poststructuralist thought advanced by Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze served as a precursor to the new media frenzy we live in nowadays. In this interconnected fluid media landscape, a completely new reality is lurking and inviting us to question, act, and invent. Responding to this invitation, I will elaborate on the concept of media-activism assemblages and then turn to specific strands of scholarship that run through the entire project, often in implicit ways. Media-Activism Assemblage As a nonsystemic effort to accommodate the dynamics of interactions between protest groups and media, I trace this constellation of concepts and ideas. This media-activism- assemblage helps understand the processes that images, texts, and events undergo as they travel through the networks of public screens. This theoretical assemblage does not predict movements of activism groups, but helps study their dynamics. The idea of media-activism assemblages that I utilize comes from Bruno Latour's (1993, 2005) Actor-Network Theory, which highlights how human elements are often entangled in networks with nonhuman elements that they cannot control completely. A 15 good example of such entanglement is a human body, which consists of billions of microbes carrying out their day-to-day activities without our knowing and instructions. Similarly, human immersion in digital communication technologies structures our lives in often implicit, but powerful, ways. The word network in this theory is also illustrated by Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) conceptualization of rhizome and assemblage. Therefore, I will use assemblages and networks interchangeably throughout the rest of the manuscript to underline their slippery distinction. One of the main ideas of Actor-Network theory is expressed by the hyphenation between the two elements in its name, which renders them fully interchangeable. An actor may well be a network, and vice versa. New media and its entwinement with activism is one of the good examples of Actor-Network theory in action. This theory bears notable traces of the concept of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which runs on ideas other scholars have elaborated on. These ideas of unpredictabiliy, decentralization, multiplicity, and dissemination (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002; Derrida, 1987; Peters, 1999;) are well represented in new media technologies as they continue to shift the human subject, the so called rhetor/orator, from the center of social movements' mise en scène, as the digital does not have a center. The characterization of interactions on the web as "endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges" (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, pp. 130-131) supplements the conceptualization of assemblage politics of protest via media. In the interconnected digital environment, framing is an emergent and multicontext process favoring multiplicity-enriched, dynamic ambiguities rather than rigid storylines. A frame represents "the mutable and fuzzy boundaries, within which for 16 a cycle of protest the interplay and interlocking of various repertoires can occur" (Steinberg, 1998, p. 860). Nowadays, the interplay occurs from multiple decentered knots to the peripheries sending "nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization" that then go from new peripheries to new centers and knots "falling back to the old center[s] and launching forth to the new [ones]" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 44). Such movement illustrates the operation of the Femen-network well, which often starts on the margins and then permeates into centers of political discussions, warping speeds, contexts, times, and spaces. Daily interactions of media activism involve moments of convergence, where old and new media collide and "the power of [the] media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways" (Jenkins, 2006, p. 2). The unpredictable nature of these interactions increases even more in the age of "presencing," where "keeping in touch" or just "hanging out" in a digital sphere "becomes a necessity, not a choice" (Couldry, 2012, p. 51). This idea of presencing is in line with rhizomatic principles of connection and heterogeneity: "any point of a rhizome [digital network] can be connected to anything other, and must be" (p. 7). In this rhizomatic web, interactions are "overflowing in all directions" defying any hidden, structural force of a central, presupposed context (Latour, 2005, p. 202). These interactions form traces of Nietzsche's "joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, …without origin which is offered to an active interpretation" (Derrida, 1978, p. 368). It is this adventurous trace of interactivity, interpretation, and transformation that puts media activism inmotion. From this perspective, rather than the direction of this motion, media activism is 17 concerned with the speed, intensity, medium-specific features, affects, and effects of the actors they carry along. Looking at the multitude of digital threads, likes, shares, tweets, posts, and comments aggregated by smart algorithms, Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) proposition about the speed of this intensity becomes clearer: …it is in the middle where things pick up speed. [The space] between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (p. 25) A recent framing study of Facebook comments shaping social protest mobilization in Guatemala illustrates how media activism picked up speed on various pages, how "quickly [the group] gained momentum, prompting more than 50,000 people to protest," and how it initiated offline protest that then "took to the streets" (Harlow, 2012, p. 227). Within the interconnected circles of stories, the movement and speed becomes only a matter of the adventurousness of a trace of affect, translation, transformation, rupture, and connection. Another study of a student movement in Italy further demonstrates the diffusion and velocity of media activism as its actors "travel quickly from one circle of friends to another thus, also reaching individuals who were not originally involved in the student mobilization," thereby utilizing social media platforms as "brokers in the diffusion of ideas … having the potential to increase the participation rate in the mobilization" (Mattoni, & Treré, 2014, p. 263). An example of the media-activism assemblage is found in how mediations of Femen image events swirl around the globe via various platforms. The media-activism assemblage enacts new possibilities that hinge on their posthuman, contingent, and 18 decentralized nature. Such conceptualization of entwinement between social movement and media challenges the preconceived notions of morals, ethics, values, identities, pragmatics, and ideas about progress. Thinking in terms of media-activism assemblages trouble reductionist approaches as it unveil the incredibly dynamic and contingent nature of posthuman transformations. Even though I propose that media-activism assemblages trouble preconceived morals and ideologies, they should not be considered as depoliticized, since nothing can exist outside of discourses, which always already bears traces of various politics. I believe that one should study assemblage politics rather than identity politics but with due respect to existing scholarly conversations in this regard. Visuality Posthuman assemblages and networks are produced through heterogeneous alliances between activist bodies, images, online discussion threads, journalists, and so on. Images frequently act as those "unexpected things," which accomplish their goals of media dissemination through ruptures, connections, and translations. It is not possible to spend a day or even an hour without a certain extent of visual mediation, where images cause sensations and act as prompts and references to various events or trends. DeLuca (1999) coins the term "image event" to describe a tactic of oppositional movements as they use visual rhetoric in advancement of their political goals. However, it is not particularly the power of images that causes social change, but their processes, affects, and desires through which images acquire the agency of a "living being" (Mitchell, 2005). Such an approach to images can be explained by media effects, which as Marshall 19 McLuhan (1964) says, "alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance" (p. 31). In the current environment of new media, patterns of perception become highly fragmented, distracted, and decentered. In such a disposition of senses towards mediatized daily life, thought becomes even more dependent upon the contingency of an encounter (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139). Those encounters could be of anyone viewing a picture of a Femen protest online, with its various human and non-human elements such as painted slogans, nipples, fishnet tights, cameras, digital screens, and urban landmarks encountering not only viewers but also each other. These encounters are responding to each other without signifying anything, but producing certain affective forces (Abel, 2008; Massumi, 1995, 2009). These affective forces give rise to presubjective curiosity, confusion, and abjection in their viewers. Affective Turn Gregg and Seigworth (2010) define affect as "the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities" as they pass through human, nonhuman, and otherwise bodies (p. 1). It is beyond emotion, as it is presubjective, but it moves, suspends bodies "across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world's apparent intractability" (p. 1). The usefulness of these concepts for my project is distinctly effective in two main ways. First, affect renders human bodies on the same terrain as their technological extensions and counterparts. Second, it allows studying the work of social movements through intensities that are beyond good and evil. Comments on Femen pictures and videos across the web are marked by affect and 20 resentment by the spectators. Those comments are trying to persuade viewers that the actions of Femen are offensive and vulgar. According to W. J. T Mitchell (2005), such comments provide eloquent testimony about the life of images (p. 93). Ron Burnett (2004) also grants images with agency: "it is not so much the case that images per se are thinking as it is the case that intelligence is no longer solely the domain of sentient beings" (p. 221). Latour would agree with Mitchell and Burnett, as he considers images to be actants that possess forces of contingent linking within vast networks. Various nodes of shock values and dissonances create "lines of force" (Latour, 1993a, p. 172) that subvert an ordinary image into an affective one. "Sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story" (Deleuze, 2003, p. 36). Causality and linearity is irrelevant to the value of sensation as it is not fixed to any particular sedentary meaning. The relevance of the sensation and affect correlates with the intensities, speeds, and connections that it generates. Controversies The immanent processes of mediation and translation mark trials of strength. Staying in the media spotlight is one of the major trials of strength for contemporary activists. As "screens become new ways of seeing and understanding" (Burnett, 2004, p. 44), affective imagery along with the articulate texts of activists help them maintain media prominence. The greater the number of the network actors that reacts to it, the more real the node is. Latour (1993a) saw this web of power coming before the