This article explores the divisive nature of social media public culture in which impromptu communities of strangers affirm or antagonize one another in non-face-to-face interactions through memes, hashtags, and other posts. Drawing upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, specifically his notion of cultural intimacy and social poetics, this article analyzes contemporary politicized social media to demonstrate what I call social media poetics, briefly, public online shaming through which antagonists criticize one another and, in so doing, create their own identities; this process relies upon essentializing communities of posters that quickly become polarized. During social media acts of “creative shame,” people “become” their posts, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” in the posts.

This essay examines social media discourse related to drag queens, Disney, and Dolly Parton for what it says about how anti-queerness intersects with the present political and cultural obsession with parents’ responsibility to protect their children from “harm.” By analyzing tweets collected from the summer of 2022, I demonstrate the ways in which pedagogy and nostalgia help explain how users evaluate contemporary “threats” to children. Users want to know what children are learning, from whom, and in what context (pedagogy); at the same time, users invoke a reverence for the past (nostalgia) as they try to interpret what they are experiencing in the present. Twitter users’ concerns about children center on “fears” related to gender identity and sexual orientation, for instance, “exposing” children to queerness. This discourse is part of an unsettling trend in which anti-queerness is masquerading as concern for the nation’s children.

and Life after NGOs provides a compelling feminist anthropological analysis of the waning of female genital cutting in Ghana. Based on extensive periods of fieldwork from 2002 to 2009, Hodžić integrated herself into the daily activities, formal and informal, of two NGOs, GAWW (Ghana Association for Women's Welfare) and RHI (Rural Help Integrated). This ethnography sits at the intersection of feminist anthropology, medical anthropology of reproduction and health, anthropology of policy ("social life of law"), and anthropology of humanitarianism and human rights. Among the themes explored are governmentality, biopolitics, cultural pathology, carceral feminism, sovereign violence and governance by extraction as forms of "slow harm," cultural significance of blood loss, and the instability of "punitive rationality" in human rights questions.

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