On Being Ugly in Public: The Politics of the Grotesque in Naked Protests

Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Alexandra Fanghanel
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
Naked Body ◽  
Activist Groups ◽  
The Grotesque

AbstractSexualized naked protest using young and attractive women's bodies have long featured in the repertoire of protest tools for interventions in public space. Antirape feminist groups and nonhuman-animal rights activist groups, in particular, have mobilized these bodies to attract attention to their causes. Contemporary debates have suggested that these sorts of protest are objectionable, and that they are entwined with contemporary rape culture. This article complicates these accounts by considering what happens when the naked body is presented as a grotesquery in the service of these apparently emancipatory politics.Analyzing two instances of naked protest as case studies, this article examines what happens to naked protest when the bodies protesting are “ugly” or are rendered so. The analysis suggests that naked protest featuring bodies that are “ugly” harbors the possibility of mobilizing a transgressive politics beyond contemporary rape culture. This article has implications for better understanding how to mobilize protest in a way that is transgressive and bold without further enshrining rape culture as the normative background against which it takes place.

Disruptive protests

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-110
Author(s):  
Alexandra Fanghanel
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
War Machine ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Naked Body ◽  
Striated Space

This chapter builds on themes established in Chapter Two and considers the naked or nearly naked protest as a carnivalesque disruption in public space. Part One posits that these protests rely on spectacularisation (in the Debordian sense (1994 [1967]) of the naked body to function. We explore this in the context of so-called feminist anti-rape protests, such as SlutWalk or Femen. Part Two analyses these gendered dynamics in the context of non-human animal rights protests including those of PETA and Lush, One of these campaigns is analysed and I draw on the auto-ethnographic experience of participating in naked protest to explore the potentialities of this as a mode of forging a war machine. This chapter demonstrates how the eroticisation of sexual violence is mobilised as part of these politics.This chapter examines the interplay between smooth and striated space, rape culture and the capacity that protest harbours for revolution.

Disrupting Rape Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Fanghanel
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Transformative Politics ◽  
Normalization Of Violence

Issues of social and spatial gendered justice have never been more pertinent in contemporary post-industrialist societies. This book which marks an intervention in contemporary debates about women’s bodies, public space and rape culture, in order to think through ways in which the normalization of violence against women might be contested. It brings together a rich web of thought about politics, embodiment and public space to examine social and spatial justice in the context of the female body in public. Transforming rape culture is not easy; the problems outlined in this book are not things that can be fixed by policy changes or legal reform (alone). They necessitate an overhaul in the ethics of the way in which we think and act in public spaces, including attending to the exclusions that everyone, in part, is complicit in enacting. Through analyses of three provocative case studies (pregnancy in public space, the female body as protest, and BDSM in public spaces), this book opens up generative ideas about transgression and revolt and advances a transformative politics of the possibilities of living without rape culture.

Causing trouble

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexandra Fanghanel
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Rape Culture

This chapter introduces the themes of the book. It uses evocative case studies to explore the ways in which the female body can be a disruptive body in public space. This sets the scene for the types of other troublesome bodies we encounter in the book. The theoretical framework is explained (war machines, molecular revolutions, carnivalesque) and key concept of rape culture defined. The chapter talks about the power of walking, and the gendered qualities of walking for causing trouble in public space. The chapter then outlines how the stories that the book tells will unfold.

scholarly journals Zero-Tolerance in Catalonia: Policing the Other in Public Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lundsteen ◽  
Miquel Fernández González
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Zero Tolerance ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Sociocultural Practices

AbstractRecent studies have argued for more nuanced understandings of zero tolerance (ZT) policing, rendering it essential to analyze the significance and actual workings of the policies in practice, including the context in which they are introduced. This article aims to accomplish this through a comparison of two case studies in Catalonia: one in the neighborhood of Raval in Barcelona and one in Salt—a municipality in the comarca (or county) of Girona. We identify a transformation in the use of ZT policies in Catalonia and a contradiction between their social effects and proclaimed objectives. This article attempts to address how specific sociocultural groups gain power and privilege from these policies. The main argument is that a set of commonsensical ideas have become hegemonic, which allows and naturalizes certain sociocultural practices in urban space, while persecuting others, fundamentally pitting two categories against each other: the desired civil citizen and the undesirable and uncivil stranger.

