How have digital tools changed and altered the goals, meanings and reception of contemporary feminist activism? In Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle use ‘awkwardness’ as a prism through which to think about 21st-century feminist movements that utilise transnational media from hashtags to film, literature, theory and blogs. This is not only a thorough study of digital feminist activism, finds Sofia Ropek Hewson, but also an unabashedly hopeful book

Ropek Hewson, Sofia

LSE Research Online

9/29/2016Book Review: Awkward Politics: Technologies of PopfeministActivism by Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehleblogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/09/29/book-review-awkward-politics-technologies-of-popfeminist-activism-by-carrie-smith-prei-and-maria-stehle/How have digital tools changed and altered the goals, meanings and reception of contemporary feminist activism? InAwkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle use‘awkwardness’ as a prism through which to think about 21st-century feminist movements that utilise transnationalmedia from hashtags to film, literature, theory and blogs. This is not only a thorough study of digital feminist activism,finds Sofia Ropek Hewson, but also an unabashedly hopeful book. Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism. Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2016.Find this book: With Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism , Carrie Smith-Preiand Maria Stehle have written a detailed and engaging study of contemporaryfeminist activism that examines the successes and failures of its digital forms. The‘awkward’ in the title refers to their methodology, as well as a type of politics theyhave identified: they write that ‘awkward’ means a ‘misdirected motion’, movementthat ‘messes with timing […] space and location’. According to Stehle and Smith-Prei, awkwardness is uncomfortable, relatable and a ‘politics of becoming,defiance and disruption’.Through chapters on ‘popfeminism’ in film and literature, viral politics and feminismand on how to develop an ‘awkward ethos’, the authors explore the importance ofawkwardness and its relation to feminist politics. The protest punk group PussyRiot, the author Charlotte Roche and the actor/rapper Lady Bitch Ray areprominent subjects of their discussions. The authors also focus on four mainfeatures of economic neoliberalism that awkward politics is capable of confronting or harnessing: namely, crueloptimism; willfulness; circularity; and (the somewhat ill-defined) joy.Firstly, ‘cruel optimism’, as defined by Lauren Berlant: ‘optimism is cruel when the object/ scene that ignites a senseof possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risksstriving.’ Cruel optimism, according to Berlant, is a defining feature of neoliberalism, binding people to situations of‘profound threat’ that are also problematically ‘confirming’ and ‘sustaining’. Stehle and Smith-Prei write that usingawkwardness as a popfeminist methodology means ‘uncovering disruptions of the cruel optimism of neoliberalism’.Awkwardness is capable of discovering ‘new avenues for connection and relatability and searching for new spacesfor feminist community and joy’. An example used is the proliferation of SlutWalks, which are protest marchesagainst rape culture that began when a Toronto police officer suggested that ‘women should avoid dressing likesluts’ in order to prevent sexual assault. SlutWalks, the authors write, play with the ‘cruel optimistic mechanisms’ ofneoliberalism through a celebration of ‘inappropriateness and joy’. SlutWalks are undoubtedly powerful, but theirspecific relation to the mechanisms of cruel optimism remains unclear.1/3Image Credit: Chapas Ladyfest (gaelx CC BY SA 2.0)‘Willfulness’ is another intriguing element of awkward politics, deriving from Sara Ahmed’s book, Willful Subjects.Stehle and Smith-Prei write that a willful child ‘stubbornly misbehaves, and does not conform to parental and societalexpectations’. Willful children are usually girls, therefore ‘willful’ is a word to be reappropriated; as Ahmed writes:‘transform this judgment into a project.’ Willfulness is ‘something that defies expectations’, something awkward andoften related to adolescence or, as Smith-Prei and Stehle describe it, the process of ‘becoming’. Willfulness relatespowerfully to awkwardness through its connections to adolescence and expectations; the authors write thatawkwardness is ‘very much of the body’, but also ‘social and ephemeral’. This also describes ‘wilfulness’: the oftenawkward, bodily discomfort related to being an adolescent girl, combined with a will to social and culturalstubbornness.The word ‘circularity’ also frequently appears in Awkward Politics, which Stehle and Smith-Prei seem to use asshorthand for Judith Butler’s conception of the repetition of gender norms. Butler writes in Gender Trouble that thetask is ‘not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or indeed to repeat and through a radical proliferation of gender todisplace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’. Butler suggests that the (inevitable) culturalrepetition of gender norms is capable of destabilising whatever engendered the repetition in the first place. Similarly,Smith-Prei and Stehle’s conception of ‘circularity’ is about ‘always returning to the point of origin’, but somehow, onthe way, destabilising it. For the authors, circularity also describes the close relationship between popfeminism andneoliberalism. They write: ‘it is constantly and consciously in danger of becoming an object of consumption’; theyadd that ‘these kinds of activisms can easily and simply be funnelled back in to a mainstream neoliberal discoursewhere they lose any kind of politically progressive edge’. For example, the authors cite Pussy Riot appearing on anepisode of House of Cards.However, ‘speed’ and ‘closeness’ enable possible disruptions of this relationship. Smith-Prei and Stehle write that‘the speed at which messages and images spread in the digital age […] creates clear moments of politicalintervention and disturbance’. Similarly, the closeness of protest actions and the object of the protest can beproductive. They write that digital campaigns often result in counter-campaigns that use the same image or hashtagto ‘subvert the original message’. The example they use is the ‘I am a feminist because…’ campaign, wherefeminists held up boards describing why they were feminists. This campaign provoked the ‘I am not a feministbecause…’ counter-protest, which used the same image and format. Smith-Prei and Stehle observe that ‘the2/3relationship between the two campaigns is awkward in that one relies on the other to get its message across,thereby destabilising the effectiveness of both’. They add that the ‘co-option of the ‘‘I am a feminist because’’campaign enhances the visibility of both campaigns without voiding the political meaning of either, the controversyadds effect and urgency to both’. Thus, the authors conclude that digital protest is not about distancing oneself fromthe object of protest through ‘ironic provocation’; rather, protests using hashtags and images are often close and(productively) awkward.Smith-Prei and Stehle write that their examples all ‘show once again that there is no outside of capitalism in a globalneoliberal economy’. However, they also note that awkward politics ‘sticks’ to the economy in an ‘uncomfortablemanner’, drawing on Ahmed’s writing on relationality and ‘stickiness’: ‘this stickiness contains the suggestion thatthere must be different modes of life, connection and community outside of the consumption patterns and identitystylings that drive neoliberal economies.’ Awkward Politics, despite initially implying the contrary, is driven by a hopefor some kind of elusive ‘outside’, characterised by their buzzwords: ‘joy’, ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’. They writethat awkward politics stick to neoliberal economies, but is ‘threatening to detach from what is already not working’;however, they fail to elaborate on the precise threat to neoliberalism of, for example, Pussy Riot declining to appearon a second episode of House of Cards or how this process of ‘detachment’ might happen.But, ultimately, Awkward Politics is an unabashedly hopeful book: it wants to ‘push back on cynicism’ and places itsauthors at the centre of its narrative. They write that ‘instead of burying the researcher in an ostensibly objectiveview of the subject matter, we place ourselves, subjectively, at the forefront of these discussions’. They explore theirown voices, histories and experiences, and the book is enriched for them, even if their calls for nebulous feminist‘joy’ and ‘collaboration’ are sometimes grating or unexplained. Awkward Politics is a thorough study of digital feministactivism, with particularly compelling insights into ‘willfulness’, ‘circularity’ and the closeness of protest and theprotested, and is recommended for students broadly familiar with terms and concepts relating to Marxist, feministand affect theories.Sofia Ropek Hewson is a French PhD student at Cambridge, researching transgression and political literature. Shetweets at @sofiahewson. Read more by Sofia Ropek Hewson.Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of theLondon School of Economics.  Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: awkward politics: technologies of popfeminist activism by Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle

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