appearance of the first social networking sites: "Discourses and associations are not equivalent, because allies and arguments are enlisted precisely so that one association 21 will be stronger than another" (pp. 168-169). But what does such underlining of the real alliances give us today in terms of activism? Calculating connections does not guarantee predictability of a course of action. Moreover, sudden controversies enable not the predictability, but the tracing of networks. Thus, in the case of Femen, it is not common sense that creates multiple connections, but decentering controversies. The swarming of multiple controversial accounts and opinions around Femen's events provides another connection to Latourian networks. In Latour's (2005) conceptualization, "an ‘actor' in the hyphenated expression actor-network is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it," (p. 46). Controversies make possible translation and transformation of fixed statuses. Controversies occur at the point of relation between a social movement and the surrounding world and show the irreducibility of networks. In the example of Femen, webs of controversies hinge on visual and affective perceptions of female sexualities. Sexualities Femen effectively utilizes its conventionally feminine bodies as mediums to affectively disrupt and move their audiences as they draw their audiences' attention to the activist messages painted across their naked bodies. According to John Berger (1977), "nakedness has a positive visual value in its own right: we want to see the other naked: the other delivers to us the sight of themselves and we seize upon it…" (p. 58). One of the most evident visual dissonances or ruptures that Femen causes is contradiction with the forms of female depictions in mass media and advertising. These are the norms of specific female appearance and performance researched by Erving Goffman (1979) and 22 elaborated since then by other scholars. Susan Bordo (1997) for instance builds off of Goffman's work and claims that in the contemporary visualized and mediatized environment, "the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images" (p. 94). Femen does comply with the norms of depicting "slimmer, younger, taller, blonder, and ‘better' looking" women (Goffman, 1979, p. 21), but breaks away from the performative part of those norms. If female sexuality in mainstream media and advertising is portrayed as passive, submissive, happy, and servile, Femen re-essentializes it into "sextremism" (Femen, n.d.; Larsson, 2013) with the purpose to show that the Female body is not an object for patriarchal order, but a tool of nomadic, unpredictable social change. Urbanity The theme of sexualities in cities recurs in various disciplines (Brown 2008; Hubbard, 2013) and contributes to the analysis of radical protest groups such as Femen. Hubbard (2013) talks about how city lightings and advertising screens create the expectation of sexuality and "effectively remind viewers that the city is a sexual marketplace" (p. 10). Screens of this sexual marketplace are dominated by bodies similar to those of the Femen members that are young, mostly White, and slim women (Fouts & Burggraf, 2000; Glascock, 2001; Signorielli & Bacue, 1999). The relation of a public place with Femen activists creates a gendered dissonance. Historically, public space has been a domain for masculine actions, while feminine actions were mainly restricted to domesticity (Lefebvre, 1991; Sennett, 1994; Wigley, 1992). Sennett (1994) traces the histories of human bodies in relation to cities from 23 ancient Greece to Medieval Europe. He explains the "naked body" as the "naked voice" that becomes a "force of disunity in urban space" (p. 66). The high number of pre-dominantly male police workers trying to control many of Femen's protests still manifests this principle of masculine dominance over public spaces. By attacking the public space of European cities landmarked by iconic symbols, Femen is "subverting uses of urban space" (Sennet, 1994, p. 24) and becoming a "force of disunity in the urban space" (p. 66). In short, Femen is trying to bring dissonance and disruption to the norms of visual perception regarding urbanity, femininity, sexuality, politics, and religion. Subversion/Transgression Subversive use of sexuality by the Femen activists augments sensual dissonance and engenders affect. In contemporary settings, submissive female sexuality saturates many urban scenes and screens (Brown 2008; Hubbard, 2013). "Through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality," Femen protestors via conventionally attractive appearances and scandalous actions are trying "to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance" (Foucault, 1978, p. 157). By writing slogans on their topless torsos, Femen activists create image events (DeLuca, 1999), which not only attract mediated attention, but also force spectators to read Femen's slogans and interrupt the world as it is, thus potentially opening spaces for alternative worlds. Comments on the videos of Femen activism reference the subversive and affective use of imagery in Femen protest.Various nodes of shock-values and dissonances entangling visuals of Femen create "lines of force" (Latour, 1993a, p. 172) that subvert 24 an ordinary image into a transgressive one. The subversive/transgressive forces of Femen mostly hinge on the interplay and rupture between factors such as sexuality, urbanity, conventional expectations for half-naked female bodies on public screens, and Femen member's radical violation of those expectations. The subversive nature of activism posits its tactical arch around the principles of provocation, disruption, connection, rupture, and transformation. Event When it comes to thinking disruption and transformation in the contexts of social movements, Badiou's theorization of event is provocative. Badiou (2001, 2006) develops a theory of the event, which is an effective tool for theorizing the catalytic moments that induce completely new ways of thinking and being in the world. For him, an event can happen in the areas of love, politics, art, and science. This project looks at events in the realm of politics, which is one of the key elements for understanding activism. First of all, the event, according to Badiou, is not a one-time occurrence that is pinned to a specific time and place, but comes together as a culmination of various aspects, developments, and ideas brewing together. Second, the event creates changes in terms of new possibilities and subjects, which attain their subjectness by being faithful to the immanent affirmative truths of the event: ‘‘when we experience the process of fidelity to an event we have the progressive construction of something which is the truth of the situation because it is in its ontological truth the void of the situation'' (Badiou, 2006). Badiou (2006) brings up the example of May 1968 in France, which was the event in his and many of his compatriots lives, by which they were 25 transformed into the new subjects of fidelity and truth to the event of May 68'. DeLuca (2010) in his article "The Performance Space Playing in the Mud" wrote "in the moment of encounter with the political/art event, in inhabiting the paradoxes, in loving the tree, we risk being transformed and living new subjectivities in fidelity to the event, thus creating new truths that transform the world" (pp. 225-226). He then goes on to quote Badiou's call for action: "When we feel that a truth-event interrupts the continuity of ordinary life, we have to say to others: ‘Wake up! The time of new thinking and acting is here!''' (Badiou, as cited in DeLuca, 2010, pp. 225-226).Wake-up calls are often delivered in provocative ways by the topless activists of Femen, who interrupt ordinary life and force us to think and act in new ways. 􀀃􀌀􀀃􀌀􀀃􀌀􀀃􀌀􀀃􀍍Methodology: Ways, Modes, and Styles of Seeing Critical poststructural theory serves as a multifaceted and messy, yet immanently organized, array of techniques that guides my multimedia approach. I will sift through the abundances of digital nodes and traces in a nonlinear way that is full of detours, deferrals, falls, jumps, and flights through and with the theories I love. With Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblages, Bruno Latour's Actor-Network theory, and Jacques Derrida's2 poststructuralist lenses as an overarching methodology, I accept that the lines between human and technological, virtual and actual, present and absent, as well as visual and nonvisual, are dissolving. What is at stake is the constant process of technologically mediated transformations through connection and rupture. This heterogeneous mediatized 2 Application of Jacques Derrida's ponderings on media and communication, mainly knotted around such ideas as differance, trace, dissemination, and pharmakon, among others, serve as lenses for exploring how new media are differing and deferring, disseminating and connecting, tracing and reversing elements of mediatized assemblages. 26 process deterritorializes connections between human and nonhuman entities, making non-mediatized modes of connection the exception. Femen's work as a case study is especially well-suited for the framework of mediatized assemblages, because their image events (DeLuca, 1999) connect "mediatization" as a concept to the production of desire to interact, connect, rupture, and (re)connect. The selection of artifacts for this project was motivated by the goal to include nonhuman elements of activism and communication into the discussion of social change. Such nonhuman elements are digital images, comments, texts, and networks, which are inextricably tied to human actions. These nonhuman elements end up acquiring agencies and agendas of their own. Such autonomy of nonhuman digital elements is often manifested by their deviation from human purposes, meanings, and contexts. The texts this dissertation studies are of the digital, networked nature, a significant portion of which are media interactions of and pertaining to Femen on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On those social media platforms, my attention is directed toward the accounts that gather significant intensities in terms of the responses of and to the Femen media assemblage. I study those responses in forms of comments, shares, tweets, re-tweets, likes, flags, and deletions. The tracing process of such texts is one of the most important aspects. The intensity of a text is what drives my scholarly attention. I trace this intensity through its prior iterations, subsequent re-iterations, and remediations, as far as digital methods allow. In particular, I utilize advanced search options of search and reverse search engines, Google Trends and Analytics, and media-specific platforms, such as Advanced Twitter Search. Often, texts on social media platforms are tied to or lead to traditional media outlets. 