MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

There are those that argue that activism, in order to be considered legitimate, must involve some form of physical protest or rather, the physical presence of activists involved (Castells 2012; Milan 2015). In this context, face-to-face protest serves as the ultimate goal of social movement mobilization (whether or not that mobilization takes place offline or online). Another school of thought proposes that movements do not need to meet these “offline” criteria (Hockin and Brunson 2018). What remains unclear in such arguments, however, is how activists are establishing their own criteria and what role the physical body plays in digital activism. The Internet is generally thought to facilitate disembodiment or disconnection from the physical body. As a result, the content most commonly associated with digital protest is linguistic discourse, such as statements of protest, hashtags or narratives. However, this paper will examine the visual content of digital protests. In the #WontBeErased campaign, individuals post images of themselves. In these images, the physical body plays a significant role in dismantling the dominant narratives about gender and sexuality, in order to create space for Trans rights and Trans multiplicity. This campaign displays the various ways in which digital tools are used to perform embodied politics online. Throughout this paper, I will discuss these strategies of embodiment and how they are distinct from protest that takes place in physical settings. Lastly, I will address how physical bodies serve the purposes of legitimizing activism on digital platforms.