“Every joke is a tiny revolution”: networked civic comedy as a tool of social change

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“Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution”:

Networked Civic Comedy as a Tool of Social Change

by
Paromita Sengupta

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2020

Copyright 2020 Paromita Sengupta
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation is the product of many years of guidance and support from several
groups of individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family. Thank you to my
parents (Amita and Aniruddha Sengupta), who were the source of love, help, and guidance from
across trans-continental borders in India. Thank you to my cats, Salem and Demogorgon, who
provided endless comfort, snuggles, head-butts, and painful nibbles while I spent endless hours
typing away on a desk, trying to write and defend a dissertation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thank you to my sisters (Ayesha Chatterjee and Anisha Banerjee), for accommodating an
endless series of midnight phone calls, frantic texts, and for keeping me (relatively) sane during a
preternaturally stressful writing process. Thank you to my uncle, aunt, and cousins (Asoke,
Mithu, Ria, and Rudro De), who provided me with a refuge, a home, and a safe haven in San
Jose right throughout the tumultuous years of my PhD, and especially towards the end.
I would also like to thank my academic family for helping me blossom into the
scholar I am today. Thank you to Henry Jenkins, my wonderful and eternally supportive advisor,
my committee members Alison Trope and Tara McPherson. Thank you to all the members of
Civic Paths, especially Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, for helping to provide a
supportive and enriching work environment, and ensuring that I had the emotional and mental
support necessary to produce the best scholarship I could. Thank you especially to Deborah
Neffa Creech, who was a wealth of emotional, moral, and logistical support during the final days
before the submission of my dissertation, and who was endlessly patient with me during one of
the most unsettling periods of my life. I could not have done this without you!
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ ii
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ v
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... vi
CHAPTER 1: .................................................................................................................................. 1
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
What is “Civic Humor”? ......................................................................................................... 1
Digitally-Mediated Comedy in the Networked Era .............................................................. 13
Digital Counterpublics .......................................................................................................... 18
Hashtags as Cultural Acupuncture ........................................................................................ 23
Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement ....................................................................... 28
Discursive Activism .............................................................................................................. 31
Research Questions and Methodologies ............................................................................... 33
Chapter2: Networked Feminist Laughter and Rape Culture................................................. 37
Chapter3: Gallows Humor and Black Lives Matter ............................................................. 38
Chapter4: Hok Kolorob and Ridicule ................................................................................... 38
Chapter5: Conclusion............................................................................................................ 39
References ............................................................................................................................. 41
CHAPTER 2: ................................................................................................................................ 47
Networked Feminist Humor and the Disruption of Rape Culture on Social Media ................. 47
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 47
Humor and Rape Culture: How to Tell a Feminist Rape Joke ............................................. 48
Hashtag Feminism and Digital Counterpublics .................................................................... 53
Data and Methods ................................................................................................................. 55
#SafetyTipsForLadies and Feminist Cultural Acupuncture ................................................. 57
Countering Sexual Micro-Aggressions through #NoWomanEver ....................................... 68
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 80
References ............................................................................................................................. 83
CHAPTER 3: ................................................................................................................................ 90
Gallows Humor in the Age of Black Lives Matter ................................................................... 90
Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 90
Gallows Humor and Black Laughter .................................................................................... 92
Gallows Humor and Networked Comedy ............................................................................. 94
Data and Methods ................................................................................................................. 99
Media Hijack of #MYNYPD .............................................................................................. 103
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: Exposing Media Biases and Respectability Politics ................ 116
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 130
References ........................................................................................................................... 133
iv
CHAPTER 4: .............................................................................................................................. 139
Tactical Play and Transmedia Organizing in the #HokKolorob Movement .......................... 139
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 139
Civic Humor and Tactical Frivolity .................................................................................... 143
Transmedia Organizing ....................................................................................................... 145
Data and Methods ............................................................................................................... 147
#HokKyalano: Laughter as Social Control in the TMC Counter-Rally ............................. 149
Appropriating and Countering Dominant Discourses......................................................... 153
Pranking and Clogging Official Apparatus......................................................................... 164
Creating New Models of Participation ............................................................................... 175
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 185
References ........................................................................................................................... 190
CHAPTER 5: .............................................................................................................................. 194
Conclusion: The Future of Networked Civic Humor ............................................................. 194
Comedy as a Tool of Social Change ................................................................................... 194
Civic Humor and Sympathetic Laughter ............................................................................ 196
Future Directions in Comedy Research .............................................................................. 200
References ........................................................................................................................... 203
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 206

v
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 98
Figure 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 105
Figure 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 106
Figure 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 106
Figure 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 109
Figure 6 ....................................................................................................................................... 109
Figure 7 ....................................................................................................................................... 113
Figure 8 ....................................................................................................................................... 113
Figure 9 ....................................................................................................................................... 119
Figure 10 ..................................................................................................................................... 119
Figure 11 ..................................................................................................................................... 124
Figure 12 ..................................................................................................................................... 125
Figure 13 ..................................................................................................................................... 128
Figure 14 ..................................................................................................................................... 128
Figure 15 ..................................................................................................................................... 151
Figure 16 ..................................................................................................................................... 157
Figure 17 ..................................................................................................................................... 158
Figure 18 ..................................................................................................................................... 159
Figure 19 ..................................................................................................................................... 160
Figure 20 ..................................................................................................................................... 162
Figure 21 ..................................................................................................................................... 162
Figure 22 ..................................................................................................................................... 174
Figure 23 ..................................................................................................................................... 177

vi
ABSTRACT
Borrowing from Henry Jenkins’ notion of the “civic imagination”, which he defines as the
capacity to create positive social change by imagining better alternatives to current social and
political problems, this study advances the notion of “civic humor”. I define civic humor through
its potential to answer four questions: (1) who is making the joke?; (2) is there an object of
attack?; (3) does it expose the joke in the social structure?; and (4) is the joke participatory?
Based on this four-step model for defining civic humor, I explore three case-studies where
humorous hashtags were used on Facebook and Twitter to discuss issues such as rape culture,
police violence, and state oppression.

Keywords: humor, civic, rape culture, police violence, transmedia organizing, hashtags,
joking, laughter

1
CHAPTER 1:
Introduction

What is “Civic Humor”?
When real estate mogul and reality TV host Donald Trump won the United States
Presidential election of 2016, progressives around the country took solace in the fact that “at
least we’ll have good comedy” (Sixsmith, 2019). However, between Trump’s mocking
impersonation of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s arthrogyprosis at a presidential
rally in South Carolina (Haberman, 2015) and his social media mockery of teenaged climate
change activist Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech at the 2019 UN climate change summit
(Stracqualursi, 2019), comedy in the Trump era has consistently been used as a mechanism for
oppression, bullying, and social control. The difficulty of distinguishing between comedy and
political news coverage in the late-2010s is illustrated by a meme that circulated on social media
around April 1
st
(popularly known as April Fools’ Day), which read – “April Fools’ is impossible
now. I just woke up to ‘Elon Musk Drops Rap Single About Harambe’ and ‘Mussolini’s
Granddaughter is Beefing with Jim Carrey on Twitter’ and neither of them were jokes”. By
referencing topical news headlines doing the rounds around April 2019, the meme reiterates the
idea that satire in the late-2010s has become redundant in the face of the absurdity of real-world
occurrences, characterized by a worldwide resurgence of neo-fascism, institutional apathy
towards environmental devastation, and the persecution and imprisonment of refugees. To make
matters worse, US comedians have increasingly come under scrutiny because of the many
2
controversies that they have been embroiled in, including Bill Cosby’s trial and subsequent arrest
for sexual assault, Louis C.K’s sexual misconduct revelations, Aziz Ansari’s sexual assault
allegation, Roseanne Barr’s racism against presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett, and Kevin Hart’s
position as Academy Award host being rescinded after a resurgence of several homophobic
tweets. Given comedy’s efficacy as a way to mock, troll, and browbeat minority voices into
silence through the widespread use of the phrase “it’s just a joke”, any research on civic humor
needs to reckon with the fundamental question: has humor served any purpose in conversations
around social change in the last decade? More importantly, is it possible to identify any key
differences between humor as a tool for oppression and social control, humor as an expression of
indifference and apathy to the current political climate, and humor as a pathway towards social
change?
One body of research has argued that the question itself is redundant, because humor has
never had a tangible civic function. Freud (1928) viewed comedy as a release for repressed
anxieties, or a outlet for repressive tendencies, whose mode of instant gratification is incapable
of bringing about any real change. Eco (1984) argued that although comedy is often celebrated
for its power to disrupt the social order, it primarily manifests as a form of “authorized
transgression”, or a temporary suspension of order and institutional power which paradoxically
served to remind ordinary citizens of the existence of order – “the law must be so pervasively
and profoundly interjected as to be overwhelmingly present at its moment of transgression”.
Others criticize the inefficacy of not humor in general – but of certain modes of humor of being
incapable of implementing social change by virtue of treating everything with equal amounts of
detachment. Sienkiewicz (2018) draws on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony to define this
stance of infinite negativity as “Kierkegaardian irony”, or the nihilistic view that no ethical or
3
political values should be taken seriously because all meaning is ultimately artificial. For
instance, researchers studying the effects of comedy in the new millennium attributed the
growing youth disengagement with electoral politics to the “ironic pose” popularized by
comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, who represented a generation of young people who were
“exquisitely self aware”, and yet terrified of the betrayal, disappointment and humiliation that
they could be subjecting themselves to if they dared to imagine a more positive future (Purdy,
1999). Irony also came under attack in the wake of 9/11, when the editors of Vanity Fair and
Time magazine announced that it was time for America’s intelligentsia to put aside their
“fashionably ironic” apathy to politics and realize that it was time to take matters seriously
(Sienkiewicz, 2018).
A second school of thought, and one often espoused by journalists and professional
comedians, stands behind the notion that comedy can no longer be relevant in the growing
political correctness of the mid- to late-2010s, where comedians have lost the right to provoke
and cause outrage for fear of causing offence. This point of view is endorsed by several famous
comedians and filmmakers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, and John Cleese, and
encapsulated by a 2015 article in The Atlantic which claimed:
“[young people] wanted comedy that was 100% risk-free, comedy that could not
trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly
scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus
mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like
a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm,
tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some
monster had upset him with a joke” (Flanagan, 2015).
The general sentiment seems to be that in the politically-correct environment of the late-
2010s (often referred to as ‘PC culture’), people are so afraid of causing offense to one minority
4
group or another, that comedy has lost its ability to shock and critique. Comedian Chris Rock
claimed in an interview with Vulture magazine that he has stopped performing stand-up on
college campuses, because they had become “too conservative” on their way to being socially
inoffensive (Rich, 2019). Hollywood director Mel Brooks, whose oeuvre of work includes
popular comedic farces such as The Producers and History of the World proclaimed in an
interview with The Telegraph that society’s “stupidly politically correct” sensibilities will lead to
the death of comedy – “Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks”, he argued (Sabur, 2017).
Others such as columnist Ben Sixsmith of The Spectator believe that comedians should stop
trying to be activists, commentators, and philosophers, and should instead concentrate on being
funny – “Crack a joke about ‘marginalized groups’ and you are not simply offending, but
endangering them”, he writes resentfully (2019). This perspective, much like that of the
‘Kierkegaardian ironists’, believes that laughter is the great equalizer; all social groups and
historical circumstances can and should be the target of satire and nothing should be off-limits.
These perspectives are typically critical of what they call the rising tide of ‘political correctness’,
which is robbing comedy of its critical edge by prioritizing the feelings of marginalized groups.
Both of the perspectives outlined above are limited in their understanding of humor as
social change. While it is true that the effects of humor cannot be replicated or measured in a
laboratory condition, there is historical evidence that the comedy’s ability to disrupt the social
status quo can result in changing public attitudes and provoking conversation. Day (2011) points
out that the 1990s saw a surge of popularity in political satire when it started becoming
intertwined with serious political dialogue through the satiric documentary, the parodic news
show, and ironic activism. Similarly, television scholars have pointed out that the highly-staged,
mediatized landscape of political actors and corporate spokespeople has engendered such
5
widespread suspicion about the electoral process that the openly parodic humor of late-night
comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert has blurred the lines between satire and political
dialogue, allowing them to assume the roles of legitimate political pundits (Jones, 2010; Marx
and Sienkiewicz, 2018). It is also problematic to assume that PC-culture has placed restrictions
on comedy’s potential to serve as a tool of social critique without analyzing how these
restrictions are coded by markers of privilege, including race, ethnicity, and gender. For instance,
white male comedians like Bill Maher and Louis C.K faced no repercussions for satirizing the
American-Muslim community, or survivors of the Parkland school shooting (Criss, 2018).
However, comedians who are women or people of color face an indiscriminate amount of
censorship, especially if they use humor to critique governmental oppression. In the wake of
Michelle Wolf’s controversial speech about the Trump government at the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner of 2018, the association announced that for the first time in 15 years,
there would be no comedians speaking at the annual dinner in April of the following year
(Grynbaum, 2018). More recently, the web-streaming service Netflix took down an episode of
Indian-American comedian Hasan Minhaj’s satirical show The Patriot Act, where the comedian
criticized Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for his role in the murder of Washington
Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (The Guardian, 2019).
This study is premised on a third perspective on humor, which argues that not all comedy
aspires to generate laughter; comedy can also be associated with feelings of bitterness, anger,
hopelessness, awareness, and morality. These are emotions which can provide the impetus for
social change by emphasizing the need to disrupt the social status quo. Eco, despite his distaste
for comedy and the carnival, spoke favorably of “humor”, or what he called the “cold carnival”–
“Humor does not pretend, like carnival, to lead us beyond our own limits. It gives us the feeling,
6
or better, the picture of the structure of our own limits”. He argued that unlike the temporary
feeling of ecstasy provided by the carnival, humor inspired feelings of unease about conforming
to authority; it made people feel “a little angry, with a shade of bitterness in our minds” (Eco,
1984, p. 112). Historian Kenneth Burke (1984) coined the term “comic frame” to describe “the
methodic view of human antics as a comedy, albeit as a comedy ever on the verge of the most
disastrous tragedy” (p. 156). He argued that viewing the progress of history through the comic
frame should engender not passiveness, but a state of “maximum consciousness” through which
one can understand social paradigms more clearly. If laughter is born out of social
consciousness, it follows that most self-aware civic comedy would come from marginalized
populations, who can be criminalized based on their public appearance, or exposed to arbitrary
forms of violence for which the judicial instruments of state do not provide sufficient redress.
This theory is supported by a robust body of research on marginalized communities using humor
to defy oppressive systems and build networks of support, including underground traditions of
humor within slave communities (Carpio, 2008), satirical graffiti scribbled on the walls of Nazi
concentration camps (Feinstein, 2008), Muslim-American stand-up comedy in the post-9/11 era
(Amarasingam, 2010), and Syrian stand-up comedians joking about the refugee crisis (Shuster,
2016). In the words of performance artist Jennifer Miller – “Some issues are far too important to
be dealt with a straight face…jokes, ridicule and play may be the most potent tools activists
have, especially in the face of overwhelming obstacles” (Shepard et al., 2008).
Therefore, in order to establish what separates civic humor from the annals of
Kierkegaardian irony or humor as a tool to bully and silence marginalized populations, we must
first ask: who is making the joke? Like Eco, Freud drew distinctions between comedy and
humor, referring to the latter as the “triumph of narcissism”, or the tendency of the ego to assert
7
its own invulnerability in the face of overwhelming oppression – “it insists that it is impervious
to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, these are merely occasions for affording it
pleasure” (Freud, 1928, p. 71). American novelist Kurt Vonnegut similarly described gallows
humor as “little people saying very wry, very funny things in the face of death” (1988). The
phrase “little people” reinforces the notion that civic humor arises out of persecution, and it
serves as a way for marginalized groups to challenge existing social conditions in a collective
show of defiance. As the following chapters will demonstrate, humor can arise out of the darkest
and most oppressive of social circumstances, including police violence, neo-fascism, and rape
culture, but a joke can only be regarded as serving a civic function if the group that experiences
said oppression is using humor to critique and bring attention to the conditions of oppression.
Conversely, if a dominant group (or a group which benefits from the conditions of oppression)
satirizes the same social situation in an attempt to mock and silence the group which is oppressed
by it, the resultant humor does not qualify as civic humor.
The second defining characteristic of civic humor is identifying what Northrop Frye
(2015) referred to as satire’s “object of attack”. Frye considered satire to be an act of poetic
imagination, through which the satirist must recognize a situation as grotesque and absurd, and
select a source towards which the attack needed to be directed. He regarded the selection of an
object of attack to be both moral and transformative, lending satire an air of subversion that led
Fry to term it “militant irony”. A clearly defined object of attack is what separates civic humor
from nihilistic irony, because it establishes that not everyone is equally implicated in the joke;
instead, the joke is meant to critique dominant power relations and the groups that benefit from
it. In their analyses of Clickhole and Saturday Night Live respectively, both Day (2011) and
Sienkiewicz (2018) agree that it is important for satire to identify an object of attack, because if
8
everyone is equally implicated, it leaves humor with no solid ground on which to stand, and no
real depth of meaning. As Sienkiewicz puts it – “Truly great parody and satire is unafraid to
consistently take a stand, push boundaries, and risk offending, ideally rousing us from our apathy
and disinterest...As the targets become fluffier, so too does our critique” (p. 17). Comedians who
approach their art from a social justice ethos seem aware of the need to use their voice to critique
those in power, not precarious populations who are already face systemic oppression. In their
interviews with comedians Nato Green, W. Kamau Bell, and Jenny Yang, humor researchers
Chattoo and Feldman (2020) noted that each comedian seemed to have a clear object of attack in
mind, and yet seemed “committed to punching up, not down”. In the words of Jenny Yang,
“truly being funny for the kind of society and America that I want means that we
don’t pick on the more vulnerable…Making fun of the 1% richest people in the world is
very different than making fun of racism, for example, or homeless orphan babies...To
me, it’s not about funny; it’s about, when you choose targets, you’re communicating what
your values are and the kind of world you want to live in” (p. 207).
A third characteristic of civic humor is its deployment through incongruity, or the
disconnect between absurdly unequal power relations and the subversion of that power in the
joke. Krefting (2014) uses the term “charged comedy” to refer to humor which is calculated to
tear the fabric of our beliefs by exposing the incongruity between society’s belief in fairness and
democracy and the social, political, and economic forces which collude to maintain inequality:
“Jokesters unmask inequality by identifying the legal arrangements and cultural
attitudes and beliefs contributing to their subordinated status – joking about it,
challenging that which has become normalized and compulsory, and offering new
solutions and strategies” (p. 2).
Kaufman (1980) emphasizes the link between the perception of absurdity and the impetus
towards civic action when she says – “The persistent attitude that underlies feminist humor is the
9
attitude of social revolution…we are ridiculing a social system that can be, that must be
changed” (p. 45). In her anthropological study of the rituals of joking, Douglas (1980) referred to
the absurdity of unequal power relations as “the joke in the social structure”. She theorized that if
there is no joke in the social structure, no other joking can take place. Therefore, for a for a joke
to be enjoyed within a particular social group, the dominant pattern of relations needed to be
challenged and replaced by another. Some scholarship on humor has argued that certain
historical and political moments have been shown to be more suited to charged comedy than
others, possibly due to historical circumstances which have escalated the joke in the social
structure. Haugerud (2013) attributes the resurgence of satirical humor and political pranking in
the 2000s to the joke in the social structure created by the Bush administration’s War on Terror,
which restricted the press from being too adversarial or interrogating the institutional persecution
of Muslims in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. She claims that the critical void left behind was
filled by satirical media organizations like The Onion, which published a post-9/11 special
edition bearing the slogan “Attack on America: Holy Fucking Shit” and concocted a mock press
conference held by God in which he angrily proclaimed, “Thou Shall Not Kill”: “I’m against it,
across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! I’m
fucking serious!” Chattoo and Feldman (2020) argue that the 2010s have witnessed a similar rise
in the use of comedy for social justice, partially because of oppressive geopolitical circumstances
which have accentuated the joke in the social structure, and partly because of the “reimagined
information ecology” perpetuated by the internet, which has opened up possibilities for newer,
riskier comedy. Each of these factors will be analyzed in more detail in the subsequent chapters,
but for now it is important to emphasize that charged comedy – or comedy that exposes the joke
10
in the social structure by revealing the incongruity between the way things are and the way that
we are trained to perceive them – is a key characteristic of civic humor.
The fourth and final characteristic of civic humor is its potential for participation. The
idea of humor as participatory hearkens back to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1968) conception of rituals
such as the Roman saturnalia and the medieval carnival as disruptions of the established social
orders premised on a participatory fantasy of liberation —
“Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any
distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the
absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle
seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea
embraces all the people” (p. 31).
Bakhtin read the carnival as a social ritual where laughter, ribaldry, and symbolic
inversions of the social order created spaces of liberation and play – a temporary “magic circle”
(Huizinga, 1955) of disruption where outside rules were suspended, and the rules of play
dominated. He argued that although the carnival could not be judged by the standards of a
political revolution, its true potential lay in its disregard for all manner of rank, regalia, and
ceremony, which encouraged the populace to experiment with new ways to play with power.
Scholars theorizing about the carnival since Bakhtin have pushed back against Eco’s notion of
the carnival being a temporary space of authorized transgression. According to Bogad (2005),
the inversion of power made possible by the carnival can be used to envision tangible social
change, because it goes beyond the limited idea of a “World-Turned-Upside-Down”, and
encourages audiences to believe that another world is possible. Contemporary scholarship on
humor shares the conviction that humor can serve as a site for cultural resistance because of its
capacity for audience engagement. Hutcheon (1994) argues that a successful joke is contingent
11
on the presence of “discursive communities”, which provide the context for both the deployment
and attribution of humor. She reads humor as an exercise in signification which is encoded by
the jokester and decoded by the receiver, based on certain mutually-shared assumptions,
ideologies, and rhetorical cues. Civic humor implements social change through its effects on
audiences (Chattoo, 2019), gradually implementing change by galvanizing attention, sparking
provocative conversations, and pushing audiences to think critically about social issues. It can
not only act as meaningful political critique, but it encourages audiences to play with politics,
instead of being intimidated by it or consuming it as ‘truth’ from authoritative sources.
The four characteristics of civic humor that make it possible for comedy to function as
meaningful social critique have led to a profusion of network-era comedy focused on social
justice issues, from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the early years of the 2010s to the rising
popularity of Hasan Minhaj, Rachel Parris, John Oliver, and Hannah Gadsby in more recent
years. As a 2015 article in The Atlantic commented, comedians are increasingly embracing their
roles “not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the
cultural debates of the moment” (Garber, 2015). My research adds to this discussion by arguing
that it is not just professional comedians, but networked online publics themselves who have
infused humor into serious political dialogue by invoking its power to disrupt the status quo and
offer a new perspective on social reality. The title of my dissertation “Every Joke is a Tiny
Revolution” refers to George Orwell’s essay on comedy, titled “Funny, But Not Vulgar”
published in the 1945 issue of Leader Magazine in London. In his essay, Orwell bemoaned the
state of satirical writing in the post-World War II era, where satirical writers like P.G.
Wodehouse and A.P. Herbert had lost the impulse to use humor to upset the established social
order, and adopted a meeker, more conciliatory approach to satire. In Orwell’s words—
12
“Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humor in a single phrase,
you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings
down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they
fall, the bigger the joke” (Orwell, 1945).
I apply Orwell’s philosophy of humor not to all forms of humor, but specifically to civic
humor, which disrupts the established social order by providing marginalized publics with the
opportunity to destroy the “dignity” of the dominant power structures and “bring down the
mighty from their seats” with a bump. It encourages them to ridicule the joke in the social
structure, to imagine what it would be like if the systemic inequalities that oppress them did not
exist. It is this act of imagination that makes humor a potent catalyst for social change. In his
theory of the “civic imagination”, Jenkins (2020) posits that all social change begins in the
imagination – one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world looks
like. He understands the civic imagination as “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current
social, political, or economic institutions or problems”, and see oneself as an active agent of
change. This study approaches humorous hashtag movements on Facebook and Twitter as one of
several possible ways of conceptualizing civic imagination practices, modeling new possibilities
for what political conversation can look like in the networked era. In these spaces, humor can
take on many different forms, ranging from satire to ridicule and even gallows humor, but they
each fit the four criteria of civic humor as outlined in this chapter. The three case studies selected
for this study indicate that when marginalized publics use humor to discuss political
infrastructures and the conditions of oppression, they are taking the first step towards social
change by changing the way these issues are talked about in the public sphere.

13
Digitally-Mediated Comedy in the Networked Era
In a now-infamous New Yorker piece called “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not
be Tweeted”, Malcolm Gladwell (2010) attributed the inefficacy of social media activism to the
fact that it is a "weak tie" phenomenon which does not require commitment and sacrifice from
the participant in the same way as political action on the streets. However, as digital networks
have begun replacing formal organizations, institutions and associations as the fundamental
building blocks of society (Castells, 1996), scholarship on civic media has made efforts to look
beyond the issue of offline impact and consider online political discourse on its own merits.
Tufekci (2017) called the 21
st
century public sphere a “networked public sphere”, or a “complex
interaction of publics, both online and offline, all intertwined, multiple, connected and complex,
but also transnational and global” (p. 6). The term is an acknowledgement of the fact that digital
technologies have fundamentally altered the fabric of civic participation, and reconfigured the
scale and visibility of human interaction. As digital interactions in the networked public sphere
become more inextricable from ‘real life’ or offline existences, it becomes important to
understand how public conceptions of social movements begin to take on newer and more
nebulous forms. Following boyd (2011) and Coleman’s (2011) unpacking of the term, I use the
term ‘networked public sphere’ to represent more than the spatial component of an online
platform – it refers not only to communication technologies that are connected to a distributed
transmission network such as the internet, but also to a gathering that is unregulated, distributed,
and possesses the capacity to gather momentum. Ito (2008) uses the term ‘networked publics’ to
reference the “linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments that have
accompanied the growing engagement with digitally networked media”. In other words, a
‘networked public’ refers simultaneously to the space that is constructed through digital
14
technologies, as well as the imagined collective that is assembled through the intersection of
people, technologies, and practices.
This brings us to the question: what is the political impact of digitally-mediated comedy?
Chattoo and Feldman (2020) argue that shifts in consumption practices brought about by
streaming services and media platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube have made it
possible for comedians from diverse backgrounds to infuse their comedy with “socially critical
and identity driven humor” (p. 191) that caters to niche, like-minded audiences who are invested
in comedy and social justice, instead of trying to create content that would be distributed on
network television and needed to focus on universal, mass appeal. Moreover, online streaming
services allow comedic content to be shared widely, reaching well beyond the audiences who
tune in to watch the actual shows. Official social media accounts owned by media networks take
advantage of these affordances, and frequently share clips of humorous pieces from their own
productions, encouraging audiences to share them with their own social networks and keep the
content circulating indefinitely in the public sphere (Lotz, 2014). Comedians have also used the
transmedial asynchronicity of the networked media landscape to naturalize the transition from
comedy to social action. A notable example of this is John Oliver’s 2018 segment on net
neutrality during his comedy news show The Last Week Tonight, where he urged his audience to
go to the official website of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and voice their
opinions on whether internet service providers should be allowed to modify the speed of online
traffic depending on the nature of the content or platform. Within minutes of Oliver’s call to
action, the FCC website witnessed a 3116% rise in traffic, resulting in their servers crashing
under the weight of the profusion of comments left by viewers.
15
Drawing on scholarship on how digital media practices have changed the relationship
between comedy and social change, I argue that the changing media ecologies of popular social
media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have also introduced a new kind of
political comedian over the course of the last decade: the networked public. Comedy that deals
with social justice issues has historically invited the audience to participate in the mockery of the
joke in the social structure – Richard Pryor routinely invited his audience to share in the laughter
and the outrage against the systemic persecution of African-American communities through a
“call-and-engage relationship” with his audience, prompted by the refrain, “How long will this
bullshit go on?” (Carpio, 2008). However, through the technological and cultural affordances of
social media, the role of the comedian as a political pundit has been expanded to include the
larger public. In their study of online political satire in China, Yang et al. (2015) claim – “The
sharing and circulation of a political joke online is more important than the contents of the joke.
It is a participatory activity involving multitudes of people interacting through digital networks”.
Yang’s study reconceptualizes online political satire not in terms of its content, but as networked
practices which serve as playful ways of communicating about critical social and political issues
online. The architecture of commercial social media platforms can stimulate the formation of “ad
hoc publics” (Burns and Burgess, 2011) who use nebulous online spaces such as Twitter
hashtags or Facebook comment sections to engage in political discussions with people they
might never encounter in their ‘real’, or offline lives. Not only are these spaces used for
circulating memes and videos that resonate with marginalized publics, but they facilitate the
creation of new civic vocabularies by drawing on shared experiences of navigating oppressive
social realities and using humor to create niche, interest-driven spaces of cultural resistance.
Moreover, as Chattoo And Feldman (2019) indicate, the porousness of the boundaries of digital
16
media allows networked comedy to travel far beyond the realm of the intended audience, inviting
sympathetic laughter from individuals who may be positioned outside the counterpublic, and
who may not share the conditions of oppression, but whose civic consciousness might allow
them to understand and laugh sympathetically with the joke in the social structure which has
created conditions of inequality and oppression.
Humor offers low barriers of participation to political talk and stimulates the sharing and
discussion of perspectives which are typically marginalized in the mainstream media. Operating
through the vast and decentralized networks of commercial social media platforms, laughter
becomes a form of civic engagement through which marginalized communities can eschew
traditional political channels and take an active role in altering public perceptions surrounding
issues that affect them. Laughter can also provide a moment of interruption that disrupts the
authority of official discourses by highlighting the absurd assumptions that underlie oppressive
social systems like racism and rape culture, allowing marginalized publics to recirculate the flow
of discourse into a critique of the institutions which enable these systems. Writing about
countercultural activism in the 1960s, Bogad (2005) posits that marginalized groups use satire to
articulate “a specific, contentious ideological critique of a system that excludes them...they
satirize the dominant political center and expose its unacknowledged exclusionary devices and
ritualistic nature. This can create a moment of theatricality in the public sphere, disrupting
assumptions of dignity, fairness, and legitimacy” (p. 11). The latent capacity of social media
further propels the narrative reach of this disruption of the political center, and invites
participation from an indeterminate audience of internet users who may not have accessed them
if they had taken place in more exclusive, activist spaces.
17
Participating in political talk on social media can also take away some of the intimidation
of entering new civic spaces. In his book Why Voice Matters, Couldry (2010) recommends that a
political ‘voice’ be understood not only in terms of a community’s ability to provide an account
of their own narratives in a way that is personally meaningful to them, but for these stories to tap
into “new intensities of listening”. Sharing funny memes and hashtags might not be regarded as a
legitimate form of political dialogue by most Western ideals of rationality, but it can allow
people who are intimidated by traditional modes of activism to experiment with civic action
without fear of being burdened with commitments that they are not ready to take on. Digital
practices such as lurking, or following along with conversations without being compelled to
share one’s own thoughts for everyone to hear can also be a form of civic participation, because
it fosters modes of learning and critical thought that are the necessary predecessors of civic
action. Moreover, research on humor has pushed back against formerly narrow definitions of
civic action – as Day (2011) put it, “There is plenty of discursive exchange that takes place in the
form of the seemingly ‘irrational’—in the registers of parody, satire, fiction, and nonsense” (p.
4). She argues that irony can be a deliberate mode of engagement and not, as is commonly
assumed, a cynical dismissal of politics. Humor not only has the capacity to offer meaningful
political critique, but encourages viewers to play with politics and question their own
assumptions instead of accepting political matters as gospel from figures of authority. Humor can
also combat the physical and emotional exhaustion of navigating quotidian life under oppressive
conditions by providing a transient space to find kinship amongst those who share the same
oppressive social realities, and collectively defy the systems of power that threaten their lives.
Even though these effects are not immediately apparent and cannot be studied through a social
18
scientific methodology, they are an integral part of the slow process of shifting social norms,
forging public opinions, and creating new social paradigms for responding to systemic injustice.
To summarize – and answer the question I posed earlier in this section – digitally-
mediated humor on social media can be politically impactful in four ways: (1) facilitating the
creation of alternative discursive spaces; (2) disrupting the flow of official discourses; (3)
enabling newer forms of political participation; and (4) bringing greater visibility to political
issues and perspectives which are underrepresented in mainstream media. In the remainder of
this chapter, I expand on each of these four factors in more detail, outlining some of the relevant
literature in each area and creating the broad theoretical framework for the analytical case-
studies that follow.