27 To trace the correlation between mainstream media and social network discourses, I study digital sites of major news media platforms in English, Russian, and French. Those sites include English and Russian services of Radio Free Europe/Radio, Govort Ukraina[Ukraine Talks]Ukrainian TV talk show, BBC English service, online platforms of mainstream British print media The Guardian, The Daily Post, and Daily Mail, Russian News Agency Itar-Tass, the TV channel Russia Today, online news sites for remote places such as Sevastpol.su-ForPost, the Russian language news portal, online versions of French Le Monde, Figaro, and Elle, as well as Washington Post, NBC News, CCTV, and Rubin Report of the Ora TV in the U.S. The texts I study on those sites include news stories, viewers' comments, and social media links to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. When conducting close-textual, audio-visual analysis of a text, I go through it frame by frame, reviewing interactions and the webs of human and nonhuman elements in those. I pay particular attention to the modes of (re)mediation in regards to the topless female body, its visuality, interactions with other elements in the frame, and users' responses to the dynamics of photo/video frames. Similar to visuals, I study sound in a video or an audio clip closely and then trace its connections to other media outlets and social media discussions. The emphasis on the digital in this project excludes direct interviews with the leaders of the Femen activism. Such is the decision not to tilt the frame of this research as it aimed to bypass human, moral, and ethical arbitrariness. A shift from an anthropocentric perspective to the digital one in this dissertation allows tracing of the politics of the Femen activism without reducing it to specific times, places, and humans, 28 but exploring them within the assemblages that open up new spaces for activist movements. The openness of a communication assemblage to the possibilities of rupture, interruption, displacement, and modification also undermines hierarchical binary ways of thinking about media, technology, and humans. Every mediatized assemblage contains multiple links that function as traces that constantly weave and unravel various mediated entities. Each chapter in a way illustrates this process of weaving and unraveling through rupture, connection, and transformation. Overview of Chapters In the following section, I provide an overview of the following chapters by discussing their major ideas, themes, artifacts, and research questions. In the descriptions of the case studies, I also discuss the particular frameworks, and methodological choices I have made in order to best approach the research questions and artifacts under analysis. This project utilizes three case studies to explore the rhetorical force of the media-activism assemblages of Femen protest. The first case study, presented in Chapter 2, studies the 2012 Femen cross-sawing event in Kiev to answer the following research questions:  How does FEMEN utilize visual rhetoric of their bodies to create mediated ruptures and connections of networks?  What is the role of affect in the translations that FEMEN enacts?  How do those translations relate to transformations? The purpose of this case study is to examine the intersections between images, the 29 use of the body, sexuality, and urbanity in protest, as well as postmodern modes of resistance and transgression. With the subversive use of their partial nakedness, sexuality, colorfulness, and multiple remediations, this Femen case study provides ample material to elaborate on the rhetorical force of activist images and their impact on the processes of media-activism assemblage/network development. This event fits well as a first case study chapter in this project, because it does not mark the beginning, which was in 2008 and in a much less radical form. The event marks a place close to the middle (not in a temporal sense though), where "things pick up speed" (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 25). As Latour (1993a, 1996, and 2005) suggests, we should always begin in the middle and trace the imperceptible web of connections and ruptures from there. This case study illustrates the concept of media-activist assemblage well, because such assemblages/networks are not concerned with origins or finalities of social movements, but the intensities that mark their middles. This case study explores the use of the transgressive bodily and virtual aspects that challenge depictions of female activists on public screens (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002) and with the threads of digital interactions sprouting from them. The chapter analyzes their mediation of the cross-sawing event in the Ukraine, Russia, France, the UK, and the Netherlands. The analysis of the crucifix-chopping event in Kiev on August 17, 2012 aims to demonstrate that the network of activism is not a pure, transparent process, but is a movement that relies on ruptures, connections, and translations. The aim of this case study on mediatized activism is to argue for the contingency of digital ‘everyday life,' which is the decentering and intermingling of geographically dispersed nodes. The second case study, Chapter 3, utilizes Femen as a case study for tracing the 30 dynamics of interrelation between abject, affect, censorship, and social change. This chapter focuses on the censorship of mediatized bodies of Femen's topless activists. The chapter discovers how the same images that were censored on Facebook have permeated commercial culture via the advertisement video of Replay jeans and broke away from the abject circle. The chapter addresses the following research questions:  What does the rhetorical force of visual censorship look like?  What are the intensities, speeds, and cross-cuttings associated with it?  How do the censored actors persevere through the myriad translations and transformations of their actions?  How do redistributed, borrowed, and betrayed activist actions play into their transformations? The purpose of this case study is to examine the variety of censorship marks as manifestations of affective abject-creation in a smooth activist space. In 2013 and then in 2014, Facebook deleted Femen's account with its multiple links, likes, followers, shares and Femen-Facebook assemblages. Since then, Femen has had several anticensorship campaigns against Facebook, but the group still continues to self-censor its images to avoid potential deletion of its account. The chapter considers the reasons for deleting Femen's Facebook accounts, which often lead to their affect-induced audiences flagging and reporting Femen activism content. Such a collective censorship affordance of participatory media culture creates abject bodies from Femen and calls for the Facebook administration to censor their images and pages in an attempt to counter their transgression. The study considers not only current self-censored images of Femen on Facebook, but places them in an 31 assemblage of all the other similarly transgressive images of breastfeeding, post-mastectomy scars, transgendered people, free the nipple activists, and unconventional art being censored on Facebook. The fourth chapter introduces a case study of the 2015 Copenhagen shootings during a free speech event. This case study is important for several reasons: first, the shootings took place when the Femen leader, Inna Shevchenko, was speaking at the event. Second, the absence of visual material and exclusive audio-phonetic account of the event propels a less considered aspect of media-sound, thus adding to the multimedia aspirations of the entire dissertation. Third, this event allows us to study the unplanned, eventual nature of activism with unusually high mobilization of solidarity around Femen. Through close-textual and audio-visual analysis of media artifacts, the chapter addresses the following research questions:  How does the audio recording of the shooting influence Femen's evental activism of the 2015 Copenhagen shooting?  How does the Twitter sonic (eye)witness reporting of Inna Shevchenko factor into the mediatized discourses surrounding the event?  What themes, images, and topics re-emerge in Twitter discussions of the Inna Shevchenko and Copenhagen shooting?  What transformations did the event produce for Femen and its movement? This chapter takes a close look at the mediatized witnessing of Inna Shevchenko's in the 2015 terrorist attack on the Copenhagen free speech event. The chapter considers the case a Badiou event, which was made possible through the interrelations of multiple layers of activism and its surrounding situations. With the bundle of various media elements, 32 Shevchenko's faithfulness to the event in the forms of live-tweeting, multiple media interviews, and her own columns about activism, the event came into being and mobilized vast groups into collective solidarities. If the first case studies are mostly dedicated to the examination of ruptures and connections around transgressive and controversial activism tactics, this case study shows the major transformation of Femen, the media-activism assemblage, from exiled, marginal, and abject into a credible defender of free expression. The final chapter provides multiperspectival elaborations on media-activism assemblages in those case studies, where I discuss conclusions and implications. I also revisit the literature reviewed in the study as a means of highlighting how my dissertation contributes to methodological and theoretical conversations relating to the contemporary workings of digital media, in particular media-activism assemblages, and more largely the visual rhetoric of social movement studies. I argue that in the light of Femen and other recent social movements around the globe, entwinements of human and nonhuman networks have become increasingly visible. The emergence of visually affective social movements and their mediatized struggles transform the status quo and disrupt hegemonic power structures while offering opportunities to see and act anew. These potentials for acting and thinking otherwise hinge on transgressive and affective forces. Networks/assemblages always exceed the human, extending to a multitude of things. I conclude by pointing to new areas of research, such as the insatiable movement desires of digital images, mainstreaming of the abject, and nomadic femininity of digital protest. I address additional questions that arise through the analysis of case studies as they illustrate the heterogeneity and dynamism of media-activism assemblages. Finally, I 33 draw conclusions regarding the instability of human subjects, which are in circuits of mutual-transformations between technologies and other mediatized humans. In this heterogeneous transformative process, it is possible to chart new territories of research, activism, and f(l)ight. CHAPTER 2 SCREAMING NODES OF FEMEN: ENTANGLINGIN VISUALLY AFFECTIVE MEDIA-ACTIVISM ASSEMBLAGES Amid a constant influx of visuals on our digital screens, the space of activism has become a dynamic web of ruptures, connections, and transformations. My analysis of Femen assemblage offers an initial charting of the mediatized activist network. By examining Femen's protest event of cutting down a crucifix in downtown Kiev, I study the processes of a mediatized activist body linking across media outlets and geographic borders, breaking off of territorial and cultural contexts, and producing new material and digital interpretations swarming around it. The emergence of visually affective activist groups such as Femen disrupts hegemonic power structures and unveils potentials to see and act anew. Twenty-two-year-old Shevchenko, holding a chainsaw in one hand, briskly follows other Femen members up the hilltop overlooking downtown Kiev. Her long blond hair dangles beneath a large, black, knit hat. Her slim bare legs contrast with her heavy boots and black overcoat. The video frame cross-dissolves into a full-size shot of half-naked Shevchenko in front of a tall wooden cross with a statue of the Archangel Michael, the landmark of Kiev Liberty Square, as the backdrop. She is wearing a colorful 35 flower-headband, associated with the Ukrainian national costume, translucent goggles covering her green eyes, black-leather