Tit-For-Tat Media

The Contentious Bodies and Sex Imagery of Political Activism

Katrien Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000597943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the visual-sexual turn in social media discourses in the field of online activism with a particular focus on the extraordinary protest years of 2018–2020.

Presenting a socially engaged theory of "tit-for-tat media" and including case-studies on activist movements such as the Euro-American alt-right, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and revolutionary artists in China, this study reveals how visual cultures, including gendered or sexualized imagery, are utilized to influence public perception. By presenting in-depth explorations of online ethnography, interviews with activists and studies of the political histories and urban protests-environments, the volume uncovers how local artists, netizens and citizens are using media and digital imagery in contemporary activism.

Covering a broad spectrum of social media content, from hyper-cute manga and cartoons to satirical pornography and sexualized hate-speech, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of media and communication studies, political communication, sexuality and gender studies.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003162056-1

Political Movements and Visuals of Sex and Gender

In March 2021, I took a taxi ride in Hong Kong at a time when it had become tacitly illegal to talk publicly about the pro-democracy movement (Anti-Extradition Bill and Law Movement, hereafter Anti-Extradition Movement) that had intensely impacted the city in 2019–2020. During this time, Hong Kong had been literally splattered with an abundance of revolutionary icons, slogans, artworks and symbols, on social media feeds as well as through urban graffiti and street art. All of these had mostly disappeared after a massive crackdown on the movement, its personalities and visual cultures of resistance, beginning in July 2020 with the implementation of a National Security Law.¹ I looked at the dashboard of the taxi I was in and saw several figurines—a cute little pig and, next to it, a tiny yellow helmet. These figurines would likely exude a strong aura for most Hong Kongers, as they represented lush and collectively constructed visual dictionaries of political struggle. The pig as mascot of the LIHKG forum (連登討論區 lin dang tou leon keoi) and its miniscule protest-helmet were also references to fighting bodies wrapped in gas masks, goggles, body suits and helmets. It reminded people of the physical pain and emotional suffering of activist frontliners or moderates, many of whom, in either role, had been women and girls.

The book was written in the middle of a fierce anti-totalitarian political conflict in Hong Kong that was largely being fought by means of visual media, songs, slogans, icons, cartoon characters and sculptural artforms. The circumstances in which the book was written were soaked in these Hong Kong discourses. I began to look for evidence of a gendered revolution, and examined how the movement intersected with non-normative visions of bodily struggle, as well as representations of sex, gender and ethnicity. I then branched out again and juxtaposed the tools of activism used in Hong Kong with those of new-right movements happening in Europe and the USA. In each case, there was a trending expression towards sexual radicalization that was aided or triggered partially by online imagery.

The most common meaning of the expression “tit-for-tat” is a brutal and revengeful exchange of actions between political nations, but the “tit-for-tat media” in this book apply more broadly to various types of visual cultures and aesthetics. The book will look closely at how activists in Hong Kong and Europe have created hard-core extreme-speech as well as benignly humorous icons to portray and protect their ideals. Some of the trends described in this book are representative of the upsurge of nativism and patriarchal-conservative identity politics, while others promote visions of gender inclusivity as rebellion or resistance. Marwick and Lewis wrote in their report “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online” that hyper-sexualized imagery has become one of the tools of online “attention hacking” amongst extreme-right groups and subcultures. These groups have pioneered a new brand of sexualization that became popularized on anonymous image boards such as 4chan/8chan and can be described as “a constant, ever-changing stream of racial and sexual epithets, porn, and grisly images chosen precisely for their transgressive nature (…) a way to shock and deter outsiders from coming into the community” (Marwick and Lewis, 2017: 5). These types of imagery are increasingly employed to “weaponize” bodies and produce sexually explicit scenes to deliberately create offensive speech, thus creating overly emotional responses from audiences. The ability to “score points” and to get indignant, angry or tearful responses in audiences is the ultimate goal.

These types of extreme speech and sexualized imagery were equally being developed by pro-democracy activists. For instance, a Hong Kong online image that circulated during the Anti-Extradition Movement represents Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam who is photoshopped onto the body of a mature-aged Japanese porn star. She is “pornified” and surrounded with various revolutionary slogans. Some slogans make fun of her name, while other asked her to “step of the stage” and join a massive protest rally. The visual alters the status of the Chief Executive by means of image manipulation and false identity attribution. It could be classified as misogynist hate-speech and typifies a tendency in digital culture towards imagining and sexualizing political leaders (KhosraviNik and Esposito, 2018: 47). But this peculiar hate-image is also different as it is arguably imbued with humour and could be seen as an anti-totalitarian art of resistance.

A Belgian example of a sexualized extreme-speech came from a campaign poster of the Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, which depicts a woman’s pregnant belly proudly bulging out of her pants. Unlike the sexual visual of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, this is an outrageous rendering of a white Belgian woman as “breeder,” someone who would procreate with other white Belgians to save the nation. The female belly is slightly eroticized and presented as a salvation to the threat of non-white bodies and migration-flows into the European nations. The slogan states “Migrants? We will make those ourselves,” (In Dutch Nieuwkomers? Die maken we zelf).² The image of the pregnant woman asserts and defends a uniquely Flemish white pride and eugenic consciousness. But similar images of white pride had already circulated within other far-right digital cultures such as the German far-right party, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland). Hence, this body-image was not original and not uniquely Flemish, but embedded within interconnected digital cultures of white nationalist hate-speech.