Digital Counterpublics
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas (1991) argued that a liberal democracy requires the formation of enclaves known as
‘public spheres’, or spaces for citizens to deliberate, debate, and discuss matters of public interest
outside of formal governmental processes. He viewed public dialogue in spaces such as Viennese
coffee shops, Parisian salons, and German literary houses as a way for the populace to develop a
political consciousness that lay outside the realm of state policies and market interests. The two
main functions of the public sphere were to make the state accountable to citizens and to provide
a space for unrestricted rational discussion for topics related to the public good. The
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Habermasian notion of the ‘public sphere’ was therefore a space for dialogic participation that
was meant to facilitate civic processes through deliberation, critical reasoning, and debate.
However, this understanding of the public sphere has been thoroughly criticized for its
shortsighted assumptions about the mechanisms of participation. Eliasoph’s (1998)
counterargument posited that individuals do not come naturally equipped for discussion, debate,
and disagreement — they needed to find a space and a community that can help them hone these
skills. Other scholars have seen publics as being constructed not geographically, but discursively,
through shared experiences and meaning-making processes. Anderson (2006) reads publics as
‘imagined communities’ constituted through the mass circulation of newspapers, which enabled
geographically-disparate communities to come together as a composite whole and share a
common civic discourse. Livingstone (2005) similarly describes publics as audiences who are
bound together by a shared text and share a common understanding of the world.
The Habermasian public sphere has also been criticized for its exclusion of women,
people of color, immigrants, queer folks, and other subordinate groups. In the 1990s, feminist
scholars such as Fraser (1990) critiqued the public sphere as being dominated by ideologies that
privileged bourgeois masculine interests. Instead of a singular, monolithic public sphere, Fraser
suggested that there are multiple public spheres, or what she called ‘counterpublics’, which
served as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and
circulate counter-discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations
of their identities, interests, and needs” (p. 56). Counterpublics were meant to serve two crucial
and simultaneous roles in a stratified society: they were primarily spaces of withdrawal and
regroupment for marginalized groups, but they were also regarded as powerful training grounds
20
for resistance through their role in expanding discursive spaces, redefining subjectivities, and
enabling new political ways of being. In her distinction between enclaves and counterpublics,
Catherine Squires (1993) argues that while an enclave is a space for a marginalized public to
gather in secret outside the purview of the dominant gaze, counterpublics are more porous in
nature, signified by “increased public communication between marginal and dominant public
spheres”, which allows counterpublics to present counter-narratives to dominant perceptions of
the marginalized group by projecting the “hidden transcripts” of enclaves to dominant publics.
This is achieved partly by increased access to media distribution networks (such as social media
hashtags) which allow previously-isolated enclaves to participate in wider discussion, and play
an active role in shaping the discourses which affect them.
Secondly, counterpublics fuse the political with the personal in a way that was
deliberately excluded from original iterations of the public sphere. Habermas believed that the
public sphere should concern itself with deliberating public matters of state and policy; private
interests were seen as messy, complicated affairs which distracted citizens from dedicating
themselves to the public good . On the other hand, counterpublics view participation as the
ability to speak in one's own voice, eschewing the neutrality of abstract debate for a form of
participatory dialogue that enables participants to root their political concerns in their
multivariate social and cultural identities. Thirdly, membership in a counterpublic is defined
through discourse. Warner (2002) posits that counterpublics frame their addressals such that
“ordinary people are presumed to not want to be mistaken for the kinds of person who would
participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene” (p. 85). The addressal
demarcates the boundaries of the counterpublic, because it assumes that “ordinary people” –
whose lives are presumably not overshadowed by systemic oppression – would not want to be
21
mistaken for being a member of the counterpublic. However, the social and cultural experiences
that allow counterpublics to recognize themselves as a member of a marginalized group also
gives them the tools to recirculate dominant discourses to suit their own purposes. Each of these
three factors is deployed by humorous hashtag movements to create alternative spaces for
political conversation.
Although this study focuses primarily on hashtags, the growth of internet-enabled
communication over the past two decades has led to a profusion of networked public spaces for
people to gather and share their thoughts with like-minded individuals. These include discussion
forums, social media comment sections, internet-relay chatrooms, microblogging platforms, and
bulletin boards. Like Anderson’s “imagined communities” of people who never physically met
each other but connected through analog mass media technologies, online counterpublics use
both digital tools and shared social experiences to reach out to a larger collective. Papacharissi
(2014) describes hashtag movements as “soft structures of feeling”, or collaborative narratives
organized through the archived and searchable function of the hashtag. She argues that although
technologies might network us, it is the narratives embedded in the emergent structures of
feeling that transform conglomerates of people into “affective publics”, or networked publics
who are “mobilized and connected, identified, and potentially disconnected through expressions
of sentiment” (p. 22). The issue of affect is critical to counterpublic formation because even
when networked counterpublics are not united through their emotional investment in an activity
or a cultural text, their shared experiences with systems of oppression link them together in a
composite whole characterized by feelings of sympathy, anger, or even laughter. The hashtag
circumscribes the counterpublic, because the act of adding a hashtag to a social media post
immediately makes it part of a larger conversation on the topic. A hashtag’s “narrative logic”
22
(Clark, 2016) lies in its ability to connect individual stories within a larger narrative framework,
through which participants try to deconstruct and offer alternatives to dominant discourses. In the
case of humorous hashtags, the use of civic humor also marks the boundaries of the
counterpublic – to ‘get’ the joke, you essentially have to be a member of the marginalized group,
or at least an ally who understands the absurdities which constitute their lived realities. By using
humor to engage in counterhegemonic discourses, online counterpublics defy the emphasis on
‘rational discourse’ which is central to the Habermasian public sphere, and engage in politics
through alternative registers including satire, irony, and wordplay, all of which allow them to
express sentiments which would typically be proscribed from more traditional platforms for
debate. The use of humor in everyday spaces of conversation on social media transforms online
counterpublic spaces into what Fraser calls “training grounds of resistance”, where marginalized
people are constantly honing activist skills such as critical thinking, argumentation, and
collective defiance of dominant powers, without necessarily taking on the burden of more
laborious forms of activism. At the same time, these spaces build networks of solidarity that
provide relief and counter the isolation of trying to battle overwhelming odds.
It is important to acknowledge that not all counterpublic spaces serve civic purposes –
Sills et al. (2016) argue that digital counterpublics can also be aggregators of intolerance by
allowing participants to express harmful sentiments such as white nationalism or misogyny
without fear of backlash. However, in a decade replete with public expressions of intolerance
from powerful political figures – from American President Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood
confessions about sexually assaulting women to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s passage
of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act revoking citizenship rights from Muslim immigrants –
it can be argued that the factions who condone these discourses do not qualify as counterpublics
23
any longer, because their ideologies are already reflected in the dominant public sphere. The
scope of this study lies in examining counterpublics who use humor to resist dominant
discourses, yet do not have access to prominent platforms to express their dissenting opinions.

Hashtags as Cultural Acupuncture
The concept of ‘detournement’ draws on Guy Debord and the French Situationist
International movement of the 1950s. Translating roughly to ‘overturn’ or ‘derail’, detournement
was a protest against mainstream mass media, aimed at mining popular culture for spectacular
images, ambiences, and events that were intended to dazzle the masses, and subverting their
intended meanings through a process of creative disruption. Later, activists who drew inspiration
from the Situationists used detournement and its capacity for subverting dominant discourses to
model other forms of political mischief-making. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies (the members
of a countercultural organization called the Youth International Party) referred to the disruption
of mainstream media as ‘culture jamming’. They defined culture jamming as the use of highly-
visible political pranks as a way of critiquing or ‘jamming’ the flow of information produced by
consumer culture. Although culture-jammers grabbed plenty of media attention with their
pranks, their virulent cynicism about entertainment and popular culture was severely alienating,
and made it difficult for them to recruit more followers to their cause. Bogad (2015) forwarded
the alternate notion of ‘serious play’, or an activist strategy premised on the use of “playful
actions that agitate in support of a social movement” (p. 2). He celebrates it as a nonviolent
approach to social-movement organizing that uses ironic inversion to ‘poach’ from displays of
24
authority and the media coverage that feeds it. On a similar note, Harold (2017) suggests
thinking about cultural disruption in terms of tinkering playfully with the signal rather than
jamming its transmission in entirety —
“Rather than approach jamming as simply a monkey-wrenching or opposition to
marketing rhetoric, perhaps activists might approach it as well-trained musicians do
music — as a familiar field on which to improvise, interpret, and experiment” (loc.
3210).
Harold and Bogad’s ideas of pranking and poaching from authoritative power structures
as a way to disrupt their power aligns with a more contemporary definition of detournement used
by the web-based activist archive Beautiful Trouble, which seeks to understand detournement not
as a way to jam official discourses, but as a rhetorical inversion of familiar media messages to
give them new subversive meanings. Therefore, the more familiar the saboteur is with the
subtleties of the artifact’s original meaning, the easier it is to repurpose and disrupt it –
“Rational arguments and earnest appeals to morality may prove less effective
than a carefully planned détournement that bypasses the audience’s mental filters by
mimicking familiar cultural symbols, then disrupting them” (Beautiful Trouble).
Jenkins (2017) draws on these ideas of poaching, improvising, and inverting dominant
discourses, and suggests using the phrase ‘cultural acupuncture’ as a more media-savvy
alternative to the idea of culture-jamming. He argues that although both culture-jamming and
cultural acupuncture are methods of disrupting mainstream media discourses, the former is
premised on blocking (or jamming) the flow of official discourses, while the latter identifies the
cultural ‘pressure points’, or elements of media culture which resonate with audiences, and uses
them to redirect the circulation of mainstream discourses into a critique of the dominant powers
and institutions which benefit from them.
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There are several reasons why humorous hashtags are well-suited to strategies of cultural
acupuncture. Firstly, hashtags have become a visually ubiquitous aspect of the social media
landscape. The original iteration of the hashtag was known as the pound symbol (‘#’), and it was
used in internet-relay chatrooms in the early 2000s to categorize groups and topics. Twitter
introduced the hashtag as a way to search and archive posts, but it did not gain the mass
popularity it enjoys today until the 2009 Iranian elections, when users started relying on it to find
conversations and news updates about the elections without having to rely on advanced
technological skills. Hashtags are currently used by most popular social media platforms
including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Google+. Creating or
following a hashtag requires no coding skills or access to exclusive chatrooms, and its low
learning curve, adaptability, and linguistic neutrality make it easy for social media users of
various cultural and ethnic backgrounds to become familiar with its workings. The hashtag’s
ease of use combined with its prevalence on popular social media platforms makes it a very
effective ‘pressure point’ for cultural acupuncture. In his ‘cute cats’ theory of digital activism
Zuckerman (2015) explained that commercially popular digital platforms are often the most
potent resources for promoting social change, because they are free, ubiquitous, and almost
impossible for the government to censor without also censoring non-political content. In other
words, any platform which can be used to share pictures of cute cats has the potential to tap into
the “latent capacity of non-activist users” and discretely introduce topics of a political nature into
their everyday digital conversations. Hashtags can foster the creation of networked publics, not
just by mobilizing disparate groups of individuals towards a common goal, but by creating
discursive spaces where publics can oppose oppressive practices, share and reflect on
experiences critically, and create collective consciousnesses (Clark, 2016). As proved by the
26
widespread visibility garnered by networked feminist movements of the 2010s such as
#WhyIStayed, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo, hashtags have altered the face of digital activism
to the extent that researchers have begun studying them not as antecedents to political action, but
as political action in their own right (Barker-Plummer, 2017).
Secondly, hashtags are inherently ‘spreadable’ – a term coined by Henry Jenkins, Joshua
Green, and Sam Ford to describe media content that spurs audience engagement, encouraging
them not only to share the content, but to appropriate, remix, and play with it as they see fit. As
they put it in their book Spreadable Media —
“A spreadable mentality focuses on creating media texts that various audiences
may circulate for different purposes, inviting people to shape the context of the material
as they share it within their social circles…The participatory logic of spreadability leads
to audiences using content in unanticipated ways as they retrofit material to the contours
of their particular community” (Jenkins, Green & Ford, 2013, loc. 278).
The authors also make the case that spreadable media is modeled on a changing media
ecology, where corporations do not directly control the circulation of content, thereby blurring
the lines between ‘producer’, ‘marketer’, and ‘audience’, and increasing collaboration between
these roles. To summarize, spreadable media encourages user engagement, and gives users more
agency over content outside the domain of corporate control. These two factors play key roles in
the efficacy of hashtags as cultural acupuncture. The spreadability of the hashtag form
encourages users to adapt it to suit their own social networks and cultural contexts. Hashtags can
build upon the social affiliation and cultural practices that many oppressed populations use on a
daily basis, and use them to create templates for meaningful political participation.
27
Finally, hashtags are already used in social media parlance as a way of sidelining a
conversation or adding ironic commentary. In a 2010 article in the New Yorker, Susan Orlean
commented on the capacity of internet hashtags to alter the tone and meaning of the original
statement drastically by using the example: “Sarah Palin for President?
#iwouldratherhaveamoose” (Orlean, 2010). The hashtag #iwouldratherhaveamoose subverts the
original use of the hashtag as a way to search for and archive posts, because the chances of
anyone actually searching for that particular hashtag are extremely virtually non-existent.
Instead, the hashtag acts as snide political commentary, disrupting any serious discussions about
Sarah Palin’s merits as a possible President of the United States, and rendering even the
possibility absurd. Recent research on networked feminism has begun noting the use of
humorous memes and hashtags as political tactics that indicate feminism’s move away from
formal organizations, and towards a model of ironic activism (Rentschler, 2015; Clark, 2016).
Horeck’s (2014) article on the humorous feminist takeover of the hashtag #AskThicke describes
how it was recirculated from an online Q&A with singer Robin Thicke to a conversation about
sexism and sexual violence in Thicke’s music. As the case studies discussed in the forthcoming
chapters will indicate, hashtags facilitate an easy transition from comedic snark to a disruption of
dominant discourses, allowing marginalized publics the opportunity to disrupt serious political
conversations from which they would typically be proscribed, and use the hashtag as a way of
introducing their own political commentary on issues that affect them.

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Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement
Researchers studying political movements of the past two decades, from the Arab Spring
Movement to Occupy Wall Street, have started mapping out ways in which the narrative logic of
protest movements has become a pervasive aspect of quotidian life. Earl and Kimport (2009)
refer to the era of networked protest as a ‘perpetual movement mobilization’ through which the
internet enables the “scripts and schemas that underlie social movement practices” to diffuse
beyond the narrow confines of organized political action, and permeate areas which are
presumed to lie outside the realm of political discourse. This perspective is supported by much
recent scholarship on the nature of political participation in the digital age, which seeks to
understand how the internet offers new templates for civic engagement that go beyond electoral
politics and demonstrations, and engage with politics through everyday acts of resistance.
Castells (2012) has referred to these movements as “networked social movements”, or social
justice movements that have used the interactive components of social media platforms and their
potential for grassroots mobilization to create “a new political imaginary” that redefines
previously understood categories of participation—
“Since the institutional public space, the institutionally designed space for
deliberation, is occupied by interests of the dominant elites and their networks, social
movements need to carve out a new public space that…makes itself visible in the spaces
of public life” (p. 10).
Kahne (2014) defines participatory politics in the networked era as “significantly peer-
based, interactive, nonhierarchical, independent of elite-driven institutions, and social, that is,
accessible to analysis at the level of the group rather than the individuals”. He outlines five
modes of online civic participation – investigation, dialogue, circulation, production, and
29
mobilization – through which individuals and groups are beginning to exert their voices on issues
which concern them. Although these are all socialization practices, typically used to engage with
popular media and make conversation in interest-driven peer groups, Kahne found a correlation
between interest-driven participation online, and increased civic behavior, such as volunteering,
group membership, and political expression.
Bennett and Segerberg (2012) refer to this mode of civic engagement as “connective
action”, or the reimagination of political engagement as “an expression of personal hopes,
lifestyles, and grievances”, enabled by various communication technologies. They theorize that
unlike “collective action” which is typically associated with formal organizations and active
recruitment, connective action uses fluid social networks, personalized manifestos and
storytelling to create prolonged protest movements that gather traction over vast and relatively
unregulated online networks of participants. Web 2.0 tools and platforms play a crucial role in
implementing connective action by enabling participation through both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ modes
of civic engagement. Zuckerman (2016) defines ‘thin’ engagement as requiring minimal effort
from a participant – their real attraction is the low cost of participation, which can draw in large
numbers of political neophytes to the cause and cause the movement to gain strength through the
sheer scale of participation. On the other hand, ‘thick’ engagement is a physical and intellectual
commitment to a social movement, which involves truly understanding the mechanisms of a
movement, and identifying what needs to be done for it to be a success. However, Zuckerman
does not place thick and thin engagement on a hierarchy of participation – he reads thin
engagement not as a step on the path towards thick engagement, but as a legitimate form of
participation in its own right.
30
Networked social movements are also crucial to providing marginalized groups with
access to the public sphere, and expand the boundaries of traditionally-understood categories of
civic spaces. Research in this area is part of a broader attempt to understand the political impact
of everyday spaces of conversation and how the interactions that occur in these spaces contribute
to the development of a political consciousness. Drawing on De Certeau’s (1984) argument that
the only way to deal with overwhelming inequalities in power is for activists to slowly “poach
upon and whittle away at the strategic power structure”, Scott (2002) suggests reading small,
everyday acts of defiance as “weapons of the weak”, or individual acts of foot dragging and
resistance that allow small steps of social transformation to succeed where an outright social
revolution would have failed. Jenkins et al. (2016) expand on the idea of resistance as individual
acts of foot-dragging on everyday spaces of conversation to argue that groups of young, media-
savvy individuals are using “any media necessary” – or any and all media channels, platforms,
and infrastructures that they can get their hands on – to highlight social issues and exert their
voice on issues which affect them. They see this form of networked participation as a model of
change which builds on the “social affiliations and cultural practices that many young people use
on a daily basis”, and reshaping them into civic action.
My research on digitally-mediated humor is premised on these ideas of civic engagement
as a form of perpetual mobilization, which is not restricted to traditionally-understood categories
of activism, but permeates the everyday spaces of conversation on commercial social media
platforms, and offers new pathways of civic engagement. As the new media ecology of
streaming is beginning to change how comedians use their voice and influence to “assert their
cultural identities and call out oppressive power dynamics” (Chattoo and Feldman, 2020),
marginalized publics are using networked technologies to create social media counterpublics
31
where they satirize the political figures, institutions, media representations, social norms, and
other dominant power structures which enable the conditions of oppression. In her book Affective
Public, Papacharissi argues that Western philosophical thought is dominated by ideas of
empiricism and rationality – “we frequently misunderstand or overlook much of the meaning of
online platforms for civic expression in our quest for impact or rationality in online specimens of
political activity” (loc. 153). She calls for research into the internet driven by an impetus to
understand how networked platforms support affective processes, thereby creating networked
publics that are mobilized, connected and identified through expressions of sentiment.

Discursive Activism
In “The Rediscovery of Ideology”, Stuart Hall (2005) posited that texts and practices are
not always inscribed with meaning guaranteed by the intentions of production; instead, meaning
is structured by an act of articulation. It is a social production which is always expressed within a
specific context, a specific historical moment, and even a specific discourse. Hall drew on
Foucault’s definition of discourse as “a group of statements which provide a language for talking
about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical
moment” (Hall, 2013). Discourse produces knowledge, but it also produces systems of
representation, by legitimizing certain ways of talking about a topic, and delegitimizing others.
However, Foucault also argued for the “tactical polyvalence” of discourse, which referred to the
multiplicity of meanings through which discourse could be an instrument of power, while at the
same time, acting as “a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy”.
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discourse as a system of representation, Young (1997) coined
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the term “discursive activism” for feminist media practices founded on a politics of visibility.
She described discursive activism as a form of collective action that focused on “promoting new
grammars, new social paradigms through which individuals, collectivities, and institutions
interpret social circumstances, and devise responses to them” (p. 3).
While it is commonly accepted that the key affordances of digital activism are reduced
costs for participation, decentralized networks, low barriers of participation, and recued risk of
grievous harm, recent research on feminist social movements (Shaw, 2012; Clark, 2016; Barker-
Plummer, 2017) has made attempts to move away from a focus on the organizational logistics of
social media in activism, and started looking more closely as online discourse as a mode of
protest in its own right, whose “new grammars” are capable of triggering socio-political change
by altering the way political issues are talked about in counterpublic spaces. For instance, Shaw
(2012) studied Australian blogs and social media to examine how feminists pushed back against
the systematic erasure of female musicians from rock music history, and used these spaces to
create their own alternative musical canons. Clarke (2016) focuses on the performativity of
discursive activism in her reading of the hashtag movement #WhyIStayed as a networked
visibility campaign. The interweaving of personal experiences with satirical humor is an
important feature of discursive activism through hashtags, because it lowers the boundaries of
participation, and fosters critical thinking skills about civic issues in a way that is playful and
undaunting.

33
Research Questions and Methodologies
“Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution: Networked Civic Humor as a Tool of Social Change”
is about the intersection of comedy and social justice in the transient, digitally-mediated
networks of social media hashtags. Drawing on Henry Jenkin’s theory of the ‘civic imagination’
which posits that we cannot create a better world unless we can imagine what a better world
looks like (Jenkins et el., 2020), my dissertation argues that part of the process of imagining a
better world involves listening to marginalized communities tell their own stories about issues
which affect them. Since these perspectives are typically underrepresented in mainstream media,
humorous hashtags create spaces of deliberation through which marginalized communities can
eschew traditional political channels, confront the social absurdities which they must navigate on
a daily basis, and change conversations around issues that affect them.
The overarching research question of this study is: how do marginalized groups use
humor to engage in political conversation on social media? Using this approach gives me the
opportunity to frame the study of hashtag humor not as a tactical tool which can produce
quantifiable, measurable effects on social change, but as a networked social practice which can
disrupt the flow of dominant discourses, and create a moment of interruptibility through which
marginalized communities can insert their own voices on issues which affect them directly. This
study does not attempt to claim that there is any direct correlation between political conversation
and social change in terms of changing policies and legislations pertaining to these issues. Not
only is a quantifiable correlation beyond the scope of this study, it places severe limitations on
how social change can be imagined by making it out to be the prerogative of governmental
institutions. Instead, social change is imagined in terms of its potential to shift public opinions
34
and attitudes by bringing heightened visibility to individuals, groups, and issues who are not
represented in dominant discourses, but who use the architecture of commercial social media
platforms to form nebulous counterpublic spaces where they can discuss issues which are
relevant to their own lives.
The overarching research question of this study can be dissected into smaller, more
specific questions, such as: who are the marginalized populations who are turning to humorous
hashtags to discuss serious political issues? What is the nature of the political, social, or cultural
oppression that these groups experience which makes it impossible for them to make their views
heard through traditional platforms and institutions? How does comedy’s influence work, and
how can it challenge problematic public attitudes? What makes hashtags an appropriate tool for
disrupting mainstream discourses? To explore these questions, I look at three case studies from
the mid-2010s which used a variety of humorous hashtags to create spaces of civic participation
on the commercial social media platforms Facebook and Twitter –
1. Networked feminism and rape culture (#SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomanEver).
2. Police violence and Black Twitter (#MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown).
3. The 2014 West Bengal student activist movement #HokKolorob.
The three chapters are methodologically diverse and include a range of qualitative,
mixed-methods approaches, integrating in-depth, semi-structured interviews with activists with
empirical content and discourse analysis of tweets and Facebook posts that used humorous
hashtags to discuss these issues. In every case, I deployed a particular set of methods to improve
my understanding of the relationship between marginalized populations and their use of digital
media for discursive activism. Spanning a two-year time period between 2014 and 2016, and
35
covering three different socio-political issues in the US and India, each chapter highlights how
these communities use participatory civic humor to engage with social issues in three distinct
ways: to highlight the joke in the social structure which lies at the center of their social
oppression, disrupt the flow of dominant discourses around that particular issue, and redirect the
conversation into a critique of the norms and practices which augment their oppression. By
analyzing changing conversations around topical social and political issues in three different
contexts, this study argues that changing the way these issues are talked about in the networked
public sphere is the first step towards a imagining a disruption of traditional power dynamics and
advancing towards a more equitable future.
While there are examples of the use of humorous hashtags to talk about social justice
issues, these particular case-studies were chosen for this study for a few reasons. Firstly, they all
took place within a few years of each other in the mid-2010s, and specifically between 2014 and
2016. As a digital media researcher, I discovered the #HokKolorob movement first, through my
involvement with the former students and alumni network of my alma mater, Jadavpur
University. Studying the Hok Kolorob movement through empirical content analysis and
participant observation provided me with a frame of reference about the use of humor and
hashtags as tools of social change, through which I was able to identify the other two case studies
for this study. Secondly, they represent a variety of important socio-political issues, including
rape culture, police violence, and state oppression. Thirdly, each of these case-studies represents
a different relationship between hashtags and social movements. The networked feminist
movement is not associated with any kind of social movement, even though it echoes the
attempts of many female comedians to change conversations around rape culture by providing
survivors with a platform to tell their own stories. The case-study on Black Twitter shows how
36
the conversations around police violence, racial profiling, and media biases that were prominent
during Black Lives Matter were reflected on Black Twitter, even though there was no direct
correlation between participants’ involvement with Black Lives Matter protests and participation
on Black Twitter. In contrast, the #HokKolorob hashtag was intimately involved with the ‘Hok
Kolorob’ student movement in Jadavpur University, indicating how online and offline forms of
protest can flow seamlessly into a composite whole through the logic of connective action and
transmedia organizing. Collectively, the three case-studies represent a gradient of engagement
between social justice hashtags and social movements. Finally, the three case-studies were
selected to be representative of three completely different groups of oppressed publics, three
different conditions of oppression, and even three different geo-political spaces. Black Lives
Matter was an American political movement, and the civic humor of Black Twitter was rooted in
the oppression of African-Americans in an ostensibly colorblind America. Hok Kolorob was a
Bengali student movement premised on the political conditions and campus dynamics of
Jadavpur University. Networked feminist humor is the least geo-politically specific of the three
case-studies – victim-blaming and microaggressive behaviors are prevalent across the world, and
although the originators of the two hashtags were both American, the sampled data indicated that
stories about women’s experiences with rape culture emerged from a range of English-speaking
countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Trinidad, and India.
The following sections provide a brief overview of each of the next four chapters of my
dissertation, along with a description of the methodologies used to collect and analyze data for
each case-study. Although the primary data for all three case-studies consists of social media
posts collected from Facebook and Twitter by tracing select hashtags, I have accompanied the
37
content analysis of the hashtags with other qualitative methods, including discourse analysis and
open-ended interviews with activists.

Chapter2: Networked Feminist Laughter and Rape Culture
Rape culture has been described by contemporary feminist scholars as a disciplinary
ecology in which “sexual violence against women is implicitly and explicitly condoned, excused,
tolerated and normalized” (Powell, 2015, p. 575) by endorsing the belief that women are
individually responsible for their own physical and sexual safety, and must abide by the proper
precautions necessary – or risk being violated. This chapter examines how women use Twitter
hashtag movements to stage an ironic reversal of mainstream discourses around rape culture
through a textual analysis of two humorous feminist hashtag movements that gathered traction
on Twitter in the mid-2010s: #SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomanEver. Although these two
movements are only a small sample of the many networked feminist movements around sexual
violence, they were selected for this study because of their deliberate use of humor to critique
rape culture and call attention to the pervasiveness and normalization of sexually predatory
behavior. The two hashtags are also representative of two of the most widespread practices
associated with rape culture: victim blaming and sexual microaggressions (Olson, 2016; Keller,
et al., 2018).

38
Chapter3: Gallows Humor and Black Lives Matter
This chapter uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to study two humorous hashtag
movements about police violence on Black Twitter: #MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.
The two hashtags studied in this chapter were crowdsourced on Black Twitter social media
networks by asking users to recommend humorous hashtag movements, and using content
analysis on a sub-sample of tweets to identify the two most popular hashtag movements that used
humor to satirize police violence in the era of Black Lives Matter. Through a detailed analysis of
the text and images used in the two hashtag movements, I explore how networked civic humor
can be used to create digital counterpublics, create solidarities, and resist mainstream discourses
around race and police violence during the Black Lives Matter movement.

Chapter4: Hok Kolorob and Ridicule
My third case study is an analysis of the ‘Hok Kolorob’ student activist movement which
took place on the campus of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the fall of 2014. As an alumnus of
the English Department of Jadavpur University, I was uniquely positioned to be both a
participant-observer in the movement, and a researcher studying it as an activist movement
which blended civic humor and networked digital practices with more traditional modes of
‘offline’ protest, including marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, and a campus-wide disruption of the
official graduation ceremony held in December 2014. The data was collected through semi-
structured interviews with current and former students of Jadavpur University, recorded on audio
and transcribed, and quotations in Bengali were translated into English to maintain uniformity.
39
To protect anonymity, all personal identifiers such as names and social media handles were
hidden. While textual analysis of the hashtags allowed me to draw certain conclusions about the
use of humor in online social movements, the in-depth interviews with activists offered an
alternative perspective on civic humor, and allowed me to study the topic of activism through
discourse from multiple angles. Data collection for the interviews was funded by a 2016
Annenberg Summer Fellowship granted by the University of Southern California.

Chapter5: Conclusion
The concluding chapter of my dissertation wraps up my argument by summarizing the
key findings from my three case-studies, and fitting them within the model of civic humor that I
have developed in Chapter 1. It also establishes a chart of operating terms such as “cultural
acupuncture”, “gallows humor”, and “transmedial humor”, which I have used to analyze the
humor of each of the specific case-studies, under the broader umbrella framework of ‘civic
humor’. In other words, all three case-studies are examples of the use of humorous hashtags to
discuss social justice issues, but each one also uses civic humor through its own unique
perspective, indicating the richness and diversity of humor as a tool of social change.
Finally, the conclusion points to my future research agenda on civic humor as discursive
activism. As the rhetoric of recent protest marches and demonstrations have indicated, civic
humor can be used for a multitude of other causes, moving beyond the ones that I have chosen
for analysis. Some of these include climate change activism, the fight for women’s reproductive
40
rights, and the public persecution of Mexican immigrants at the southern border of the United
States.
41
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CHAPTER 2:
Networked Feminist Humor and the Disruption of Rape Culture
on Social Media

Introduction
In 2015, a Stanford University student named Brock Turner was arrested for raping an
unconscious woman outside a fraternity party. Although Turner was indicted for charges on rape
and felony sexual assault, which collectively carried a potential sentence of 14 years in prison,
the Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky ruled that Turner should only serve 6
months of his prison sentence. During the hearing, Turner’s father proclaimed that jail time was
a steep price for his son to pay for “20 minutes of action”, media coverage made frequent
mention of Turner’s achievements as a Stanford student athlete while declining to use a mug
shot, and Judge Persky himself admitted that he did not wish to derail Turner’s promising future
by giving him a harsher sentence (Sojourner, 2016). Amidst the public outcry that followed the
ruling, several feminist media channels observed that the lenient treatment of Turner’s case was
indicative of the norms and patterns of behavior that sustain rape culture, strategically shifting
the blame for sexual assault from the perpetrator to the external circumstances – such as
Stanford’s party culture and the victim’s state of public intoxication –and using Turner’s
scholastic and athletic achievements to mitigate the implications of his actions (Gupta, 2017;
Jasper, 2017). In the aftermath of Turner’s sentence, women took to Twitter to express their
frustration at the absurdity of Turner’s three-month rape sentence using the darkly humorous
hashtag #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence, where they compared his trivial 3-
48
month sentence for sexual assault with the length of the wire on (wireless) iPhone 7 earphones,
the probation period for underage beer pong, and even the time it took to type out the verbose
hashtag ‘#ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence.’
The lenient treatment of Turner’s case was indicative of the patterns of behavior that
sustain rape culture, shifting the blame for sexual assault from the perpetrator to the external
circumstances. However, the civic humor of #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence
also created alternative social paradigms for responding to sexual violence, and encouraged users
to stage a discursive derailment of the infrastructures that support it. This chapter poses the
research question: what is the role played by civic humor in mediating discourses around rape
culture on social media? Drawing on scholarship on networked publics, hashtag activism, and
feminist humor, I examined conversations around rape culture through a critical textual analysis
of two Twitter hashtag movements that used humor to critique the normalization of rape culture
in society – #SafetyTipsForLadies and #NoWomanEver.