motorcycle gloves showing her red-nail-polished fingers, nicely fitting red denim shorts and the slogan "Free Riot" painted across her naked torso. She kneels, crosses herself as an Orthodox Christian would, and adjusts her gloves, mask, and headband. Inna turns on the chainsaw and starts sawing down the tall wooden cross. We see a small group of journalists with cameras and microphones move into the frame, approaching Inna as she continues to saw the cross. With this affective "image event" (DeLuca, 1999), Femen saturated multiple digital screens and drew polyvalent attention to its activist causes. It does not matter what language you use to search "Femen" online; in seconds, you will be flooded by multiple links to news, photos, videos, blogs, and even merchandise that depicts young, attractive female activists crowned with colorful flowers and marked with aggressive slogans on their bare breasts: "No religion," "Naked freedom," "Fuck your morals," "Do not play with human rights," "Topless jihad," "Obscene because of you," "Fuck Dictator," etc. In their protests, Femen effectively utilize multimedia production and PR skills to create unexpected and affective events. The Davos World Economic Forum, the Vatican, the Madrid parliament, the Vilnius Summit, Belarus ("the last dictatorship in Europe"), Notre Dame de Paris, and the Tunis Judiciary System in Tripoli are among their multiple protest actions that were staged to attract large-scale media coverage. Founded in Ukraine in 2008 by teenage students from provincial towns, Femen initially used pink erotic clothes, balloons, paper banners, and leaflets. Having seen no media or public attention, the group went topless in 2009 and immediately attracted much craved attention (Ackerman, 2014). 36 Atlantic in its review of a recently published book about Femen (Ackerman, 2014) aggrandizes the movement: With Femen, we are dealing with something new ... Its activists are charting a new route for public discourse about women and religion, and making it an unabashedly universal discourse, venturing into realms where they may be hated, and they may yet pay a high price for this. But that they have gotten people talking, even shouting and crying, is undeniable, and it is good; only through debate and discussion, sometimes painful, often unsettling, will we progress. (Ackerman, 2014, back cover) In addition to multiple media stories, one of the leaders of the movement, Shevchenko became the new Marianne3 for the national stamp of France (Sulzer, 2013). This event caused outburst of discussions and even twitter-mediated violent threats directed toward one of the designers of the stamp, Olivier Ciappa." Woke up to discover somewhat violent messages of hate on Twitter"4 tweets Ciappa, calling some of the social media messages violent. The Russian Foreign Ministry joined those provoked by Femen. In its press release following the court hearing on the case of Femen protest inside the Notre Dame de Paris, Russian Foreign Ministry accuses the French court of political bias in support of Femen, who violated the rights of believers in the cathedral: "For the sake of political expediency the feelings of believers were ignored and offended, thus leaving them perturbed by the desecration of one of the most revered temples in France" (BFM.RU, 2014). How does Femen manage to receive such media resonance, while having only 3 to 10 protestors per event? Using Femen as an example of ANT and activism, I am not 3Marianne is the bare-chested pictorial symbol of the French Revolution in the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People" (1830). 4My translation from French. Original text: "Réveil un peu violent en découvrant les messages de menaces et dehaine sur Twitter. Parfois violents, parfois..." 37 gearing this analysis toward judgment of this popular movement. On the contrary, my goal is to show the dynamics of their assemblage. In particular, my objective is to look into Femen actions, reactions, and transactions by responding to the following set of questions: How does Femen utilize visual rhetoric of their bodies to create mediated ruptures and connections of networks? What is the role of affect in the translations that Femen enacts? How do those translations relate to transformations? In order to explicate ANT and Activism, I will examine the event of chopping down the wooden crucifix in Kiev by Femen. This event does not mark the beginning of the movement or its most recent development. However, in order to proceed to the event, I need to elaborate on the theoretical approach that will guide my analysis sections. 􀀃􀍁ANT and Multimedia Activism With this chapter, I depart from moral, technological, and political determinations and propose three main processes of network activism. In particular, I propose that the activism network is comprised of decontextualized visual and textual nodes that are entangled with processes of rupture and connection, where affective forces link transformation and translation. This approach helps us move away from a consequence-oriented gaze, while also articulating the processes social movements undergo or spring from. The Femen example in this case will not yield any definitive statements on their achievements as potential social change agents, but on the process of their multilayer mediation. The development of new media provides the possibility of reaching vast numbers of readers, viewers, and listeners who are enabled to engage in multimedia discussions 38 and various feedbacks. As Kahn and Kellner (2004) argue, there are a growing number of citizens "using the new media to become informed, to inform others, and to construct new social and political relations" (pp. 87-88). Such networking is a process of creating heterogeneous alliances between activist bodies, images, online discussion threads, journalists, and other actors. According to Latourian ANT, "the network does not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points," but instead qualifies the "ability of each actor to make other actors do unexpected things" (Latour, 2005, p. 139). Images frequently act as those "unexpected things," which accomplish their goals of media dissemination through affects, ruptures, connections, and translations. Affective forces let Femen image events produce ruptures, connections, and translations of their activism network. For instance, Femen's affective cross-sawing image event in Kiev produced a multiplicity of ruptures for Femen in Ukrainian and Slavic Orthodox Christian communities as it effectively violated the norms of female appearance, actions, and location in relation to religion and the city. Massumi (1995) refers to such rupture as a shock-"the sudden interruption of functions of actual connection" (p. 97). He connects those interruptions to Benjamin's (1969) writing on shock as the media effect of film, which "like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind" (p. 238). Heightened presence of mind yields polysemic translations, some of which rely on and produce connections. Femen's ruptures with Slavic culture connected them with anti-Russian, Western discourses. This is evident in the cross-sawing event, since it was dedicated to the protest group Pussy Riot, which in the West is persistently utilized for vilification of Russian leadership. This connection 39 helped Femen to utilize affect and extend their network in the West. Networks such as Femen's are breakage resistant and connection enhanced, similar to rhizomes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), but the process of connection sometimes relies on rupture. Such heterogeneity of networks constitutes their fragility and strength simultaneously: There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject-anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9) There are no presupposed origins for networks as they are immanent. Connections and ruptures emerge as a result of exchange and battle in the network. As Latour (1993a) says, "the freest of all democracies reigns between instants" (p.165). In Latour's philosophy, actors are immersed in instantaneity and immanence. The immanence of Femen's protest actions does not mark an illusory epiphany of transcendental essences of feminism, democracy, or egalitarianism, but an unfolding actuality of multiple visible and/or invisible elements, such as affective activist body parts, paints, flower head bands, city views, cameras, screens, and the eyes of viewers and their environments that are interconnected in decentralized ways. This decentralized interconnection of the visible and invisible elements would not be possible without a visual media matrix. Ron Burnett (2004) coined the term "image-words" to describe the similar phenomenon of images creating contexts for embodiment. According to Massumi (1995), this embodiment is simultaneously actual and virtual as it provides potentials for "what are normally opposites [to] coexist, coalesce, and connect" (p. 91). Ergo, distribution of Femen network's elements is "turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that 40 holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986/2010, p. 20). Deleuze and Guattari point to two types of spaces: smooth and striated. The difference between the two is that striated space is "immovable (immeuble)" (p. 57), seized by a state apparatus of fixed hierarchy, while smooth space is occupied by nomads of fluidity and change. Distribution of a network's elements often look like social battle, in which some sedentary discourses use contexts to wrongly tether actors'/actants' actions to moral labels and values, and thus territorialize and submit them to striated spaces. In other words, some efforts wrongly try to fix contexts, and establish a right-versus-wrong binary way of thinking. Such thinking that strives to determine substance and/or essence is unlikely to suffice. Instead, in Prince of Networks (2009), a guidebook to Latour's philosophy, Harman suggests that actors are "trying to adjust or inflict its forces, not unlike Nietzsche's cosmic vision of the will to power" (p.16). This dynamism is stripped of an inherent morality and is entirely dependent upon "trials of strength" (Latour, 1993). The immanent processes of mediation and translation mark those trials. For Shevchenko, staying in the media spotlight is one of the major trials of strength, as she pointed out in the documentary "Femen: Exposed" Russia Today (2013). As "screens become new ways of seeing and understanding" (Burnett, 2004, p. 44), affective imagery along with the articulate texts of Femen help them maintain media prominence. Latour (1993a) argues that some actors are stronger and some are weaker: "For an entelechy there are only stronger and weaker interactions with which to make a world" (Latour, 1993a, p. 185). But what distinguishes the strong from the weak? Harman (2009) 41 considers realness to be a barometer of strength. He thinks that the more connections an actant has, the more real it is. This translates well in the modern social media-driven world where no event, no experience, is real unless photographed, recorded, and shared. Even Sontag (1977), who criticized photography, admits that "the picture may distort, but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's on the picture" (p. 5). Such a picture of Femen protest forms a node that in turn connects to other nodes and thus forms a network. Castells (2013) believes that nodes can increase their importance for the network "by absorbing more relevant information and processing it more efficiently" (p. 20). For Femen, maintaining media prominence is a constant process of absorbing relevant information, such as political developments or upcoming holidays, and responding to that information in activist ways. Their official website could be a good example of processing information efficiently5. However, the efficient processing of information by a network node alone does not guarantee its "realness." The greater the number of the network actors that react on it, the more real the node is. Latour (1993a) saw this web of power coming before the appearance of the first social networking sites: "Discourses and associations are not equivalent, because allies and arguments are enlisted precisely so that one association will be stronger than another" (pp. 168-169). But what does such underlining of the real alliances give us today in terms of activism? Calculating connections does not guarantee predictability of a course of action. Moreover, sudden controversies enable not the 5 Like a successful commercial organization, Femen changes its welcome flash banner from its regular topless activist picture to a picture of their topless member turned into a witch as Halloween approaches. 