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We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilising the derisive laughter that energises current feminisms. Using the 2012 case of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, we argue that feminist memes create online spaces of consciousness raising and community building. The timeliness, humorous affect and media techné of meme propagators become significant infrastructures for feminist critique, what we term ‘doing feminism in the network’. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, as others argue, we illustrate how the networking and distribution capacities of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and the online shopping site Amazon.com also cultivate new modes of feminist cultural critique and models of political agency for practising feminism through meme production and propagation.

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argues in The Good Citizen, 'to understand American political experience' one must 'direct attention to the instructions of the game itself' (1998: 7). This commentary essay examines how citizens learn, and are expected, to bear witness to human suffering through mass mediated depictions. Citizens 'bear witness' through both mundane and extraordinary forms of media documentation. Professional and amateur photographic displays of atrocity, for instance, call on viewers to carefully attend to images of suffering and its causes as a practice of ceremonial mourning, but they can also be used to support military action. Even in its apparently ceremonial forms, then, acts of mass mediated witnessing have a necessarily political component. Posters in the windows of retail stores around cities and small towns in the US urge passersby to 'remember the victims of September 11th' not only as a ceremonial act of commemoration -these dead victims also play the lead role in justifications for the US/UK war on terrorism. While the war on terrorism gives meaning to the exhortation to pay witness to the memory of September 11th victims, war supporters have also made invisible many of the civilian and soldier-victims of US and UK military action in the war. Built into the act of bearing witness, then, comes the political distinction between victims whose suffering matters, and those whose does not. Witnessing constitutes a form of selective attention to victims -and sometimes identification with victims -in ways that often make invisible citizens' own participation in state violence against others.To examine this phenomenon more closely, this essay draws on recent scholarship that probes the link between mass media depictions of suffering and current models of spectatorial citizenship:

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