Humor and Rape Culture: How to Tell a Feminist Rape Joke
The term ‘rape culture’ came into use in the 1974 book Rape: The First Sourcebook for
Women to describe the mechanisms through which the physical act of rape is reinforced by social
and cultural practices which justify the perpetration of aggression and sexual violence, and
normalize the toxic attitudes that lie underneath. Rape culture has been described by
contemporary feminist scholars as a disciplinary ecology in which “sexual violence against
women is implicitly and explicitly condoned, excused, tolerated and normalized” by embedding
49
it within myriad social and cultural practices which form the “cultural scaffolding of rape”
(Gavey, 2005). In other words, rape culture normalizes the physical act of sexual assault by
making it seem not only inevitable, but even desirable and excusable by women (Mendes, 2015).
According to empirical research on rape culture, the two most widespread and nefarious of these
social practices are victim-blaming discourses which shift the onus of responsibility for rape
from the perpetrator to the victim, and performative displays of male aggression and
hypersexuality, which encourage men to believe that women enjoy being pursued aggressively
and overpowered by men (Sills et al., 2016). Collectively, the norms and practices which sustain
rape culture make it difficult for survivors to gain access to public platforms where they can
speak up about their experiences, because they are frequently discredited and subjected to
increased public scrutiny in the media.
Humor plays a complex and controversial role in rape culture. On one hand, rape jokes
place into the dominant discourses of rape culture by perpetuating sexist “joke cycles” (Mier et
al., 2018) – a term used to describe the recurrent patterns of joking that coalesce around a single
topic, and serve as potent indicators of dominant cultural attitudes. Joke cycles around rape are
especially toxic, because they endorse the cerebral dissociation of the physical act of rape from
the ideologies that validate it. Male comedians are well known for inviting this dissociation
through their stand-up routines, such as the time Daniel Tosh commented on a female audience
member who complained about his rape jokes – “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by
like five guys right now?” By invoking collective cerebral participation from the audience,
Tosh’s joke separates the physical act of rape from any sense of individual liability. Social
scientific studies of rape jokes suggest that they lead to an increase in sexual discrimination,
tolerance for sexual harassment, victim-blaming, and even proclivity towards rape (Perez and
50
Greene, 2016). Unfortunately, humor that is ostensibly meant to empower women and resist rape
culture can also cause significant amounts of collateral damage. A contemporary example of a
humorous feminist protest movement that was sabotaged by its own vocabulary is ‘Pussy Grabs
Back’ – a phrase which became a rallying cry for the opposition during Republican candidate
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In the final stages of the campaign, a leaked Access
Hollywood tape from 2005 showed Trump boasting about how his television stardom granted
him unmitigated access to beautiful women and their bodies – “You can do anything. Grab ‘em
by the pussy.” Amidst widespread national outrage about the sexism of the comment, Jessica
Bennett, gender editor of The New York Times repurposed artist Stella Marrs’ image of a snarling
cat into a feminist rebuttal of Trump’s blatant sexism, captioned “Pussy Grabs Back”. The image
received great social media visibility, and became a ubiquitous symbol of protest through the
pink, cat-eared ‘pussy hats’ of the Women’s Marches of 2017. However, the explicit gendering
of the humor around ‘Pussy Grabs Back’ marked it off as an exclusionary space for cis-gendered
women, and the phrase garnered considerable criticism for excluding trans bodies, and implicitly
equating womanhood with the possession of biological reproductive mechanisms.
Despite the global pervasiveness of rape culture, there have been few scholarly attempts
to preserve testimonies from survivors and allow them to tell their own stories on their own
terms. In her 2018 anthology titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, Roxanne Gay
acknowledges the enormity of this act of documentation when she muses: “What is it like to live
in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, and not if, a woman will encounter
some kind of sexual violence?” (Gay, 2018, p. 3). However, an increasing number of female
comedians have begun addressing rape culture through feminist rape jokes about the cultural
perceptions of rape and its isolating effect on survivors. In 2018, New York-based filmmaker
51
Kelly Bachman curated a comedy show called “Rape Jokes: By Survivors”, inviting comedians
to tell jokes about their own experiences with sexual assault. The show, which sold out almost
immediately, stressed the need to change the narrative about how rape is joked about in society:
“Sexual assault is everywhere, and the comedy community is by no means an exception. With a
new industry predator revealed seemingly every month, we think it’s time for a new kind of rape
joke” (emphasis added). Comedian and LGBTQ activist Cameron Esposito’s comedy special
Rape Jokes is a similar attempt to redefine the notion of a rape joke by telling it from her own
perspective as a survivor of sexual assault. In a comment about the origin of the show’s
controversial name, Esposito said, “If I titled it, 'Rape Jokes,' maybe the number one Google
result for the term rape jokes will be this special and not some coverage of some stupid, half-
delivered punchline” (Thomas and Gonzalez, 2018).
Comedians Emma Copper and Heather Jordan Ross have created the stand-up comedy
show “Rape is Real and Everywhere” (RIR&E) to provide survivors of sexual assault with a
platform to tell their own stories. In an appearance on the Canadian talk-show Breakfast
Television, Ross explains that survivors of sexual assault typically suppress their emotions about
the trauma and stay silent. Therefore, their voices are glaringly absent from the discourses
around sexual violence. When these survivors get up on a stage and tell jokes about rape culture,
they are using humor as a form of discursive activism to change the conversations around rape
and highlight perspectives that are marginalized from mainstream discourses. RIR&E invites
participation from the audience, and at the end of each show they pass around comment cards
asking the audience to send in their own jokes and stories. Unlike the form of audience
participation invoked by Tosh, this practice does not encourage the audience to laugh at rape
survivors or the act of sexual assault, but solicits personal experiences from survivors about
52
navigating rape culture in a way that shows sympathy and understanding even as it underscores
the absurdity of their predicament.
These examples suggest that female comedians are making a deliberate attempt to disrupt
the traditional power dynamics of a rape joke by regaining control of the narrative, and providing
platforms for other survivors to tell their own stories. I see this as the “new kind of rape joke”
that Bachman referred to – a feminist rape joke which relies on making fun of the absurd realities
of patriarchal power structures,. Therefore, a feminist rape joke is indicative of Freud’s
incongruity theory of humor (1960), or laughter which is premised on transgressing expectations.
Like other kinds of civic humor, feminist rape jokes do not only aspire to generate laughter; they
are also ways of channeling anger, awareness, and morality into the collective task of
dismantling interlocking systems of power. Kaufman (1980) emphasizes the link between
feminism’s perception of social inequalities and the impetus towards civic action when she says
– “The persistent attitude that underlies feminist humor is the attitude of social revolution…we
are ridiculing a social system that can be, that must be changed” (p. 45). In the context of rape
culture, the ridicule of the social system can be read as ridicule of the joke in the social structure
which normalizes sexual violence against women. In fact, some feminists have argued that one
of the biggest myths of anti-feminist propaganda is that “wanting equal rights and having a sense
of humor are somehow mutually exclusive” (Hennefeld, 2018). A ‘feminist rape joke’ uses civic
humor to expose the joke in the social structure and create a window of transgression where
anyone who has survived sexual assault – or lived under the threat of possible sexual assault –
can use laughter to process trauma, lend validity to their experiences, and disrupt the dominant
power relations of rape culture. Unlike the usual rape joke formula, which uses ridicule as a tool
of oppression to silence dissenting voices, a feminist rape joke is a form of networked feminist
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intervention premised on accentuating the difference between jokes about women getting raped,
and the way that rape culture makes women feel.

Hashtag Feminism and Digital Counterpublics
Hashtag feminism, or networked feminist civic engagement which manifests through
social media hashtags, has always struck an uneasy balance between what Banet-Weiser (2018)
calls the ‘economies of visibility’ and the ‘politics of visibility’. She argues that a politics of
visibility values representation and recognition as essential elements of a collectively organized
struggle to achieve political goals, whereas an economy of visibility considers political action to
begin and end with the issue of representation. Hashtag feminist movements of the 2010s such as
#MeToo have been criticized for being emblematic of the ‘economies of visibility’ because of
their overemphasis on individual stories of survivors and perpetrators at the expense of a
systematic transformation of gender-based oppression (Faludi, 2017). Some critics also claim
that the architecture of the hashtag form, with its upper limit of 280 characters, tends to
oversimplify or even replicate structural inequalities by obscuring the historical background and
socio-political context of activism around issues as complex as sexual violence (Dadas, 2017).
Lastly, hashtag feminism is often considered to be dominated by a white, neoliberal, and cis-
gendered feminist sensibility, which can further marginalize the communities who are at the
highest degree of risk from sexual violence (Khoja-Moolji, 2015).
However, despite the many valid criticisms that is has incurred, hashtag feminism has
emerged as one of the central proponents of what some digital media scholars call the “growing
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digital feminist responses to rape culture” (Keller, 2015) over the past decade. Research has
suggested that networks of women are utilizing their existing digital skills to create online
networks of support for victims of rape culture (Mendes, 2015; Rentschler, 2014), document
instances of sexual violence on Tumblr blogs such as “STFU Rape Culture” and “Project
Unbreakable”, and use strategies of detournement to interrupt the dissemination of rape culture.
Hashtags provide storytelling prompts that curate a vast archive of personal stories, and raise
awareness about perspectives that are frequently marginalized in mainstream media. For
instance, one recent study of the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported concluded that hashtags
can enable rape survivors to connect with a larger feminist community online and participate in
“comforting solidarities and connections between strangers” which help counter the isolation and
shame that often accompany sexual violence (Keller et al., 2018, p. 33). Rentschler (2014) refers
to the capacity of feminist hashtag movements to tap into both affective and technological media
practices to articulate collective responses to sexual violence as ‘response-ability’ and argues that
the networked laughter that emerges from these spaces can offer marginalized groups a moment
of interruptibility which cuts through serious political discussions from which they are exempt,
and introduce their own political commentary on issues which affect them. In discussions about
sexual assault through civic humor, this moment of interruptability acts as a media hijack of
discourses around rape culture, rerouting the discourse away from the behavior of the victim, and
towards the societal practices that augment rape.
Hashtags also foster the creation of counterpublics by creating discursive spaces to call
out oppressive practices, share and reflect on experiences, and create collective consciousnesses
(Olson, 2014; Keller et al., 2018; Clark, 2019). Groups of women meeting together in alternative
public spaces to discuss issues that are relevant to their lives, but which are typically proscribed
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from traditional public spheres is a practice that long predates the internet. Walker (1988)
describes how women’s consciousness-raising groups from the 1960s and 70s brought together
diverse groups of women who shared some of the same social problems, and helped them realize
that these problems were not due to their own inadequacies, but indicative of larger structural
inequalities in society. Fraser (1992) pointed to the variety of journals, bookstores, conferences,
conventions, and festivals which formed counterpublic spaces for second-wave feminists. In the
networked era, feminist counterpublics which operate through social media hashtag movements
serve a similarly civic purpose, because they allow women to discuss private issues in a space
which demands minimal labor in terms of organization and cost, but which allows their
experiences to be legitimized and validated in a way that can often be missing from their offline
social networks (Sills, 2016). Their participation in these counterpublic networks transforms
their everyday media practices into what feminist scholars call “discursive activism” (Young,
1991; Clark, 2018; Clark, 2019) through which they resist dominant patriarchal discourse around
sexual violence, and create new interpretive frameworks for responding to systemic injustice.

Data and Methods
The primary research question of this study is: how do social media hashtag movements
use humor as discursive activism to create networks of resistance against rape culture? To
explore this question, I conducted a critical content analysis of two humorous feminist hashtag
movements that gathered traction on Twitter in the mid-2010s: #SafetyTipsforLadies and
#NoWomanEver. Although these two movements are only a small sample of the many
networked feminist movements around sexual violence, they were selected for this study because
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of their deliberate use of humor to critique rape culture and call attention to the pervasiveness
and normalization of sexually predatory behavior. The two hashtags are also representative of
two of the most widespread practices associated with rape culture: victim blaming and sexual
microaggressions (Olson, 2016; Keller, et al., 2018).
For this study, I collected data from the Twitter API using the Advanced Search Function
within the time range of March 2013 and March 2015 for #SafetyTipsforLadies and June 2016 to
June 2018 for #NoWomanEver. For each hashtag movement, I used the first public tweet using
the hashtag to mark the beginning of my data collection, while also providing a discursive and
social context for each movement. The data was cleaned up to remove duplicates and retweets,
and manually coded using an inductive approach to identify emerging themes and connections.
Through an inductive coding approach, I identified the various strategies used by survivors of
rape culture to turn an experience that is overwhelmingly characterized by fear, humiliation, and
isolation into a collective mockery of the social practices that sustain aggressors. The dataset
revealed 263 tweets using the hashtag #SafetyTipsforLadies, which were coded into 3 categories:
(1) satirical advice giving; (2) narrative testimonials; and (3) crossovers. The 197 tweets using
the hashtag #NoWomanEver were coded into 2 categories: (1) textual storytelling; and (2)
photographic evidence.
In keeping with the framework of civic humor outlined in Chapter 1, I argue that joking
about rape culture through humorous Twitter hashtags is a form of civic humor because the jokes
are being made by a marginalized population, they have an established object of attack, they
highlight the incongruity of the joke in the social structure, and they are participatory in nature.
In conclusion, the two case studies indicate that although social media hashtag movements might
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not have immediate, perceptible effects in the form of protest marches or policy changes, the
spaces of deliberation that they claim through the ironic reversal of oppressive social practices
allow marginalized communities to challenge dominant discourses and bring visibility to
perspectives which are not represented in mainstream media.

#SafetyTipsForLadies and Feminist Cultural Acupuncture
Conversations around sexual violence and women’s safety often use a variation of the
phrase ‘safety tips for women’ or ‘safety tips for ladies’ to construct a narrative where women
must learn to protect themselves from sexual assault using mace and self-defense, or by
monitoring their clothes, hairstyles, and behavior. These discourses are the building blocks of the
normalization of rape in society, because the onus of avoiding rape becomes an issue of personal
liability, thereby reinforcing the regulation and surveillance of female bodies. The Twitter
hashtag #SafetyTipsForLadies was started in March 2013 by Hilary Bowman-Smart as a way of
challenging these preconceptions about rape culture. She explained in her blog that she was “sick
to death of being told what to wear and what to do and how to be” (Rentschler, 2015), and
wanted to start a conversation that critiqued victim-blaming practices using humor. Her post on
Twitter read—"If you hide your forearms in your sleeves, the rapist will mistake you for a T-Rex
and carry on his way. #SafetyTipsForLadies”. As the hashtag gathered momentum on Twitter, it
became an easily personalized storytelling prompt for other women to share their personal
experiences trying to navigate rape culture, while pointing to the joke in the social structure
where women are held responsible for their physical and sexual safety.
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A majority of the tweets from my sample (117 of the 263 tweets) were coded as ‘satirical
advice’ that ridiculed advice typically given to women urging them to monitor their clothes,
demeanors, and social circles in order to prevent being raped, although there was a variety of
different rhetorical techniques that were used to impart the advice. Many tweets followed a
formulaic pattern where the first part of the tweet was framed as a traditional ‘safety tip’, while
the second part used ironic reversal to disrupt the patronizing tropes of rape prevention
discourse, and bring attention to the egregious practice of making women responsible for
avoiding sexual assault:
Don't walk home alone when it's dark. Even a little dark. Or might be dark. Don't
walk home. Or walk. Levitate. #safetytipsforladies.
Since most rapes are committed by someone you may know, un-know everyone.
#safetytipsforladies.
Avoid showing skin, or having it at all. Call your local skinner for a professional
opinion. #safetytipsforladies.
Rapes often occur in reality. Consider shifting your physical being into a
nightmarish alternate dimension. #safetytipsforladies.
#SafetyTipsForLadies is not the first contemporary feminist movement to use ironic
reversal as social critique –it is part of a network of online feminist practices aimed at
interrupting the flow of dominant patriarchal discourses through humor. In their study of the
‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, Rentschler and Thrift (2015) argue that satirical content created
in response to Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s casually sexist comment about
“binders full of women” (referring to files of resumes sent to his office by female applicants)
used detournement to disrupt the transmission of dominant political brand messages and call out
the misogyny of the Republican political platform. Ranging from image macros with witty
captions to mock customer reviews for 3-ring binders sold on Amazon, the meme used humor as
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cultural critique to jam the public discourses of misogyny surrounding the 2012 Presidential
election, and help build a larger networked feminist public. They conclude that the laughter that
is created by acts of feminist detournement “signal the reflexive circulation of an incredulous,
joke-based discourse about the state of gender politics in the US” (p. 338).
The ‘satirical advice’ tweets from #SafetyTipsforLadies suggests that the movement is a
similar detournement of the ‘safety tips’ model of victim blaming. As mentioned in Chapter 1,
the more familiar the saboteur is with the subtleties of the media artifact’s original meaning, the
easier it is to repurpose and disrupt it (Malitz, Beautiful Trouble). The wide pervasiveness of
rape culture and society’s tendency to train women to be individually responsible for their own
safety makes the ‘safety tip’ formula of victim blaming an especially familiar trope for women,
but this familiarity also makes it easier to disrupt it. By injecting an unexpected dose of humor
into conversations around rape prevention, the satirical advice of #SafetyTipsforLadies creates a
moment of interruptibility which provokes the audience into thinking critically about the practice
of making women responsible for protecting themselves from sexual assault instead of teaching
men not to rape. For some, the humor was expressed through ironically reversing oft-quoted
‘safety tips’ about wearing revealing clothing, or walking alone after dark. Others commented on
the fact that not only are ‘safety tips’ an ineffective means of protection from sexual assault, but
the advice that they provide is frequently self-contradictory and impossible to follow:
Consider staying in, many rapes occur out of the home. Consider also not staying
in, many rapes occur in the home #safetytipsforladies.
Don't wear clothing. It only inflames rapists. Also, don't be naked, you whore.
#safetytipsforladies
Trans women get raped for disclosing, and for not disclosing, so remain in a
superposition of quantum states #safetytipsforladies.
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The feminist rape jokes which constitute #SafetyTipsforLadies do not merely jam the
transmission of the traditional ‘safety tip’ model; they also recirculate the notion of safety tips
into a discursive critique of rape culture through the strategy of ‘cultural acupuncture’ proposed
by Jenkins (2017) as an alternative to culture-jamming. Jenkins also argues that unlike jammers,
acupuncturists are fluent in the language of popular culture and are skilled at ‘poaching’ themes
and narratives from well-known media texts to fit the contours of their chosen cause. Rather than
seeing themselves as saboteurs who seek to destroy the impact of popular narratives and
neutralize their seductions, they fashion themselves as textual poachers who “reconstruct,
rewrite, and remix them: they are seeking to draw out themes that are meaningful for them”
(Jenkins, 2017, p. 144). Tweets from my sample indicated that the satirical advice of
#SafetyTipsForLadies similarly poached from popular media texts like The Vampire Diaries,
Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Dungeons & Dragons by reconstructing the cultural logic of
these fictional worlds to parallel real-world scenarios involving sexual assault —
Don't let anyone take your photo without your consent. Drink the blood of
vampires and inherit their magicks. #safetytipsforladies.
Women are often assaulted while walking, so only travel by Floo Network.
Except to Knockturn Alley, it's fucking shady. #SafetyTipsForLadies
Keep the Ark of the Covenant in your vagina. If someone tries to rape you, close
your eyes and open your legs. #safetytipsforladies.
Many rapists drug their victims. Consider becoming a dwarf, gaining a +5 to
saving throws against poison. #safetytipsforladies.

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Fandom scholars have long argued that popular culture provides a potent repertoire of
narratives to fuel activist movements, allowing protestors to deploy elements of fictional content
worlds as analogies for political issues (Brough & Shresthova, 2011; Kligler-Vilenchik, 2015).
Images of General Leia Organa from Star Wars: The Force Awakens were widely used to
accompany the slogan “the woman’s place is in the resistance” during the 2017 Women’s March
on Washington. Political memes on Tumblr often refer to teenaged environmental activist Greta
Thunberg as the new Slayer, poaching from the opening narration of the television show Buffy
the Vampire Slayer: “Into every generation, a Slayer is born; one girl in all the world; the chosen
one”. Similarly, the #SafetyTipsforLadies movement reconstructed popular culture tropes to
create satirical advice for women to avoid being raped, such as literally transforming into a
magical creature with an innate poison resistance to gain immunity from date-rape drugs, or only
traveling by the incorporeal Floo Network to avoid being targeted in isolation. Mapping fictional
content worlds on to ‘real world’ concerns lowered the boundaries of participation and uses
cultural acupuncture to redirect the conversation into a critical deconstruction of rape culture in a
way that is playful and undaunting for women, while also jamming the flow of mainstream
victim-blaming discourses. Moreover, safety tips which rely on the use of fantastical objects
such as the Ark of the Covenant or “the blood of vampires” further underscore the absurd lengths
to which women are expected to go in order to ensure their safety from sexual predators.
I coded the second category of 94 tweets from my sample as ‘narrative testimonials’.
Although these tweets continued to follow the ‘safety tips’ formula of ironic reversal, they drew
on more intimate experiences of witnessing and documenting evidence of victim blaming. The
act of providing narrative testimonials is often heralded as a core feature of feminist activism
around sexual violence, because they help create affective communities of support where
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survivors can share their traumatic experiences with others who had been similarly affected, and
in an environment free of judgement and censure. In two separate studies on the feminist hashtag
movements #WhyIStayed (2016) and #MeToo (2019), Clark suggests that narrative testimonials
from survivors heighten the visibility of connective action by illustrating the systemic nature of
sexual violence and deconstructing the misconception that sexual violence is a result of
individual women making bad decisions that compromised their safety. Narrative testimonials
operate through what Bennett and Segerberg called “the logic of connective action”, where civic
action is motivated by personal hopes, grievances, or attempts at self-validation, rather than a
strategy established by a formal political organization—
“Participation [in connective action] becomes self-motivating, as personally
expressive content is shared with and recognized by others who, in turn, repeat these
networked sharing activities. Action networks characterized by this logic may scale up
rapidly through the combination of easily spreadable personal action frames and digital
technology enabling such communication” (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013, loc. 172).
The tweets that I coded as ‘narrative testimonials’ were also humorous and satirical in
nature, but they possessed a tone that was a shade darker than the tweets in the ‘satirical advice’
category. Instead of generic ‘safety tips’ about monitoring women’s clothes, behavior, and
movement, the narrative testimonials were more personal in nature, and focused on verbatim
quotations of safety tips from real-life instances of rape culture. Using the hashtag not as a form
of comedic exaggeration, but to provide testimonials of real examples of ‘safety tips’ given to
women in situations of great trauma gave the humor of these tweets an increased sense of
urgency, reiterating the deeply personal nature of these grievances. The spreadability of the
hashtag form made it possible for users to adapt what Bennett and Segerberg call “personal
action frames” to fit the ongoing humorous framework of the #SafetyTipsforLadies movement,
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while also imbuing the stories with an enhanced emotional resonance because of their closer
proximity to reality. The two most re-tweeted examples of narrative testimonials from my
sample were —
Before reporting a sexual assault, carefully consider how it may affect your
attacker’s college athletic career. #safetytipsforladies.
Shoot every man you see. If a man is not a legitimate rapist, his body has a way to
shut gunshot wounds down. #safetytipsforladies.
Both of these tweets are references to actual instances involving sexual assault and rape
culture. The first tweet alludes to the Brock Turner sexual assault case discussed earlier in this
chapter. Much of the outrage around Turner’s court proceedings was caused by what feminist
channels called the news media’s “athlete bias”, which led outlets like CNN, Time, and The
Washington Post to label Turner the “Stanford swimmer” and unnecessarily reference his
achievements as a student athlete at Stanford in articles about his sexual assault of an
unconscious woman (Lopez, 2016). The anger that accompanied Turner’s sentencing and the
media framing of his crimes manifested as a whole corpus of dark humor on Twitter, the hashtag
movement #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence being one example. One user
tweeted news headlines posted by Time magazine and Sports Illustrated, both of which referred
to Turner as the “Stanford swimmer”, and quipped: “Dear @TIME & @SInow, you spelled
‘convicted rapist’ wrong. Brock Turner THE CONVICTED RAPIST, not Stanford Swimmer”.
Another quoted a Time headline which read “Stanford Swimmer Brock Turner Has Been
Released from Jail for Good Behavior” with the comment: “Wow @Time he sounds like a great
guy!” The #SafetyTips tweet which alludes to Turner partakes of the dark humor behind the
many scathing indictments of mainstream media biases as social ramparts of rape culture, and
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further implies that framing rapists in terms of their athletic talent – which would be
compromised by sexual assault charges – protects perpetrators at the expense of survivors.
The second tweet is an ironic reversal of a quote by Republican Congressman Todd Akin,
who stated on national television that sexual assault does not result in pregnancy, because if a
woman has experienced “legitimate rape” then “the female body has ways to try to shut it down”
(Moore, 2012). Akin’s statement revealed how discourses of legitimacy in the context of rape
prevented survivors from speaking out publicly about their experiences. The tweet satirizes this
by implying that a ‘non-legitimate’ rapist would possess a similar ability to protect his body from
gunshot wounds. Tweets which implicated real statements from public figures and media outlets
continued to use cultural acupuncture to redirect conversations around rape culture into a critique
of its perpetrators, but framed them as narrative testimonials arising from a networked feminist
counterpublic. They used humor as discursive activism to expose the patriarchal power dynamics
of rape culture, bringing attention to the fact that the satirical advice was predicated on survivors’
substantive trauma and anger as they navigated media biases that invalidated their experiences
and biologically impossible fabrications endorsed by powerful political figures.
The ‘narrative testimonials’ category also included tweets which used the hashtag to
document non-ironic safety tips that they been given to keep their bodies safe from sexual
violation:
Trying to remember all the ‘helpful hints’ I have been given: Don't wear large
earrings. Rapists look for women whose earrings they can pull...If someone is assaulting
you, yell ‘fire’ rather than ‘rape’ because people will actually do something if there is a
fire. #SafetyTipsForLadies.
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I remember being told by a cop in the 90s not to wear overalls, because rapists
target women in overalls. I had assumed that we were all done having rapes, since I
haven't seen a woman in overalls in about a decade. #SafetyTipsforLadies.
“Carry a condom so you can stop your rapist and persuade him to wear it”, said
by a man at a #UN agency security briefing. #SafetyTipsforLadies.
Narrative testimonials that curate unironic safety tips are a useful frame of reference for
contextualizing the joke in the social structure, because the lack of ironic reversal is, in itself, a
powerful comment on rape culture. Seen alongside the other posts using the same hashtag for
satirical purposes, it might appear at first glance to be humorous by virtue of its sheer absurdity,
but the fact that it is not satirical acts as a grimly humorous reminder of the need for discursive
activism that changes conversations around rape culture.
The last category of tweets in my sample were ‘crossover’ tweets from Indian
Twitter users who used #SafetyTipsforLadies in conjunction with the satirical hashtag
#ShiningIndia to critique Indian political figures for their perpetuation of victim blaming
discourses in the face of the infamous ‘Nirbhaya’ rape case of December 2012—
BJP MLA, UP: "Use of mobile phones & free movement of youth cause rape"
#safetytipsforladies #shiningindia.
“Rapes cannot always be stopped, we shouldn’t hype them up so much”: Union
minister #safetytipsforladies #shiningindia.
Today in #rapeculture from India's top lawman: If you can’t stop rape, enjoy it,
says CBI director Ranjit Sinha #SafetyTipsForLadies #shiningindia.
Feminist social media movements have often been criticized for embodying an elite,
white, US-based feminism, which has no resonance with transnational feminisms. However,
Bowman-Smart’s original tweet about #SafetyTipsforLadies went viral in March 2013 during a
period of nationwide outrage in India over the violent gang-rape of a young woman by four men
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inside a public bus in New Delhi. The victim was dubbed nirbhaya (fearless) by the Indian
media, and her eventual death as a result of her injuries triggered an outpouring of statements
from prominent politicians and political parties about ‘safety tips’ that women should follow to
avoid sexual violation. The Bharatiya Janata Party (the political party affiliated with Prime
Minister Narendra Modi) claimed that the rise in sexual violence could be traced to the
emergence of a liberal Western sensibility in India, exemplified by young people wearing jeans
and using mobile phones; the Union Minister suggested that women should consider rape to be
an inevitable part of their existence, and not try to incite national outrage over it; and the director
of the Central Bureau of Investigation recommended that women should lie still and enjoy rape if
all other measures failed (Sengupta, 2020). These statements incited a wave of protest
movements which used humor to satirize Indian public figures for their victim-blaming approach
to sexual assault, including memes, hashtag movements, and a viral Youtube sketch called
“Rape: It’s Your Fault” by the Indian stand-up comedy group All-India Bakchod.
The phrase ‘Shining India’ was coined by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1990s to mark
India’s rapid growth in the information technology sector, and was adopted as the party’s official
slogan during the 2004 general election. However, the hashtag #shiningindia is commonly used
on Twitter as satirical commentary to critique instances of corruption, racial tension, and the
legal injustice, such as the rise of militant Hindutva ideologies and anti-Muslim nationalism
during Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister. A Twitter search for #ShiningIndia during
2013 to 2015 (the same time period as the data sample for #SafetyTipsforLadies) shows that 76
of the first 100 tweets in the ‘top results’ section used the hashtag ironically to comment on the
Nirbhaya rape case, and the attribution of the sexual assault to the victim-blaming discourses of
India’s political elite. When #SafetyTipsforLadies started trending on social media in 2013,
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Indian Twitter users combined it with the satirical hashtag #ShiningIndia, and adapted it to fit the
ongoing national conversation around rape culture. Like the ‘narrative testimonials’ category of
my sample, the humor of the ‘crossover’ tweets arises from the ironic interspersion of the
hashtags #ShiningIndia and #SafetyTipsforLadies to chronicle public statements which neither
showed Indian politicians in a positive light, nor offered women any real respite from the
possibility of sexual assault. The ‘crossover’ tweets also indicated that networked feminist
laughter around rape culture can traverse transnational borders and transition to fit the contours
of cross-cultural discourses. Through its crossover with the satirical hashtag #ShiningIndia,
#SafetyTipsforLadies demonstrated its capacity to bring attention to the global scale and
outreach of rape culture, while at the same time reflecting local feminist inflections.
Therefore, textual analysis of tweets from 2013 to 2015 shows that as a discursive activist
practice, #SafetyTipsforLadies was based on affective solidarities as much as technological
networks of distribution. The networked feminist humor of the movement acknowledges that
rape is an act of social and rhetorical violence as much as it is an act of physical violence, and it
needs to be countered through language by changing the conversations around it. The publics
that form around humorous hashtag movements use laughter as a discursive mechanism to
dissect contemporary social issues and push back against the norms and practices that augment
oppression. Operating through the vast and decentralized networks of commercial social media
platforms, laughter becomes a form of discursive activism through which marginalized publics
can eschew traditional political channels, and take an active role in altering discourses
surrounding issues that affect them. Much like the women’s consciousness-raising groups of the
60s and 70s, the disruption of rape culture through humorous hashtags is a statement of
solidarity, which dismantles notions of sexual violence being caused by individual women’s
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failure to keep themselves safe. The use of humor and cultural acupuncture in
#SafetyTipsforLadies created feminist counterpublics of support through which women validated
their shared frustration, acknowledged the absurdity of the ‘safety tips’ formula, and redirected
the conversation into a revision of the normative interpretations of rape culture.