42 predictability, but the tracing of the networks. Thus, in the case of Femen, it is not common sense that creates multiple connections and spinning frames, but de-centering controversies. Controversies and Networks Controversies make possible translation and transformation of fixed statuses. Controversies occur at the point of relation between a social movement and the surrounding world and show the irreducibility of networks. In the example of Femen, webs of controversies hinge on visual and affective perceptions of female sexualities. The theme of sexualities in the cities is recurring theme in various disciplines (Brown 2008; Hubbard, 2013). Hubbard (2013) talks about how city lightings and advertising screens create the expectation of sexuality and "effectively remind viewers that the city is a sexual marketplace" (p. 10). Screens of this sexual marketplace are dominated by bodies similar to those of the Femen members who are young, mostly White, and slim women (Fouts & Burggraf, 2000; Glascock, 2001; Signorielli & Bacue, 1999). Femen effectively utilize their sexual bodies as mediums to affectively disrupt audiences and draw their attention to the activism messages painted across their naked torsos. According to Berger (1977), "nakedness has a positive visual value in its own right: we want to see the other naked: the other delivers to us the sight of themselves and we seize upon it…" (p. 58). Sennett (1994) traces the histories of human bodies in relation to cities from ancient Greece to Medieval Europe. He explains "naked body" as "naked voice" that becomes "force of disunity in urban space" (p. 66). Similarly, Femen is trying to bring dissonance and disruption to the norms of visual perceptions regarding 43 femininity and its relations to politics and religion. Disruption has become one of the common media frames for Femen, as we can see in the example of lifesitenews.com. The headline states, "Topless Femen activists disrupt Mass at Swedish cathedral" (LifeSiteNews.com, 2014). The article tells a news story and provides a link to the video of the event with the note "Viewer discretion advised," which verifies the intensity of visual imagery and explains why the story received over ten thousand views. The video is taken without a tripod by a hand-held low-resolution camera and has shaky frames, which adds effects of rough material and authenticity. Despite the occasional shakiness, the visual prominently shows three young, tall, slim, blond, topless women in high heels, blood painted across their long legs and hangers on their short shorts. Their naked model-looking breasts bear slogans dedicated to the freedom of abortion, which are well exposed as their hands are raised up holding banners with more slogans. They are chanting in English "Catholic Church out of my body" and "my body, my rules." This chanting lasts only a few minutes as a group of provoked church personnel and church-goers starts to push them out of the church jerkily. Spectators' emotional comments on Femen pictures and videos across the web create an affective field marked by dissensus. Those comments are trying to persuade viewers that the actions of Femen are offensive and vulgar. Still and moving images of Femen activism are among actants that "translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it" (Latour, 1993b, p. 81). Betrayal similar to disruption reoccurs in the discussion of Femen (O'Keefe, 2014, Zychowicz, 2011). One example of betrayal is related to Femen and its Tunisian activist Amina Tyler, whom Tunisian Muslim women accused of wrong feminist politics. 44 "Femen stole our voice" was the slogan of Tunisian Muslim women as they were demonstrating their radical disapproval of the form in which Femen was acting to promote women's rights in Tunisia. Their argument against Femen's image event could be read in Luce Irigaray's (1985) way: "Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies" (p. 25). Since those sexual imageries are visual, one can also approach them in James Elkins's (1998) way: "Contemporary images rarely have single or primary meanings… …instead they court ambiguity and obscurity…" (p. 214). Ambiguity as part of controversy yields different translations of the same image events. Thus, by contrast to Tunisian Muslim women, liberal Western European communities applauded Femen's form of activism as effective and pledged support for Amina. Such clashes in the translations cause not only transformations of Muslim women's perceptions in the West and the infiltration of Muslim traditions in Tunisia, but also perforate previously impermeable boundaries that constitute pseudo-purities (religion, femininity, morals, and rights). Controversies fuel ANT and activism with the force of confusion and curiosity. According to Latour (1993a), making connections alone does not guarantee realness: "The real is what resists" (p. 174). Confusion supplements resistance in the form of contradictory interpretations. As Berger says (1977), "the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled" (p. 7). Thus nodes and actors never stop negotiating their place in the networks and the specifics of their interconnectedness. Images as parts of the networks are tied to the question of desire "desire generating images and images generating desire" (Mitchell, 2005, p. 58). Desire is what from Deleuze and Guattari's (1986/2010) viewpoint composes assemblages and networks. Intertwining and unfolding 45 networks persevere through earthly immanent controversial events. Rupture With the dynamic chainsaw sound, a black-and-white long shot of a tall wooden cross quickly pans down to show the slim, white body of a half-naked protestor standing on the ground and sawing the cross. This is the same image event I described in the beginning of the chapter. This time, the image is remediated in a 25-minute Russia Today (2013) documentary about Femen. The black-and-whiteness of the image frames the event as gruesome historical past, a kind of flashback. Above the head of Shevchenko, two black straps tied to the cross stretch out of the shot, naturally framing and accentuating the activist's figure. In the next two-second (7:17-7:18) medium close-up shot, Inna's torso from the left side appears on the screen with a blurry circle imposed to cover her bare chest as she actively continues to saw the cross. The marking of the word "sextremism" is partially hidden under her long hair and the blurry circle of censorship. In the next extreme long shot, Shevchenko saws down the cross. The cross falls completely, revealing the busy urban view of downtown Kiev. At the sound of the cross hitting the ground, Femen activists holding the black straps tied to the cross and journalists recording the event quickly step back, distancing from Shevchenko and the fallen cross. In the next moment, Inna raises her hands up holding the chainsaw that is still in motion. Because of the gray-scale visual, most of the background marks of the image appear much more fluid and homogenous than in the color picture described earlier. Overall, fluidity and natural framing with the black straps above the activist show her and 46 the censorship mark on her body more prominently. "The ontological instability of the mark is a double and conflicting condition" (Elkins, 1998, p. 42). This mark of censorship not only serves as signal of a potentially offensive visual, but also acts as an assemblage. This assemblage generates new marks, coalesces with the surrounding marks, and tries to striate the smooth space of the activist body. With this striating of the space, the censoring mark itself appears as a symptom of rupture between the activism and the competing orthodox Christian discourse showcased in the documentary and viewers' comments on it. The complex web of affective ruptures between the Femen activism and the orthodox discourse is traceable to the aspects of bodily sensations and powers of Christian places. As Sennett (1994) explains, for Christians places, of martyrs and victims carry immense power, which according to the Christian ideology, are not meant to be challenged by the force of human flesh. By cutting the Christian cross, Femen ruptured this relationship by flipping the hierarchical binary between place and flesh. Thus, becoming iconoclast, Femen generated "fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators" (Latour, 2002, p. 17). With this action, Femen set up a new game where "provocateurs and those they provoke are playing cat and mouse" (Latour, 2002, p. 29). A short interview with Ukrainian writer and journalist Oles Buzina, right after the black-and-white censored depiction of the cross-sawing event, emphasized this cat and mouse game rhetoric: "When the girls went ahead and cut down the cross, they really let themselves down for good. I think that if they wanted to go to the West, they meant to cut down the cross" (Russia Today, 2013, 7:25). In Ukraine, and similarly in Russia, where the Christian Orthodox religion 47 structures every aspect of political, social, and economic life, a half-naked woman who chops down a crucifix creates multiple ruptures. The act of chopping down the crucifix alone does not achieve the same effect without the outfit of Shevchenko. Her naked torso inscribed with the English-language slogan "Free Riot" and "Sextrimism" across her chest and arms. Her short red shorts and heavy boots create an appearance that the Orthodox Church considers vulgar. This outfit intensified the desire of the orthodox Christian community representatives to attack the image. "When it [image] asks to be shattered, disfigured, or dissolved, it enters the sphere of offending, violent, or sacrificial image, the object of iconoclasm, the pictorial counterpart to the death drive, or ecstatic shattering of the ego associated with the orgasm" (Mitchell, 2005, p. 74). This affective reaction is easy to find in the comments and blog entries dedicated to the image event. Below is one such example: The cross was installed in dedication to the victims of hunger and political repressions in Ukraine. I am not able to wrap my head around, how could anyone raise a hand against this holiness. And why is that these ‘monsters with boobs' are running around and putting together such unreasonable actions… …Excuse me for my emotions, but it's utterly painful for me to watch this unbounded [violent vandalism] actions. Clearly, the event caused more hype and sensation than they [femen] could have counted on. It's