At the Women's March in January 2018, many protest posters featured offensive jokes at the expense of Trump's body and behavior. Such posters were shared widely online, much to the amusement of the movement's supporters. Through a close analysis of posts on Instagram and Twitter, we explore the role of "vulgar" and "offensive" humor in mediated social protest. By highlighting its radical and conservative tendencies, we demonstrate how we can understand these practices of offensive humor as a contemporary expression of "the carnivalesque" that is complexly intertwined with social change.

Abstract:The "affective" turn has enabled many scholars to theorise media representations not only as texts that can be distantly decoded but also as a matter of emotional attachments, intensities of feelings, synesthetic sensations, and embodied experiences. Yet, what has been less often theorized is how this affective meaningmaking is (re)shaped by the dynamic and interactive nature of social networking systems such as Facebook or Twitter. How do images and the affective qualities that "stick" to them, travel and transform through user engagement where "users grab images and technologies by which they are grabbed in return" (Paasonen, Carnal Resonance 178;Senft 2008). We aim to explore this question further through examples of humorous images from the January 2017 Women's March, considered within the digital contexts of Facebook and Twitter. Social movement scholars argue that emotional engagement can be a powerful and positive motivating factor in getting people involved in political life, and we here suggest that these humorous images can move the reader in new critical directions, encouraging them to challenge systems of inequality and oppression in contemporary society. Keywords: online humour, affect, activism, feminismThe Women's March was an international protest event on January 21, 2017, advocating for legislation and policies on issues such as women's rights, racial equality, LGBTQ rights, immigration reform, healthcare reform, climate change, freedom of religion, and workers' rights. The rallies took place the day after President Trump's inauguration and took aim at his statements and positions that many regarded as misogynistic, racist or otherwise offensive. Protesters participated in almost 700 marches across the world, making it one of the biggest human rights demonstrations in history. Social media networks played a crucial role in the preparation, organisation and communication of this multi-sited event. Our study explores one key aspect of this communication, which was the widespread circulation of humorous feminist images from the march on Facebook and Twitter. We want to examine this practice to reflect on some of the opportunities and limitations for using digital humour to communicate political messages and struggles.By bringing critical humour studies into dialogue with contemporary scholars of affect, digital media and political communication, the article explores the affective and sensuous relationship between humorous online images of protest and social/political change. Rather than understanding these humorous images merely as a product and commodity of a new form of affective capitalism (which they are!), we suggest that they can also have the capacity to move "users" in new critical directions, encouraging them to challenge systems of inequality and oppression in contemporary society. This potentiality lies in the complex ways in which humour and the affective force of these online representations can move and touch the offline reading body.

The fine line between humour and offence has long been of interest for scholars and media outlets alike. While some argue for an avoidance of offence at all costs, others defend the ‘right to offend’ as an essential part of humour. By bringing critical sociological studies in humour into dialogue with feminist writings on affect and the politics of emotion, this article argues for a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of offensive humour. Based on empirical data from an audience study about offensive television content in Britain and Germany, we consider what exactly people do with humorous content they find offensive, not what it does ‘in general’. Such a contextualised approach illustrates the ethical and transformative potential of so-called negative affect. Thus, rather than perceiving offence as an ‘ugly’ feeling with merely negative consequences for society, this article contends that the avoidance of offence can also operate as a strategy for evading responsibility and action, thereby hindering social change.

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