Countering Sexual Micro-Aggressions through #NoWomanEver
If #SafetyTipsForWomen calls out rape culture’s tendency to hold women responsible for
keeping themselves safe from sexual assault, the second feminist hashtag movement discussed in
this study brings attention to smaller, everyday acts of sexual micro-aggression and their effects
on the normalization of rape culture. The hashtag #NoWomanEver was first used in June 2016
by Twitter user @ImJustCeej to chronicle an incident where she was subjected to sexual micro-
aggression during a pedestrian trip to the pharmacy —"He blocked me from walking to the
register when I was ignoring him in CVS and we been together since that day!
#NoWomanEver”. The hashtag started trending on Twitter, spawning thousands of tweets from
women chronicling experiences being threatened, cat-called, stalked, and subjected to myriad
other forms of harassment that impeded their free and unfettered movement.
The term ‘micro-aggression’ was originally used in critical race theory to describe
how racism is integrated into society, enabling discrimination against African-Americans,
immigrants, and people of color, without committing acts that would be denounced as overly
racist. However, early gender theory scholars drew parallels between micro-aggressive behavior
and the shaping of cultural norms around rape. Herman’s 1979 essay on sexual violence argued
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that rape culture is a continuum of violent actions, ranging from “mini rapes” to violent sexual
attacks, which constituted a form of cultural terrorism designed to keep women in a constant
state of terror. She used the provocative term “mini rapes” to describe a range of sexually micro-
aggressive actions — “the pinch in the crowded bus, the wolf whistle from a passing car, the
stare of a man looking at her bust during a conversation” (Herman, 1979). More recent research
on micro-aggressions attributes these behaviors to underlying societal assumptions about male
sexual aggression and female passivism, and points out how these perceptions shape “social
scripts for how laws are constructed, and for how society reacts to victims of violence” (Phillips,
2016, p. 11). In a 2016 article titled “The problem with how men perceive rape”, writer and
comedian Lux Alptraum explicitly linked sexual micro-aggressions with rape culture. She
defined sexual micro-aggressions as—
“Small acts of boundary-pushing and coercion that might be easy enough to brush
off in isolation, but in aggregate teach women that their bodily autonomy is revocable,
and that violations of their boundaries and sense of safety aren’t just tolerable, but utterly
and completely normal.” (Apltraum, 2016).
Drawing on accounts of uncomfortable sexual encounters recounted to her by friends and
colleagues, Alptraum argued that micro-aggressions are aimed at problematizing the nature of
consent through sexual experiences “that weren’t quite rape, but didn’t feel completely
consensual either”. Micro-aggressions are one of the seminal components of rape culture,
because they normalize a wide range of hypermasculine behaviors, from ostensibly innocuous
ones like sexual overtures and overly-familiar compliments, to incrementally more hostile acts of
catcalling, stalking, and non-consensual physical contact. However, mainstream discourses
around rape culture often normalize micro-aggressive behavior by creating the misconception
that persistent sexual attention from men is desirable to women. Film critic Ann Hornaday
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attributes this to the cult of masculinity heralded by the entertainment industry, especially with
regards to Hollywood romance plotlines involving dashing male womanizers—
“If our cinematic swagger is one of violence, sexual conquest, and macho
swagger…no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the
culture at large” (Hornaday, 2014).
The overwhelmingly negative reactions that Horndaday received for her essay
overlooked the nuance of the argument she was making. She was not suggesting that there was a
direct, quantifiable correlation between the depiction of male hypermasculinity in Hollywood
and rape culture; what she is suggesting instead is that these depictions shape the discursive form
of conversations about consent, sexuality, and rape culture. In this context, the dialogic spaces
where feminist counterpublics discuss their experiences with microaggression become central to
the task of deconstructing and offering alternate perspectives to mainstream assumptions, and the
nebulous, ad hoc counterpublics that form around hashtags offer a rich source of material for
understanding this phenomenon. #NoWomanEver is part of a growing nexus of feminist hashtag
movements that chronicle women’s quotidian experiences with sexual micro-aggressions,
including #NotJustHello, #MasculinitySoFragile, and Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project
(@EverydaySexism), which is a crowdsourced catalogue of daily acts of microaggression from
streets, schools, universities and workplaces. Rentschler (2014) uses the example of the
smartphone app Hollaback!, which offers a set of tools for users to document, map, and respond
to instances of street harassment by using their existing digital media skills of photography and
video recording. She argues that feminist technocultural networks on social media are becoming
increasingly important resources for women to move beyond critiques of rape culture, and take
an active role in intervening in the power structures that are implicit in its creation.
71
#NoWomanEver is part of this wider do-it-yourself feminist attempt to bring attention to the
pervasiveness of sexual violence by recording and transcribing their daily experiences with
violent, micro-aggressive behavior.
Of the 197 tweets in my dataset, 156 were coded in the ‘textual narratives’ category and
41 in the ‘photographic evidence’ category. The tweets in the ‘textual narrative’ category
chronicled a range of micro-aggressive behavior that can be described as “mini rapes”, as
defined by Herman. Technically, none of these actions constituted a physical act of sexual
assault, but they were collectively designed to invoke fear and insecurity in women by teaching
them to view their consent and bodily autonomy as revocable at any time —
He screamed sexual profanities at me from a moving car as I was walking from
the bars, and that's how I met your dad, said #NoWomanEver.
He told me I was cute, I ignored him. He then called me an ugly cow as he
followed me. At last, the man of my dreams found. #NoWomanEver.
I found it so flattering how he catcalled me, then followed me to the train during
my 8 am morning commute that I rewarded him with a date. #NoWomanEver.
He blocked me from getting in my car in the parking lot at night and demanded I
give him my number. I just knew he was the one. #NoWomanEver.
Like #SafetyTipsforLadies, many of the #NoWomanEver tweets followed a formulaic
pattern, where one part of the tweet recounted a public instance of micro-aggression, and the
other uses ironic reversal to express an exaggerated pretense of joy (“the man of my dreams was
found”, “I just knew he was the one”, etc). The wide range of behaviors documented through the
hashtag – from screaming sexual profanities to verbal abuse, cat-calling, and physically blocking
access to a means of escape – are emblematic of the many different forms in which “mini rapes”
can manifest, but the ritualistic refrain of “said no woman ever” repeatedly stresses the point that
72
all of these behaviors are perceived as undesirable and threatening for women. Through the
formulaic structure of these narratives, the hashtag became as an easily customizable storytelling
prompt, encouraging hundreds of women to chronicle their experiences with unwanted sexual
attention and how it left them feeling vulnerable and unsafe. The hashtag’s “narrative logic”
(Clark, 2018) was deployed through its ability to chronicle a wide broad continuum of sexually
predatory behaviors under a common interpretive framework, thereby enabling participants to
contextualize their individual experiences with rape culture within the broader framework of the
joke in the social structure that sanctioned sexual violence against women.
Some tweets used the hashtag to push back against the pernicious misconception that
women who are targets of sexual assault have ‘asked for it’ in some way through their makeup,
clothes, or deportment. The tweets indicate that the hashtag was not just a way to archive
women’s varied experiences in a common digital space – it was a rallying cry that transformed
the jokes into what Krefting calls ‘charged comedy’ by tearing apart the notion that women find
hypermasculine behavior attractive, and repeatedly asserting that ‘no woman ever’ desires to be
the target of aggressive, physically-threatening attention:
When he told me I was “too pretty to be wearing all this makeup”, I immediately
wiped it all off because I was waiting for him to tell me I should. #NoWomanEver.
As I walked by he said, “Mmm, wear that dress!” This obviously made me want
to take it off & leave it in a pile next to his bed. #NoWomanEver.
“He yelled that he’d fix my bougie attitude so I could learn to appreciate a man,
and now I’m a happy submissive sidepiece.” #NoWomanEver.
For these participants, humor became redirected attention away from the constant
scrutiny of how women dress and behave in public, and accentuated the absurdity of sexually
micro-aggressive behaviors when seen from the perspective of those who experience it on a daily
73
basis. As a mode of addressal to an oppressed counterpublic, the humor of the #NoWomanEver
hashtag helped alleviate some of the vulnerabilities of publicly performing the identity of a
survivor of rape culture in a society where survivors are frequently subjected to doubt and
shame, even by their own personal networks. For a few months in 2014, #NoWomanEver was
used in conjunction with the hashtag #NotJustHello, where women shared stories to support the
claim that men who solicited them on the streets were not just trying to start a conversation with
them. As one crossover tweet put it, “pretty sure a dude screaming "HEY BABY, HEY GIRL,
HEY SEXY" doesn't qualify as striking up a convo. #NoWomanEver #NotJustHello”. The
conjunction of the two hashtags further reinforced the argument that street harassment was not a
harmless form of flirtation – it was always about establishing and confirming power over a
potential victim.
The data also indicates that the #NoWomanEver movement included testimonies from
trans women and transmasculine AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) folks about their experiences
navigating sexual micro-aggressions:
“He said I couldn't possibly be trans because he's attracted to me and now I'm cis
and we're married with 5 kids," said #NoWomanEver.
“Obviously, me coming out to a guy as trans and him killing me is a fair trade”,
said #NoWomanEver.
"Oh, I totally transitioned so guys could threaten me with violence on a daily
basis," said #NoWomanEver.
Hashtag movements which aggregate stories about rape culture from the LGBTQ+
community are essential to heightening visibility around its effects on queer, trans, and non-
binary folks, whose experiences are often misrepresented or missing entirely from mainstream
discourses around sexual violence. A 2016 survey by the National Center for Transgender
74
Equality found that trans women are hypersexualized by society, leading them to believe that
they are individually responsible for sexual violence directed at them (James et al., 2016). The
data indicated that although 47% of transgender folks have been subjected to sexual assault, the
discrimination they face around their identities tends to discourage them from seeking help from
police, hospitals, shelters, and rape crisis centers. A story in the LGBTQ magazine Them claimed
that “rejecting sexual advances from cis men often results in violence for trans women”, and it is
not uncommon for street harassment to escalate into physical violence (Reign, 2018). Violence
against trans women is sanctioned by the American legal system, as evidenced by the fact that 42
American states allow the use of a legal strategy called the ‘trans panic defense’ to justify male
violence against a transgendered individual by claiming that the victim’s act of misgendering had
provoked the assailant into violence.
Western feminism itself has a sordid history of excluding or discriminating openly
against trans women, leading to the coinage of the term ‘trans exclusionary radical feminism’
(TERF) as a way to refer to feminists who deny trans women the right to self-identify as female.
TERF organizations like the Women’s Liberation Front have allied with Christian
fundamentalist groups and right-wing policy makers to rob transgender folks of fundamental
constitutional protections by perpetuating the myth that they pose sexual threats to cis-gendered
women (Peltz, 2019; Wang, 2019). The exclusion of trans women is also evident in protests
against sexual violence in the US, such as the use of anti-trans protest signs and the trans-
exclusionary language of the slogan ‘Pussy Grabs Back’ in the Women’s March of 2016. In an
episode on Rupaul’s podcast What’s the Tee?, actress Rose McGowan – one of the most
prominent voices in the sexual assault lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and a vocal advocate of
the #MeToo movement – claimed that trans women could not relate to “living in this world as a
75
woman” because even if “they felt like a woman on the inside, that’s not developing as a woman,
that’s not growing as a woman, that’s not living in this world as a woman.”
Given the history of trans people’s experiences with rape culture and their exclusion from
certain feminist ideologies, their voices in the #NoWomanEver hashtag movement served two
critical purposes. Firstly, the hashtag enabled trans people to document their own experiences
with sexual microaggression, thereby facilitating what Young (1991) called discursive activism
and bringing increased visibility to an issue which is marginalized from public conversation,
even within feminist circles. As form of participatory spreadable media, the hashtag lent itself to
being adapted to fit a variety of social contexts, even those which might not have been
anticipated by the originator of the hashtag. Secondly, trans people used the language of the
hashtag to articulate varying intersectional claims of womanhood, overturning the joke in the
social structure that defined womanhood as trans-exclusionary and biologically determined. As
Warner (2002) pointed out, a counterpublic is framed through addressal such that “ordinary
people are presumed to not want to be mistaken for the kinds of person who would participate in
this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene”. I have also argued in Chapter 1 that civic
humor can be a way of discursively defining the boundaries of the counterpublic – to understand
the punchline of a joke made by a member of a marginalized group, you have to empathize with,
or share the conditions of oppression. Therefore, when trans people used the humor of
#NoWomanEver to tell their own stories, they were claiming the right to participate in the online
feminist counterpublic, and affirming that they shared experiences of gender-based oppression
and violence, despite the ideologies perpetuated by trans-exclusionary feminist discourse. The
logic of connective action transformed their personal narratives into a collective struggle against
76
rape culture, while also affirming the validity of their unique experiences under the banner of
#NoWomanEver. As one participant who identified as transmasculine AFAB put it—
“I do not invade women’s spaces, but when it comes to #NoWomanEver, I see my
experiences in them. I will not forget the old man telling 17-year old me that I was
welcome to interview him for our open job on my knees in the back room. I will not
forget being 10, 11, 12, 13, wearing a bikini top with my mother and getting catcalled…
My point is, I may be trans and I may be transmasculine, but being AFAB is 19 years of
my history, and I won’t turn my back on it. I won’t invade women’s spaces. That doesn’t
mean I don’t remember what it’s like to be treated as one”.
Although this tweet is not the kind of humorous critique that my study focuses on, the
story that it tells is critical to understanding why transwomen and AFAB folk felt an affective
connection with the #NoWomanEver hashtag movement. The tweet implies that hypermasculine,
micro-aggressive behavior is pervasive in society, and therfore cis-gendered, transfeminine, and
transmasculine users could each discover common ground through experiences of “what it’s like
to be treated as [a woman]”. The acknowledgement of this reality is dark and tragic, but that is
exactly what makes it appropriate for a feminist rape joke about navigating daily life under the
constant threat of sexual violence.
The second category of 41 tweets from my sample depicted users posting photographs of
themselves wearing the clothes they had worn while experiencing cat-calling, stalking, and other
forms of sexual micro-aggressive behavior. The ‘photographic evidence’ category is the smallest
one in my entire dataset, but these tweets warranted a unique mode of analysis because this was
the only category to supplement textual jokes with personal photos. Participants uploaded photos
of themselves featuring the clothes that they had been wearing when they experienced cat-calling
and other forms of sexual solicitation:
77
LOL at when people say catcalling only happens when women are showing skin,
or wearing tight-fitting clothes. I just got catcalled walking home from Tesco wearing
this. #NoWomanEver.
Love that people still think street harassment has anything to do with what women
are wearing. Today I was harassed on the train wearing THIS. #NoWomanEver.
A guy tried to stop me tonight because he liked my legs in this outfit, so
obviously I stayed with him and will do for the rest of my life. #NoWomanEver.
In her description of ‘response-ability’, or the networked feminist capacity to respond
directly to rape culture, Rentschler (2014) argues that these responses “transform notions of
witnessing, moving from conceptions of witnessing as a sensory-based act of seeing or hearing
to the ability to record and distribute audio-visual evidence of rape culture and its
interruptability”. She uses the example of the app Hollaback!, which utilizes the affordances of
mobile and social media to record instances of street harassment and share the stories and GPS
locations of the aggressors with the community of users. Feminist art projects premised on
displaying the actual clothes worn by survivors during their sexual assault are a powerful
rhetorical subversion of rape culture myths which assign blame to the survivor for inviting
deviant behavior by wearing sexually suggestive clothing. One powerful example of this is the
‘What Were Your Wearing’ art installation curated by Dr. Mary A. Wyandt-Hiebert of the
University of Arkansas and Jen Brockman at the University of Kansas. The installation was
aimed at promoting awareness about sexual violence and the dangers of victim blaming by
collating visual representations of clothing worn by survivors during their sexual assault.
Ranging from swimsuits and cocktail dresses to football jerseys, army ASUs, and plaid pajamas,
the exhibit was a powerful rebuttal of the commonly-held myth that women dress provocatively
as an invitation to men to direct hypermasculine, sexually-aggressive behavior towards them.
Social media has also served as a powerful repertoire for crowdsourcing and archiving personal
78
photographs of the clothes worn by survivors when they experienced sexual micro-aggressions.
Examples range from the Tumblr blogs “Got Stared At” and “But What Was She Wearing?” to
Twitter hashtag movements such as #INeverAskedForIt and hidden camera videos used to film
instances of street harassment and distribute them on the internet.
The ’photographic evidence’ category of #NoWomanEver is part of this larger feminist
interventionist project of exposing rape culture through everyday digital tools. Each tweet was
accompanied by a ‘selfie’ (a self-taken photograph shot with either a front-facing smartphone
camera or reflected in a mirror) depicting the participant wearing ordinary, often loose and baggy
clothes, sometimes with scarves, hats, or oversized headphones obscuring their faces. The
accompanying stories reiterated the fact that each of these participants was subjected to sexual
microaggressions, even though they had not been wearing suggestive clothing. Together, civic
humor and photographic evidence created a feminist interventionist project that was equal parts
disruptive art and evolving archive of material evidence. Unlike older modes of culture jamming,
it did not reject the social reach of popular culture. Instead, it mined the lexicon of popular
digital culture – such as the practice of taking selfies of one’s outfit for social media – to disrupt
myths about rape culture, empower survivors to reclaim their agency as recipients of unwanted
sexual attention, and offer a visible network of support to women who might feel isolated by the
shame and trauma of their experiences.
The sampled data from the #NoWomanEver hashtag movement indicates that laughing
about rape culture can be a feminist intervention for survivors, asserting a politics of defiance
which disrupted the trauma of sexual micro-aggressions. The hashtag form aggregated individual
experiences under a shared narrative framework, and encouraged survivors of rape culture to
79
regain agency over their own narratives, away from dominant social frameworks for interpreting
sexual violence. Although each narrative shared under the hashtag was unique, the repeated
patterns of sexual violence documented in the hashtag showed how sexual micro-aggressions
encompassed a wide range of behaviors which could not legally be construed as rape, but which
were calculated to exert dominance through the constant possibility of escalation.
#NoWomanEver also provided an inclusive space for trans folk to share their own current or
former experiences as women navigating rape culture, and bring visibility to an issue which is
typically sidelined by mainstream media. For both women and transmasculine people, the
hashtag became a networked documentation tool against sexual micro-aggressions that moved
beyond a critique of rape culture and into an attempt to expose the pervasiveness of rape culture
as a mechanism of control. Through the use of humor as discursive activism to turn the spotlight
on the behavior of their assailants, the networked feminist counterpublic of #NoWomanEver
held patriarchal power dynamics accountable for the prevalence of sexual violence, and pushed
perpetrators to examine their own predatory behavior.
`

80
Conclusion
The data collected from the two hashtag movements indicates that feminist rape jokes can
be understood as a form of civic humor, as understood by the 4 characteristics outlined in
Chapter 1. Although rape culture and socialized gender roles also affect men and non-binary
genders, survey data from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest
anti-sexual assault non-profit in the United States, indicates that women experience sexual
assault as overwhelmingly higher rates than men, with trans women being at the highest risk of
sexual assault and physical violence (US Transgender Survey, 2015). Therefore, feminist rape
jokes that satirize women’s lived conditions under rape culture fulfil all four characteristics of
civic humor as outlined in Chapter 1. Rape culture marginalizes women by treating their physical
safety as inconsequential, further empowered by public discourses and institutions which treat
women’s safety as their individual concerns. As humor originating from a marginalized group,
the feminist rape jokes disrupted the notion of a rape joke as the public ridicule of a victim of
sexual assault, and turned it into a collective mockery of the norms and practices which allow
rape culture to exist. The “objects of attack” of #SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomenEver were
the practices of victim-blaming and sexual micro-aggressions, which scholars have identified as
the two most visible forms taken by rape culture, and the existence of a clearly identifiable object
of attack made it clear that these jokes were not implicating everyone equally. The charged
comedy of a feminist rape joke arises out of the incongruity between the way sexual violence is
talked about in society, and the way it shapes the lived experiences of people who live under the
threat of assault and violation every day. The jokes did not play into dominant power relations by
making fun of the victims of sexual assault and rape culture; they punched up’ by overturning the
dominant power relations embedded in ‘safety tips’, perceptions of hypermasculinity, and even
81
the notion of rape jokes themselves, thereby robbing them of their symbolic authority and
leaving them looking ridiculous. Finally, the networked civic humor was implemented through
Twitter hashtags, which invited participation not just from cis-gendered, Western feminists, but
also transwomen, AFAB folk, and women fighting rape culture in India. The hashtags brought
these stories together in a digital archive where they can be read as a collective narrative, while
also maintaining the intersectional identities which make the stories unique.
Digital counterpublics formed through hashtags rely on both technological and affective
networks to bring visibility to marginalized narratives, which in turner garner more widespread
media coverage for stories which would otherwise remain untold. The latent capacity of Twitter
propelled the narrative reach and enabled the conversations to reach an indeterminate audience
of internet users who may not have accessed them if they had taken place in more exclusive,
activist spaces. The boundaries of a hashtag conversation are porous in a way that is unique
amongst counterpublics – the public nature of tweets makes it possible for audiences to learn
about women’s experiences with rape culture simply by reading the tweets and following along
with the conversation, without subjecting women to the burden of teaching them about privilege.
They made it possible for feminist allies to join in the laughter sympathetically, even if they
cannot participate fully within the counterpublic where the laughter was intended to occur. In the
age of social media, this porousness gives feminist hashtag movements an inclusiveness that is
often missing from traditional protest organizations, whose exclusionary gatekeeping practices
can be detrimental to participation and further marginalize precarious populations.
Networked humor is a powerful rhetorical tool for online counterpublics, and can be used
in conjunction with the diffusive potential of social media not only to disrupt dominant
82
discourses, but to recirculate the conversation into a critique of exploitative social structures.
While victim blaming and sexual micro-aggressions are prevalent aspects of women’s everyday
lived experience with rape culture, there is a notable lack of inclusive public platforms where
survivors can share their narratives and create affective networks of support. Public discourses
around sexual violence are arguably the most prominent enforcers of rape culture, because they
divert the attention from the perpetrators to the victims, and teach women to think that it is their
actions or deportment which invite unwanted sexual attention, and by monitoring their behavior
they can keep themselves safe. The rhetorical appeal of a feminist rape jokes lies in the fact that
it does not need participants to be shared recipients of any particular cultural texts; the punchline
is easily recognizable to any individual who has experienced victim blaming and sexual micro-
aggressions. Countering these discourses through humor can therefore be read as an act of
feminist resistance which provided women with an expressive outlet for their rage and
frustration, while sharing testimonials, building networks of support, and collectively laughing at
the absurdity of patriarchal power structures.

83
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CHAPTER 3:
Gallows Humor in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Introduction
In 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted for his brutal
murder of 16-year old African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, an Oakland activist named
Alicia Garza published a post on her Facebook profile expressing her sorrow and anger at the
plight of African-Americans in America. Her post concluded with the words – “Black people. I
love you. I love us. Our lives matter”. Later that year, three radical black feminist organizers –
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi – started a social media campaign to resist and
intervene in the violence inflicted on African-American people by the dominant power structures
in America. The Black Lives Matter website describes the movement as “an ideological and
political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted
for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and
our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/). In
March 2015, in the wake of a string of incidents in Baltimore, Fergusson, and State Island,
involving the deaths of African-American men and women at the hands of predominantly-white
police officials, the multi-billion dollar coffee enterprise Starbucks decided to create a publicity
campaign to improve racial relations in America. Titled #RaceTogether, the campaign was meant
to “facilitate a conversation” about race between employees and customers, by having Starbucks
baristas write the phrase “Race Together” on coffee cups (Wahba, 2015). According to Starbucks
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CEO Howard Schultz, an open letter was sent out to all his employees, which included some
conversation starters meant to be displayed on large cards near the cash registers. They included:
“I have ___ friends of a different race”, “In my Facebook stream, ___% are of a different race”,
and “In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ____ times” (Shah,
2015). The campaign was an abject failure, and was pulled from Starbucks shortly thereafter.
However, the issue was picked up by Black Twitter, and channeled into a conversation about
racial profiling and police violence. In response to ‘Race Together’, the hashtag campaign
#NewStarbucksDrinks went viral on Black Twitter, prompting users to invent new beverages,
directly invoking incidents of police brutality, such as “Mocha Money, Mocha Problems”,
“Police Brew-tali-Tea”, and “I Can’t Breve”.
This chapter examines gallows humor in the age of Black Lives Matter as an example of
civic humor and poses the research question: how do Black Twitter counterpublics use gallows
humor to resist mainstream discourses around police violence during the Black Lives Matter
movement? . I use the phrase “age of Black Lives Matter” to define a period approximately
between 2013, after the death of Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman’s acquittal, and 2016, when
mass protests over the deaths of Castille, Sterling, and other victims of police violence took over
the United States. These questions are explored through a visual and semiological critical
discourse analysis of two Black Twitter hashtag movements from the 2010s – #MyNYPD and
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown

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Gallows Humor and Black Laughter
Watkins (1995) traces a trajectory of black humor from slavery to Richard Pryor, where
he argues that black comedy is virtually indistinguishable from a deep societal discomfort with
the idea of the free black body. He describes how white accounts of black laughter in the mid-
1800s demonstrated an almost obsessive discomfort with the “cackling laughter” and open
display of joviality in gatherings of black communities. The discomfort with black laughter
provides an interesting contrast against the widespread popularity of the black minstrel, or the
Sambo figure, in American colonial history. Boskin (1988) writes of Sambo as the epitome of
the lighthearted, merry-faced buffoon, whose sense of humor made him a well-beloved figure in
minstrel shows on stage and in private homes, mostly due to the perceived non-threatening
nature of his comedy—“African-American comedians were accepted as clowns and jesters, but
were expected to avoid satire and social commentary—the comedy of ideas” (Watkins, p. 528).
There is a long tradition of black comedians deriving laughter out of the precarity of
black existence, and using what Scott called the “hidden transcripts” of systematic racism to
create unified counterpublics of their audiences. The phrase “hidden transcripts” refers to the
ideological resistance of oppressed groups – the myths, folklore, songs, jokes, and gossip that
allow them to maintain collective group identities and form in-group identities based on a
common experience of being marginalized. Scholarship on comedy in the Jim Crow era has
posited that jokes about segregation played a crucial role in creating hidden transcripts by
generating laughter which robbed the racial system of legitimation before the legal courts
stepped in with their desegregation efforts (Levine, 1978). Carpio (2008) talks about black
laughter as a “wrested freedom” derived from centuries’ worth of political and cultural
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persecution, and argues that even in the allegedly colorblind society of post-slavery America,
racial stereotypes continue to be used to justify hegemonic ideologies about black people being
lazy, irresponsible and “in violation of core American values” (p. 3). African-American folklore
is saturated with stories about the trickster, who overcomes adversity by outwitting a more
physically imposing opponent. The punchline is generated by what Du Bois (1903) termed a
“double consciousness”, or “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (p.
45). Du Bois understood double consciousness as a “conflicted identity shaped by the need to
participate in parallel yet discontinuous discourses” (Brock, 2020). However, scholarship on
black laughter (Watkins, 1995; Carpio, 2008) has contended double sconsciousness can also be a
crucial aspect of creating humor, because a comedian is trained to view society from multiple
different perspectives, and adopt an attitude similar to “amused contempt and pity” to turn
quotidian life into the subject of laughter. Ellison (1964) makes this connection between laughter
and the double consciousness, by drawing on Du Bois to describe how the social and political
predicament of the black condition profoundly shapes African-American tragicomedy—
“It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a
fluid, ambivalent response to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly
civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in the modern world” (p. 93).
Stories which make the most effective use of gallows humor are ones where characters
are constantly and unnaturally exposed to sudden and violent death, such as soldiers in the field
of battle (Joseph Heller’s Catch-22), Nazi concentration camps (Mel Brooks’ The Producers)
and the nuclear armaments race (Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb). It says much about the political and social climate of the 21
st

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century that in the face of American society’s alleged color-blindness, African-Americans
continue to dominate the list of precarious populations in the United States. In most of the stories
to come out of the era of Black Lives Matter, the victim had committed no actual crime, but had
been racially-profiled by institutional structures including the law, the criminal justice system,
and even the media. The threat of police brutality exposes black people to a constant differential
exposure to violence, and the uncomfortable proximity of death and laughter redirects the
“amused contempt and pity” of double-consciousness towards the creation of a dialogic space of
critique, self-expression, and social reform.

Gallows Humor and Networked Comedy
Research on digitally-mediated comedy in the era of networked media consumption has
argued that streaming services and networked media platforms such as Netflix, Hulu. and
Youtube have fundamentally altered the landscape of consumer viewership, making it possible
for media content to cater to more niche, like-minded audiences instead of trying to appeal to a
universal audience (Chattoo and Feldman, 2020). For African-American comedians, this
translates into the ability to create “socially critical and identity driven humor” (p. 191) that
specifically draws on their experiences with systemic racism. The era of Black Lives Matter
witnessed an explosion of comedy around police violence against African-American people,
much of which was funded by and featured on media streaming platforms. In 2016, Netflix
premiered a web television series called Luke Cage based on the Marvel superhero of the same
name. Although the Marvel character itself dates back to the 1970s, the appearance of a black ex-
convict wearing a hoodie, whose superpower is the ability of his skin to deflect bullets, led media
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outlets including Rolling Stone and Time magazine to hail Luke Cage as the “first Black Lives
Matter superhero” (Shefield, 2016; Dockterman, 2016). Despite the grim, humorless nature of
the show itself, the gallows humor of Luke Cage lies in the fact that the embodiment of black
super-heroism in the era of Black Lives Matter is not the ability to fly, control minds, a secret
identity, or an array of hi-tech gadgetry. As the article in Rolling Stone put it, “[Cage’s] most
exhilarating superpower isn’t even that he’s bulletproof. It’s that he’s a black man who never
needs to hide” (Shefield, 2016). Other Netflix-exclusive television shows that use gallows humor
to engage with Black Lives Matter include the episodes “Chapter V” from Dear White People
and “The Broken Policing System” from Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which delivered
scathing critiques of how institutional racism trained cops to “fear the communities they were
supposed to protect”. In 2018, Hulu ordered a pilot for a comedy series called Woke about the
life and work of Keith Knight. Knight is an artist, and a traveling lecturer, best known for his
lecture series titled “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?”, which uses cartoons to depict
instances of police brutality. These examples indicate that networked viewing practices are
changing the landscape of media viewership, and encouraging comedians to create socially-
conscious comedy that resonates particularly strongly with the histories and experiences of
certain segments of the audience.
Another characteristic of digitally-mediated media content is its potential to make the
walls of a counterpublic more porous, allowing socially-conscious comedy to reach a wider, and
more indeterminate audience through the affordances of connective action. The short duration,
asynchronous viewership, and social media shareability of Youtube allows the content to
circulate indefinitely and reach a much wider viewership than those who had had tuned in to
watch the actual show. For example, the sketch comedy show Key and Peele, created by
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comedians Keegan Kay and Jordan Peele, was originally made for Comedy Central, and
averaged about 1.9 million viewers each week (“TV By the Numbers, 2013). In contrast, the Key
and Peele Youtube channel has a membership of almost 3 million, and their sketches have
between 10 and 20 million views. While Key and Peele frequently explores racial and ethnic
identities through comedy, at least two of their sketches explicitly uses gallows humor to address
police violence and institutionalized racism. One titled “Investigating a Disturbance” is about a
white police officer who is physiologically incapable of not shooting black people. In the
uncomfortable 2.2-minute sketch, he is shown mistaking everyday household objects—a
popsicle, a banana, a stuffed giraffe toy, a coffee cup—in the hands of black peope as lethal
weapons and shoots them down. The sketch is a satirization of the circumstances surrounding the
shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by a police officer because he was playing
with a toy pistol. In the aftermath of his death, it was revealed that the Cleveland police officer
who shot him had a history of violent behavior, and had been deemed unfit for duty (Mai-Duc,
2014). The second is called “Hoodie”, and depicts a black man in a hoodie walking through a
white neighbourhood amidst openly-hostile and fearful reactions. When a police car pulls up
next to him, he flips his hood to reveal a Caucasian face painted on the side of the hoodie. At the
sight of the Caucasian profile, the cop relaxes, gives him a friendly wave, and drives past. After
the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera claimed that the
hoodie that Martin was wearing at the time was as complicit in his death as the shooter. The
sketch satirizes Riviera’s comment about hoodies as a signifier of criminal mentalities, through
the implication that whiteface is the only safe disguise for the precarious black body. Each of
these videos has over 12 million views and 500 comments, indicating that the viewership on
Youtube extends far beyond that offered by Comedy Central.
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A third characteristic of gallows humor in the networked era is its potential for
participatory action. This is embodied by Intelligent Mischief—an Afro-Caribbean activist
initiative based in Boston, who self-identifies as a “creative action design lab” specializing in the
use of humor, digital media, and storytelling to protest police violence. In an interview with
Terry Marshall, the founder of the group, he explained his use of humor as a tactic for protest in
the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal —
“…what is humorous is that when black people are killed – even when they’re
unarmed – they’ll find any little thing to discredit this human being who’s done nothing
wrong against a paramilitary force. Trayvon tragically is almost the perfect victim. Even
when we’re presented with someone who’s so innocent, you could discredit them.
There’s no other way to go but to be absurdist. The reality that we’re living in is absurdist
when it comes to Black people’s lives. When reality gets absurd, it’s time to get surreal”
(Sengupta, 2019).
Drawing on Max Brook’s humorous Zombie Survival Guide about survival tips for
humans during a fictionalized zombie attack, Marshall developed a satirical resource called The
Black Body Survival Guide, based on the idea that like zombies, black bodies were deemed so
dangerous, that they needed to be eliminated at sight. The Guide is a multimedia project which
crowdsourced tips for the survival of the black body in a system which condoned
institutionalized racism, and compiled them into a multimedia participatory toolbox. The Guide
comprises a collaborative book, a performance art piece, printable artefacts, hoodies, and other
tools which can be used to “validate how absurd racism in America is to black folks” (Esema,
2015). One of the most popular artefacts of the Guide is a printable ‘Black Body Survival Card’
which lists the names of white allies who have volunteered to be responsible for the health and
well-being of the carrier of the survival card, and have requested to be notified before any

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“negative interaction” is carried out against the card-holder. The artefact (Figure 1) literalizes
the act of ‘pulling out the race card’—a
derogatory phrase used to imply that a
person of colour is making false allegations
of racism to gain some sort of tactical
advantage. As an actual card which can be
pulled out every time an African-American
life is under threat, the joke uses gallows humor to highlight how blackness is inevitably
perceived as a threat to safety and order, while the physical appearance of whiteness provides
easier access to public spaces. It points to the joke in the social structure where the government
provides insufficient protection for the lives of black people, which leads to the onus of
responsibility falling on individual white ‘saviours’. But most importantly, the template of the
card, with the Caucasian ally listed as a ‘co-signer’ of the vulnerable black body, instantly elicits
uncomfortable associations with ownership and slavery. One of the most popular arguments used
by proponents of the slave trade was that indigenous African society was savage and uncivilized,
and that “negroes in a well-regulated plantation, under the care of a kind master” had safer and
more enjoyable lives, than they would have in their own “despotic governments” (Sergent,
1778). The fact that more than 150 years after the official abolition of slavery, African-
Americans continue to need white co-signers to protect them from harm raises uncomfortable
questions about the ownership and protection of the black body.
These 3 characteristics of digitally-mediated and networked humor – audience
resonation, porousness, and participation – are also evident in humorous hashtags around police
violence that started trending on Twitter during the Black Lives Matter movement. In the next
Figure 1
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sections, I will use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the hashtag movements
#MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and explain how they use gallows humor to critique
discourses around police violence and create counterpublics of support on Black Twitter.