just the methods that those ‘actors' utilize go beyond the acceptable normal behavior…(Nechiporenko, 2012, para. 2) Many Ukrainian and Russian journalists and bloggers, who frame this event as a deliberate rupture with the Ukraine's mainstream way of thinking, are trying to impose a fixed meaning to the image of cross chopping. Some bloggers and journalists, such as Oles Buzina, label the cross-sawing image as legible sign of Inna's desire to emigrate from Ukraine and expand the movement of Femen internationally (Russia Today, 2013). The quest of those to fix the meaning and make the event transparent does not take into consideration the processes of the image event itself, but the solidified-over- 48 time history behind the object being chopped. According to media accounts, the cross was installed during Ukraine's 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in the memory of the victims of communism. Soon after the first brief news stories about the event, there followed articles and comments with stories behind the crucifix Femen chopped. One of the numerous commentators on the RFERL article, Vitaliy from Kiev on the second day of the event wrote: "It is a monument [dedicated] to victims, to three million Ukrainians, who have died of artificially created hunger by a Stalin mode in 1933" (RFERL, 2012). A comment "Ukrainian Sluts Pledged Support to their Moscow Colleagues by Destroying the Prostration Cross in Kiev" (Sevastopol.su, 2012) stands out with its aggressive tone and represents the majority of the event's virtual audience. Femen are "not only dummies, but also provocateurs. Their support of Pussy Riot was a sad mistake, meaning that they sawed not the right cross" (YK1, 2012). Such swarming of multiple controversial accounts and opinions around the cross-chopping event provides another connection to Latour's elaboration on networks. In Latour's (2005) conceptualization, "an ‘actor' in the hyphenated expression actor-network is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it" (p. 46). "This is what we wanted to achieve," said Shevchenko during her Skype mediated participation in the Ukrainian TV talk-show Ukraine Talks (govoryt-ukraina.tv, 2012), "we did not want people loving or supporting us. All we wanted is to stir the debate, which is happening in this TV show." At the time of this TV show, Inna was already in Paris, far from the "powerless power of social inertia" (Latour, 2005, p. 85) in mediatized Ukraine. This "social inertia" hides "the real causes of social inequalities" (Latour, 2005, p. 85). Thus, on the one hand we have cross-sawing image 49 event transfixed in negative contexts in media, which ruptures mainstream society into groups of people with various affective responses to Femen's activism. On the other hand, we have the sets of visually triggered controversies and debates over religion, the place of women in society, and the ethics of protest (govoryt-ukraina.tv, 2012). Connection6 Approximately three fourths of the On n'est pas couché TV talk-show's purple fluid screen is filled with a color, uncensored moving image of a young topless Femen activist, who is about to saw a cross in Kiev. On the right side, about one fourth of the screen is filled with a close-up frontal shot of Shevchenko with her long blond hair, dressed in a white Femen t-shirt, with flower-headband, sitting with her gaze fixed to the left. Inna is watching herself as she is going to cut the cross in Kiev about a year ago. The video is projected on a large screen in the talk-show studio, filled with dozens of people. Kiev urban traffic noise is lost in a cacophony of quick camera-clicking sounds. Shevchenko silently crosses herself in an Orthodox Christian way, as she is standing on her knees in the three-fourth angle medium close-up color shot. Still standing on her knees, she bows in front of the cameras as she finishes crossing. Meanwhile, in the background, another Femen activist ties a black strap to the cross. Through a quick white flash dissolve cut, we see Inna's back behind the back of another Femen activist in a grey 6 Debates caused by ruptures are unimaginable without connections. Perhaps this is the reason "Connection" should not be a separate section. Having a separate section for the connection aspect of network activism is contradicting the overarching argument: the heterogeneous nature of networks does not allow separation of rupture from connection and the two from translation/transformation. However, for the sake of conventional clarity, it makes sense to ponder the specifics of connection in relation to the network allies, forces, and their "trials of strength" (Latour, 1993, 2005). 50 pullover holding the strap tied to the cross. The other Femen activist is standing further in the back holding the other end of the strap tied to the cross. Inna's figure appears framed by the two black straps above her head. As she turns on the chainsaw, the camera pans up to reveal the crucifix up on the wooden cross and the downtown urban landscape of Kiev. In the next quick white-flash-dissolved close up shot of Inna, we see her struggling to cut the cross, twice as thick as her torso, which bears a slogan "Free Riot," partially hidden under her loose hair. As the cross falls with a heavy sound in the next extreme long shot, Shevchenko victoriously raises her hands up holding the chainsaw that is still in motion. In this video, it is evident how "media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all" (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 55). This entire remediation of Femen's cross-sawing event on a popular French TV show serves as an example of Femen's new connections transgressing multiple geographic and visual rhetorical lines. This TV show signposts Femen's growing popularity in France and Europe generally. It also demonstrates how the cross-sawing image event continues to have its own life event after a year. Such images have "a parallel existence to the social life of their human hosts, and to the world of objects that they represent" (Mitchell, 2005, p. 93). On the double screens of On n'est pas couché, present-day Inna is juxtaposed to her own image of the past event, which is out of her control, disseminated and dispersed in the web on the network of Femen activism. The image of the cross sawing has "entered a feedback loop" (Gitlin, 1980, p. 238), which does not allow fixing of any errors related to activism causes, context, or meaning. But who cares about such incoherence and errors in postpostmodern society? It 51 certainly was not clarity and unity of meaning that promoted media circulation of the cross-sawing image event. From the previous section, we see that the more controversy, the more attention. This is not only desire of visual elements in the image, but also the desire of the lay spectator, who imagines pictures through "ideals of dissonance, incoherence, and chaos" (Elkins, 1998, p. 214). In the image I described above, it is possible to see these postmodern ideals manifest themselves and generate connections that enhance Femen's network of activism. One of the most evident visual dissonances or ruptures that Femen has caused with the cross-sawing event is contradiction with the forms of female depictions in mass media and advertising. These are the norms of specific female appearance and performance researched by Goffman (1979) and elaborated since then by other scholars. Bordo (1997), for instance, building off of Goffman's work, claims that in the contemporary visualized and mediatized environment, "the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images" (p. 94). Femen does comply with the norms of depicting "slimmer, younger, taller, blonder, and ‘better' looking" women (Goffman, 1979, p. 21), but breaks away from the performative part of those norms. Goffman (1979) points out that the majority of women in advertisements tend to demonstrate "feminine touch" by "using their fingers and hands to trace the outlines of an object or to cradle or to caress its surface" (p. 16). In the cross-sawing event, Inna Shevchenko's hands do the extreme opposite of this norm, as they are not caressing, but destroying a religious object. The process of destruction also shows serious engagement with the object, which breaks the norms of "licensed withdrawal," or of "mentally drifting away" usually manifested by a tender smile or averted eyes 52 (Goffman, 1979, p. 65). On the contrary to advertising norms, in the cross-sawing event, the activist's facial expression is belligerent and the eyes are fixated on the object of destruction. The relation of a public place with the main actor of the chain-sawing event creates a gendered dissonance. Historically, public space has been a domain for masculine actions, while feminine actions were mainly restricted to domesticity (Lefebvre, 1991; Sennett, 1994; Wigley, 1992). The high number of predominantly male police workers trying to control many of Femen's and other activism protests still manifests this principle of masculine dominance over public spaces. By attacking the public space of downtown Kiev landmarked by the crucifix, Femen is "subverting uses of urban space" (Sennet, 1994, p. 24) and becomes the "force of disunity in the urban space" (p. 66). Subversive use of sexuality by the Femen activist in the urban space of Kiev augments sensual dissonance and engenders affect. In contemporary settings, submissive female sexuality saturates many urban scenes and screens (Brown 2008; Hubbard, 2013). "Through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality," Femen protestors via Shevchenko's conventionally attractive appearance and scandalous action are trying "to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance" (Foucault, 1978, p. 157). By writing slogans on her topless torso, the Femen activist creates an image event, which not only attracts mediated attention, but also forces spectators to read Femen's causes as they are looking at her body. Comments on the videos of Femen activism reference the subversive and affective use of imagery in the Femen protest: 53 Another example of contemporary media being merely a vehicle for entertainment, non-news. These groups HAVE incredible messages and goals in their protest... ...They do want attention and shock value, but that's NOT their end goal. They want that because that's the only way to get these entertainment news outlets to cover their cause! (maychocho, 2014) Various nodes of shock-values and dissonances I have touched upon in this section create "lines of force" (Latour, 1993a, p. 172) that subvert an ordinary image into affective one. Images such as Femen's cross-sawing event are subversive "when it is pensive, when it thinks" (Barthes, 1981, p. 38). Burnett (2004) in How Do Images Think explains images as "intelligent arbiters" (p. 221), which are "parts of the ‘seer' and of "everything that one could define as sensual" (p. 75). "Sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story" (Deleuze, 2003, p. 36). Causality and the value of sensation is almost irrelevant as it cannot be fixed on any particular sedentary meaning, such as the meaning the cross that Femen cut down was the wrong cross or that the form of Femen's activism is perpetuating objectification of women. The relevance of the sensation and affect is salient only to the extent of the intensities, speeds, and connections that it creates. Translation/Transformation7 The large chainsaw in motion is generating sawdust as it is cutting a tall wooden cross. Behind the grey-red chainsaw, there is a young blond topless woman with huge breasts, red parted lips, long hair, and a small red flower wreath headband with its multiple colorful long ribbons flying in all directions. Behind the woman and the cross, 7Having those two words next to each other and separated by a slash can be understood as translations lead to transformations, the end. But there is no end; transformations lead to social change, social change leads to new ruptures, ruptures lead to new connections, and thus cycling, entangling, and disentangling infinitely. This would make sense following Latour since for him translations are everywhere. 