The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity

Bruce, Caitlin Frances

doi:10.1080/14791420.2014.989246

Cited by 22 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Three of the five women masked by colorful balaclavas were arrested and jailed. A global movement in solidarity with Pussy Riot reenacted the mockery of authority with the colorful balaclavas as their symbol (Bruce 2015; Groeneveld 2015). This form of political participation builds on carnival traditions dating back to ancient Rome.…”

Section: Anonymity In Different Modes Of Political Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The global movement in support of Pussy Riot reinterprets these objectives from a Western perspective as protest against state surveillance and police brutality. Interpreting an image of a policeman pulling the balaclava off a female protester's face at a US solidarity demonstration with Pussy Riot, Bruce (2015) states: “In this image the balaclava circulates as vehicle for drawing parallels between US and Russian state repression” (54).…”

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The threat “eat the rich” is echoed by the chorus of the “Punk Prayer”: “Virgin Mary, chase Putin away.” The “Punk Prayer” consists of aggressive rock music and swear words. The balaclava itself, however colorful, contains aspects of threat: “[T]he circulatory power of the balaclava means that such endless reproduction can become monstrous and terrifying” (Bruce 2015, 49). This can also be observed in the techniques of the black bloc in anti-capitalist demonstrations.…”

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Asenbaum

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy.

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Section: Anonymity In Different Modes Of Political Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Asenbaum

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…As one element of the TCM, we argue that the ticking clocks function as an "affect generator," heightening a sense of urgency to claim the unclaimed. 97 Caitlin Bruce forwards the concept of affect generator "to signify supercharged image that enables multiple claims and performances of solidarity and identification to take place." 98 One may search the TCM for "only show AIDS burials," whether stories have been posted for those folks or not.…”

Section: "He Was Not Unknown": the Traveling Cloud Museummentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentering whiteness in AIDS memory: Indigent rhetorical criticism and the dead of Hart Island

Brouwer

Morris

2021

Quarterly Journal of Speech

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For over 150 years, Hart Island in New York City has been a burial ground for the city's indigent and "unclaimed," over a million dead who because of race, immigration, poverty, and disease were buried in obscurity. For decades, the activist organization Hart Island Project (HIP) has labored to find the names and locate the bodies of those buried there, to destigmatize the island, and to memorialize the interred. More recently, HIP launched its "AIDS Initiative." Focusing on this initiative, we query: what specific modalities of remembering does the AIDS Initiative cultivate? And, given the crisis of the whitening of AIDS public memory, what are the initiative's capacities for interrogating and decentering whiteness? Amidst an abundant set of its activist practices and memory artifacts, we focus our analysis on the initiative's haunting artistic video, "Loneliness in a Beautiful Place," its five-part storytelling webseries, and its Traveling Cloud Museum. Performing indigent rhetorical criticism, we engage the problem of the "whitewashing" of AIDS remembering, interrogate who counts as a grievable AIDS subject, and practice historical and historicized frames of interpreting and remembering.

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“…The recent rise of affect studies in communication alongside a rise in protest across the globe, once again, brings the role of the rational/irrational binary in social movement studies to the fore (Bruce, ; DeLuca, Brunner, & Sun, ; Gerbaudo, ). The challenge for those utilizing affect is to break away from the binaristic thinking that posits rationality as the opposite of affect in the process.…”

Section: Rationality Emotion and Affectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wild Public Networks and Affective Movements in China: Environmental Activism, Social Media, and Protest in Maoming

Brunner

2017

J Commun

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In the following essay, I offer and explain the concept of wild public networks as a tool for social movement scholars interested in taking a network approach to contemporary protests via poststructuralism. Wild public networks offer scholars a means of approaching social movements that moves past binaries to productively incorporate affect. In so doing, the concept of wild public networks advances an ontological shift for social movement scholars that also alters what we examine and how. Wild public networks consider how the movement of the social can be witnessed in changes to relationships between actants and the configurations of networks. To explicate this new concept, I turn to contemporary environmental protests in Maoming, China.

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The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Decentering whiteness in AIDS memory: Indigent rhetorical criticism and the dead of Hart Island

Wild Public Networks and Affective Movements in China: Environmental Activism, Social Media, and Protest in Maoming

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