Data and Methods
Black Twitter as an online counterpublic has drawn considerable media attention over the
past decade, as digital media and critical race scholars turned their attention on how African-
Americans were using the social media platform Twitter to create cultural identities and discuss
issues that were not represented on traditional media platforms. Hill (2018) traces the emergence
of counterpublic spaces for oppressed communities from ‘hush harbors’ formed in slave quarters
in antebellum America to black barbershops, bookstores, churches, independent presses, and
even the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, where discourse around race and politics could be
conducted outside the purview of the white gaze. However, scholars have differing opinions
about what exactly Black Twitter is, and how to describe its workings, because of the disruptive,
nebulous nature of Black Twitter as a networked public. Brock (2020) describes Black Twitter as
“an online gathering (not quite a community) of Twitter users who identify as Black and employ
Twitter features to perform Black discourses, share Black cultural commonplaces, and build
social affinities” (Brock, 2020, p. 81). Brock theorizes that Black Twitter is a socio-technical
assemblage that combines black cultural identities with digital practices and cultural discourses
about black everyday life, expressed through the signifying function of the hashtag. He sees the
hashtag as key to the discursive construction of Black Twitter, because it is the “the combination
of social affinities, network participation, and content” that enables Black Twitter hashtags to
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appear on the ‘trending topics’ list on Twitter, and bring visibility to issues which are often
sidelined by the mainstream media. Hill (2018) argues that part of the role played by Black
Twitter as a digital counterpublic is to appropriate the technologies of surveillance historically
used to criminalize blackness, and turn them on to the oppressor. By capturing their violent and
traumatic interactions with law enforcement and sharing them through social networks and
interest groups on social media, Black Twitter is using the logic of connective action to create
visually-powerful counternarratives to official discourses around police violence.
Scholarship on Black Twitter has also expressed uncertainty about whether to categorize
Black Twitter as an enclave or a counterpublic. These distinctions were created by Catherine
Squires (2002) as a way of distinguishing between various types of subaltern and alternative
public spaces. She theorized that an enclave is a space for oppressed groups to hide
“counterhegemonic ideas and strategies” outside official sanctions, whereas counterpublics are
more willing to “engage in debate with other publics” to test ideas and strategies. Florini (2019)
expands upon this distinction by arguing that Black Twitter is a combination of an enclave and a
counterpublic, often oscillating between in-group discursive forms and wider debates about race,
identity, and social consciousness. She refers to Black Twitter as “an oscillating networked
public” which migrates between different social networking platforms, engaging with issues and
concerns which are specific to black identity politics, and yet possessing the capacity to create
coalitional alliances with other movements and exercise influence on the mainstream news cycle.
Part of this is due to the ‘trending topics’ feature that Twitter introduced in 2009, which allows
the heavy traffic and user engagement of Black Twitter to push their previously-enclaved
discussions into the ‘trending topics’ section, thereby guaranteeing higher visibility and media
coverage for racially-coded discourses.
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Unlike the two other case-studies discussed in my dissertation, I did not approach the
issue of Black Twitter with a specific list of hashtag movements in mind, because I was
cognizant that my racial and ethnic identity made me an outsider within the counterpublic space
of Black Twitter, especially when it came to discussing the intricate discursive mechanisms of
humor. As Brock (2020) put it, although Black Twitter has facilitated the construction of social
affinities amongst people of color who do not identify as black, “participating in Black Twitter
requires a deep knowledge of Black culture, commonplaces, and digital practices”, because
Black Twitter users intentionally signal their racial and cultural affiliations to a like-minded
audience “in a space where, until recently, racial identity was considered a niche endeavor” (p.
81). The hashtag movements discussed in this study were crowdsourced from Black Twitter
users (or users who follow the hashtags #BlackTwitter and #BlackLivesMatter). I posed the
question “In your opinion, what are some of the funniest hashtags to come out of Black
Twitter?” on my personal Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit accounts. I used the
hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackTwitter to widen the reach of my question on the first 4
social media platforms, and shared my question on the discussion boards for both Black Twitter
(r/BlackTwitter) and Black Lives Matter (r/BlackLivesMatter) on Reddit. I used a simple online
tally counter to keep track of the list of hashtags as well as the number of mentions garnered by
each hashtag in order to determine the hashtags which would be analyzed in this study. The
crowdsourced list originally consisted of 28 humorous Black Twitter hashtags, which ranged
widely in terms of humor, the object of attack, and the timeframe. All hashtags with fewer than
100 mentions were excluded, leaving me with a list of 7 hashtags. I conducted an exploratory
content analysis of each of these 7 hashtags to identify the ones which specifically addressed the
issue of police violence using humor.
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Following the exploratory analysis, #AskRachel, #PaulasBestDishes,
#ThanksGivingClapback, and #GreatestMomentsinBlackTwitterHistory were excluded, because
they did not refer specifically to police violence. The hashtag #GrowingUpBlack was also
excluded because police violence was not a majority issue within the corpus of tweets, although
some users did use the hashtag for that purpose. The 2 hashtags that remained on the list after the
exploratory content analysis were #MyNYPD (118 mentions) and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown (105
mentions). For each of these two hashtags, I used a combination of the Twitter API and a
personal archive of screenshots that I had collected in 2014 to select a dataset of 200 tweets
using the hashtag, cleaned up the data to remove duplicates, and analyzed them on Nvivo using
critical discourse analysis (CDA) to identify emerging themes and patterns.
Van Dijk (2015) describes CDA as a method of qualitative data analysis that focuses on
the ways in which inequalities of power are enacted, legitimated, and resisted through text and
speech. She describes CDA as not only a way of studying how power structures are constituted
through language, but also how discourse structures can “challenge relations of power abuse
(dominance) in society” (p. 467). In this case, CDA was adopted as the methodological
framework for understanding how Black Twitter uses humor to resist the dominant narratives
around death and police violence during the Black Lives Matter movement. Given the digital
affordances of Twitter as a platform for sharing both text and images/memes, this study adopts a
multimodal approach to CDA, which examines not just written text, but also images as resources
for meaning-making.

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Media Hijack of #MYNYPD
The first case-study concerns a Twitter hashtag campaign that was started by the New
York Police Department in order to change public perceptions of police officers at a time when
the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was beginning to gain traction on social media. In May 2014,
during the aftermath of nationwide outrage against the NYPD and a class action lawsuit (Floyd v.
City of New York) against their controversial ‘stop and frisk’ program for unfairly profiling racial
minorities, the NYPD decided to garner a public show of support for their officers by inviting
native New Yorkers to take part in a hashtag campaign called #MyNYPD. The official NYPD
Twitter account @NYPDNews posted a photo of a civilian flanked by two smiling police
officers, and a tweet which read: “Do you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD? Tweet us
and tag it #MyNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook.”
For a few hours after the tweet was posted, the campaign went as planned and users
posted appropriately wholesome photographs of NYPD officers interacting with civilians,
helping senior citizens cross the street, and sharing a moment of camaraderie with foreign
tourists. However, within an hour of the announcement from @NYPDNews, the hashtag
#MyNYPD was hijacked by Twitter users, and channeled into a satirical commentary on the
NYPD’s use of police brutality against civilians. Between 2014 and 2016, more than 150,000
tweets using the #MyNYPD hashtag had been posted on Twitter, leading the hashtag to start
trending on the Twitter homepage, and alerting users across the world to the social realities
imposed by the New York Police Department, effectively disrupting what was meant to be a
campaign to improve the public image of the NYPD in the face of the ‘stop and frisk’ lawsuits
and the rising awareness of Black Lives Matter. Much like Black Twitter’s response to the
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Starbucks #RaceTogether campaign discussed earlier in this chapter, the media hijack of
#MyNYPD indicates that Black Twitter’s use of gallows humor to stage a media hijack of a
corporate or institutional hashtag is a form of civic humor through which a community which is
targeted and profiled by the police on a quotidian basis uses laughter to critique systemic racism
and overturn the joke in the social structure.
Data for this study was collected through a personal archive of screenshots of tweets that
I created in 2014 while the #MyNYPD hashtag was trending on Twitter. My dataset of 200
tweets was collected by manually screenshotting and archiving the tweets as they were being
posted on Twitter over a 10-day period between April 22 and March 2. Although this was an
unsophisticated method of data collection, it gave me access to a wider range of tweets than the
1% of all public tweets that Twitter makes available for free to the Streaming Application
Interface (API). It also helped me narrow down the focus of the #MyNYPD movement to the
immediate responses of Black Twitter, because my data was collected in the most immediate 10-
day period of the backlash. I used tweets that used images and text in conjunction with each
other instead of text-only tweets for this study in order to identify the humorous discursive
mechanisms through which the text was used in ironic contradiction of the text. Critical
discourse analysis of the visual and textual components of the #MyNYPD hashtag movement
indicated that the movement was using civic humor to disrupt the NYPD’s public relations
campaign in 2 major ways: (1) expose police brutality against unarmed civilians; (2) building
transnational coalitional networks with other protest movements. Collectively, these two tactics
created a powerful counter-narrative to the NYPD’s public relations campaign.

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More than 60% (124 of 200 tweets) of my dataset was coded in the first category of
exposing police brutality through civic humor. Of these 124 tweets, 94 were posted by individual
Twitter accounts, and the remaining 30 were posted by the Twitter accounts of political and
activist organizations, most commonly
the Occupy Movement’s official Twitter
account. Analyzing the tweets in this
category indicated that there were two
similar – but distinct – ways in which
these users were using gallows humor to
stage a media hijack of #MyNYPD. Some
users merely used the hashtag #MyNYPD
to post a photograph of themselves
experiencing violent and dehumanizing
treatments at the hands of NYPD police officers (Figure 2). In these photographs, the disconnect
between the use of the appreciative hashtag #MyNYPD and the graphic images showing the
NYPD beating up, restraining, and manhandling unarmed civilians served as a powerful
commentary on the real public perception of the NYPD amongst the African-American
population of New York. Others took the joke a step further, and added ironically-exaggerated
commentary that further emphasized the cognitive dissonance between the hashtag and the
NYPD’s treatment of people of color. In one widely-circulated example, the user posted the
caption “The #NYPD will also help you de-tangle your hair. #MyNYPD” alongside a
photograph of three NYPD officers in riot gear, roughly yanking the hair of a handcuffed
Figure 2
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African-American woman (Figure 3). Another user posted a caption reading “If you can’t walk,
don’t worry. The NYPD will carry you.
How helpful! #MyNYPD”. The
accompanying photograph depicted
NYPD officers restraining and carrying a
struggling black woman. A photograph
depicting armed NYPD officials violently
handcuffing a black man in a hoodie is
captioned “NYPD officers are known worldwide for their timely and hands-on response to
citizen grievances” (Figure 4). A photo of four
NYPD officers carrying the bruised body of an
unconscious black man through the streets is
captioned “Need a lift? The NYPD’s got you!
Free delivery, only at #MyNYPD.
Collectively, these posts stage a media hijack
of the #MyNYPD hashtag and use gallows
humor to juxtapose innocuous (and even
celebratory) language to celebrate the
achievements of the NYPD with visual evidence of the treatment of minorities and people of
color at the hands of New York law enforcement officers.
Media hijacking is an example of what Umberto Eco (1986) called “semiological
guerrilla warfare”, which is premised on the notion that the receiver of a message has a residual
freedom – the freedom to interpret a message in a way that was not intended by the transmitter.
Figure 3
Figure 4
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Writing about culture jamming and the war against commodity culture in the 1990s, Christine
Harold argues that the power of a media hijack lies in its ability to deploy the visibility of mass
media to towards its own downfall – she describes it as a “political jujitsu” that expresses
opposition to a dominant power through a public spectacle which makes it difficult for the target
to respond to, or regain any semblance of its formerly authoritative stance (Harold, 2017).
Harold uses the example of an anti-establishment political pranking organization called the
Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB), which garnered viral media attention for its strategy of throwing
pies in the faces of dominant political figures such as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown,
conservative media personality Ann Coulter, and anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps. According to
Harold, media hijackers like the BBB target public figures at events that are already orchestrated
for television – “the face that gets disseminated throughout the mediascape is not that of an angry
protestor, but the often well-known face of a captain of industry — however, after being pranked
by the BBB, its ability to convey authority and influence is momentarily disenabled” (loc. 117).
Much like the strategy of cultural acupuncture discussed in the previous chapter, media
hijacking is a form of humorous detournement, but there is a critical distinction between the
strategies employed by the networked feminist hashtags and Black Twitter. As the use of cultural
acupuncture in the #SafetyTipsforLadies hashtag movement demonstrated, it was possible for
feminist counterpublics to identify key pressure points in the debates around victim blaming and
recirculate the conversation into a critique of rape culture. However, media hijacking is less
invested in the recirculation of discourse, and more in the notion of undermining the authority of
a dominant rhetoric by staging a public, spectacular hijack of its ability to command.
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Black Twitter’s appropriation of the #MyNYPD hashtag and transforming in into a
graphic demonstration of the NYPD’s reliance on violence and brutality to maintain control is
not cultural acupuncture, but a media hijack of an official discourse aimed at undermining the
sovereign authority of the NYPD as an institutional power structure. Harold explains that the
Biotic Baking Brigade’s tactics were premised on their awareness that the “image-hungry media”
channels would not be able to resist broadcasting images of famous politicians and celebrities
with pie dripping down their faces (loc. 102). Similarly, the media hijack of #MyNYPD was
intended to be a viral media spectacle, contingent on the assumption that the media would not be
able to resist covering a story about the NYPD’s public humiliation on Twitter. The hijack was
successful at grabbing media attention, as evidenced by the fact that several popular news
sources covered the story in terms of a humiliating public relations failure. In their analysis of
the mainstream media coverage of the #MyNYPD movement, Jackson and Welles (2015) found
that the NYPD was overwhelmingly framed as “a hapless victim of its own lack of foresight and
social media literacy” (p. 945). For instance, The New York Times ran the story under the
headline “Lesson for the Police: Be Careful What You Tweet For”, and The Washington Post
reported that the hashtag had engendered “a troll fest of epic proportions” (Phillips, 2014). The
visual nature of the hijack also meant that any news coverage of #MyNYPD (even if it was
unsympathetic) was compelled to use the photographs posted by Black Twitter, thereby bringing
greater reach and visibility to images of graphic police violence against unarmed minorities. The
data also suggests that the viral media attention around the hijack was meant to bring attention to
the issue of police brutality against racial and ethnic minorities, while also creating a counter-
narrative about the NYPD being not just brutal, but also absurdly incompetent government
stooges who had failed to maintain control over their own social media campaign. Black Twitter
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continued to feed into the public ridicule of the NYPD by posting photographs showing officers
violently arresting people of color for suspicion of crimes, or for committing petty crimes, such
as failing to swipe a subway card (Figure 5),
or painting graffiti on public buildings. One
popularly-shared image (Figure 6) showed
NYPD officers between a bank and a
Byzantium Security billboard which read:
“We’re not for everyone. Just the 1% that
matters”. The photograph was captioned
“Sometimes the jokes just write themselves”,
implying that the NYPD was an inherently
corrupt institution which prioritized the interests
of the wealthy 1% over those of working class
populations and people of color.
The second way that civic humor was
used in the #MyNYPD movement was to build
networks of solidarity with other movements
against police brutality in the US and across the world. The second category of tweets in my
dataset (76 of the 200 tweets) were posted by Twitter accounts that are not part of the
counterpublic of Black Twitter, but had ideological resonances with their resistance against
oppression and police brutality. These coalitional alliances included the Twitter pages of the
Occupy Wall Street movement, the global hacktivist organization known as Anonymous, and a
Figure 5
Figure 6
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transnational network of activist movements that calls itself Copwatch, which monitors instances
of police brutality around the world in an attempt to hold the law enforcement system
accountable for its misconduct against civilian protestors. This finding is supported by a study
published in 2015, which used network analysis to map hubs of activity around #MyNYPD and
identify the accounts which served as “crowdsourced elites”, or the most retweeted and
mentioned accounts within the movement. The study found that that unlike the typical Twitter
broadcast networks, the hubs of #MyNYPD were not “mainstream elites” such as media
channels, celebrities, or political institutions. Instead, the hubs were a mixture of activists,
independent media organizations, and citizens unaffiliated with any particular media or political
organization. This is a significant finding, because it indicates how social media counterpublics
can be porous and build coalitional alliances with other oppressed populations to resist dominant
power structures. Although the Occupy Movement had fewer Twitter followers than either
Anonymous or Copwatch, they were the most vocal coalitional supporters of the #MyNYPD
movement, accounting for more than 30% (23 of 76 tweets) of the second category of my
dataset. The tweets posted by the Occupy Movement followed the format of using adding
commentary which sounded appreciative of the NYPD, but used ironic reversal in the form of
photographs using unarmed civilians being brutally roughed up by armed officers.
An important distinction between the tweets posted by Black Twitter and the Occupy
page was that the civilians in the Occupy photographs were not exclusively people of color.
Instead, of focusing on Black Lives Matter, the Occupy movement took on a broader approach to
their critique of police violence by linking it to violent police responses to other movements,
such as Occupy Wall Street and ‘We Are the 99%’. On one hand, this took the focus away from
Black Twitter’s focus on highlighting police brutality against the African-American community,
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and turning it into an ostensibly colorblind political issue that downplayed the role played by
race in institutionalized oppression. Florini (2019) describes how this is a common tactic
employed by supporters of Occupy, who seek to build frameworks of resistance that prioritize
“class above race in social oppression” (p. 83). As one of the few non-humorous tweets in my
dataset pointed out, “I mostly enjoyed #MyNYPD, but am concerned that most of the brutality
captured on camera was of white folks during Occupy. The whole world really was watching
when white folks were getting harassed, beaten and arrested for protesting during Occupy.
#MyNYPD”. However, Florini also argues that Black Twitter occupies a liminal, oscillating
position between an enclave and a counterpublic, enabling it to create “points of articulation” (p.
83) with other networked publics. Occupy’s involvement in #MyNYPD detracted from the issue
of race which was critical to the original media hijack, but is also created points of articulation
with other critiques of institutional power structures, such as the protest against free market
corporate capitalism.
For instance, in one photograph depicting NYPD officers in riot gear standing guard
outside Chase Bank, Occupy tweeted: “#MyNYPD keeping Wall Street safe from You the
public”, thereby aligning the power and corruption of Wall Street with the NYPD’s violence
against working-class minorities. The Occupy Twitter account also used the #MyNYPD hashtag
to issue a wider call to action, such as encouraging their followers to keep the hashtag trending
and post more photographs of the NYPD’s brutality, and offering to feature them on their
Facebook page. In another example, they tweeted a photo reading “If you see something, say
something” – a slogan adopted by the Homeland Security in the post-9/11 era and commonly
seen in public transit spaces such as airports and train stations – but they amended the quote so
that it now read, “If you see something, film something. Film the police. You might save an
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innocent person from going to jail #MyNYPD”. The ironic reversal of the trope of surveillance
reframes the NYPD as not law enforcement officers, but threats to innocent lives, who needed to
be kept under watch by citizen vigilantes. The caption can also be read as an explicit reference to
the role played by mobile and video recording technologies in exposing police violence against
unarmed African-American people. From the 1991 video recording of Rodney King being beaten
up by a police officer to cell phone recordings of the murder of Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid
Transit (BART) officer in 2009, civilian bystanders have played a critical role in dismantling the
discourses around race and police violence in the US by disseminating video footage of police
violence that challenge officers’ own accounts of the circumstances. Although the Occupy
Movement is not explicitly aligned with Black Twitter, and often expresses sentiments which
betray a certain myopia about race and intersectional oppression, tweets from my dataset indicate
that they continued to direct the gallows humor of #MyNYPD at the same object of critique,
exposed the joke in the social structure, and invited participation from their followers, indicating
their coalitional alliances with Black Twitter’s media hijack.
#MyNYPD also inspired a number of transnational spinoff hashtag movements about
police violence in other cities, including #MyLAPD about the Los Angeles Police Department,
#MiPoliciaMexicana about the Mexican police, and #MyELAS about the Hellenic Police
(ELAS), the national police service of Greece. These spinoff hashtag movements continued to
use the gallows humor of Black Twitter’s original media hijack, but imbued it with local political
inflections in order to highlight how police brutality against precarious populations is a rampant
global phenomenon which needs to be addressed as a systemic – and not an isolated – problem.
In one example, the user posted a graphic photograph of a man lying on the ground with his head
bashed in, blood pooling around him. The caption read: “Greek police beating knowledge into a
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university student’s head. #MyELAS #MyNYPD”. However, despite their engagement with
issues of police brutality outside the territory of New York and the NYPD, several of the spinoff
tweets continued to use the #MyNYPD hashtag
(Figure 7) in conjunction with the spinoff hashtag,
emphasizing the porousness of digital counterpublic
spaces, which allowed the discourses around protest
and police violence to permeate beyond the realm of
Black Twitter, and create alliances with other
marginalized populations around the world. There is even evidence that suggests that #MyNYPD
was a precursor of the media hijack as a political tactic, offering a template of replicability for
other media hijacks of official publicity
campaigns after April 2014. Examples include the
#CosbyMeme media hijack, where comedian Bill
Cosby’s official Twitter account posted a
photograph of himself with an invitation to his
followers to transform it into a meme, and share it
using the hashtag #CosbyMeme. However, the
hashtag was hijacked into a Twitter protest
movement highlighting the multiple sexual assault
allegations against Cosby. The #CosbyMeme hashtag even acknowledged its discursive ties with
#MyNYPD through crossover tweets (Figure 8) which linked the two movements together in
their use of networked civic humor to stage public takeovers of official publicity campaigns.
Figure 7
Figure 8
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In her research on political pranking, Harold (2017) argues that a prank is not merely a
mechanism for disruption, but a ‘rhetoric’ which can destabilize the power and authority of
official discourses by attacking them in their own territory. She explains that the power of a
political prank lies in its ease of replicability: “Pranking has the potential to unravel rhetoric’s
continued reliance on individual auteurs, because a prank’s source is often impossible to locate
and, ultimately, irrelevant to its political impacts”. As a ‘rhetoric’ of protest, the #MyNYPD
movement destabilized the power of the New York Police Department to shape the narrative of
their own public perception by attacking them on their own territory and appropriating the very
same hashtag movement that they had created. It is possible that the strategy of media hijacking
also made it difficult for Twitter to play a disciplinary role in the movement by shadow-banning
the hashtag and curtailing its spread, because doing so would automatically shadow-ban the
NYPD’s own Twitter account as well. Finally, the replicability of the movement made it possible
for Black Twitter to build important coalitional alliances with other movements and populations
fighting institutional inequality and corruption across the world, such as the Occupy Movement
in the US and the anti-ELAS movement in Greece. Historically, white-dominated movements
like Occupy have been problematic in their colorblind approach to issues of marginalization,
especially through their incapacity to acknowledge race as being a central component in
discourses around police violence and Black Lives Matter. However, the continued use of
gallows humor in movements like #MyLAPD and #MyELAS linked together instances of police
violence across the world in a pattern that establishes that these were not isolated incidents, but
practices of control enmeshed in corrupt systems of power.
Critical discourse analysis of the hijack of #MyNYPD indicates that it was a successful
media prank which used humor to stage a “political jujitsu” of official discourses around police
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violence, and expose the joke in the social structure by creating a visually-compelling counter-
narrative about systemic racism within the American law enforcement system. A campaign
which was intended to improve the public image of the New York Police Department by
soliciting expressions of approval from their social media following was hijacked into a hashtag
activist movement premised on humor manifested through laughter in the face of a violent and
dehumanizing death. The proximity and cavalier attitude towards death that is implicit in the
humor around #MyNYPD exemplifies the “amused contempt and pity” of black double-
consciousness, but it also suggests that gallows humor in the era of Black Lives Matter is a form
of civic humor. The humor is premised on the institutionalized racism that is perpetuated against
African-Americans, making them a uniquely vulnerable and oppressed population, and creating a
very tangible object of attack in the form of the law enforcement system as an embodiment of the
institutions and structures of oppression which dominate their quotidian existence. The charged
comedy of the #MyNYPD movement arises from the incongruity between how the New York
Police Department wanted to be viewed by the public, and the way its policies and actions
shaped the lived experiences of precarious populations which viewed it as a threat to their safety.
The replicability of the media hijack did not render the ‘source’ of the hijack irrelevant, but it
contributed to its porousness by expanding the boundaries of the counterpublic beyond the
digital realm of Black Twitter, and allowing increased participation from other oppressed
populations from around the world, allowing their voices and narratives to become visible.

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#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: Exposing Media Biases and Respectability Politics
On the afternoon of August 9
th
2014, an unarmed black teenager called Michael Brown
was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, allegedly because he was mistaken for
a suspect who had robbed a convenience store (McLaughlin, 2014). When NBC News posted an
article about his death on their Twitter account, they accompanied it with photograph drawn
from Brown’s personal Facebook account, which depicted a solemn-faced young man wearing
khakis and a red Nike Air tank top, flashing a three-fingered sign at the camera. The photograph
immediately drew criticism on Black Twitter, with users claiming that the photograph was
intentionally selected to support the narrative that Brown was a criminal who had been
apprehended by law-abiding police officers. This argument continued to gather traction as
several influential media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the
Christian Science Monitor, published articles that lent credence to the theory that the hand
gesture that Brown was displaying in the photograph was a “gang sign”, possibly associated with
the Los Angeles street gang known as the Bloods (Bosman and Goode, 2014). The Ferguson
Chief of Police held a press conference where he released surveillance footage from an armed
robbery at a convenience store, claiming that it depicted Brown stealing cigarillos from the shop
owner, and leading media outlets to speculate that the robbery was directly connected to Brown’s
shooting (Roller, 2014). However, he redacted his statement the following day, announcing that
the police officers had approached Brown not because of his involvement in the robbery, but
because Brown and his friend were “walking down the street blocking traffic” (Berman, 2014).
Two days later, the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown started trending on Twitter. It was
conceived by a criminal defense lawyer named C.J. Lawrence (@CJLawrenceEsq) who posted a
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photograph of himself standing in front of Bill Clinton and delivering college graduation speech
with another photograph of himself dressed as Kanye West for Halloween. The juxtaposition of
what was meant to be thought of as a ‘socially deviant’ photograph with a ‘socially respectable’
photograph, combined with the use of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, implicitly asked the
question: “Which picture of me would the media use if I were to become a victim of police
violence?”. The campaign went viral on Black Twitter, and within 48 hours, more than 168,000
tweets with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown had been posted on Twitter (Gross, 2018).
Sociologist Latoya Lee posits that the mainstream media’s discursive construction of the
black body as criminal dates back to the control and surveillance of plantation slaves by ‘slave
patrollers’ who would post runaway notices in local newspapers in order to tempt bounty hunters
and the local populace to be on the lookout for escaped slaves. The popular press of the time
reinforced these notions of criminality and sub-humanity with the ‘For Sale’ and Wanted’
posters displayed in the paper (Lee, 2017). Research on frame theory and the coverage of racial
issues in mainstream journalism have indicated that the media frequently conflates African-
American ethnic identities with depravity and lawlessness. One study showed that in a two-year
sample of news coverage of prominent Los Angeles news organizations, African-Americans
were significantly overrepresented as welfare queens and career criminals, compared to Latinos,
Asians, or other racial minorities (Dixon and Azocar, 2006). Media scholars have termed this
journalistic bias “incognizant racism”, or the idea that journalists perpetuate the systemic
marginalization and stereotyping of people of color (Heider, 2014). Some of the ways in which
incognizant racism manifests in journalistic coverage of African-Americans includes featuring
black folks in stories about violent crimes in numbers that are statistically disproportionate to the
percentage of crimes that are actually committed by them (Gomes and Williams, 1990), using
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mugshots to accompany stories about black men four times more often than commensurate
stories about white men (Gomes, 2016), and overrepresenting black men as aggressors and
perpetrators of violence in local news coverage (Jackson, 2016).
Critical race scholars have also theorized that the collective effects of representing young
black men in photographs which typify them in roles such as “a jewelry-bedecked drug-pusher, a
misogynous pimp, or a vicious thug” (Eschholz, 2003) contribute to “an ongoing narrative of
black violence at the individual level” by labeling the black body as criminal and deviant
(Jackson, 2018). Research has indicated that the mainstream media’s depiction of race can have a
powerful effect on public perceptions and opinions, by exacerbating dehumanizing racial
stereotypes about African-Americans (Holt, 2013). For instance, during the O.J. Simpson murder
trials of 1994, Time magazine posted a photograph of Simpson’s mugshot on their cover, where
they noticeably darkened his skin, leading writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to speculate that Time was
actively championing the correlation between blackness and criminal behavior (Coates, 2016).
As part of my discourse analysis of the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement, I first coded
each of the 200 tweets selected for analysis for visual sociological markers of categories that I
define as ‘social deviance’ and ‘social respectability’ according to the sartorial and kinesic
markers of each photograph. The results indicated that there were 3 main differences between the
two categories. Firstly, the difference between the two categories was emphasized through social
context – every one of the ‘socially deviant’ photographs was taken either in an informal social
context, either with a group of African-American men and women of a similar age, or casual
‘selfies’ taken in poor lighting. However, 67% of the ‘socially respectable’ photographs were
taken in formal or semi-formal gatherings, such as public talks or award ceremonies (Figure 9),
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and the remaining 33% depicted the user surrounded by
older family members, young children, or a white-
passing individual. Secondly, the difference between
‘social deviance’ and ‘social respectability’ was
emphasized through sartorial choices – the ‘deviant’
photographs typically depicted the participant wearing
clothing that is associated with both blackness and lower
socio-economic status (Gross, 2017), such as thick chains,
skull caps, saggy pants, and tank tops. More than 85% of the photographs featured hoodies.
However, in the ‘socially respectable’ photographs, they can be seen wearing clothing that
signifies economic prosperity and social aspiration,
such as business suits, graduation gowns, or army
fatigues. The third difference was expressed through
body language – the ‘deviant’ photographs showed
them slouching, gazing unsmilingly at the camera,
holding a bottle of alcohol, a cigarette, or displaying
hand gestures similar to the ‘gang signs’ that Michael
Brown had been accused of exhibiting (Figure 10).
On the other hand, the ‘respectable’ photographs were more likely to portray bright, smiling
faces and more structured controlled kinesic poses.
The humor of the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement was complex and multi-layered. It
was indicative of what Du Bois called the ‘double-consciousness’ of the African-American
subjectivity, which is perpetually engaged in a precarious balancing act of images of blackness
Figure 9
Figure 10
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produced and maintained by dominantly white narratives alongside those constructed through
personal identity, community, and social experience. On one level, the campaign was an example
of the gallows humor that is characteristic of much of the laughter around Black Lives Matter – a
joke whose punch line was premised on death by police violence, and the media biases which
would use that death to strengthen a public narrative about black criminality. This is embodied in
the language of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where the use of the personal pronoun
‘me’ indicates an acceptance with the notion of being ‘gunned down’ by a law enforcement
officer which is both shocking and grotesquely funny. In other words, the phrasing of the hashtag
itself is a use of civic humor to expose the joke in the social structure where a community has
become so accustomed to the possibility of a violent death at the hands of the judicial
instruments of state, that they can afford to use the possibility of their own death as a social
experiment for exposing media biases.
Participants also used gallows humor to highlight the deliberate performativity of the
markers of ‘social deviance’ – the clothes, gestures, and social contexts through which
mainstream media representations of African-Americans attempts to frame them as being
deserving of the violent and premature termination of their lives. What made the performed
‘social deviance’ darkly humorous is that none of these markers signified deviance or criminality
outside the racial context in which they were depicted. In other words, there is nothing
objectively illegal hoodies and chain necklaces, using hand gestures, or smoking a cigarette.
However, as the NBC news coverage of Michael Brown’s shooting indicated, abstract markers of
‘social deviance’ are used by the mainstream media to frame a narrative about African-American
criminality, which can decrease public sympathy towards the victims in the event of a police
shooting (Jackson, 2016). Some of the posts accompanied the photographs with satirical news
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headlines, indicating that the language of the headlines and the photographs that are selected to
accompany them work in tandem to support the public narrative that deviant black criminals
deserve to be shot down by the police:
“#Iftheygunnedmedown: He had a collection of Tupac CDs in his door panel.
Nose ring found in the console. Potential thug."
“#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: ‘He was overweight anyway...Black men have health
related issues that plague our healthcare system so...thank us later’".
Others provided additional social commentary, highlighting that media biases are
racially-motivated, because news coverage of white criminals does not ascribe performative
signifiers of ‘social deviance’ on to them:
“White privilege is not having to create hashtags like #iftheygunnedmedown”
“#IfTheyGunnedMeDown does not apply to whites. Police wouldn't gun y'all
down, they'd actually protect & serve y'all. They are hunting us…”.