54 there is light orange illumination and Femen typed in cartoonish grassy green font narrowing into perspective. When hovering over the image with a mouse, it is possible to see even more details close up. Out of all four t-shirt designs referencing the cross-sawing event in Kiev, this one has the most dramatic look. Along with three other similar-themed t-shirts, it is sold on the neatly organized Femen shop that is part of their official website (Femen.org). As I am writing this chapter today on October 7, 2014, this "Handmade T-Shirt Sextremizm" costs $39.90, almost half of its original price due to "final sale 50% off" discount. I will not go into details about other merchandise, such as cups, caps, and activist-signed boob-prints that are sold on this website, since it is beyond my current focus in this chapter. However, I should point out that Femen members in their media interviews and social networking posts frequently reference the Femen online shop along with their online donation link, as means of financial support and development. "Handmade T-Shirt Sextremizm" demonstrates how images "are now capable of being transformed as well as acting in transformative fashion" (Burnett, 2004, p. 59). In this t-shirt, we see not only Inna Shevchenko transformed into a caricature drawing, but also transforming Femen allies into potential customers or turning potential customers into activism supporters. This t-shirt is one example of the cross-sawing image event translation. As Latour (1993) says, "nothing is by itself, the same as or different from anything else. That is, there are no equivalents, only translations" (p. 162). Such translations exemplify how "the disassociation of action from context is a central and continuing feature" of activism (Gitlin, 1980, p. 238). However, on the contrary to Gitlin's concern about disassociation of context from protest cause, Femen's cross- 55 sawing event demonstrates dissociative translations/transformations as forces of contemporary networking. Femen's cross-chopping event had intensive translations in Russia, where four crosses were chopped. Even though Femen on its website and social media was urging its followers to cut crosses to "save Russia" (Femen.org, 2012) the actual cutting of the cross should not be rendered as a mere cause-effect relation. Cutting crosses in Russia following the cross-sawing event in Kiev is similar to "a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting" (Latour, 2005, p. 108). Looking at the translations of the cross-sawing event into similar actions in Russia through the perspective of association helps see intricate details of the networking process, details such as Russian mainstream media deliberations, hybridity of opinions, and further extensions of Femen's network. The debates about who cut the crosses and why took several hundred stories, posts, and comments. Vadim Karasyov, director of the Institute of Global Strategies, draws a parallel between different types of translations in his discussion during the political talk show Velika Politica [grand politics]: "if these events were in Germany or some other secular places, there would not be such a storm [of furious discussions] in the mainstream societies [of Russia and Ukraine]" (Grand Politics with E. Kiseliov, 2012). Karasyov's comment proved correct. Netherlands' chain-sawing of the crosses by topless activists during the GOGBOT festival in support of Pussy Riot showed a festive, fun-loving, and playful tone as they were chopping down crosses without any religious signification. The news section on Femen's website dedicated a post to Femen's participation in 56 the GOGBOT Festival. This page provides multiple pictures taken from various angles and distances where topless Femen members have "FREE RIOT" and "sextrimism" slogans painted across their torsos, glitter under the stage lighting, talk into microphones, saw crosses, pleasantly react to audience applause, and so forth. "The hybrid nature of the elements of pictures is an impediment to interruption-it slows the gathering of meaning…" (Elkins, 1998, p. 47). To help viewers with the meaning-gathering, Femen provided verbal supplement in the form of a news story to the eclectic image event in Holland: Last night sexy sawflies Femen took their chain saws and broke the patriarchal silence of the town Enshede, Holland. Femen activists with their anti-religious performance opened the second day of the eighth Dutch art-GOGBOT Festival, dedicated to the group Pussy Riot. Under the stage Sextremists of Femen cut down three art-crosses. The performance got full support of the audience of the Festival. The cross-crashing workshop was preceded by a speech of activist Inna Shevchenko. She compared crosses with splinters that are in a body of society. Inna called everyone to take chainsaws as surgeon's scalpels and to help democracy. Femen are going to continue to destroy religious idols that support developing of patriarchy in the world. (Femen.org, September 9, 2012) This verbal attempt of Femen to fix the meaning of their visual protest in Holland did not work for traditional orthodox communities, for whom Femen's action was a flagrant blasphemy. Tatiana, who commented on the news story about cross-sawing in Holland, demonstrates the breadth and rhetorical force of Femene's visual spectrum: "Someday, these dummies will get crushed quite literally. But, god, forbid that they would do this [saw crosses] in Siberia… We are waiting for this to happen [to get revenge]" (Tatiana, 2012). This comment is an example of an oppositional translation of the Dutch cross-sawing event, which itself was a translation of the Ukrainian cross-sawing event. These examples show that translation does not happen once and in one place, but everywhere, near or far, now or then. The multiplicity of translation layers of the cross- 57 sawing events in Kiev demonstrate the multiplicity of the ways/mode of seeing and being. Latour (2011) explicates on modes of existence "through its [actor's] own way of differing and obtaining being by way of the other" (p. 17). The Femen actor of the cross-sawing event in Kiev produces its mode of existence through translations and mediations of other actors such as the aggressive Siberian commentator, the downtown urban landscape of Kiev, camera angles, intensity and relativity of the color of the protestor's shorts, and so on. A "space metaphor" Sennett (1994) writes about in his elaboration on human flesh and urban concrete, in the case of Femen cross-sawing event, is related not only to Kiev downtown, or other places where crosses were sawed, but a world-wide web of these and many other places, where these actions were redistributed. In this sense, the Web becomes "a place in which people can join unlike elements. They do so through how they use their bodies, rather than through explaining themselves" (p. 79). It is through the bodies of protestors and their spectators who are virtual and actual at the same time. "The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential" (Massumi, 1995, p. 91). This landscape of mediatized potential is "bringing about distortions, folds, discomforts, and innumerable category mistakes" (Latour, 2011, p. 17). Ways of seeing those processes enables different modes to exist and sustain networks of activism. As Berger says (1977), seeing establishes our place in the world: "we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled" (p. 7). Abel (2007) suggest that different modes of seeing yield different "rhetorical 58 actualizations" (p. 192) of image events. Such modes of seeing I tried to illustrate were apparent in the examples of Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch, and French interpretations and mediations of the cross-sawing event. The multiplicity of translations of the cross-sawing events in Kiev shows a "vast chain of meaning that is circular and never ending" (Burnett, 2004, p. 78). Those meanings in mediatized worlds act as spinning frames that swirl within and around controversies. Implications The visible is never in an isolated image or in something outside of images, but in the montage of images, a transformation of images, a cross-cutting view, a progression, a formatting, a networking. Of course, the phenomenon never appears on the image, yet it becomes visible in that which is transformed, transported, deformed from one image to the next, one point of view or perspective to the next. (Latour & Hermant, 1998, p. 29). In light of Femen and other recent social movements around the globe, entwinements of networks with images have become increasingly important. In the seminal chapter "Irreductions," Bruno Latour conceptualizes actor-network theory and writes: "forces [forming networks] are always rebellious" (1993, p. 198). These forces are not limited to human systems, extending beyond them to include trees, locusts, cancer, mullahs, and more. "The acryllic blues that consume other pigments, the lion that does not follow the predictions of the oracle-all of these have other goals and other destinies that cannot be summed up" (Latour, 1993, p. 198). In a world with multiple truths, with polyvalent events, with unfolding margins, the concept of visually affective network activism is a tool people can use to understand social movements. The challenges and advantages of these movements stem from the web-enhanced flat and uneven distribution of their visual efforts. Femen's visually driven network of 59 activism relies on "seeing as an experimental mode-not as a creative discovery of what is but as an ethical production of the yet to come" (Abel, 2007, p. 192). Latour's (1993, 1996, 2005) theorization of networks suggests a flat ontology for the polyvalent tangled world and shows how such an approach can help people better grasp resistance and activism. This multifaceted rupture creates connections. One such account of connection is well represented in an extended radio program of the Moscow bureau of Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe. In the program Beyond Barriers/Cultural Diary with the headline "FEMEN Phenomenon," journalist Drmitry Vorlchok discusses in detail Femen's protest actions with various experts (Volchek, 2012). Despite most of the experts in the program seeing Femen as a negative and degrading phenomenon, each of them admits that the group earned unprecedented levels of media coverage in the history of activism in the Ukraine. Latour says that in the networks "it is no longer possible to distinguish an actor from the allies which make it strong" (Latour, 1993, p. 174). Have those people who spend hours criticizing Femen become their allies? Are Femen's fierce opponents making Femen stronger just by discussing them and drawing attention to them? Those are not the only potential allies of Femen. The trend of cross-sawing stirred discussions about Femen being "good or bad" on mainstream Russian and Ukrainian language channels, which served as "trials of strength" for Femen. Along with opponents, Femen started to gain supporters. "I think they are a