The affect of the hashtag: #HandsUpDontShoot and the body in peril

Abstract

On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, a young man of barely 18 years, was killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, which renewed discourse surrounding the occurrences of racial violence in the United States enacted at the hands of police. Brown’s death led to the development of a hashtag movement called #HandsUpDontShoot on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, which critiqued the disparate treatment of racial minorities and the excessive use of (often deadly) force by police on black bodies. #HandsUpDontShoot offers an example how the convergence of subjectivities occurs affectively: the hashtag, while making a discursive appeal to consider Michael Brown’s rumoured stance of surrender when he was shot by Wilson, also featured photos of movement participants recreating his pose with their own bodies. Further, the embodied affect of the movement overlapped and entangled with that of offline spaces, where protesters on the ground in Ferguson and other communities began to raise their hands above their head in a desire to not only create an external spectacle of Brown’s victimhood, but to live within the subjectivity of his abject body. Through a media ecology analysis, I argue that the subjectivity of Brown’s body was kept alive through the movement, as the hashtag and associated imagery can be seen as material extensions of Michael Brown’s body and a desire to make sense of Brown’s death through an affective exchange with the body in peril. In this sense, the participants of #HandsUpDontShoot transformed the movement from a space for standing with the victim to a state of standing within the body in peril.

Divided we tweet: The social media poetics of public online shaming

“…The naturalization of such distinctions also naturalizes social stratification and broader inequalities. Often, these naturalized hierarchies become projected onto users in a bodily way such that posts “become” people and these people are imagined to have particular embodied social identities (see Hoyt, 2016 for social media as “material extension” of “the [Black] body in peril”).…”

“…Typically, similarly hashtagged posts make sense together in some way, even if ironically. Hashtags, then, “help weave disparate images, messages and events together to create a cohesive narrative” and in some cases, generate a “virtual collective” (Hoyt, 2016: 40). Examples would include the #Deplorable and #NastyWoman hashtags referenced just now.…”

“…However, this does not mean that social media lacks affective cues altogether. Kate Hoyt (2016) contends that, “now, hashtags can be used to generate irony or sarcasm through an addendum strategically placed to allow audiences to read between the lines of messages” (p. 40). Thus, the management of “face,” as Erving Goffman (1967) has theorized it, looks different on social media.…”

“…During social media acts of “creative shame,” people become their posts , when posts are, for example, gendered and racialized, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” (Hoyt, 2016) in the posts. Social media short-hands lend themselves to essentialism, and essentialism tends to be boundary enhancing (see Roberts et al, 2017), that is, tends to increase the likelihood that users double-down on their social identities and most closely align themselves with those within communities that share those identities.…”

#DiminishingDiscrimination: The symbolic annihilation of race and racism in news hashtags of ‘calling 911 on Black people’

“…Hashtags rose in popularity following large social actions, particularly in 2011's Arab Spring (Bruns, Highfield & Burgess, 2013). The hashtag has also been adopted to discuss race in the U.S. #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, and #HandsUpDontShoot became common for extending information, activism, and journalism related to the deaths of young black men beginning in 2014 (Hoyt, 2016). Hashtags related to violence against U.S. blacks, particularly African Americans, have also become personal, through the use of names, including #Trayvon Martin, #EricGarner, and #SayHerName, the latter used to discuss police violence against black women (Richardson, 2017).…”