PERFORMING CRISIS IN GREEK THEATRE: SCENOGRAPHIC STRATEGIES AS DRAMATURGIES OF CRISIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (46) ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
María Konomi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Specific Performance

This essay will investigate a series of performances in Greece that showcase the theme of crisis discussed through the particular frame of their expanded scenographic strategies as dramaturgies of crisis. This expanded scenography is not restricted to politics and aesthetics of scenographic representation extending well beyond traditional staging paradigms to aspects that reinstate the emergence of social realities and a fundamentally social conception of space. Indicatively, this includes strategies like introducing various charged elements from lived experi-ence and contemporary visual culture, as well as conflictual aesthetics of the crisis and visual and spatial dramaturgies of the precarious. Sce-nographic dramaturgies of crisis seem to thrive on new spatial perfor-mance forms that directly interact with social realities and real spaces (like site-specific performance), while they mobilize a renewed address to found, shared public space putting to use strategies of participation. In this context of the crisis, the widespread multimedia idioms and the proliferation of video and cinematic idioms are also notable. Perfor-mances that thematize aspects of the crisis, such as Revolt Athens (2016), and the twin site-specific performances built with a core topographical address, Tea Time Europe (2014-15) and Eat Time Europe (2016) will be an-alyzed as key case studies to exemplify and further contextualize their scenographic approaches as content and context-oriented formulations, as visual and spatial dramaturgies that provide us with an entryway into performing crisis.

scholarly journals Nonhuman Animal Rights, Alternative Food Systems, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

PhaenEx ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Lee Wrenn
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Alternative Food ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Alternative Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

Alternative food systems (namely the humane product movement) have arisen to address societal concerns with the treatment of Nonhuman Animals in food production. This paper presents an abolitionist Nonhuman Animal rights approach (Francione, 1996) and critiques these alternative systems as problematic in regards to goals of considering the rights or welfare of Nonhuman Animals. It is proposed that the trend in social movement professionalization within the structure of a non-profit industrial complex will ultimately favor compromises like “humane” products over more radical abolitionist solutions to the detriment of Nonhuman Animals. This paper also discusses potential compromises for alternative food systems that acknowledge equal consideration for Nonhuman Animals, focusing on grassroots veganism as a necessary component for consistency and effectiveness.

scholarly journals Informação, Publicidade, Propaganda: Correspondentes estrangeiros, agências noticiosas e a “Grande Guerra de palavras” da primeira metade do século XX

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Fernando Clara
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Foreign Correspondents ◽  
Decisive Importance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
News Agencies ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Political Scene

The essay takes as a starting point Goebbels’ speech delivered at the closing session of the Continental Advertising Congress, held in Vienna in June 1938, and explores the transformations that the communicational public space of the first half of the twentieth century underwent following the two world conflicts that erupted then. In the first part, the essay addresses the progressive hybridisation of public discourse at the time, the increasing blurring of information, advertising and propaganda, and the rapid acceleration of the international circulation of communication during the period. In this context, special attention is paid to actors who, though not new to the international political scene – such as foreign correspondents and news agencies –, gained a new and decisive importance throughout the period in question. The second part analyses two case studies involving these actors and their power on the international political scene during World War II. Geographically, the two case studies are centred around an axis that is usually considered peripheral to the war – neutral Portugal – but which appears central and, in a way, paradigmatic to the “Great War of Words” that was also being fought in the international public space.

“Animals Like Us”: Identifying with Nonhuman Animals and Support for Nonhuman Animal Rights

Anthrozoös ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Courtney N. Plante ◽  
Stephen Reysen ◽  
Sharon E. Roberts ◽  
Kathleen Gerbasi
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

From the East River to the Sea

Arab New York ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-144
Author(s):  
Emily Regan Wills
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Arab Americans ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
East River ◽  
Activist Groups

This chapter documents the diversity within Arab-led activism for Palestinians, through detailed case studies of two different activist groups, Adalah-NY and Al-Awda NY. While Al-Awda draws its membership and discourses from the recently-immigrated communities of New York and New Jersey, Adalah-NY is oriented towards international discourses of solidarity and social justice. The different ways that identities (such as Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, American, and Jewish) are used by these organizations represent different responses to the problems of political engagement that Arab Americans and their political allies face.

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