Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis

Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race

Tamara Shefer, Jeff Hearn, Kopano Ratele, Floretta Boonzaier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138283008
• eBook ISBN: 9781351982177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación comparada

Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives on Gender, Sex, and Race offers critical perspectives on contemporary research and practice directed at young people across the global north and south. Drawing upon pedagogical, programmatic, and activist work with respect to challenging inequalities and injustices for young people, the authors interrogate the dominant discourses of sexuality, gender, race, class, age and other social categories. Emerging out of a Finnish-South African collaboration, this volume does not take a comparative approach but rather a transnational one by embracing the intersections of local and global knowledges. We draw on this transnational and transdisciplinary framework and these various contexts to generate a critique of mainstream theory and pedagogical practice, as well as to subvert and disrupt such research and practice so as to speak more directly to young people's agentic and activist engagements in social justice, specifically inequalities of class, race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, and health.

Section Three

Young People “Talking Back”

Agency, Resistance, Activism and Change

11 Social Media and Feminist Activism

#RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest and #RUReferenceList Movements in South Africa

Tigist Shewarega Hussen

Digital technologies have profoundly changed the way we communicate. The emergence of various social media spaces, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Google+, has impacted the level and intensity of communication practices. A growing body of research emphasizes the relevance of new media technology and the Internet for political participation, as they provide “alternative spaces” for citizens to practice their civil rights and protest against social and political injustices (Bennett, 2003; Bohler-Muller & Merwe, 2011; Castells, 2015; Dartnell, 2006; Earl, Hunt, & Garrett, 2014; Hands, 2011; Haythornthwaite & Kendall, 2010; Hill, 2013; Joyce, 2010; Lievrouw, 2011; Wellman & Gulia, 1999).

New media technology, particularly social media, is playing an important role for the advent of a different form of political participation and protests in South Africa. Scholars argue that digital activism has increasingly become a “game changer”, affording alternative “informal” and “invented” spaces in the e-political sphere (Chiumbu, 2015; McEwan, 2005; Miraftab, 2004). It also reforms the structure, representation and interaction of social movements by providing broad-based effective citizen engagement and political participation (Dahlgren, 2005). As a result, it is evident that “political action is made easier, faster and more universal by the developing technologies” (Van Aelst & Walgrave, 2004, p. 87). Most importantly, the structure of online space, as an alternative medium, facilitates social movements since it is decentralized, fluid, without boundaries and often “unconventional” and “progressive” (Donk, Loader, Nixon, & Ruche, 2004).

While this is relevant, it needs to be recognized that the growing dependence on technological mediation for political expression of citizens, particularly for young people, in many ways implies the existence of a rigid and oppressive political system that still needs to be challenged. Therefore, the focus on ICT in this chapter should not be misunderstood as what Bohler-Muller and Merwe (2011) calls the “naive attitude of cyber-utopianism, where the Internet equals democracy” (p. 6). It is rather an attempt “to illustrate the developing potential of technology to influence the socio-political climate across the continent” (Bohler-Muller & Merwe, 2011, p. 6).

This chapter is part of a larger feminist digital ethnography research project that explores the nature of online social movements in South Africa, with particular attention to how gender is shaped and made visible in online political communicative practices. The chapter attempts to show the significant role that has been played by the #FeesMustFall movement, specifically #RapeMustFall, in re-signifying the feminist struggle against gender-based violence in South Africa, with particular reference to rape culture. Particular attention is given to strategic use of “spaces” to deploy the protest. It looks at how young women in the #RapeMustFall protest used public and virtual spaces to resist rape culture and the policing of women’s body in universities.

Brief Background

In October 2015 the #FeesMustFall, also called #Fallist movement, was formed to protest against the government’s plan to increase the rate for study fees and to challenge the Higher Education (HE) system with a greater political movement—namely, the decolonization of the higher education system in South Africa. The #FeesMustFall movement became a student-led national movement, as it formed alliances with students in the major universities within South Africa (Ngidi, Mtshixa, Diga, Mbarathi, & May, 2016). What appears unique to the #FeesMustfall, perhaps even uniquely globally, is that the movement continuously shifted and spread its roots in tackling multifaceted social, economic and symbolic violence. For instance, the #EndOutsourcing movement tackled policies that are discriminatory and exploitative against workers. #Shackville was a movement that exposed the racialization of residence; specifically the struggle black students go through to get residence in some universities. Likewise, #BringBackOurCadres was a movement that challenged HE to reinstitute leaders of the #FeesMustFall movement in the university. #PatriarchyMustFall was a movement that erupted to challenge the patriarchal and misogynist leadership style of male leaders of the Fallist movement (Oxlund, 2016). Relatedly, the #RapeMustFall movement drew attention and exposed the rape culture in the universities.

All these movements are interconnected and portray intersectional social, political and economic injustices in post-apartheid South Africa. The focus of this chapter, however, is to analyze the #RapeMustFall movement. In April 2016¹ outraged young and mostly black women students took to the street of Rhodes University in protest against sexual assault, rape culture and the poor legal system that failed to protect women from sexual violence (Charter, 2016; News24, 2016; Mdaka, 2016; Mbalimz, 2016). The young women students protested against institutional negligence and failure to put the necessary legal and policy frameworks in place to help tackle the rape crisis on its campuses. Unfortunately, the university management appeared more concerned with protecting and restoring the reputation of the university instead of addressing the students’ outcry against rape culture; police violence and brutality were also reported (Charter, 2016; Haith, 2016; Mett, 2017).