This perspective is supported by empirical research on news framing. Lee uses the
example of a 2015 newspaper article about a burglary in Iowa, which resulted in the arrest of
three white men and four black men for the same crime. The ABC Iowa news station used
mugshots of the four black men with the headline “Coralville police arrest four in burglary
investigation”. Later that day, the same journalist wrote a story about the three white men, except
this time he used a school photograph and the headline “Three University of Iowa wrestlers
arrested; burglary charges pending” (Lee, 2017, p. 5).
The third way in which gallows humor was used in the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown
movement was to critique black respectability politics. Higgenbotham (1993) coined the term
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'politics of respectability' to describe how 19
th
century black Baptist women deliberately adopted
the social and cultural norms of “White America” in order to earn a certain degree of esteem
from society. Respectability politics were rooted in the belief that oppression was directly related
to prevailing stereotypes about black people, but it could be dismantled by rejecting those
stereotypes and embracing a more racially-neutral version of blackness. In “The New Cultural
Politics of Difference”, Cornel West (1990) analyzes why these two contradictory visions of
blackness exert such a powerful force on racial dynamics. West quotes Kobena Mercer, an art
historian and visual culture scholar who argued that white stereotypical notions of blackness can
only be countered by black representations which “reflect or mirror the real Black community,
not simply the negative or depressing representations of it”. Mercer explains that since all forms
of representation are constructed, black representation should make a concerted effort to create
positive representation of African-Americans. However, West challenges his argument by
questioning the notion of ‘a real Black community’ subscribing to Caucasian ideals of black
respectability, given that any ideological construction of a ‘real Black community’ is
automatically “value laden, socially loaded, and ideologically charged” (West, p. 263), resulting
in black people to enact an image of blackness which is perceived as being socially-aspiration,
and therefore non-threatening.
An alternative media narrative that emerged in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s
shooting is emblematic of West’s argument, because it used the fact that Brown had been
enrolled at Vatterott College shortly before his death to incite public sympathy for him. For
instance, one Fox News article was headlined “Remembering Michael Brown: College-Bound
Shooting Victim Called ‘Little Kid in a Big Body’”. A study analyzing mainstream news
coverage of Brown’s death found that even moderate or liberal-leaning news outlets such as
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CNN, The Washington Post, MTV, USA Today and The Huffington Post had used the phrase
“college-bound” to describe Brown in the newspaper coverage of his shooting (Everbach et al.,
2018). Korn (2015) refers to this narrative as “racialized positivity”, or the underlying
implication that if Brown had been a less aspirational figure, his death might not have been quite
so tragic. The critique of respectability politics in the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement is
directed at the fact that the two photographs represent these two interrelated stereotypes — black
people as thugs and miscreants, and black people as upstanding role models. According to
critics, these two contrasting images subscribe to black respectability politics, because it makes
certain visual signifiers of blackness less sympathetic than others. At a conference presentation at
the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in 2015, Jenny Korn critiqued the dual-
photographic structure of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown for covertly implying that the ‘socially
deviant’ form of blackness was more deserving of death than the ‘socially acceptable’ form:
“Does the one on the left deserved to be snuffed out more than the one on the
right? Do either one of them have more value in society’s eyes than the next?...Do you
like the one on the right because it makes you feel safe?”
Willis (2014) brought up another critique of the respectability politics of
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown when she wrote:
“The “respectable” line of thinking…completely side-steps the fact that law
enforcement and the government on some levels could not care less whether an
individual looks like an Al Sharpton or an Antoine Dodson. One can still be profiled,
mistreated and ultimately eliminated if race is at play”.
While these arguments are both valid and important, they do not entirely account for
some of the nuances of the gallows humor of the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement.
Examining the tweets in my dataset through a CDA framework indicated that humor was used to
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critique not just media biases against African-Americans, but also the joke in the social structure
of black respectability politics, by which black people were expected to look and act a certain
way in order to avoid being violently murdered by the police. The critique of respectability
politics is implicit in the gallows humor of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, because the use of the
word ‘me’ implies a wry, tragicomic acceptance of both the ‘deviant’ and ‘respectable’ selves
depicted in the photographs. As a defiant challenge issued to mainstream media institutions to
see which photo they would choose if the user were to become a victim of police violence,
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown shifts the onus of responsibility from the individual black body to
media representations of it.
However, this implicit critique is not the only way in which the movement pushed back
against respectability politics. Across the sample of tweets examined in my study, users also
articulated their critique through a variety of tactics used to curate the ‘socially deviant’ and
‘socially acceptable’ categories of photographs. Some users chose professionally-taken
photographs of successful, affluent black celebrities such as Prince, Jay Z, Morgan Freeman, and
Forest Whittaker to represent the ‘acceptable’
category, while using selfies of themselves in
the ‘deviant category’. These tweets are using
humor to critique black respectability politics,
by which an African-American man can only
be considered socially-acceptable if he is a
successful and famous celebrity. As Figure 11
indicates, there is nothing even performatively deviant about the second photograph – it simply
depicts an ordinary, non-celebrity, black, male figure, who is not considered to be the epitome of
Figure 11
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social aspiration, and is therefore a suitable candidate to be demonized by both the media and the
logic of respectability politics. One user posted a photo of African-American pop musician
Michael Jackson before the onset of vitiligo as the ‘deviant’ photograph, and a photo of Jackson
with vitiligo – a skin condition which significantly lightened the color of his skin – as the
‘acceptable’ photograph.
Another popular tactic involved using photographs of gorillas to depict both the
acceptable and deviant photographs. Analyzing the visual and textual components of the 34
tweets which used gorilla imagery showed that there were two different ways in which images of
gorillas intersected with
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, depending on the
year in which the tweet was posted. Tweets
posted in 2015 included links to (or were
tweeted in response to) news articles about an
incident with Google Photos in 2015, where
users discovered that Google’s photo categorization program had been using facial recognition
algorithms which tagged African-American faces as gorillas (Zhang, 2015). Given the
widespread usage of the gorilla as a racist stereotype of African-Americans, the incident caused
widespread outrage both offline and on social media, and resulted in crossovers with
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Tweets posted in 2016 also used the gorillas in both the ‘acceptable’
and ‘deviant’ categories, but they used #IfTheyGunnedMeDown in conjunction with the hashtag
#BlackGorillaLivesMatter (Figure 12). This was another darkly humorous Black Twitter hashtag
which started in May 2016 after the killing of a male silverback gorilla named Harambe, who
was shot by a worker at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 3-year-old child accidentally climbed into his
Figure 12
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enclosure. After his death, Harambe became the subject of multiple internet memes, one of
which was the hashtag #BlackGorillaLivesMatter, which used the circumstances around
Harambe’s death for a situation for which he was not to blame – that an unsupervised child had
climbed into his enclosure – as an analogy for the killings of the African-Americans at the hands
of law enforcement officers for no fault of their own. For both categories of gorilla imagery, the
conjunction of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, topical news items about race in the media,
and the use of gorillas for both the ‘acceptable’ and ‘deviant’ categories – suggests that this was
another way to use gallows humor to critique black respectability politics. Together, the visual
and textual components of these tweets combine to form a humorous exposure of black
respectability politics, which implies that no matter how ‘socially acceptable’ African-Americans
attempt to be, they will never been seen as fully human and autonomous within the current socio-
political system, because systemic racism is deeply engrained in society, and dominant political
forces have repeatedly asserted that they continue to view black people as a primeval and sub-
human entity, and use state-mandated violence to subdue them at will. The Google Photos
incident indicated that race is algorithmically embedded in code (Noble, 2013) which had not
been trained to distinguish African-American people from gorillas, lending further credence to a
pernicious stereotype. The killing of the gorilla Harambe was used to overturn the racist
stereotype of on its head and emphasize that much like Harambe, black men and women are
perpetually in danger of losing their lives because of circumstances that are outside their control.

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#IfTheyGunnedMeDown was one of the most viral of Black Twitter hashtag movements,
inspiring more than 52,000 tweets and re-tweets within the first week of its appearance. This was
enabled partly by changes to the Twitter algorithm shortly before 2014, which enabled users to
share pictures directly on the Twitter interface without requiring other users to click on a link in
order to view the picture. The ease of viewership also contributed to the porousness of Black
Twitter as a digital counterpublic – even though the specific counter-narratives that were
circulating around the death of Michael Brown were fundamentally linked to Black Twitter as a
space for sharing in-group humor and developing what Hill (2018) calls “pedagogies of
resistance”, the sheer number of Twitter users sharing content using the hashtag made it
impossible for mainstream media channels such as Time magazine, Huffington Post, and even
Buzzfeed to ignore the existence of the hashtag, thereby bringing greater visibility to narratives
they might have otherwise sidelined. However, it is the spreadability of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown
as a template for emulation which really contributed to its porousness and global popularity as a
form of discursive activism. As the examples mentioned above indicate, users were able to play
around with various notions of ‘social acceptance’ and ‘social deviance’ and retrofit the
fundamental template of the hashtag to suit a variety of counternarratives around police violence,
media biases, and respectability politics. The template itself became so popular within Black
Twitter, that it was adopted for other hashtag movements, such as the #AllLionsMatter hashtag
which started trending on Twitter in the wake of the killing of Cecil the Lion by an American big
game hunter. #AllLionsMatter was Black Twitter’s way of critiquing not just the Black Lives
Matter counter-movement ‘All Lives Matter’, but also the global outrage that followed the death
of Cecil the Lion by comparing it satirically to the lack of social outrage and media coverage of
the deaths of African-American people. Some of the most widely-shared memes in the
128
movement adapted the familiar dual-photo
format of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown to fit the
contours of #AllLionsMatter (Figure 13 and
Figure 14), thereby creating a complex meta-
joke. The meta-joke further emphasizes the
nature of Black Twitter as an “oscillating
networked public” (Florini, 2019), which shifts
discursively between an enclave and a
counterpublic. On one hand, the meta-joke
creates points of articulation between
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AllLionsMatter,
but at the same time, the in-joke format and the
absence of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown
created a “hidden transcript” which essentially
rendered the joke incomprehensible to anyone who was not intimately familiar with both of these
movements.
Critical discourse analysis of the tweets in the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown movement
demonstrates that Black Twitter used gallows humor in multiple different ways to resist
mainstream media discourses around Michael Brown’s death, mirroring the multi-faceted nature
of black laughter itself. On one level, humor was used to critique mainstream media biases which
use racially-coded language and photographs to frame news coverage of African-American
victims of police shootings such that their public image is one of a thug, a criminal, and a social
threat, which was rightfully eliminated by law enforcement. However, humor was also used to
Figure 13
Figure 14
129
push back against black respectability politics, which marks certain visual constructs of
blackness as more deserving of police violence than others. The posts indicate that
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown satirized not just media biases against black bodies, but also the
socially-sanctioned ideals of black respectability, which construct templates for emulation that
only serve to strengthen dominant ideologies about ‘respectable blackness’ and ‘deviant
blackness’. The contrast between the two categories reinforces the assumption that the deviant
blackness is the result of individual bad choices, and thereby assign ‘deviant’ black people to the
category of social and physical death. Using gallows humor to expose the performativity of the
‘socially acceptable’ and ‘socially deviant’ binaries asserts that both of these categories are
arbitrarily-determined and harmful to public perceptions of African-American people.

130
Conclusion
In August 2017, a police officer in Georgia was conducting a routine traffic stop, when
his dashboard camera recorded him reassuring a white woman that she had nothing to fear from
police officers, because she was not black – “Remember, we only shoot black people” (Hauser,
2017). Although the police officer possibly meant it in a humorous fashion, the contrast between
his joke about shooting black people and the gallows humor of Black Twitter establishes how the
positionality of the person making the joke is critical to establishing whether or not a joke
qualifies as civic humor. For the police officer in Georgia, firmly-embedded in a position of
privilege from which he is mocking the plight of a racially-oppressed population, the joke creates
an alliance between him and the white woman at the traffic stop. It indicates that jokes can serve
to strengthen dominant power relations at the expense of oppressed publics. In other words, jokes
like these reinforce Lipsitz’s sardonic sentiment that the “mere survival of black people in
America is a miracle” (Lipsitz, 2011). The denigration of the fundamental belief that black lives
matter exposes black people to a form of social death – a complete annihilation of human dignity
that eradicates the black body from spaces of public deliberation. However, sampled data from
the Black Twitter hashtag movements #MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown indicates that
humor can be an effective method to critique institutional power structures, and symbolically
derail their power and authority. Gallows humor about police brutality channels the “amused
contempt and pity” that characterizes the black double-consciousness into the subject of laughter
over the precarity of black lives under conditions of institutionally-sanctioned racism.
Humorous hashtag movements critiquing police violence in the age of Black Lives
Matter use gallows humor as a form of civic humor that arises from a marginalized public, has
131
tangible objects of critique, exposes institutionalized racism as the joke in the social structure,
and invites participation from the counterpublic. The primary objects of critique for these
movements were the law enforcement system and mainstream media respectively, but they also
targeted other social constructs such as black respectability politics and misdirected social media
outrage in order to highlight their effects on the precarity of African-American lives. White
audiences have historically found black laughter to be a source of discomfort, and gallows humor
about laughter in the face of police brutality taps into this discomfort by using police violence as
a way of discursively marking out the space of the counterpublic, separating those who would
never be wanted to be mistaken as a member of that counterpublic from those who cannot help
but be a part of it. At the same time, Florini refers to Black Twitter as an “oscillating networked
public” which can transition between an enclave and a counterpublic depending on the nature of
the discourse. Black Twitter is more clearly aligned with a counterpublic than an enclave as
defined by Squires (1993), because it is structured by the technical affordances of Twitter as a
commercial social media platform with great reach, visibility, and a ‘trending topics’ feature
which can propel popular hashtags into public knowledge and even influence the mainstream
news cycle. This contributes to the porousness of the counterpublic space of Black Twitter,
allowing users to engage with – or even hijack – dominant discourses around police violence and
its effects on African-American people.
The virality of the two hashtag movements examined in this study also broadcast the
“hidden transcripts” of gallows humor to ‘outsiders’ who are not members of the counterpublic
because they do not share the conditions of oppression, but understand the joke because they are
sympathetic to their lived experiences. Moreover, porousness contributed to the spreadability of
the hashtags as a template for emulation, leading to coalitional alliances with other oppressed
132
populations. While these alliances can detract from the issue of race which is fundamental to the
understanding of police violence in the age of Black Lives Matter, they can also further the
critique of the joke in the social structure by pointing to the underlying conditions which sustain
it. However, the data also shows that Black Twitter continues to retain certain characteristics of
an enclave by creating meta-jokes that are only comprehensible to users who are familiar with
the histories and hidden transcripts of previous hashtags. Hashtags like #CosbyMeme and
#AllLionsMatter pay homage to the structural format of the previous hashtag movements
#MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, but they require users to possess an in-group
familiarity with those movements in order to understand the meta-joke. As a networked public
which is nebulous, oscillating, and constantly in flux, Black Twitter makes effective use of civic
humor to further the mockery and symbolic dismantling of institutional power structures and
affect public discourses around police violence.

133
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CHAPTER 4:
Tactical Play and Transmedia Organizing in the #HokKolorob
Movement

Introduction
Between September 2014 and January 2015, all classes at one of the largest public
universities in India came to a staggering halt as a student movement of almost unprecedented
magnitude raged across campus. The Jadavpur University ‘Hok Kolorob’ movement, as it came
to be called, started as a student protest against administrative negligence of a sexual assault
charge, but over the course of the next five months, the university campus became the stage for a
protracted battle between the students and the state officials of West Bengal over the resignation
of Professor Abhijit Chakrabarti, the Vice-Chancellor of Jadapvur University. Although
Jadavpur university has a long history of student activism, the Hok Kolorob movement was
unique both in its deployment of connective action through social media networks and the use of
civic humor to construct a transmedia organizational structure that brought the movement great
attention, both nationally and amongst the Indian diaspora in the UK, the United States, and
Australia.
The events which of the fall semester which led to the Hok Kolorob movement can be
briefly summarized before moving on to the analysis. On August 28
th
2014, a female sophomore
student at the university filed an official complaint against ten male students, accusing them of
having sexually assaulted her in one of the campus dorms. Following her accusation, her father
140
tried to meet with Chakrabarti to launch an official investigation into the matter. However, his
request for a meeting was denied and the student was instructed to stay away from campus while
an internal committee investigated her claims (DNA India, 2014). Following this incident, two
faculty members who were appointed members of the university’s Internal Complaints
Committee (ICC) reportedly showed up at her house and interrogated her extensively about her
clothes, demeanor, and alcohol consumption on the night of the assault. In the light of these
revelations, the Jadavpur University Student Union launched their own investigation into the
matter, which concluded with their demand for the removal of the accused member of the ICC
and increased transparency about the university’s policies regarding the investigation. On
September 10
th
, the students started an indefinite sit-in outside the central administrative building
of Jadavpur University. On September 16
th
, the university’s Executive Council – which included
the registrar and the Vice Chancellor – met to discuss the students’ demands, but refused to
comply with them. In an act of protest known as a gherao, the students encircled the
administrative building, effectively confining the members of the Executive Council within until
they had met their demands and come to a mutually-agreeable solution. However, there was no
documented use of violent force on the part of the students, who repeatedly claimed that they had
been protesting peacefully through slogans and music. At 8 pm that same night, the VC
threatened to summon the police to break up the gherao, but the students refused to back down.
At 2 am on the morning of September 17
th
, a group of policemen and unidentified plain-
clothes ruffians armed with batons entered the university grounds at the behest of the VC, turned
off the electric lines, and stormed across the darkened campus violently beating up the students.
The attack was partially filmed on mobile phone cameras and indicated that the students were
unarmed, panic-stricken, unable to flee from the scene, and entirely unprepared for the
141
onslaught. More than 40 students were injured badly enough to require urgent medical care,
many requiring blood transfusions to recover from their injuries. 36 other students were arrested
and taken to the Lalbazar jail in prison vans. During the upheaval, the VC and the rest of the
executive committee were escorted out of the building by the police. Within hours, news of the
attack had spread to the students, faculty and alumni of Jadavpur University. Video footage of
the police brutality were posted on Facebook and Twitter, along with eyewitness testimonies and
urgent calls for blood donations for the hospitalized students. A Facebook page called ‘Students
against Campus Violence’ was set up to coordinate resources and share updated information
about the hospitalized students. During this process, the hashtag #hokkolorob started trending
across Indian social media networks as a way for students to organize information and express
their outrage over the incident.
The Bengali phrase ‘Hok Kolorob’ can be translated as ‘let there be noise’ or ‘let there be
clamor’. The phrase derives from a popular song written by Bangladeshi singer Shayan
Chowdhury in 2006. Although there are conflicting anecdotes about who first used the phrase in
conjunction with the movement, in the days following the campus attack, ‘Hok Kolorob’ became
the official name of the student movement. In the days following the attack, faculty members
across the university held a silent protest to condemn the VC’s actions, while the student activists
called for a boycott of classes and other university activities, and directed their energies towards
organizing a mohamicchil – a massive protest rally held on a rainy afternoon on September 20th
with attendees ranging anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000, including students and faculty
members from universities across the state of West Bengal (Times of India, 2014). Over the next
four months, Hok Kolorob activists continued a sustained resistance against the university
142
authorities and the state officials of West Bengal, insisting on the resignation of the Vice
Chancellor who had authorized the police attack on the students.
There are two characteristics of the Hok Kolorob movement which made it stand out
amidst West Bengal’s long and storied history of student activism. The first was the extensive
use of social media, especially Facebook, to coordinate the multiple directions adopted by the
movement. The second was the extensive use of civic humor – ranging from memes and
wordplay to elaborate pranks, cyber hacks, and culture jamming – that shaped the narrative of
Hok Kolorob. Together, these two elements contributed to what Sasha Constanza-Chock (2014)
calls the practice of “transmedia organizing”, premised on the use of multiple media platforms to
create a narrative of social transformation that directly solicits participatory media making from
the movement’s base and connects them to concrete opportunities for action. Unlike the case
studies I discussed in earlier chapters, Hok Kolorob was not only a hashtag activist movement. It
used social media in conjunction with more traditional modes of activism, such as protest
marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and rallies. This chapter uses participant observation of the
#hokkolorob hashtag movement on Facebook and transcribed data from semi-structured
interviews with 45 participants to analyze how the intersection of civic humor and networked
participation on social media through the #hokkolorob hashtag structured the transmedia
organization of Hok Kolorob.

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Civic Humor and Tactical Frivolity
The phrase “tactical frivolity” was coined by L.M. Bogad, communications scholar and
co-founder of the activist initiative Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA). CIRCA
worked with trained activists and professional clowns to create a methodology of protest which
Bogad called “rebel clowning”, premised on the idea of training activists to find their ‘inner
clown’ – an almost spiritual state of childlike spontaneity that transformed protest into play.
According to the activist archive Beautiful Trouble, one of the fundamental beliefs of CIRCA
was that “mocking and utterly confusing the enemy can be more powerful than direct
confrontation”. Bogad drew on his experiences with CIRCA to theorize about tactical frivolity,
or the notion of using play to enact a form of civil disobedience intended to “satirize the
dominant political center and expose its unacknowledged exclusionary devices and ritualistic
nature”. Much like Krefting’s notion of charged comedy, the point of tactical frivolity is to
disrupt the dominant discourses in the public sphere and overturn assumptions of fairness,
authority, and dignity. Tactical frivolity combines many of the tactics discussed in earlier
chapters – semiological guerrilla warfare, media hijacking, culture jamming, and spreadability. It
is therefore not so much a specific political tactic with an intended goal as a perspective on
political action that reconfigures it as a communal activity which offers participants the
opportunity to play with and around politics, and resist institutional authority by disrupting its
power to command. Bogad also argues that the point of tactical frivolity is not just to occupy
public spaces, but to open them up, with the hope that “more people will join the movement
when a space for joyful participation is opened up” (Bogad, 2016). In other words, tactical
frivolity can work alongside more traditional modes of activism by providing relief from the
physical and emotional labor of extended civic action. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, “seasoned
144
organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after the ‘revolution’…so movements
have aimed to put the right to party on the table” (2007). Play becomes a necessary resource for
activists to communicate their desires and grievances, build momentum for their movements, and
discourage violence from authorities.
The process of participatory play is also central to creating shared mythologies of
resistance that constitute what Fine (1995) calls the ‘idioculture’ of a social movement, or the set
of “shared, repeated, and meaningful references” that create a cohesive group narrative and lead
to collective identity. One example of this is the Mexican Zapatista movement, which has
historically augmented its strategy of civil resistance with revolutionary music, indigenous
folklore, and manifestos denouncing neoliberalism written in the form of whimsical Platonic
dialogue with a beetle named Durito. In Race Rebels, Kelley describes how the everyday
practices of working-class black and Chicano youth redefined notions of authentic politics,
primarily through their deployment of play and pleasure – “The terrain was often cultural,
centering on identity, dignity, and fun. We tried to turn work into pleasure, to turn our bodies
into instruments of pleasure” (1994). The low barriers of participation offered by play as
resistance counter notions of activism as a laborious and alienating mode of activity. This is an
argument emphasized by Stephen Duncombe, who argues that play allows politics to be
refashioned as not only an affair of reason and rationality, but also desire and fantasy. Drawing
on myriad sources of inspiration, from the architecture of Las Vegas to the virtual freedom of
Grand Theft Auto, he calls for an imaginary restructuring of politics that “understands desire and
speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells
good stories” (Duncombe, 2007).
145

Transmedia Organizing
In his book Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets, Sasha Constanza-Chock theorizes about
the new forms of participatory civic action brought about changes to the media ecology in the
second decade of the 21
st
century. His theory draws on Jenkins’ concept of transmedia
storytelling, or “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across
multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment
experience” (Jenkins, 2007). Transmedia storytelling is premised on building a shared narrative
world with multiple entry points for various segments of the audience, thereby allowing co-
creation and collaboration amongst participants. Jenkins argues that transmedia storytelling is
“the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence”, because it benefits from the new
social structures created by the production and circulation of knowledge in a networked society.
Filmmaker and activist Lina Srivastava has applied the notion of transmedia storytelling to
political action in the networked era by advocating for “transmedia activism” which encourages
the distribution of content on multiple different platforms, and encourages participants to play an
active role in the creation and dissemination of content (Srivastava, 2009). Transmedia activism
has also been used to understand the workings of fan activism, allowing fans to poach themes
and values from the world of touchstone texts and retrofit them to the contours of the social
justice movements which resonate with them (Brough & Shresthova, 2011). Constanza-Chock
adds to this body of research by coining the term “transmedia organizing” to describe a form of
political action that attempts to create a cohesive social movement identity, spanning across
multiple media platforms and providing multiple different points of entry for participants—
146
“Transmedia organizing includes the creation of a narrative of social
transformation across multiple media platforms, involving the movement's base in
participatory media making, and linking attention directly to concrete opportunities for
action… it requires co-creation and collaboration across multiple social movement
groups; it provides roles and actions for movement participants to take on in their daily
life; it is open to participation by the social base of the movement; and it is the key
strategic media form for social movements in the current media ecology.” (Constanza-
Chock, 2007, p. 50).
Examining a wide range of contemporary social movements from migrant workers’
protest against exploitation of labor to DREAM activist networks, Constanza-Chock argues that
transmedia organizing in the networked era is characterized by 3 main strategies – the
reclamation of public space through mass mobilization, the replacement of collective action with
newer and more idealistic social networks, and the ability to maintain a presence through both
online and offline modes of protest. The idea that the new forms of protest engendered by the
internet is a bricolage of old and new media has been theorized by several digital media scholars
who have tried to move beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s cynical dismissal of the weak tie
phenomenon of online activism on one hand, and Clay Shirkey’s techno-optimistic belief that
“the internet runs on love” on the other. Tufekci (2017) pointed out that although social media
platforms are data-mining business enterprises which can create serious risks for activists by
monitoring their activities and sharing the information with surveillance apparatuses, he also
discovered that protestors during Arab Spring and the Occupy Movements were using their
digital devices as “integrating screens” to connect with other people and creating a sense of
community and camaraderie which contributed to the mass popularity of these movements.
Tufekci concluded that “digital tools and street protests are part of the same reality” (p. 217) –
although it is commonly accepted that social media cannot replace offline forms of protest, it can
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greatly augment the idioculture of a movement by creating a counternarrative and a culture that
permeates beyond the physical boundaries of the movement.
Gerbaudo (2012) refers to this hybrid form of protest as the intersection of “tweets and
the streets”, or digitally-mediated communication working in tandem with physical gatherings in
public spaces. He argues that the greatest contribution of social media to activism is not the
networked, horizontal, leaderless, protest movements celebrated by Castells and Bennett, but
rather the creation of new choreographies of assembly which entail “the symbolic construction of
a sense of togetherness” allowing protestors to feel like they are a part of something bigger than
themselves, while continuing to root them in a physical sense of place. Gerbaudo sees online
communication tools and platforms such as tweets, Facebook groups, smartphone apps, text
messages, and even web-polling programs like Doodle as creating digitally-mediated forms of
face-to-face communication which ‘choreograph’ social movements by providing protestors with
social scripts to guide their physical assembling in public spaces.

Data and Methods
This study takes a multi-method qualitative analytical method, which includes online
participant observation, semi-structured interviews with the student activists of Jadavpur
University, and textual analysis of Facebook posts using the hashtags #HokKolorob and
#HokDaantKyalano. As an alumnus of Jadavpur University, I was uniquely positioned to be both
an observer and a participant in the movement as it unfolded in 2014. As a participant observer, I
followed social media updates, tracked news articles in the Indian media, shared memes, and
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communicated daily with other members of the JU alumni network in the US. In the summer of
2016, I was awarded a research fellowship by the Annenberg School of Communication at the
University of Southern California, which I used to travel to India and collect data for this study.
Data collection involved 45 semi-structured, interviews with participants in the Hok
Kolorob movement. 34 of the interviewees were current students of Jadavpur University who
were interviewed in-person in an office I rented for the purpose in Kolkata during the summer of
2016. The remaining 11 were JU alumni like myself who were attending graduate school in the
US during the movement, and participated primarily through hashtag activism on social media.
These participants were interviewed using the video conferencing program Skype. The
participants were located through a combination of my personal connections with the JU student
networks, social media groups like ‘Students Against Campus Violence’ and ‘Hok Daant
Kyalano’, and snowball sampling. 4 of my interviewees were creators and/or moderators of
Facebook pages dedicated to sharing information and memes about Hok Kolorob, and 18 of
them had been associated with some degree of student activism through their current or former
membership in the Federation of Arts Students (FAS), the Faculty of Engineering and
Technology Students’ Union (FETSU), or the Student Federation of India (SFI) – three of the
most well-known student electoral bodies on the JU campus. The remaining 23 interviewees had
no prior experience with campus politics or student activism before Hok Kolorob.
Each interview was between 90 and 120 minutes in length, and audio recordings of the
interviews were translated from Hindi and Bengali where necessary and transcribed. In the
interests of protecting the identities of the student activists, all names and identifying information
has been removed from this analysis. The transcribed data was coded and analyzed using the
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qualitative data analysis program Nvivo. The data indicates that there were 3 primary ways in
which civic humor and social media created a transmedia organizational structure for the Hok
Kolorob movement: (1) appropriating and countering official state and university discourses
about the movement; (2) tinkering with the machinery of the university apparatus; and (3)
creating new models of participation. However, laughter was also used as a tool of social control
by the state government of West Bengal, and the following section explores this briefly before
delving into the student activists’ response to it.

#HokKyalano: Laughter as Social Control in the TMC Counter-Rally
While coding my transcribed interviews, the first pattern I noticed was that participants
were overwhelmingly of the belief that the humor of Hok Kolorob was initiated not by the
student activists, but by the state government of West Bengal as a way of policing and
intimidating the students into abandoning the protest. The use of humor as a social corrective
was first theorized by French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose essay titled Laughter: The
Meaning of the Comic argued that the social function of humor was to compel people to become
aware of, and thereby suppress, their vices by confronting them with other people’s mockery of
it. Bergson uses the example of absent-minded individuals, who do not realize the incongruity of
their actions, but are forced to confront them when other people laugh at their social ineptitude
(Bergson, 1900). The use of laughter as social control was evident in many of the tactics used by
the state government and the university administration to subdue the Hok Kolorob movement in
its earliest stages. In 2014, Jadavpur University was the site of a concerted campaign by the
Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) of West Bengal, headed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee,
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to establish more control over the public educational sector. The TMC had come to power in
2011 after thirty years of the Marxist-leaning Communist Party of India, and had adopted a
stance of extreme distrust and suspicion towards autonomous state universities such as Jadavpur,
and their attempts to establish academic freedom in the face of increased state control over
standardized admission tests and university curricula (Chaudhuri, 2019). In the aftermath of the
JU student rally, the TMC adopted a tone which one activist described as “scolding
condescension, escalating rapidly into outright hostility and mockery” towards the Hok Kolorob
movement. TMC officials posted social media diatribes declaring that students had turned
against the VC because of his attempts to ban the illicit use of alcohol and narcotics on campus.
Partha Chatterjee, a prominent leader of the TMC and Education Minister of West Bengal
released an official statement ordering students to cease their agitation and return to classes
before the situation escalated any further—
“We are requesting [the students of JU] to resume the classes and not waste their
academic year by this movement. They have voiced their protest and now they should go
back to their classes” (Sengupta, 2014).
The barely-veiled threat of violence in Chatterjee’s statement manifested into a TMC-led
counter-protest on September 22, where protestors followed the same route taken by the Hok
Kolorob activists, holding signs which read “Hok Gorjon” (Let there be outrage) and “Hok
Kyalano” (Beat them up). The counter-rally’s wordplay on the slogan ‘Hok Kolorob’ in the
TMC counter-rally was one use of humor as social control as described by Bergson. It was meant
to construe a narrative of Hok Kolorob activists as young, wayward, and juvenile children, who
were in need of firm disciplinary measures to straighten out their follies. The wordplay on ‘Hok
Kolorob’ was not lost on the student activists. As one participant pointed out:
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“The slogan [Hok Kyalano] is clearly meant to be ‘witty’ wordplay on Hok
Kolorob, but does the TMC not realize that they are actively condoning police violence
against unarmed 18-year olds on a university campus?”
TMC protestors also turned to social media to mock Hok Kolorob through a Facebook
group dedicated to the TMC counter-protest. A meme that circulated widely on Facebook
featured a photograph of female students dressed in jeans and smoking cigarettes, captioned
“Oshadharon meyeder andolon” (The activism of extraordinary women). This was contrasted
with a photograph of female TMC supporters dressed in traditional Indian garb, captioned
“Shadharon meyeder andolon” (The activism of
ordinary women). The ironic usage of the terms
‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ is characteristic of
the denigrating mockery of TMC’s response to
Hok Kolorob, and the difference between the
sartorial choices of the two groups of female
protestors was used to emphasize their respective
dedications to social justice. The TMC-
sympathetic Bengali newspaper Khobor 365 Din
published a story on Hok Kolorob, where they
used a photograph of Dr. Rimi B. Chatterjee –
feminist activist and Associate Professor in the English Department—captioned “Professor
Punkoo” (Figure 15). The caption was a play on the name ‘Professor Shonku’, an eccentric
character from a popular Bengali science fiction series written by Satyajit Ray, but the meme
used it to denigrate Chatterjee’s ‘punk’ mohawk hairstyle as a symbol of the deplorable anti-
establishment ethos of the university. The use of the hashtag #hokkyalano to accompany these
Figure 15
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memes, and their circulation on a dedicated Facebook page created by supporters of the TMC
indicates that humorous memes were yet another use of humor as social control to justify the
violence perpetuated on the students, under the assumption that not only were their activist
endeavors underlaid with self-serving motives, but they were also lacking in positive mentor
figures in their educational environments.
However, the counter-rally set the stage for its own failure, and several of the student
activists I interviewed pointed to this failure as the inception of Hok Kolorob’s use of humor as a
protest strategy. According to an AVP Ananda news segmented circulated widely on Youtube
and Facebook, the majority of the protesting body did not seem to know what they were
protesting against, and came up with myriad disparate reasons for the march. One group of
protestors said that they did not know what the march was regarding, but they were sure the
organizers had good reasons. Another group of undergraduate students from Behala College
appeared to believe that the march was in support of the students who had been beaten up by the
police: “The police committed a grave injustice when they beat up the students. That is what we
are protesting about”, they said (ABP Ananda, 2014). A TMC insider admitted to the press that
the organizers had failed to find enough supporters to allow their counter-rally to match the
magnitude of the JU protests: “It wasn’t possible to get a large crowd of college students from
the nearby areas, particularly when the majority of them seem to be supporting the JU
students…We had little option but to pick whoever we could find to make up the numbers” (The
Telegraph, September 23). The stories about the failure of the TMC counter-rally went viral on
the JU social media networks resulting in an influx of humor around the failure of the counter-
rally. Quoting a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one participant said, “Compare the chaos of
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the TMC rally with the spirit and the passion of the mohamicchil... it was all sound and fury,
signifying nothing!” Another summarized the response succinctly when she said—
“We couldn’t believe some of the accounts we were hearing. After all the time
they spent mocking us, did they literally recruit people off the streets and hand them signs
without giving them any explanations for their actions? The jokes just wrote themselves
from that point onward.” (emphasis added).
Appropriating and Countering Dominant Discourses
Despite the jocularity around the situation, participants also expressed anger towards the
TMC for condoning the use of violent slogans like “hok kyalano” especially in the light of the
grievous injuries sustained by students on the morning of September 17
th
. For some, the anger
translated into a desire to stage a rhetorical intervention by turning the TMC’s mockery against
their own failure. As one participant put it, “If [the TMC] can organize a counter-rally, what is to
stop us from organizing a counter-counter-rally?” One way of staging this intervention was
through the creation of the hashtag #hokdaantkyalano, which used a verbal sleight of hand to
hijack the TMC’s violence-condoning slogan and rob it of its symbolic authority. In colloquial
Bengali, the word ‘kyalano’ can mean both ‘to hit’ and ‘to display’. Therefore, while ‘hok
kyalano’ can be translated as ‘beat them up, ‘hok daant kyalano’ colloquially means ‘let there be
a display of teeth’, or ‘let there be laughter’. Several participants pointed to the hashtag
#hokdaantkyalano as having created a precedent for using humor as tactical frivolity to turn the
TMC’s own rhetoric of delegitimization against them. According to one participant who was an
elected FAS student representative with a long history of involvement with campus activism:
“Parodies of popular Bengali songs and humorous slogans had been part of the
movement from the very beginning, even as we were staging the sit-ins outside the JU.
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administrative buildings. However, it was more about spontaneous individual expression
than a planned strategy at this point…But after the TMC counter-rally, we realized that
these authority figures, through their own words and actions, were actually providing us
with a lot of ammunition for humor. Memes, caricatures, jokes, and graffiti became a
more effective strategy than organized political action, because it made them look weak
and ridiculous.”.
In other words, the point of the #hokdaantkyalano counter-movement was to take
advantage of the “ammunition” provided by the words and actions of state officials, university
administrators, and other figures of authority, and use humor to make them look ridiculous. The
hashtag #hokdaantkyalano also spawned an eponymous Facebook page, whose description read:
“A response to the page which openly advocates physiKYAL violence. This is a space where
you can take a break, have a laugh, share a few jokes and unwind.” As the bilingual pun on
‘physical’ and ‘kyalano’ indicates, the ‘Hok Daant Kyalano’ (HDK) Facebook page was meant
to disrupt the authority of powerful state officials and university administration by hijacking their
rhetoric of violence and turning it into an occasion for laughter.
One way in which the disruption of authority was enacted through humor was the
rhetorical hijack of the TMC’s use of the word bohiragoto to denigrate the Hok Kolorob
activists. The Bengali word bohiragoto can be translated as ‘outsider’, and it was used by Police
Commissioner Surajit Kar Purakayastha (amongst others) to suggest that Hok Kolorob was not a
student activist movement, but rather a form of civil unrest created by a group of armed
“outsiders”, who had threatened the police officers with violent retribution (Roy, 2014). In other
words, Purakayastha claimed that the police had been compelled to use violent tactics on the
morning of September 17
th
to subdue “outsiders carrying arms” who were trespassing on the
Jadavpur campus. It should be noted that this was not the first instance where a government
official had denigrated a social movement by referring to the activists as outsiders. The CPM
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(Communist Party of India Marxist), who were the ruling party of West Bengal before the TMC
came to power, had made similar use of the term “outsiders” to dismiss protestors after the police
attack on villagers in Nandigram in 2007, and the Singur land acquisition controversy of 2008.
Therefore, when Kar used the word bohiragoto to refer to the JU student activists, he was
deliberately playing into the established rhetoric of state propaganda by seeking to delegitimize
the validity of their claims. This rhetoric was also reflected in the slogans used in the TMC
counter-rally, where the protestors chanted slogans such as “Andoloner gopon shur/bohiragoto-
ey bhorpur (The secret song of revolution is the profusion of outsiders)”, further entrenching the
notion that Hok Kolorob was not a student movement, but an initiative carried out by ‘outsiders’.
However, the Hok Kolorob movement appropriated the term bohiragoto, and refashioned
it into a signifier of underdog solidarity against a more powerful political opponent. I have
argued earlier in this chapter that the humor of the Hok Kolorob movement was integral to its
transmedial organizational structure, allowing activists to channel it through multiple avenues of
participation in both “tweets and the streets”. The rhetorical appropriation of bohiragoto is a
strong example of that, and participants repeatedly stressed how the term had been incorporated
into both offline and online civic action during Hok Kolorob. On Facebook, the hashtag
#bohiragoto was used in conjunction with #hokkolorob and #hokdaantkyalano to share a great
deal of highly creative and visible humorous media making practices. One of the most widely
shared Facebook posts provides a dictionary-style definitional framework for understanding how
civic humor was used to hijack the discourse around Hok Kolorob and the bohiragoto—
“Bohiragoto. n. – type of human (only much cooler).
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Habitat: College Campuses, devastated by state sponsored violence. Rain washed
streets. Or any movement fighting injustice for that matter, and maybe found in prison at
times.
Eating Habit: Will eat anything. However they need cheap cigarettes to survive
(this may vary from bohiragoto to bohiragoto).
Activities: Standing up for what is right. Rushing out, at mid-night, to save their
pals. Being beaten up by goons. Singing. Shouting. Owning the noobs who run the state.
In other words, being awesome.
Note: They may look harmless, but if you see 1 lakh of these approaching, your
petty politics are fucked majorly. It is very hard to identify one, but this species is far
from extinction. They grow in numbers, every time someone thinks they can mess with
them and get away with it.
BE VERY SCARED! VERY!
#bohiragoto #hokkolorob #hokdaantkyalano”.
The appropriated definition of bohiragoto ran the full gamut from casual jocularity (being
awesome, but needing cheap cigarettes to survive) to more targeted defiance of state authorities
through the references to “fighting injustice”, “petty politics” and “the noobs who run the state”.
Several participants echoed the idea that Hok Kolorob refashioned the idea of being an outsider
into a badge of honor: “As Hok Kolorob activists, we did not really have a name for ourselves
until the authorities handed us bohiragoto, but once we claimed it, it was ours. We were proud of
being disruptive, guerrilla outsiders” Another participant described the appropriation of
bohiragoto as a semantic restructuring of the very notion of protest:
“We took the allegation of being an outsider, of not belonging, of being an
illegitimate presence…and turned it into a marker of solidarity. During Hok Kolorob,
bohiragoto came to mean standing up against oppressive forces and for a cause you
believed in. And the memory of this will live on, so that every time the authorities report
an illegitimate presence in a protest movement, the public will read it as a proud presence
in solidarity.”

