Co-winner of the 2021 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society Contributions by Susan Eleuterio, Andrea Glass, Rachelle Hope Saltzman, Jack Santino, Patricia E. Sawin, and Adam Zolkover The 2016 US presidential campaign and its aftermath provoked an array of protests notable for their use of humor, puns, memes, and graphic language. During the campaign, a video surfaced of then-candidate Donald Trump’s lewd use of the word “pussy”; in response, many women have made the issue and the term central to the public debate about women’s bodies and their political, social, and economic rights. Focusing on the women-centered aspects of the protests that started with the 2017 Women’s March, Pussy Hats, Politics, and Public Protest deals with the very public nature of that surprising, grassroots spectacle and explores the relationship between the personal and the political in the protests. Contributors to this edited collection use a folkloristic lens to engage with the signs, memes, handmade pussy hats, and other items of material culture that proliferated during the march and in subsequent public protests. Contributors explore how this march and others throughout history have employed the social critique functions and features of carnival to stage public protests; how different generations interacted and acted in the march; how perspectives on inclusion and citizenship influenced and motivated participation; how women-owned businesses and their dedicated patrons interacted with the election, the march, and subsequent protests; how popular belief affects actions and reactions, regardless of some objective notion of truth; and how traditionally female crafts and gifting behavior strengthened and united those involved in the march.

Through meticulous examinations, this book analyzes how women update their identities and articulate their feelings through clothing and art in protests, politics in the United States in the 20th century. Topics explored include the suffragists and their impact on contemporary art, the significance of the red dress in both The Handmaid’s Tale and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, the impact of the Miss America protests, the rising popularity of the pantsuit for women, the recent dominance of the pussyhat, and the way that feminist slogans are disseminated on t-shirts. Movements discussed include craftivism, hashtag culture, feminism, the CROWN act, Pantsuit Nation, socially-committed stores, and more. Interdisciplinary and intersectional at its core, addressing numerous areas, including fashion, sociology, visual culture, art history, feminism, and popular culture; Fashioning Politics and Protests uncovers how women continue to use visual means, explored via their clothing, to change the world.

This textbook equips students and educators committed to understanding how art and creative practice work as powerful communicative tools and have a substantial role in advancing civic participation. Alongside promoting educational practices with learners’ civic engagement in mind, this book is a call to action, inviting creative educators to explore the potential of art for developing critical perspectives, articulating voices and diverse points of view, and engaging in dialogue across difference. Chapters assist students and educators in understanding critical concepts ranging from the protections afforded art under the constitution, to the role of civic institutions such as museums, community arts centers, and schools in advancing civic participation. They also present the relationship between art, education, and civic engagement using watershed political moments such as voter suppression initiatives, xenophobic reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, and widespread national Black Lives Matter protests. Readers are guided throughout with a series of key questions at the onset of each chapter and encouraged to investigate further the issues discussed through exploration of the many resources embedded in each chapter. Coursework and participatory learning experiences that orient future and current art educators to the relationship of the arts and culture to democracy are also featured. This book will be ideal for students in art education in both upper division undergraduate and graduate levels, with cross-curricular appeal for students of political science, social studies, sociology, public history, public anthropology, heritage studies, and public humanities. As well as this, it will be a must read for educators who are asked to respond to challenges within the political sphere, and how these political challenges are influencing educational environments.

Pussyhats, typically crafted with yarn, quite literally created a sea of pink the day after Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States in January 2017, as the inaugural Women’s March unfolded throughout the U.S., and sister cities globally. But there was nothing new about women crafting as a means of dissent. Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats is the first book that demonstrates how craft, typically involving the manipulation of yarn, thread and fabric, has also been used as a subversive tool throughout history and up to the present day, to push back against government policy and social norms that crafters perceive to be harmful to them, their bodies, their families, their ideals relating to equality and human rights, and their aspirations. At the heart of the book is an exploration for how craft is used by makers to engage with the rhetoric and policy shaping their country’s public sphere. The book is divided into three sections: "Crafting Histories," Politics of Craft," and "Crafting Cultural Conversations." Three features make this a unique contribution to the field of craft activism and history: The inclusion of diverse contributors from a global perspective (including from England, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Australia) Essay formats including photo essays, personal essays and scholarly investigations The variety of professional backgrounds among the book’s contributors, including academics, museum curators, art therapists, small business owners, provocateurs, artists and makers. This book explains that while handicraft and craft-motivated activism may appear to be all the rage and “of the moment,” a long thread reveals its roots as far back as the founding of American Democracy, and at key turning points throughout the history of nations throughout the world.

A global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline, and how they will save or destroy us all. Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media–driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today’s politics. She finds that the “silly” stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women’s March. Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement. Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

Claiming Space examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centered approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notions of self, community, education, and the unknown future. Claiming the space of these graduation caps is a popular and widespread way that individuals make their voices heard, or rather seen, in the visual landscape of commencement ceremonies. The forms and meanings of these material displays take shape in relation to broader, ongoing conversations about higher education in the United States, conversations grounded in discourses of belonging, citizenship, and the promises of the American Dream. Integrating observational fieldwork with extensive interviews and surveys, author Sheila Bock highlights the interpretations of individuals participating in this tradition. She also attends to the public framings of this tradition, including how images of mortarboards have grounded online enactments of community through hashtags such as #LatinxGradCaps and #LetTheFeathersFly, as well as what rhetorical framings are employed in news coverage and legal documents in cases where the value of the practice is both called into question and justified. As university administrators and cultural commentators seek to make sense of the current state of higher education, these forms of material expression offer insight into how students themselves are grappling with higher ed's promises and shortcomings. Claiming Space is a meaningful contribution to folklore, cultural studies, media studies, and education.

The work folklorists do on the ground and in communities can make a concrete difference in quality of life. While the field is not immune to extractive, racist, colonial, heteronormative, and misogynistic practices, it can counter and combat these same forces in society. Culture Work presents case studies of public-oriented work that define the Wisconsin Idea of folklore in all its complexities, challenges, and potentialities. Thematically arranged chapters represent interconnected aspects of culture work, from amplifying local voices to galvanizing community from within to reflecting on how we might use folklore to build the world we want to live in.

National Bestseller On January 21, 2017, millions of people gathered worldwide for the Women’s March, one of the largest demonstrations in political history. Together they raised their voices in hope, protest, and solidarity. This inspiring collection features 500 of the most eloquent, provocative, uplifting, clever, and creative signs from across the United States and around the world. Each is a powerful reminder of why we march. As with the recent battle cry of “Nevertheless, she persisted,” these messages continue to reverberate daily and fortify a movement that will not be silenced. All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Planned Parenthood.

A trade paperback anthology of original essays from leading feminist writers on protest and solidarity in the Trump era

The objective of this book is to outline how a radically democratic politics can be reinvigorated in theory and practice through the use of the internet. The author argues that politics in its proper sense can be distinguished from anti-politics by analyzing the configuration of public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. Each of these terrains can be configured in a more or less political manner, though the contemporary status quo heavily skews them towards anti-political configuration. Using this understanding of what exactly politics entails, this book considers how the internet can both help and hinder efforts to move each area in a more political direction. By explicitly interpreting contemporary theories of the political in terms of the internet, this analysis avoids the twin traps of both technological determinism and technological cynicism. Raising awareness of what the word ‘politics’ means, the author develops theoretical work by Arendt, Rancière, Žižek and Mouffe to present a clear and coherent view of how in theory, politics can be digitized and alternatively how the internet can be deployed in the service of trulydemocratic politics.