Following these responses young women students came out in public half-naked and protested against rape culture, refusing attempts to silence their voices. In solidarity with the students at the Rhodes University, the protest quickly expanded to other universities, such as the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC). These interactions, together with release of the new book by Pumla Dineo Gqola (2015): Rape: A South African Nightmare, strengthened the context of the protest and rudely awakened, intervened and interrupted the epistemological freezing state of the HE around sexual violence and the country in general.

Simultaneous to the public protests and demonstrations, students used different digital platforms and social media to publicize their cause and reach out to potential audiences and allies from other universities in South Africa and globally. This protest is part and parcel of the #Fallist movement but #RapeMustFall was embraced as its distinct protesting motto. As the movement intensified and was the subject of heavy police surveillance and brutality, followed by quick dismissal of the protest by some Rhodes University management, students added the following hashtags that embody different aspects of movement: #NakedProtest—a reference to the use of their bodies as the center of protest; #Chapter212—a reference to South African constitutional chapter to freedom and security of the person, instrumentally used here to challenge the HE; #RUReferenceList—a reference to the leaked information of a list of eleven “alleged” rapists on social media; #IAmOneinThree—relating to a call by young women activists for urgent political action by flagging statistical evidence about the magnitude of rape and sexual violence in the country. In the radical political performance of the half-naked protests on campus streets, together with the strategic use of online space and real-time Twitter feeds, the movement managed to garner national and international attention.

The scope of this research by no means represents facets of the #RapeMustFall movement in their entirety. The research hopes to contribute to showing the complexity of the protest and the feminist dimensions of the students’ response. Some of its limitations are: (1) Twitter or Twitter users are representatives of neither the Internet users in South Africa nor the population outside the digital world that were directly involved in the protest. (2) It is important to recognize that #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, #RUReferenceList are not only used by students who were following the movement. Other sectors outside the student body such as NGOs, feminist activist organizations, mainstream media and bloggers were also employing these. Hence, the research only attempts to focus on dominant political and ideological impressions and controversies that have influenced the movement in multiple ways.

The Role of Digital Space in Extending Public Protest

Digital activism and public social movements are becoming inextricably entangled with growing media technology and widespread nature of Internet connections and online engagement. More than ever, many researchers (Bohler-Muller & Merwe, 2011; Castells, 2015; Dartnell, 2006; Earl, Hunt, & Garrett, 2014; Hands, 2011; Hill, 2013; Joyce, 2010; Lievrouw, 2011) have become cognizant of the influential role that new media technologies play. Digital spaces allow social movements to gain popularity at national and international levels beyond the refrainment of public protest procedural politics.

The space also allows for a wider dissemination of protest than mainstream media reporting, which is often constrained by its particular ideological framing and a particular political role it performs. Thus, the physical public space merges with online spaces that are created in different social media outlets. In some ways, then, the virtual space instantly expands beyond the territorial limitations of the physical public spaces. It reinforces and amplifies already existing different social movements, strengthening the offline and online political spaces by creating alternative spaces and opportunities for diffusion of social movements from marginalized communities (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2015; Castells, 2015).

Furthermore, according to Gurumurthy (2013), “the autonomous nature of communities forged online may defy centralised value-based organizing” (p. 28). Individuals are empowered to take part in the movement autonomously. The online networking and communication emerges with generic coded political catchphrases that continue to be used as “master frames” (Benford & Snow, 2000). Individuals interested in the political agenda can take part collectively in the conversation by echoing /hashtagging the movement’s “master frame”. Snow and Benford (1992) argue that “ ‘master frames’ provide the interpretive medium through which collective actors associated with different movements within a cycle assign blame for the problem they are attempting to ameliorate” (p. 139). These “frames” can be catchphrases, such as #RapeMustFall, #NakedProtest, #RUReferenceList, or images that represent the social movement often with highly sensationalized creative work (Donk et al., 2004).

Transforming the Public into the Political

Performances of political protest primarily require “space of appearance” (Butler, 2011). These spaces, however, have symbolic boundaries that categorize people based on class, race, gender and other social and institutional categories. Differences in identity and social status create unequal power relations among public social actors (Lamont & Molnar, 2002). Butler (2011) argues that “the square and the street are not only the material supports for action, but they themselves are part of any theory of public and corporeal action” (para. 1).

As mentioned earlier, the intersectionality of institutional oppression, symbolic or otherwise, and its effects have been the most important argument of student protest under the #Fallist movement. Since, the #Fallist movement in general has a history of consecutive protest events that have happened on campus, it might seem very easy to form protest gatherings. However, as Butler (2011) argues “we miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather” (para. 1). Hence, in #RapeMustFall the young black women protestors were protesting against rape culture while facing margina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Engaging Youth in Activism, Research and Pedagogical Praxis: Transnational, Intersectional and Everyday
• Section One Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Scholarship and Practice Directed at Young People
• Section Two Alternative, Non-Hegemonic Ways of Doing Scholarship and Engaging Young People
• Section Three Young People “Talking Back”: Agency, Resistance, Activism and Change
• Contributors
• Index