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The transmedial humor of Hok Kolorob was also evident in the distribution of cross-
platform media, such as printable ID cards (Figure 16) intended to be carried by the student
activists during their marches
and sit-ins. The JU campus
itself became a contested
territory between university
administration and student
protestors, and it was replete
with hand-drawn posters with
slogans such as “Ami gorbito,
ami bohiragoto” (I am proud, I am an outsider). When I questioned participants about the humor
behind the ID cards, I got the sobering response: “We wanted to carry documentation that
included our names, photographs, and blood groups, in case there was another police attack and
students were in urgent need of blood transfusions.” In spite of this grim practicality, the cards
perpetuated the mockery of authority by dubbing the holder a “Bohiragoto/Outsider” and making
the cards “valid till victory”, defined in terms of the resignation of the Vice Chancellor.
A third way in which the term bohiragoto was satirized was through the creation of
multimedia artwork, including posters and grafitti on campus walls and Facebook memes shared
using the #hokkolorob and #bohiragoto hashtags. A popular touchstone text for creating memes
and other derivative artwork was the Belgian comic book series The Adventures of Asterix,
created by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. The series features the shenanigans of “a small
village of indomitable Gauls” as the eponymous warrior Asterix uses a combination of magic
and ingeniousness to withstand the Roman invasion of 50 AD, and its English and Bengali
Figure 16
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translations enjoy an inordinately high popularity in urban West Bengal. Several participants
pointed to one particular meme (Figure 17) as
being particularly popular amongst Hok Kolorob
activists – the meme depicted the map of the
Gaulish village surrounded on four sides by
Roman camps (featured on the first page of every
Asterix comic), but the panel was edited to
change the text of “village of indomitable Gauls”
to “Jadavpur University”, while the four Roman camps were renamed after the four south
Kolkata police stations responsible for the attack of September 17th. The Roman sigil which
dominated the rest of the area on the map as a representation of the bore a pennant which said
“Maa, Mati, Manush” (Mother, Motherland and People), the official slogan of the TMC. As a
touchstone text for meme-creation, this text was a popular choice in the Hok Kolorob movement,
because it was premised on the underdog mythos of a small body of subversives, using wit and
determination to hold its own against a larger, better-armed political body. Therefore the meme
is another example of the proud appropriation of the official discourse around bohiragoto by
aligning Hok Kolorob activists with the smarter, braver, and much-beloved outsider figure, while
casting the TMC and the law enforcement in the roles of arrogant tyrant and discombobulated
goon.
The TMC was not the only target of the humorous disruption of official discourses – the
interview data revealed that two other popular targets were the vernacular newspaper Khobor
365 and Abhijit Chakrabarti, he Vice Chancellor of Jadavpur. When Professor Rimi B.
Chatterjee, the target of the ‘Professor Punkoo’ meme in Khobor 365, she immediately made the
Figure 17
159
meme her Facebook profile picture, flooding the post with laughter and admiring comments from
her students in the JU English department. As one participant put it, “We were so proud of [Dr.
Chatterjee] for the way she turned the TMC meme on its own head [sic].
We told her she should consider introducing a module on The Adventures
of Professor Punkoo in her graduate creative writing class!” Inspired by
Chatterjee’s appropriation of what was meant to be a derogatory meme
mocking both her appearance and her capacity to be a diligent instructor,
one of her former graduate students came up with the idea of refashioning
the Professor Punkoo of the meme into a fierce activist superhero figure,
complete with her infamous mohawk and a canine sidekick (Figure 18).
The superhero refashioning of Professor Punkoo went viral on Facebook within moments of
being posted using the #hokdaantkyalano hashtag, resulting in almost 4000 likes and 700 shares
on Facebook alone in the first week of its appearance.
Transmedial civic humor was also used to criticize the alliance that exists between public
education authorities and law enforcement officers in West Bengal. According to participants,
this alliance became the subject of mockery after a televised interview with NewsX, when
Chakrabarti claimed that the reports of police violence on the night of September 16th had been
grossly exaggerated—according to his version of events, the police had been trying to rescue the
imprisoned administrators from the protestors outside Aurobindo Bhavan and they had merely
pushed some students out of the way while clearing out a corridor for evacuation. He also
claimed that many policemen had been grievously injured by belligerent students during the
rescue mission. At this point in the NewsX interview, the news anchor showed him video footage
of armed policemen viciously kicking the students until they were unconscious and dragging
Figure 18
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them away by their ankles, but Chakrabarti staunchly claimed that it was the students who had
exhibited violent behaviour, and not the police officers who were rescuing him (NewsX, 2015).

He also claimed that he had required urgent medical attention after the trauma, and checked
himself into a hospital soon after. Chakrabarti’s comments echo those made by Police
Commisioner Purakayastha, who claimed—
“Normally police do not enter academic premises on their own unless there is a
request, and in this case, the VC made repeated distress calls saying they were under
threat and wanted to be rescued. Accordingly, police went there and tried to negotiate
with the students...The police were extremely patient and, in fact, they were assaulted,
abused and provoked by the students. As many as 11 of our men received injuries”
(Business Standard, 2014).
The many striking similarities between the two accounts led several participants to
speculate that the exchange between
Purakayastha and Chakrabarti had been
rehearsed, leading to an outpouring of Facebook
memes, several posters plastered on campus
walls, and an offline culture jamming project
titled the ‘To Sir with Love’ campaign. A
widely-shared meme satirizing the alliance
between the VC and the Police Commissioner
also used Asterix the Gaul as a touchstone text,
pointing to the continued popularity of Uderzo and Goscinny’s comic books as a template for
textual poaching. The meme (Figure 19) is in the form of a hand-drawn, 3-panel comic strip
depicting a ‘VC-Goth’ cowering in fear, while an armed ‘Ostrogoth’ bumbles in to save him.
Figure 19
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The text is written in a combination of English, Bengali, and French
1
, and it can be translated as
the following:
“Le VC Goth: Help me, my life is in danger! What are they holding in their hands?
Le Ostro-Goth: We’re coming, Sir! But are they first-years or second-years?”
‘VC-Goth’ is a play on the word ‘Visigoth’, the name of an early Germanic tribe that
flourished in the Roman Empire and is featured prominently in the third volume of the Asterix
series – Asterix and the Goths. Ostrogoths constitute the other major branch of the Germanic
tribe, but ‘ostro’ is also the Bengali word for ‘weapon’, and therefore represents Purakayastha
and the baton-carrying policemen who arrived to rescue the VC from the student gherao. The
final panel reveals Asterix the Gaul, captioned ‘Le Bohira-Goth’ and representing the archetypal
Hok Kolorob activist, carrying a guitar and wearing an expression of complete befuddlement.
The punchline of the joke is both a direct invocation of the bohiragoto discourse and a mockery
of the VC’s reported fear of unarmed student activists. At the same time, the meme ridicules the
JU university administration’s attempt to muster up a show of solidarity with the police and
collectively intimidate a group of unarmed undergraduate students into submission. Although the
example described here is the original iteration of the ‘VC-Goth’ meme, I found several other
variations by searching for #hokkolorob and #hokdaantkyalano on Facebook. As with most
digital memetic artifacts, the text inside the speech bubbles is changed up in the different
iterations of the meme, but the basic premise underlying the alliance between various state
departmental officials – and the activists’ mockery of this alliance— remains consistent.

1
i.e. borrowing the popular use of the French ‘le’ as a substitute for the article ‘the’ from Reddit rage comics. See
Chen (2014) for more details.
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The posters that sprung up on the walls and food canteens of the JU campus buildings
(Figure 20) also used civic humor to counter the official account of the events of September 17
th
,
often by depicting a variety of musical instruments
emblazoned with satirical slogans such as “Danger!
Activists Protesting Peacefully”, “Revel with a Cause”
(a play on the title of the 1955 James Dean film Rebel
Without a Cause), and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
As Figure 21 indicates, the posters were typically rough
and hand-drawn, but they often included the hashtag #hokdaantkyalano in the margins,
indicating that the transmedial humor of the
#HokDaantKyalano hashtag had been incorporated into
offline protest tactics. According to one of the artists, the
posters were meant to mock Chakrabarti’s claim that the
students had been armed and dangerous, when video
footage from September 16
th
show them protesting through humorous slogans and revolutionary
music. Moreover, as the participant put it, the students had sustained far more grievous injuries
than the VC, thereby undermining their claim that the police had intervened non-violently—
“The sight of my friends lying on the ground bloody and bruised shocked me to
the core. Those of us who could still walk were running around frantically, trying to
contact their families, asking for blood donations, and arranging for them to be taken to
the hospital. And we have cellphone footage of the police that proves our claims. When
we heard the VC and the police tell the media that the students had attacked them with
weapons, the lie was so absurd that all we could do was turn it into a giant joke!”
Finally, Hok Kolorob activists pranked Chakrabarti through a postcard campaign called
‘To Sir with Love’. The campaign was created to express their outrage at Chakrabarti’s claim
Figure 20
Figure 21
163
that he had checked himself into the hospital following his ordeal with the student gherao.
Borrowing ironically from the title of E. R. Braithwaite’s novel of the same name, the campaign
involved students writing exaggeratedly heartfelt postcards meant to be delivered to the VC
while he was in the hospital, recovering from his injuries. In the words of a participant who was
also one of the organizers of the campaign, it was a way for the students to “convey our respect
for, and our warmest regards to the educator who was responsible for deliberately endangering
those he is meant to protect”. The postcards were hand-written and much like the posters, often
ended with the hashtag #hokkolorob. Some examples (translated from Bengali to English where
necessary) are included below:
“Beloved VC, bravo for unleashing the police on us in the middle of the night and
getting female students molested. I wish you a speedy recovery from whatever
psychological disorder ails you. #hokkolorob”.
“Dear VC, our demands are clear to you by now, I hope. If not then please ask, do
not imagine things about us like you did on the 16th night. I am sure you’re seriously
unwell, else no sane man would do what you’re doing. So dear, get well soon. But
remember, tofaat shudhu shirdaraaye (the difference is only in the backbone).
#hokkolorob”
“Sir, heard you are not well. I wish you a speedy recovery and hope you GET
WELL SOON. In such troubled times a joke always helps and here’s one to light up your
mood – “Dear VC, apnar jibone chakra-bharti” (Your life is full of troubles. Also a pun
on Chakrabarti) #hokkolorob”.
The ‘To Sir, With Love’ campaign further illustrates the transmedial nature of the humor
of Hok Kolorob, as the jokes and hashtags moved seamlessly from offline to online modes of
protest. Collectively, the creation of the #hokdaantkyalano hashtag, the appropriation of
bohiragoto, and the reactions to the Chakrabarti and Purakayastha’s accounts of the events of
September 17
th
demonstrate how activists used humor to overturn the official discourses around
the Hok Kolorob movement, and expose the joke in the social structure. The hashtag
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#hokkolorob and the humorous sab-tags #hokdaantkyalano and #bohiragoto worked in tandem
with each other to create a transmedial organizational structure for the Hok Kolorob movement.
Activists used #hokKolorob as an information disseminating tool for circulating real-time
photos, videos, and news updates about the movement and a organizing the demonstrations and
marches which constituted the mass takeover of public space that Tufekci (2017) considers to be
essential to the success of a social movement. However, the humorous sub-tags also played a
critical role by constantly disrupting the authority of official discourses and making powerful
public figures appear silly and inefficacious in the face of an organized student movement.

Pranking and Clogging Official Apparatus
Distinguishing between strategies and tactics adopted by various players in a struggle
over power, de Certeau (1984) posits that strategies are employed by dominant political forces,
such as corporations and states. A strategy involves setting up a hegemonic structure, and
circumscribing those who deviate from it. However, he argues that tactics are the purview of
activists and dissidents, who use them to adapt to the environment created by the dominant
powers, and lie in wait, searching for opportunities to “poach upon and whittle away at the
strategic power structure”. The slow, and often grueling process of whittling away at power
structures is what Scott (2002) calls the “weapons of the weak”, or the “individual acts of foot
dragging and resistance” that allow for small steps of protest to succeed in lieu of an outright
social revolution. Examining the Hok Kolorob movement though the participants’ own accounts
of their actions and motives indicates that it incorporated elements of larger social movements
(such as the massive protest rally known as the mohamicchil) as well as smaller, subversive acts
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of foot-dragging that whittled away at the university administration’s posture of authority. One
of the most effective tactics employed by the activists involved a range of humorous pranks,
which had the cumulative effect of clogging the official administrative apparatus of the
university in the fall semester of 2014. Some of the pranks were less participatory than others,
and were primarily aimed at garnering media attention and destabilizing the performative
authority of the university system. One example of such a prank was a cyberattack on the official
website of Jadavpur University, where Chakrabarti’s faculty page was wiped clean of his
publications, achievements, and other faculty information, and replaced with a single message
which read, “I am sorry” (Panjabi, 2014). News of the hack spread widely on Facebook through
the use of the #hokkolorob hashtag, and several students and alumni of the university recounted
it in terms of the comic implications of watching an upper-level administrator with a PhD in
Electrical Engineering struggling to undo the effects of a student hack. As one participant put it:
“We suspected it was a prank, because the VC would never apologize for his
actions in such a public manner. But when the Registrar confirmed that the website had
been hacked, and that the VC and his office was trying in vain to take it down, it made
the whole thing funnier!”
Other participants framed the hack as retribution for Chakrabarti’s complete absence of
remorse about the use of state violence to subdue a group of student activists: “It’s not like he
was going to apologize for his actions anyway, until we made him do it!” Or alternatively: “The
university might not hold him accountable for his actions, but we do.” The logic of connective
action through the Hok Kolorob hashtags allowed the story to become one of the best-loved folk
legends of the movement, spreading virally across student and alumni networks. More
importantly, the use of the collective ‘we’ in many of the student accounts of the hack is
significant – as Christine Harold (2017) has argued, the source of a prank is “often impossible to
166
locate, and ultimately irrelevant to its political impact”. Although the source of the website hack
was never discovered, the repeated use of the pronoun ‘we’ suggests that participants felt
affectively connected to the disruption of authority implicit in the hijack of one of the
“sanctioned venues” of Chakrabarti’s administrative authority – his official faculty page on the
JU website. Therefore, even though the hack was not a participatory endeavor, accounts of its
reception from Hok Kolorob activists suggests that they saw their own frustrations at
Chakrabarti’s lack of accountability represented in the act of forcing an apology out of him, even
if it was only performative. By staking their own representational claims on the anonymous
website hack and sharing it across social media networks with the hashtag #hokkolorob and a
humorous variation of the hashtag titled #hackkolorob, the student activists further clogged the
apparatus of university machinery by making the administration look helpless in the face of the
multi-pronged student resistance that characterized Hok Kolorob.
Other humorous pranks were aimed at pitting the administrative officials against the
combined resistive powers of the students and teaching faculty of Jadavpur University.
According to the results of my data analysis, this was achieved through two main avenues: (1)
the boycott of classes; and (2) the hijack of the official JU convocation. In the following section,
I analyze these two larger pranking projects in more detail, focusing on the transmedial alliances
that they created between teachers and students, along with their role in undermining the
symbolic authority of the university administration by disrupting official proceedings.
Although Hok Kolorob was overwhelmingly characterized as a student movement, the
Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association (JUTA) was largely sympathetic to the demands of
the student activists, and frustrated with the draconian security measures imposed by the
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administration to curb the flow of ‘outsiders’ on campus. Since 2010, Jadavpur had been the site
of a number of security measures put into place by the administration to monitor faculty and
student activities, the most notorious of which was the installation of 16 close-circuit televisions
(CCTVs) as a safety measure against what the administration defined as illicit alcohol and drug
usage and sexual activity on campus property (Panjabi, 2014). Moreover, as Jadavpur Professor
Emiritus Supriya Chaudhuri (2019) argues, the politics of control between state officials and
teaching faculty over TMC’s interference in higher education in West Bengal had led to the party
positioning their own elected officials in direct opposition to the autonomy and educational
freedom that the JU teaching faculty had been trying to negotiate. As Chaudhuri put it—
“…immediately after being voted into power, [the TMC] instituted amendments
to the West Bengal Universities Act drastically reducing the proportion of elected
members on statutory bodies and replacing them by ex officio or government nominees.
This was because it suspected – rightly – that surviving leftists in university posts would
be able to dominate elections. It also imposed a moratorium on selection of new faculty,
appointed interim vice-chancellors of its own choice, and revised regulations so as to
have the final say in the selection of all state university vice chancellors”.
In the context of jamming the official machinery of the Jadavpur administration, this
tension manifested itself through a covert alliance between JUTA and the student body regarding
the boycott of classes following the events of September 17
th
. Interviews with students from the
JU English Department indicated that at least two professors specifically used the affordances of
transmedial organizing to articulate their solidarity with the students. The first of these was Dr.
Rimi B. Chatterjee, whose humorous appropriation of the ‘Professor Punkoo’ meme has been
discussed earlier in this chapter. Chatterjee, who had been teaching Percy Shelley’s revolutionary
poem “Masque of Anarchy” to her undergraduate English classes at the time, used the
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#hokkolorob hashtag to circulate an open letter on Facebook pointing out how the motifs of
revolution were being enacted in real life, outside the classroom—
“Remember that your enemies are Murder, Fraud and Anarchy, as they have been
through the ages. You are writing history. Generations of students in the future will study
you. Do not think you are boycotting classes, because the whole world is your classroom
now. Remember the dragon, remember Hope, and put into practice the wisdom that poets
have treasured up for you through the ages. Long live the humanities, because without
them, we aren't human. I am proud to be your teacher. You have indeed understood what
I taught you in class.”
Chatterjee’s strategic use of her social media networks and the Hok Kolorob hashtags to
bolster more traditional, face-to-face organizational structures is also characteristic of transmedia
organizing. Constanza-Chock (2014) argues that a transmedia organizational structure involves
the construction of “a social movement identity, beyond individual campaign messaging… it
provides roles and actions for movement participants to take on in their daily life” (loc. 146).
Analyzing participants’ responses to reading Chatterjee’s viral Facebook post indicates that they
believe that her post provided the movement with a shared narrative, or what Fine calls the
‘idioculture’ of a social movement at a time when the student activists were facing a
considerable degree of pressure from various authority figures in their life to abandon their
demands and return to classes. One participant stated:
“At times, fighting for Hok Kolorob felt like we were aligned against the rest of
the world. Every single authority figure, from the Education Minister to the university
administration, and even our own parents, was telling us that we were wasting our time,
squandering away our educational opportunities. They were telling us to abandon the
movement and return to classes…but to hear [Professor Chatterjee] publicly declare that
we were making history and making her proud by protesting for our fellow students was
astonishing!”
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Chatterjee’s use of Shelley’s epic poem about non-violent resistance in the face of
overwhelming political odds, whose call for the populace to “rise, like lions after slumber/in
unvanquishable number” has resonated with populist movements ranging from the Tiananmen
Square protests of 1989 to the Arab Springs uprisings and Occupy Movement protests of 2011,
provided the student activists with a shared narrative of resistance, aligning their cause with
historical struggles for justice and autonomy against dominant political forces. Moreover, the
contrast between her post and the injunctions from the administration for students to return to
classes seemed to strike the Hok Kolorob activists as particularly humorous. Across my
interview sample, participants broke into fits of laughter while discussing the Facebook post, and
commented on the “surrealism”, the “bizarre-ness [sic]”, and the “ironic conjunction” of the
public education authorities’ repeated assertions for the students to return to classes with the
statement from a teacher who taught those classes, insisting that that they could fully
comprehend their lessons only by boycotting the classes and participating in the protests.
Another faculty member from the JU English Department who used social media to
encourage students to defy the administration and perpetuate the jamming of the official
university apparatus by boycotting classes was Dr. Abhijit Gupta, Associate Professor of
Literature and Book History. Gupta’s viral Facebook post was created in response to an
announcement from the VC’s office decreeing that all students and faculty members must
possess university ID cards to enter the university premises, which must be produced for
inspection whenever asked. Gupta seemed to object strongly to this measure as a violation of the
university as a space for open conversation and unfettered movement. In a Facebook post shared
virally on the Hok Kolorob social media networks, Gupta posted the following notice—
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“Since I have no desire to show ID to police to enter a university where I have
taught for over 15 years, I will henceforth take my classes on the pavement opposite gate
no. 4...Next class, Monday 29 September 2014, at 12.50…Bring a mat/newspaper if you
don't want to get your clothes dirty. I have long wanted to do this anyway, so I humbly
thank the honorable VC for giving me an opportunity to do so.”
Gupta’s extensive use of sarcasm in his exaggerated thanking of the “honorable VC” was
intended to send out a clear message to the administration that even tenured faculty members
were aligning their sympathies with the student activists, instead of banding together with
university administration. Much like Chatterjee, Gupta tailored his syllabus to reflect the
zeitgeist of the Hok Kolorob-era, introducing discussions on the anti-establishment poetry of
Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, and Curt Bennett into his ‘Modernist Poetry’ classes, and
encouraging students to think of Hok Kolorob in the context of historical fights for social justice.
There were 3 ways in which Gupta’s post used transmedia organizing strategies to strengthen the
idioculture of Hok Kolorob, while creating a model of participation which jammed the workings
of the university administration. Firstly, his use of the #hokkolorob hashtag spread awareness
and recruited participation for an offline performative prank with very low barriers of entry,
which would enable students to continue taking their classes while perpetuating the boycott of
official classes. Secondly, the public nature of the prank, which involved students and teachers
using positioning their bodies on the boundaries of the university campus, sent a very clear
message of non-compliance to the university authorities, while getting around the injunction to
possess ID cards while on campus. Finally, the project opened up the boundaries of Gupta’s
classes, allowing former students, alumni, and students from other universities in West Bengal –
most of whom would not be in possession of valid ID cards, or even be classified as ‘outsiders’
by the administration’s restrictive standards – to voice their support and attend Gupta’s classes.
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The third way in which the alliance between JUTA and the student activists jammed the
university apparatus through tactical frivolity was the disruption of the Convocation of
December 24
th
2014, or the ceremony where graduating students officially received their medals
and diplomas from Dr. Keshari Nath Tripathi, the Chancellor of Jadavpur University and the
Governor of West Bengal. In the weeks leading up to December 24
th
, the students held a number
of general-body meetings to discuss whether they should organize a mass boycott of the
Convocation to protest Tripathi’s presence, given his association with both the TMC and the
university administration. Participants reported varying accounts of the decisions made by the
general-body meetings, and there did not seem to be a general consensus about an official
boycott of the Convocation. Some reports mentioned there being talks of holding a 24-hour
“cultural protest” from 4 pm on December 23
rd
to 4 pm on December 24
th
, where students were
requested to bring music, poetry, and art to the Jadavpur campus, and staging a peaceful
occupation. However, a few weeks before the Convocation was scheduled, the Governor’s office
issued a statement claiming that the university would place a ‘non-attendance’ stamp on the
diploma of every student who participated in the boycott. Participants reported being “horrified”
and “livid” at the news. One participant who was a graduating senior who had been accepted into
a graduate school program in the US stated:
“This was a power move. The administration knew that they were jeopardizing
our futures…we would have to show those documents to future job interviewers and grad
school committees and explain the circumstances surrounding it.”
News of the Governor’s announcement circulated on Facebook, alerting the majority of
the non-graduating student body, and prompting the creation of an official Facebook event titled
“Boycott the JU Convocation”, which asked both current and former students to show their
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solidarity for the Hok Kolorob movement by participating in the 24-hour peaceful takeover of
the Jadavpur campus. The event garnered so many Facebook RSVPs, that it automatically moved
to the Time Out list for ‘Top 10 Events to Do in Kolkata Today’ on December 24
th
– a fact that
only seemed to add to the mass hilarity surrounding the event.
In his discussion of what joyful protest through mass mobilization might look like,
Duncombe (2003) describes it in language that is evocative of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival.
He calls it a “lived imaginary”, or an engaging, ludic form of protest which encourages
protestors to imagine other possible worlds. Bogad (2016) similarly describes “serious play” as a
“breathing, dancing example of what a liberated public space might look like” (loc. 1120). He
argues that the point of tactical play is not to occupy space, but to open up public space for
collective and individual performative protest, encouraging participants to engage in “a do-it-
yourself creativity, generally organized around a certain loose theme”. As Ehrenreich (2007) and
others have argued, the space for tactical play is only a temporary zone of liberation; these
spaces can be dispersed quickly by authoritarian powers. However, they also maintain that the
symbolic reversion of power dynamics that occurs in a space of liberation can dispel fear and
tension, paving the way towards a more celebratory and participatory culture of active defiance.
Accounts of the “cultural protest” that led up to the Convocation Boycott of 2014 bear strong
similarities to what Bogad describes as a “liberated space” as opposed to an “occupied space”.
The night before the convocation, the atmosphere on campus was described as being “playful
and festive”, with plenty of music, slam poetry readings, and humorous sloganeering. According
to one participant—
“The 24-hour cultural protest of December 23
rd
was almost like a mirror-image of
the police attack of September 17
th
. Instead of a dark campus and students panicking and
173
getting beaten up, the atmosphere was triumphant and festive. The campus was brightly
lit with portable lamps…people brought food, blankets, and thermoses of hot tea. In one
corner, you could see artists painting graffiti by the light of their cellphones, in another
was a group of people playing guitars and singing ‘we don’t need no education’
2
.”
The participant’s use of the phrase “mirror-image” is telling, because it aligns with
Bogad’s argument that tactical frivolity is rooted in the free play of the imagination, and the
belief that “another world is possible”. Bogad also mentions that a liberated space where
participants can play with carnivalesque power inversions can only take place when they feel
relatively protected. This was also evident in the cultural protest of December 23
rd
– several
participants reported that more than forty members of JUTA joined in the festivities and kept
watch over the proceedings overnight, possibly to keep the students safe from another police
attack. Moreover, participants who were members of the various student political bodies on
campus – the most prominent of these being the Federation of Arts Students (FAS), the Faculty
of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union (FETSU), and the Student Federation of India
(SFI) – repeatedly asserted that the cultural protest was entirely non-partisan, and devoid of any
interference from a student governing body.
Accounts of the events of the Convocation ceremony of December 24
th
suggest that with
each minor act of defiance, the movement was chipping away at the university administration’s
posture of control and authority. On the morning of the Convocation, several graduating students
of the class of 2014 reported turning up with black badges of protest pinned to their lapels as a
signifier of protest. The valedictorian of the Department of Bengali walked on to the stage and
pointedly declined her gold medal from the Governor, following which at least a hundred more

2
A reference to the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall”
174
students left the dais without accepting their diplomas. Some of the students even organized an
alternate mock-Convocation to celebrate the Hok Kolorob protestors, complete with fake
diplomas (Figure 22) designed to mock the
language and appearance of the official
Jadavpur University graduation certificate.
The mock-diploma was stamped with the
official university logo, but in place of the
university’s motto “To Know is To Grow”
was the phrase “Resignation. No Negotiation”
– a reference to the movement’s central
demand for Chakrabarti’s resignation from the post of Vice-Chancellor, and one of the most
popular slogans used in the Hok Kolorob protest marches. Instead of the Chancellor’s signature,
there was a message from the general student body of JU, thanking the recipient for being part of
#hokkolorob. The document was also adorned with a line of figures with sprigs of marijuana tied
to their heads, and a banner reading “Big Brother is Watching You”—a reference to the TMC’s
unrelenting attempt to discredit the student protestors by insisting that Hok Kolorob was really
all about weed and narcotics use on campus.
Hok Kolorob was characterized by a great deal of creative mischief-making, including a
number of humorous pranks which jammed the workings of the university administration system
and exposed the joke in the social structure. The pranks constitute what de Certeau (1984) and
Scott (2002) describe as “tactics”, or the “individual acts of foot-dragging and resistance” which
can collectively chip away at a dominant political power and undermine its authority. The pranks
also point to the transmedial organizing of the Hok Kolorob movement, with its close integration
Figure 22
175
of social media networks created by the #hokkolorob hashtags with offline protest tactics. The
hashtag created what Gerbaudo (2012) calls new media “choreographies of assembly” – whether
it was being used by faculty members to share their solidarities with the movement, share news
and express communal hilarity about a funny hack, or create social media event pages for
boycotting formal ceremonial events – the hashtag was used to set the stage and script a shared
vocabulary and idioculture of protest before the movement migrated to the streets.

