Awkwardness and Assemblage: Digital Schemes for Feminist World-Making

14 pagesIn this essay, we develop the concept of awkward assemblages to describe feminist digital activism that is multidirectional in its political effects and interpretive legibility, built of uneasy bedfellows and ill-suited coalitional partners. We exemplify the way in which activist practices, developing out of the tensions in which contemporary feminisms find themselves, complicate the genealogy of feminist protest. We focus on feminist responses triggered by the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, particularly the work of Swiss-German performance artist Milo Moiré. This example allows us to highlight the complex ways in which local and contemporary feminist interventions intersect with the history of feminist protest art and how they link to transnational movements—among other examples, the #MeToo movement. We then turn to digital-feminist coalitional possibilities by thinking through assembling, along with coding and hacking, as performative labor that emphasizes the potential of inventing and visualizing political forms that (however awkwardly) materialize different worlds