group of sincere and desperate women, who are fed up with the religious demagogy," said popular Russian journalist and media expert Alexander Nevzorov (nevzorov.tv, 2012). According to him, religion in Russia is an "abscess, which Pussy 60 Riot helped open up." He parallels religious rigidities in Russia and Ukraine: "The question of religion was always an unquestionable, taboo theme, which thanks to those provocative girls opened up for public discussions." Alexander Nevzorov, PavelSheremet, Dmitry Bykov, and other allies of Femen are in line with Latour's principle of irreduction, which is supplemented by ruptures and connections of activist groups. Thus, we discover not only Femen opponents, but also unusual allies. Those unusual allies of Femen represent intertwined networks of people, comments, and associations in Ukraine and Russia, which have joined together with radical orthodox forces without being contaminated by them. Latour (1993) describes this condition: There is enough room. There is empty space. Lots of empty space. There is no longer an above and a below. Nothing can be placed in a hierarchy. The activity of those who rank is made transparent and occupies little space. There is no more filling in between networks, and the work of those who do this padding takes up little room. There is no more totality, so nothing is left over. It seems to me that life is better this way. (p. 191) Is this flat ontology better for us? Using the word "us" would be quite reductionist, because there are multiples of "us" and multiple conceptions of "better." However, for Femen, flat ontologies with plenty of empty spaces and voids are "better." As Shevchenko says, "If people were not reacting then our protests would be pointless" (Larsson, 2013). Inna and other Femen activists consider the provocative nature of their activism as a sign of change. Without provocative ruptures, there would be no connections and transformations. The emergence of visually affective social movements and their network struggles to transform the status quo disrupt hegemonic power structures, and unveil potentials to see and act anew. CHAPTER 3 SPECTACULAR CENSORSHIP: FLEETING TRACES AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF ABJECT, AFFECT, AND ACTIVISM Abjectfication/objectification of femininity is a trend that implicates not only activism, but also the everyday lives of many women. Images of rape, violence, as well as sexual objectification of women have long been adopted by mainstream culture. What is new is the woman, whose visuality complies with the norms of female depiction, but deviates from them in their actions and purposes. Images of women using their bodies for activist and artistic purposes easily translate into the realms of the affective abject. Censorship of their bodies in social media brings this abjectification of femininity to public attention. In this chapter, I study femininity in thse context of activism to provide a poststructuralist perspective of mediatization at the intersections of affect, censorship, and social change. In particular, I will focus on how Femen images are censored on Facebook, how activists regain followers after having their accounts deleted, and how their images are replicated in the commercial clip of Replay jeans. Through close textual and visual analysis of images and texts pertaining to the artifacts, I explore the versatile potential of mediatized, abject, sexual bodies of topless activists by tracing their affective forces within activist and commercial cultures. 62 Femininity is troublesome. Even without tapping into the realms of activism, it is a minefield. Invisible grids of normativity regulate visage, body shape, skin exposure, and logistics of hair-growth/removal/coloring, proper posture, demeanor, action, and purpose. In short, femininity "asks" for censorship. One "wrong" step and the feminine may become abject (Kristeva, 1982). Becoming this othered / othering other, who does not fit into the order of things and yet is implicated in it, is spectacularly problematic. What makes crossing of an invisible line of feminine normativity so significant is its web of affective forces around it. Chasing a result-oriented train of thought, trying to define cause and effect between abjectification of the feminine, its censorship, or affective net-weaving, is futile. What matters is the constellation of those three processes and the intensities of their interrelations in the mediatized world, where changes happen. In this chapter, I focus on the affective intersections of mediatized sexual bodies of topless activists, their otherness to mainstream cultures, and their censorship on Facebook. Through the close textual and visual analysis of the set of multimodal artifacts, I will address the following questions: What does the rhetorical force of visual censorship look like? What are the intensities, speeds, and cross-cuttings associated with it? How do the censored actors persevere through the myriad translations and transformations of their actions? How do redistributed, borrowed, and betrayed activist actions play into their transformations? The purpose of this study is to examine the variety of censorship tactics as they run through smooth activist spaces and tackle the transgression of normativity within Facebook. The Femen International page on Facebook now has over 8,000 followers, which is one tenth of what the number was before their page was deleted, along with all the 63 information it held, in June 2014 (Femen.org/news, 2014). This was the second instance of their page being deleted for posting "pornographic" material. The first time Facebook removed Femen International was in June 2013 (Femen.org/news, 2013), in the midst of the Tunisian Femen activist Amina Tyler's protest and imprisonment controversy. Before its deletion in June 2013, the page had around 170,000 followers. The censorship of the female body on Facebook is not a new trend. The policy outlined in Facebook's Community Standards has been in place since its inception. The digital document states: We want people to feel safe when using Facebook. …We restrict the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content - particularly because of their cultural background or age. In order to treat people fairly and respond to reports quickly, it is essential that we have policies in place that our global teams can apply uniformly and easily when reviewing content. … We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple. (Facebook.com, n.d.) What Facebook's Community Standards document is articulating is redirecting our attention from its administration to the worldwide community. It acts on behalf of culturally diverse groups to ensure that their sensitivity is respected. This document also illustrates the blurring of the line between online and offline, acknowledging the transgressive nature of online communication. As Ibrahim (2012) explains in his chapter about Facebook's censorship of breastfeeding photos, "there is an element of continuity between the offline and online contexts. Invariably social norms are often negotiated through the intertwining of the two environments (i.e., online and offline) and technological capabilities" (p. 44). The negotiation/battle over what is appropriate and what is not in virtual public spaces has been going on for the past few years with some victories, drawbacks, and ambiguities. Long lists of groups and actors being censored by Facebook, ranging from 64 breastfeeding moms to activists raising awareness about breast cancer with post-mastectomy scarring, have been recently joined by The New Yorker magazine with its cartoon of the nude Adam and Eve. Having its Facebook page temporarily disabled due to the violation of the community standards on "Nudity and Sex," The New Yorker published a column titled "Nipplegate" (Mankoff, 2012). Commenting on this piece, Gawker wrote "the social network mercilessly hunts down and censors pictures of bare breasts like Iranian computer scientists going after Stuxnet" (Chen, 2012). Celebrities, such as Rihanna, Chrissie Tiegen, Scout Willis, Miley Cyrus, and Cara Delevingne among others, have been posting their bare breasted photos on social networks in support of the Free the Nipple movement after the release of its documentary film in December 2014. The mediatized intensities surrounding U.S. celebrities and the Free the Nipple movement create a hope that "by allowing for the radical potentialities of the rhetorical, new understandings can be developed of the ways in which the body, affect, and desire disrupt the normative discursive logics of publics" (Deem, 2002, p. 448). The most recent subversive campaign against antifemale nipple censorship includes pasting of a male nipple to cover a female nipple. Last summer, an artist and an Associate Professor of Art at Chapman University, Micol Hebron posted on her website and on Facebook a cropped male nipple with a comment: Here you go - you can use this to make any photo of a topless woman acceptable for the interwebs! Use this ‘acceptable (male) nipple template', duplicate, resize and paste as needed, to cover the offending female nipples, with socially acceptable male nipples (like a digital pasty). You're welcome. ( Micol Hebron, n.d.) In the summer 2015, her male nipple went viral. As Huffington Post notes, "male nipples 65 are having a moment, and it's surprisingly all in the name of freeing the female body from censorship" (Pittman, 2015). The image of the male nipple remediated on the musical band LaSera's page has over 167,000 shares (La Sera, 2015). "I got 1500 new Facebook fans today and they are ALL in it for the nipples and only the nipples," says a musician of La Sera (Aubrey, 2015). The popularity of a male nipple among those arguing for the freedom of female nipples illustrates Grosz's (1994) argument that "women [still] are somehow [perceived as] more biological, more corporeal, more natural than men" (p. 14). The idea of women being earthier than men highlights their susceptibility of becoming an abject. Despite the battles that were won over the postmastectomy (Scorchy Barrington, 2013) and breastfeeding (Facebook.com/help, n.d.) images on Facebook, there remains a long way ahead for activists to achieve similar results in regards to censorship of female bodies. In order to explore the relations between censorship, abject, femininity, and affect, I will first provide a theoretical framework and then move on to a discussion of artifacts. In the concluding part, I will bring together the findings of the artifact analyses as seen through the theoretical framework provided below. Affect and Censorship Online We may not be puppets. Still, the image of strings and their movements are not far-fetched metaphors. Everyday life is laced with invisible, yet strong connections to multiple digital screens that are imbued with the potential of liberation, and positive social change, as well as control, repression, and subjugation. To problematize the liberatory potential of decentralized webs is not a new endeavor. The overwhelming 66 majority of scholarly literature explicates how the threats to freedom of expression come from nation-states and authoritarian regimes that are tied to specific geographic spaces, usually far from the democratic Western world. What is missing from such scholarly pictures is the censorship of European and North American activist pages that occur through the complex interrelation of human, technological, visual, and affective actors. This interrelation is a part of the larger process of mediatization, which implies not only i