Creating New Models of Participation
The third way in which the Hok Kolorob movement used civic humor was to create
varying pathways of participation. For this stage of my study, I divided up my interview sample
into 3 categories, based on participants’ capacity for civic action. I labelled the first category
‘neophyte activists’, made up of primarily first- or second-year undergraduate students with no
prior experience with activism. Some of the neophytes were upper-classmen or even graduate
students who were familiar with Jadavpur’s history of student political organizing and campus
activism, but they reported no affiliations with any of the student governing bodies, and had not
participated in any previous student movement. The second category was made up of more
experienced activists who were either elected student representatives of FAS, SFI, or FETSU, or
had prior experience with community organizing before Hok Kolorob. The final category
consisted of diasporic alumni, such as myself, who were not physically present in West Bengal
during the movement, and participated primarily through social media activism using the hashtag
#hokkolorob. Participants from each of these categories reported using humor and social media
in a variety of ways, suggesting that humor served as a way for activists in different geographical
176
locations and with varying degrees of prior experience with organized civic action to get
involved with the movement.
The first important result of the analysis was that participants in the ‘neophyte’ and
‘diasporic’ categories expressed significantly higher levels of enthusiasm over the use of humor
as a protest tactic than more experienced activists. For the neophytes, especially when they
happened to be first-year students who had enrolled in the fall of 2014, the hostile battle with
university authorities in their first semester of college had been a source of great fear and stress.
As one participant put it, “We had never dreamt of openly challenging the authorities in high
school. It was simply not an accepted part of Indian culture”. In other words, many of the
younger neophyte activists were recent graduates of the strict Indian educational system, and the
instinct to obey figures of authority such as the Vice-Chancellor and the Education Minister was
strongly-embedded in them. Some of them expressed great discomfort with the idea of joining
protest marches, or even attending the 24-hour cultural protest out of fear of another police
attack. For these participants, sharing memes and jokes online, and reading about Chatterjee and
Gupta’s open defiance of the administrative office played an active role in dispelling the fear and
making them comfortable with the idea of rebelling against figures of authority. Participants also
commented on the low barriers of access provided by the networked media making practices
around Hok Kolorob. One participant noted:
“I attended one general-body meeting, and there were some interesting
conversations, but it went on for 3 hours, and I did not feel invested enough to attend
another one. My parents ordered me to stay away from the protest marches because the
police might be using water cannons
3
. But sharing an Asterix meme on Facebook, or

3
This is an unverified rumor and none of the other activists I interviewed managed to confirm it. It is unclear
whether the participant’s parents had misheard, or had made up the rumor to dissuade her from attending the march.
177
catching up on VC-jokes on the #bohiragoto hashtag was an easy way to stay in touch
with the movement.”
For participants in the ‘diasporic’ category, a majority of whom were attending graduate
school in the US, Ireland, or Australia during the fall semester of 2014, networked humor
afforded similar capacities for participating and showing their solidarities with friends and
former classmates who were participating in the
movement. One tactic that was popular amongst both the
neophytes and the diasporic categories involved changing
their Facebook profile picture to an image with a plain
black background featuring the slogan “V-Chhi” in bold,
white lettering. Like much of the humor around Hok
Kolorob, the slogan (Figure 23) was a bilingual play on
words, replacing the second letter in ‘VC’ with the Bengali
colloquial expression ‘chhi’ – a term of reprobation commonly used to convey mockery or
disgust. In his analysis of young DREAM activists and their transmedial political practices,
Constanza-Chock (2014) also notes the frequent use of changing social media display names or
profile pictures to convey their alliance with a cause or articulate political demands. According
to Constanza-Chock, “these practices, created organically by the students themselves…take
advantage of the changed media ecology to generate collective consciousness, enhance
movement identity, and circulate knowledge of key processes, actions, and events” (loc. 1874).
My research on Hok Kolorob was consistent with this argument, but I discovered additionally
that when neophyte and diasporic participants in my sample were using networked digital
practices such as changing their Facebook profile pictures or sharing memes, they were
Figure 23
178
continuing to rely on humor as a pathway for participation. 92% of the ‘diasphoric’ category and
87% of the ‘neophyte’ category reported tracking the #hokdaantkyalano and #bohiragoto
hashtags much more frequently than the regular #hokkolorob hashtag, indicating that they found
humor an easier pathway to participation than the planning and organizing, most of which was
coordinated using #hokkolorob.
The data also indicated that 75% of the ‘diasphoric’ category and 92% of the ‘neophyte’
category reported that when it came to engaging with and sharing Hok Kolorob-related media on
Facebook, they were more likely so share jokes, memes, and humorous artwork than news
articles, personal thoughts, or calls to mobilization. Although skeptics of social media
engagement such as Malcolm Gladwell would likely to dismiss the engagement of the
‘neophyte’ and ‘diasphoric’ categories as trivial and ultimately ineffective in a social
movement’s pursuit of justice, participatory media scholars (Duncombe, 2007; Earl and Kimport,
2009; Constanza-Chock, 2014; Zuckerman, 2016; Shesthova and Kliger-Vilenchik, 2015;
Jenkins et al., 2016; ) have long maintained that it is important for a social movement to have
multiple points of entry, to enable activists of different degrees of prior experience and different
degrees of commitment to a movement to contribute their efforts to a cause. Quoting Situationist
philosopher and activist Guy Debord’s infamous quip “Boredom is always counter-
revolutionary”, Duncombe (2007) argues that the rationalist and exclusive language of reason
often adopted by left-leaning electoral constituencies does not always seem interesting to novice
activists; instead, Duncombe calls for politics to be transmitted through stories, works of art, and
myths, thereby marketing political ideologies in ways that resonate with people and inspire them
to participate. This is evident from the accounts of their participation from ‘neophyte’ activists
who claim to have connected through the movement through its use of the Asterix comics as a
179
touchstone text for participation, emphasizing that their familiarity with and connections to the
text made it easier for them to relate to the underdog mythos of Hok Kolorob. Others attribute
their interest to the profusion of humorous art and graffiti that they encountered both on campus
and their social media news feeds on a quotidian basis, adding that:
“it was the creativity and cleverness behind these pieces that drew me into the
movement. The artists who created [the satirical graffiti] would come back each morning
to find their work had been covered up or whitewashed by the authorities, but they would
just draw it again. Or people would photograph the completed pieces and share them
online before they could be covered up.”
For participants in the ‘diasphoric’ category, the movement’s verbal appropriation
of the term bohiragoto seemed to resonate with them the most because they saw themselves
represented in the figure of the ‘outsider’ who had been declared “an illegal and alien figure on a
campus that was once home to us”. ‘Diasphoric’ participants also cited their geographical
remoteness and their immersion in their demanding graduate programs as reasons for their
incapacity to become closely involved in the movement. For instance, one participant had been
3rd year doctoral student writing her qualifying exams at an American graduate program in the
fall of 2014. She reiterated several times that although she wanted to participate and fight in the
movement, her lifestyle at the time made it impossible for her to spare the resources:
“I started writing my qualifying exams on September 14
th
, 2014. Two days later,
the police attack happened, and the news was everywhere on Facebook and Whatsapp
group chats. I was horrified and I wanted to help, but my exams left me with no time or
energy to participate as enthusiastically as I would have liked to. However, I loved the
memes because they always made me laugh at the end of a long afternoon of writing, and
I remember sharing the ‘Bohiragoto Manifesto’ on my own feed. Also, Dr. Gupta’s
Facebook post [regarding classes on the pavement outside Gate 4] was so hilarious, it
made me really nostalgic about my JU days.”

180
There was also some indication that the ‘diasphoric’ participants tried to avail of the
transmedial organization structure of Hok Kolorob. 4 of the 11 participants in this category
reported reaching out to transnational JU alumni in their current locations and university
campuses, and even organizing localized protest marches (often with no more than 7 members).
However, each of these 4 participants mentioned that they used the #hokkolorob and
#hokdaantkyalano hashtags to locate humorous artwork on Facebook, and printed out physical
copies to be used as signs during their localized marches. One participant, who organized a
localized protest at Bowling Green State University, added:
“We frequently used a photograph of the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ graffiti
as a protest sign along with the hashtag #hokkolorob, because it caught other people’s
attention, and they would stop and ask us about the movement.”
This indicates that ‘diasphoric’ activists were consciously relying on the use of civic
humor to spread awareness about the movement beyond the boundaries of the Jadavpur
University student network by capitalizing on the efficacy of humor in drawing the attention of
passers-by. It also points to the fluidity of transmedia organizing in the era of networked
participation, where online and offline modes of engagement cannot be considered mutually
exclusive modes of participation. The use of humor and digital media in the Hok Kolorob
movement constantly eluded such reductive categorization, as indicated by the fact that offline
graffiti was used to create Facebook memes, while online memes and hashtags became
incorporated into signs displayed during offline protest marches.
Another noteworthy finding in this section of my data sample was that for some
participants in the ‘neophyte’ and ‘diasphoric’ categories, engagement with Hok Kolorob
through humor and memes translated into more engaged forms of participation such as
181
organizing localized protest movements in other cities, or participating in the on-campus cultural
protest of December 23
rd
. For others, the humor of Hok Kolorob was its main attraction, and
their participation through social media activism did not necessarily translate into more engaged
forms of participation. However, this is not to say that the efforts of this second category should
be discounted in the history of the movement. In his description of the “ladder of engagement”
(discussed in Chapter 1), Ethan Zuckerman (2016) is firm in his belief that although ‘thick’ and
‘thin’ modes of engagement require different levels of engagement and labor from a participant,
the ladder is not meant to be thought of as a mode of linear progression. Zuckerman argues, “thin
engagement is not necessarily a step on the path to thick engagement, but a legitimate form of
participation that may be particularly useful at the scale of Web-based movements is a key step
toward being able to evaluate the efficacy of participating in campaigns” (p. 67).
My next finding relates to the use of humor by the second category of participants in my
sample: participants with some prior experience with activism, many of whom also had
affiliations with one of the 3 major student political bodies on campus. These participants were
notably less enthused about Hok Kolorob’s extensive reliance on humor, with one participant
explicitly stating, “I hope the meme-ification [sic] of Hok Kolorob does not become its only
legacy”. However, this was also the group that seemed most self-reflexive about the use of
humor in Hok Kolorob, especially in terms of the role played by humor in appropriating and
countering dominant discourses. For instance, as I have previously discussed in this chapter,
several participants in this category noted that #hokdaantkyalano and the creative media making
practices that sustained it would have never been created if not for the TMC counter-rally and
their use of the violent slogan ‘Hok Kyalano’. The data indicates that participants in the
‘experienced’ category valued the use of humor primarily in terms of its role in reducing the
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labor of participating in a four-month long and highly intensive battle against the university
administration and the state authorities. One participant noted:
“Part of the process of organizing the general body meetings was to recruit
participants for the next march, or the next sit-in, or the next boycott…it was sometimes a
grueling process, especially towards the December when it seemed like there was no end
in sight. The marches were conducted in all kind of weather conditions, from
thundershowers during the mohamicchil to unbearable heat and humidity. The funny
slogans and songs were what kept us motivated to keep going.”
In other words, the more ‘experienced’ activists used humor in a more utilitarian fashion,
relying on it to relieve the tedium of months of organized protest and keep despair in check. The
participants also described the process of coining the slogans in detail, explaining that they
would either poach from the lyrics of a popular song, or incorporate topical references that would
make them memorable. The humor of the slogans ranged from witty bilingual wordplay to the
explicitly scatological. One particularly popular example was “Ei VC ke chiney nao, OLX-ey
beche dao!(Recognize this VC for who he is, sell him off on OLX now)” and in its
counterpart “Ei VC ke chinlo na, OLX-o kinlo na! (This VC is so unacceptable, even OLX
wouldn’t agree to buy him)”. The punchline of the two-part joke relies on the unsavory
reputation of the online marketplace OLX, infamous for its fraudulent deals involving the sale of
stolen electronics and cars. As previously mentioned, Hok Kolorob was characterized by its
interplay between offline and online modes of engagement, and several participants noted that
the slogans used in the protest marches frequently drew on jokes shared using the #hokkolorob,
#hokdaantkyalano, and #bohiragoto hashtags on Facebook. One popular example was the slogan
“Amra shobai bohiragoto/Thaakbo paashe maarbe joto (We are all outsiders, the more you hit
us, the stronger we become)” – a slogan that participants attributed specifically to the viral
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Facebook post that provided an appropriated, dictionary-style redefinition of the term
bohiragoto, infusing it with ideas of strength, comradeship, and resistance.
Finally, the ‘experienced’ activists argued that in the absence of an electoral structure, the
humor and social media presence of Hok Kolorob provided the movement with a shared
narrative which allowed participants from opposing student political bodies to come together in
solidarity. In other words, Hok Kolorob was one of the first Jadavpur student movements that
was not organized by a student political body, such as the SFI, the FAS, or FETSU. They also
pointed to the relevance of social media as being central to the shaping of the movement. As one
of the organizers of the massive September 20
th
protest rally put it, the march was organized
“solely on the basis of social media posts. It operated on the principle of organizing without
organizers [emphasis added].” This context explains why the #hokkolorob hashtag was central to
the horizontal networking structure of Hok Kolorob, which is implicit in the participant’s use of
the phrase “organization without organizers”. The phrase implies that while there was some
organizational structure behind Hok Kolorob, it was a leaderless movement, with no specific
student political body headlining the course of the movement. This is significant, because there is
a long history of tension between the various student political bodies on campus, especially
between the competing student unions SFI and FAS. SFI is the student wing of the Communist
Party of India Marxist (CPM), and has historically allied with the political agenda of the
formerly-dominant party, while the FAS has fashioned itself as a left-leaning, but anti-
establishment student union with no ties to state electoral parties (Bag, 2014; Panjabi, 2015).
However, in my interview sample, activists from both student unions reiterated that the electoral
divide between student unions was set aside during the fall of 2014, referring to Hok Kolorob a
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“bannerless movement” where no political body dominated over another. In the words of one
participant:
“…instead of party-specific networks, Whatsapp groups, and group texts, we used
the #hokkolorob hashtag on Facbeook to organize the movement. Anyone could follow
along with the hashtag and attend the general body meetings”.
The affordances of connective action and networked participatory politics allowed
participants to use the hashtag for a multiplicity of purposes, including sharing details about
marches, organizing the non-electoral general body meetings, keeping the Jadavpur community
appraised about the decisions made at these meetings, issuing calls to action, sharing news about
other ongoing networked social movements – most prominently the Umbrella Movement in
China — and even sharing memes. Moreover, instead of making each other the target of the
slogans, memes and online jokes, participants from opposing political bodies united in their
shared mockery of state and university authorities, the most popular of which were the TMC, the
Kolkata Police Commissioner, the Governor of West Bengal, and the Vice-Chancellor of JU.
Hok Kolorob is a unique example of a localized student movement which had both
national and global resonances. The data indicates that part of this success can be attributed to
the networked civic humor of the movement, which provided opportunities for participants with
varied experience with activism, and seemingly-insurmountable geographical remoteness. The
contrast between the ways in which humor was used by the 3 different categories of participants
in my data sample – neophytes, experienced activists, and diasphoric participants – lends further
credence to the argument that civic humor is an important tool of social change, providing a
movement with multiple points of entry and low barriers of participation. For the neophyte
activists, networked civic humor practices such as sharing memes or viral posts on social media
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alleviated the stress of being involved in a fight with powerful state and university authorities,
and provided unintimidating pathways for participation. For more experienced activists, humor
was used to counter the weariness of long months of protest, while also allying formerly-
opposing student unions against a common object of attack. For diasphoric participants who
were geographically removed from the hub of the movement, humor offered them ways to
continue to show their solidarity for a cause and a community that they continued to care about.
The variety between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ forms of participation in Hok Kolorob illustrates
Zuckerman’s notion of the ladder of participation, which considers each form of participation on
its own merit instead of necessitating a linear progression from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’ forms.

Conclusion
The Hok Kolorob movement eventually came to an end in January 2015, with an
intervention from Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, and the forced
resignation of the Vice-Chancellor. Despite the jubilation of the student activists and the fact that
83% of the participants in my data sample referred to Hok Kolorob using positive language such
as “success”, “victory”, “triumph”, or “win”, much recent scholarship on the movement has
been critical of its achievements, primarily in terms of the movement’s paradigmatic shift from
being a protest against sexual violence to a battle between Jadavpur students and the university
administration, and particularly the Vice-Chancellor (Dey, 2019). The student whose accusation
was critical to the inception of the movement quietly disappeared from the public eye, and it was
rumored that her family had withdrawn her original charge, and the accused victims were not
prosecuted for their actions. Scholars and journalists alike have also pointed out that Hok
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Kolorob did not ultimately succeed in creating new university policies regarding the handling of
issues around sexual violence, even within the Jadavpur administration (Sengupta, 2017; Dey,
2019). In fact, as recently as 2016, the Jadavpur English Department was in tumult once again
with multiple sexual assault allegations involving a male, undergraduate student. However,
despite several complaints to the new Internal Investigations Committee and a carefully-
compiled set of witness statements, no formal charges were filed, and the accused student was
allowed to complete his degree and graduate on time, even attending the 2016 Convocation
ceremony in the presence of several of his accusers (Sengupta, 2017). In other words, much of
the ‘success’ that is widely attributed to Hok Kolorob eventually came down to the students’
protracted fight with Chakrabarti, and his eventual resignation from the position of Vice-
Chancellor. Given the contested nature of Hok Kolorob as a ‘successful’ social movement,
navigating the role played by networked civic humor becomes increasingly tricky, especially
when the humor is compared to the notion of the feminist rape joke discussed in the feminist
hashtag movements of Chapter 2. Unlike #SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomanEver, the humor
of Hok Kolorob was not a feminist rape joke. The object of attack was not the perpetrators of the
original crime, but rather the West Bengal state government and the JU administrative
authorities. The joke in the social structure was the approbation of armed force against unarmed
students, the TMC’s counter-rally, and the university administration’s heavy-handed response to
the movement. Most importantly, for a movement that arose out of an instance of sexual
violence, the humor of Hok Kolorob was notably missing a clear critique of rape culture.
However, it is important to remember that the point of Hok Kolorob was for there to be
clamor. It was a movement about making noise, and one of the roles played by networked civic
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humor was for “noise” to be recognized as legitimate political discourse. Chaudhuri (2019)
argues that at the time of Hok Kolorob,
“well-known social scientists regarded the students as innocent, but deluded. The
lack of cohesion in recent campus protests, their relatively short-lived character and their
failure to project a single ideology – or even a set of ideologies – has been an argument
for viewing university spaces today as merely anarchic, populated by a few
troublemakers with dangerous or even ‘seditious’ affiliations, and a ‘herd-like’ mass of
followers” (p. 52).
In this context, the networked civic humor of Hok Kolorob was influential in the creation
of a new tactical mode of protest, based on de Certeau’s model of encroaching upon dominant
power structures, waiting for opportunities to present themselves, and slowly whittling away at
their pretense of authority by ridiculing every move they made. While the movement admittedly
did not have a united and identifiable ideology, the data indicates a strategic use of humor to
achieve a distinct set of goals, including countering official discourses, jamming the workings of
university apparatus, and even reclaiming the university campus as a liberated space outside the
dominion of bureaucratic control.
The movement also had at least two long-terms consequences – firstly, the humorous
appropriation of the term bohiragoto and its refashioning into a signifier of communal solidarity
has passed into the popular lexicon of Bengali political discourse, re-emerging often in social
media critiques of Banerjee and the TMC party. The same goes for the hashtag #hokkolorob,
which is used as a social media rallying cry every time a new protest movement involving
government authorities occurs, such as the 2019 protest involving the right-wing BJP’s Union
Minister Babul Supriyo’s controversial campus visit (Panjabi, 2014), as well as the 2020 students
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protests in support of the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), who were similarly
subjected to an armed attack on campus by supporters of the BJP (Singh, 2020).
Secondly, the networked civic humor of Hok Kolorob created a social media
counterpublic which “set the scene” (Gerbaudo, 2012) for offline protest tactics. As Dey (2019)
asserts, much of the digital dialogue using #hokkolorob (and I would argue, also #bohiragoto and
#hokdaantkyalano) emerged in the absence of a public sphere where the student activists could
voice their own thoughts about the movement. In the aftermath of the police attack, the news
media was dominated by accounts from powerful political figures, including the VC, the Police
Commissioner, and the Education Minister, leaving the students with little recourse but to turn to
social media to offer their own counter-narratives to official accounts. The digital counterpublic
space also provided opportunities for former alumni to show their support of the movement, or
for members of the teaching faculty to express their solidarities through content that was both
humorous and a powerful refutation of the university’s injunctions for students to abandon the
movement and return to their classes. The humor of Hok Kolorob was critical to the creation of
this counterpublic – for instance, the humorous hashtag #hokdaantkyalano and the eponymous
Facebook page that followed it were created to counter the TMC’s use of mockery as a tool of
social control. At other times, the counterpublic was used to counter specific instances of public
statements given by university and state authorities to the mainstream media, such as
Chakrabarti’s NewsX interview where he narrated a version of events that contradicted strongly
with witness testimonies and mobile video footage captured on the night of the police attack. The
students’ counter-narratives to these statements relied on humor as discursive activism to
dismantle the authority of powerful political figures by dismantling their own statements through
satire and wordplay.
189
Finally, Hok Kolorob created multiple pathways of participation, thereby creating a
transmedial organizational structure that indicated how online and offline social media tactics are
beginning to interweave in the networked era. The multiple instances where hashtags and online
memes were incorporated into offline protest signs, or an offline protest event such as the
Convocation Boycott or Gupta’s classes outside the bounds of university property was
coordinated through social media announcements using the #hokkolorob hashtag indicate that
popular protest in the age of participatory media cannot be understood through antiquated
distinctions between ‘hashtag activism’ and ‘real activism’. Instead, the networked civic humor
of Hok Kolorob was characterized by its presence on both “tweets and the streets”, or their
capacity to use idiocultures created on social media to fuel physical mobilization, which is in
turn archived and maintained through social media documentation efforts. Moreover, the
networked humor created a horizontal organizational structure which provided low barriers of
participation to neophyte and diasphoric activists who did not have the time and resources to get
deeply involved with the movement, and yet wanted to express their support. At the same time,
for experienced activists, the humor provided moments of levity during months of debilitating
protest, while creating alliances within the many opposing student unions by uniting them
against a common target of satire.

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CHAPTER 5:
Conclusion: The Future of Networked Civic Humor

Comedy as a Tool of Social Change
As a tool of social change, comedy in the networked era offers a unique set of
affordances and challenges. In this qualitative study of humorous hashtags and networked civic
engagement, I have approached the issue of “social change” in terms of the capacity for
humorous hashtags to represent the voices and stories of oppressed publics in ways that offer
compelling counter-narratives to mainstream discourses around them. Through a practitioner-
centric methodology grounded in three contemporary case-studies and five different hashtags
(along with assorted sub-tags), I have explored how Facebook and Twitter hashtags have been
used to generate laughter around rape culture, police violence, and state oppression.
As I have previously discussed, the three case-studies in this study were chosen because
the hashtags intersected with other modes of organizing and protest in distinctly different ways.
The networked feminist humor of #SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomanEver was not connected
directly with a specific social movement, although it is part of a larger discursive shift in the
notion of a ‘rape joke’, as female comedians such as Carmen Esposito, Emma Copper, and
Heather Jordan Ross attempt to reconfigure the punchline and object of attack of a rape joke.
Black Lives Matter was characterized by a great deal of offline protest strategies, and the civic
humor of the two hashtags addressed issues of police violence and media representation of
African-Americans that were part of the discourses around Black Lives Matter. However, unlike
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Hok Kolorob, the humor of Black Twitter was not transmedial, and there were no visible
interplay between the networked civic humor of the hashtags and the offline organizing of Black
Lives Matter. #HokKolorob was the only hashtag which intersected directly with a protest
movement, and there were many indications of the interplay between offline and online protest
tactics which support the argument that networked civic humor can be a part of the repertoire of
transmedial organizing.
Through the model of civic humor I have developed, I have argued that each of the three
case-studies involves a public which has been oppressed by existing power relations, and turned
to humor as a way of satirizing the incongruity of the joke in the social structure. Each instance
involved the use of humor to target a specific object of attack – rape culture, police violence, and
state oppression. Finally, the porousness of the hashtag structure, along with the popularity of
Facebook and Twitter as mainstream social media platforms make the jokes inherently
participatory and lowers the boundaries of engagement, thereby redefining how we imagine the
‘civic’ in fights for social justice in the networked era.
Through a comparison of the three case-studies, I have argued that while all three fit
under the broader umbrella framework of ‘civic humor’, each of them is premised on its own
variation of the framework of civic humor. For #SafetyTipsforLadies and #NoWomanEver,
networked feminist humor used not culture jamming, but rather cultural acupuncture to
redirect the conventional structure of a rape joke into what I have called a ‘feminist rape joke’,
where the punchline of the joke is not the victim of sexual assault, but the norms and structures
which allow sexual violence to exist in society. In other words, a feminist rape joke does not shut
down or ‘jam’ the notion of a rape joke, but rather circulates the discourses around what exactly
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makes a rape joke funny into a powerful critique of the social practices which allow a
conventional rape joke to be told. For the Black Twitter hashtags #MyNYPD and
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the conjunction of a violent physical or social death at the hands of
law enforcement and the tragicomic laughter at the joke in the social structure lends a gallows
humor perspective that raises important questions about systemic racism in America. Finally,
the transmedial humor of the Hok Kolorob movement allowed the jokes, memes, and pranks
that characterized the movement to flow seamlessly from offline to online modes of engagement,
indicating how contemporary social movements could make effective use of humor and social
media to recruit neophyte activists, bolster traditional forms of protest such as demonstrations
and boycotts, disrupt the dissemination of official discourses of power, and tinker with the
workings of official administrative machinery. To summarize, each of these three modes of
humor is a form of civic humor, and successfully answers each of the four questions of the
model, but civic humor manifests differently in each of these case-studies, thereby indicating that
the model is fluid and flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of publics and geo-political
circumstances.

Civic Humor and Sympathetic Laughter
The four-part model of civic humor poses the related question: who is the intended
audience for these jokes? When a comedian gets up on a stage to tell a joke, the intended
audience is circumscribed by the boundaries of the physical space. As Chattoo and Feldman
(2020) have pointed out, networked comedy in the age of media streaming platforms makes the
intended audience of a joke much harder to define, because the comedic content is shared in the
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form of video clips and can travel far beyond the audience who actually ‘tunes in’ to watch the
show. Through the logic of connective action, the content can potentially travel even further
through the creation of memes, gifs, and other spreadable content. When it comes to networked
civic humor through hashtags, the boundaries circumscribing the audience become even more
porous, inviting members outside the counterpublic to listen and laugh. As Squires (1993)
argued, the difference between an enclave and a counterpublic lies in their willingness to
broadcast “hidden transcripts”, or the resistance and critique of dominant power relations that are
hidden from the public eye, and serve as means to unite members of an oppressed group. Unlike
an enclave, a counterpublic can choose to engage with the wider public by transmitting the
hidden transcripts in an effort to create counter-narratives to mainstream discourses about issues
which affect them.
With each of the case-studies discussed in this study, there is evidence to show that
digital counterpublics are in a position to take advantage of the porousness of social media
architectures to invite sympathetic laughter by transmitting the hidden transcripts of their own
oppression and resistance to participants outside the counterpublic. For networked feminist
counterpublics, part of the process of cultural acupuncture was to bring greater visibility to the
absurdity of practices such as victim blaming and sexual microaggressions, not just to create
solidarities with other women who share those experiences, but to broadcast the absurdity of
those practices, the frustration that women feel about navigating rape culture on a quotidian
basis, and the sardonic humor that they use to expose the joke in the social structure to members
outside the counterpublic, who might listen and laugh sympathetically, thereby perpetuating the
ridicule of the joke in the social structure. The sympathetic laughter was meant to permeate
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outside the porous boundaries of the social media counterpublic of networked feminism, and
bring wider attention to their central concerns.
Black Twitter also broadcasts some of the hidden transcripts of African-American
gallows humor in the age of Black Lives Matter, but it problematizes sympathetic laughter by
indicating how conversations around race and oppression can be co-opted by allies who attempt
to insert themselves into the conversations instead of limiting their active role to that of a
sympathetic listener. This is evidenced by the discomfort that several Black Twitter participants
felt when the official Twitter account of the ‘Occupy’ movement started re-tweeting posts from
Black Twitter, and co-opting what was intended to be a conversation specifically about race and
anti-blackness into Occupy’s own agenda against capitalism and class consumption. For many
Black Twitter participants, the hashtags #MyNYPD and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown were meant to
discuss police violence in terms of the systemic racism against the African-American people—a
concern which was largely sidelined by the Occupy Movement. In other words, while the
Occupy Twitter page assumed that they were being a good ally to Black Twitter by sharing their
critique of law enforcement, they were approaching it from a racially-neutral and color-blind
perspective which ignored the demand for the importance of ‘black lives’ which echoed the
central demands of Black Lives Matter. A discussion of what constitutes being a good ally is
outside the scope of this study, but the Occupy Movement’s ’s involvement in Black Twitter’s
#MyNYPD hashtag movement is worthy of future research on the politics of allyship, especially
in terms of the porousness of social media conversations and sympathetic listening.
Finally, for the digital counterpublic of the Hok Kolorob movement, sympathetic laughter
helped create alliances with the Jadavpur diasporic network, as well as neophyte activists who
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had not developed close affective ties with the Hok Kolorob movement through the protests and
general body meetings, and yet felt close ties with the cause and community. Moreover, through
the porousness of social media boundaries, the laughter permeated beyond the boundaries of the
Hok Kolorob counterpublic, inviting participation from other sympathetic parties, including the
Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association (JUTA), Jadavpur University alumni networks, and
even student activists from other universities in India and abroad, who collectively formed the
#bohiragoto and #hokdaantkyalano sub-tags of the #HokKolorob hashtag movement. Therefore,
in the case of #HokKolorob, sympathetic laughter and the porousness of social media boundaries
were integral parts of the movement’s transmedial organizational structure, thereby creating new
models for integrating offline and online modes of engagement in the networked era.
Collectively, the varied instances of ‘sympathetic laughter’ discussed in this study
indicate that civic humor in the networked era is using “any media necessary” (Jenkins et al.,
2016) to ensure that laughter operates not just as a tool of social change, but that it also
permeates through the porous boundaries of social media networked publics to broadcast the
“hidden transcripts” of oppressed publics beyond the boundaries of the counterpublic, and invite
laughter from sympathetic listeners. The porousness works partially through the logic of
connective action (Bennett, 2008) and the affordances of the social media hashtag, through
which anyone can locate and track the emergence of a viral Facebook or Twitter hashtag. Also
this porousness runs into certain risks of co-optation within the networked alliances of digital
media imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) which is deserving of future study, focusing on
the various affordances and risks involved through allyship with oppressed publics.

200
Future Directions in Comedy Research
The dynamics of ‘civic humor’ highlighted throughout this project offer a number of
important takeaways for social movement research, humor theory, participatory politics, and new
media studies – four fields which converge through the study of networked civic humor as a tool
o9f social change. The scope of “social change” in this study has been limited within the scope
of discourse, and operationalized through changing conversations about social justice issues
within the networked public sphere. Within 3 years of the publication of the Atlantic article on
the role of the comedian as a truth teller in the era of networked comedy, Comedy Central
announced that political communication consultant Erika Soto Lamb had been named the Vice
President of Social Impact Strategy – a newly-created position which would allow her to
“develop campaigns that make comedy constructive and leverage laughter to create positive
social change” (Press Release Archive, 2018). In a press release about the affordances of her new
position within Comedy Central, Soto Lamb stated –
“Comedy Central has been commenting and critiquing and poking fun at
the various and many social and political issues for a long time ... but what is new is the
interest in not just the critique of comedy, but also the transition to a more constructive
comedy”.
The fact that affluent media industries and networked comedy is beginning to take
an interest in the efficacy of comedy as a tool of social justice by creating an official position for
Social Impact Strategy indicates that research on civic humor is beginning to flourish in the era
of networked comedy, and there are important alliances to be made between researchers,
activists, and media networks on how to best channel the affordances of comedy into a widescale
public interest in social justice. This study has focused on humorous hashtags in creating social
201
change in terms of highlighting conversations around rape culture, police violence, and state
oppression. However, there is much work to be done in terms of establishing connections
between academic research and public service work, especially in terms of establishing relations,
funding, and spaces where these relations can be fostered.
Future research on this topic should also allow for a more robust process of data
collection, moving beyond some of the smaller datasets used in this study and checking for the
validity of my findings across a larger sample size. Moreover, future research on the intersection
of civic humor and social justice needs to identify additional areas where these relations can be
explored and mapped. This dissertation has identified three such areas, namely rape culture,
police violence, and state oppression, but several other areas remain and can provide rich sources
of research and social change. Some of my preliminary research efforts have established that
these relations can be found in areas such as environmental activism, reproductive rights
activism, and the fight for immigration rights. My own fluency in English and Bengali allowed
me to explore hashtags in these two languages, and analyze the bilingual nature of civic humor in
the #HokKolorob movement. However, the geo-political variety of the three case-studies
indicates that there are examples of humorous hashtags and social justice to be found in a range
of other countries, languages, and political issues. One example is the artistic activism initiative
ASARO (Asemblea de Artistas Revolucionarios de Oaxaca), which uses digital media and
hashtag humor to accompany the fight against artistic censorship and oppression in the city of
Juarez de Oaxaca in Mexico. Another example would be the use of humorous slogans and signs
in the Women’s March against Washington in 2016, contrasting the use of popular culture and
humorous textual poaching in the signs carried by the protestors with the social justice discourses
and transmedial organizing of contemporary protest movements. The existence of a range of
202
examples outside the purview of the specific case-studies discussed in this study indicates that
the model of civic humor is diverse enough to accommodate a wide range of digital media
practices, which can benefit from the fight for social justice through participatory politics.

203
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Asset Metadata

Creator Sengupta, Paromita (author)

Core Title “Every joke is a tiny revolution”: networked civic comedy as a tool of social change

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 09/22/2020

Defense Date 09/22/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag civic,hashtags,humor,joking,laughter,OAI-PMH Harvest,police violence,rape culture,transmedia organizing

Language English

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Trope, Alison (committee member)

Creator Email paromitasengupta@sfsu.edu,psengupt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-377104

Unique identifier UC11666315

Identifier etd-SenguptaPa-9012.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-377104 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SenguptaPa-9012.pdf

Dmrecord 377104

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Sengupta, Paromita

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Borrowing from Henry Jenkins’ notion of the “civic imagination”, which he defines as the capacity to create positive social change by imagining better alternatives to current social and political problems, this study advances the notion of “civic humor”. I define civic humor through its potential to answer four questions: (1) who is making the joke?