The AfD campaign of 2018 repeated this body-concept in 2019 by making use of Jean-Léon Géro¯me’s painting “Slave Market” (1866), in which an idealized white woman is captured and undressed by ethnic others (Figure 1.1). The slogan states that “Europe must not become Eurabia” (in German Damit aus Europa kein “Eurabiën” wird), hence the white naked woman must be saved from the threat of ethnic others and specifically, Muslims. But the image does not only rehash binary thinking about good Europeans and bad Muslims, it also seeks to idealize the white female body by contrast with the dark and bundled bodies that surround her. The naked woman is presented at the same time as an erotic object of pleasure and as a tool of hatred towards others as marginalized and racial subjects.

FIGURE 1.1 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) campaign of 2019 makes use of the painting “Slave Market” (1866) by Jean-Léon Géro¯me to fetishize a white woman held captive by ethnic others. Via commons.wikimedia.org

Online Sex Imagery Caught between Empowerment and Ressentiment

One way to decipher the differences between these body-images is to examine the extent to which they represent an aesthetic of resistance, or whether they merely signify or propel a hatred of others. Remley for instance has written about how white supremacist groups have become totally focused on negative depictions of enemy-groups. This approach, according to Remley, can be explained by means of the Nietzschean term “ressentiment,” which Nietzsche borrowed from the French language to denote a heightened emotional state of vulnerability and imagined vengeance. At the same time, this deeply emotional state of mind comes with an aristocratic sense of honor over and above the other (Remley, 2019: 166). Resentful subjects place themselves within a dyadic structure in which the self can only be praised or preserved in accordance with the annihilation of the other. Nietzsche argued that subjects who live through ressentiment will often be controlled by an imagined or fantasized vengeance on enemies, as their ability to express self-worth is dependent upon the act of negating somebody else: “Ressentiment aims at other individuals, other groups, or other institutions: its very essence requires that one view be directed outward instead of back on oneself” (Remley, 2019: 16). This will lead to the formation of groups within society that structure themselves around an ingroup/outgroup hierarchical dichotomy (Remley, 2019: 161).

How then were the activists in my study creatively expressing an ingroup/outgroup dichotomy by means of body-images and sexual imagery? Within the European new-right, the nation is associated with victorious, white masculinity, while Hong Kongers presented a need for rebellion against visions of Chinese patriarchy. These divergent or antithetical proposals also sometimes used similar icons, like the Pepe the Frog icon, which became dominant in Hong Kong in Summer and Fall of 2019. Pepe the Frog was originally designed by Matt Furie as a perverse and dry-witted cartoon figure, but was hijacked by USA white supremacists as the mascot of xenophobic, misogynist and homophobic hate-speech. Pepe the Frog is an example of an Internet meme as “a character worth copying,” or a semantic unit that was hijacked away from its creator so as to propagate more polemical information. Pepe the Frog became a prime example of creative memetic production and also of “meme magic” as the meme was consecutively hijacked and repurposed within different communities. As Pelletier-Gagnon and Diniz write about the meme, it became part of an intricate struggle for meaning, a constant effacing and repurposing of messages that signal different ideologies (Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, 2018). In a tug of war, Pepe the Frog was finally taken over by the most radicalized and visible white supremacist groups and in this way came to epitomize their hetero-patriarchal metaphors and extreme speech. For instance, in many recreations the cartoon became an overtly racist “nazified” hate-frog and eventually in 2016 was classified as hate-speech by the USA Anti-Defamation League. The icon was also believed to be imbued with “meme magic” as it helped secure the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and hence changed the course of history.

However, a lesser-known fact in Pepe’s meme magic is that the icon underwent another large transformation when it was hijacked by the 2019 Anti-Extradition activists in Hong Kong who repurposed Pepe the Frog as an anti-government mascot. Many Hong Kongers were unaware of its white supremacist lineage, but others did know and were keen on restoring Pepe as a “love-frog.” The icon experienced a different type of “meme magic” or “emoticon magic” when it was recreated by several protest-designers as thousands of tiny digital figures and emoticons. The icon was also sexualized and “gendered” (made feminine, gender-neutral, gender-fluid) in order to express empathy with women activists and with victims of sexual abuse and state violence (Figure 1.2). The main objective of the Anti-Extradition Movement was to challenge a political system of governance, but the analysis of the meme reveals contradictory attempts at defining Hong Kong identity. This attempt at hijacking and recreating a white supremacist icon brought Hong Kong’s own issues of racial identity and sexuality into sharper focus.

FIGURE 1.2 Female Pepe the Frog with “EyeforHongKong” (還眼香港 waan ngaan hoeng gong) symbol at Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement. Photography By Jimmy Lam Kin-Hang

A similar conjoining and transforming of protest imagery between these different cultures also happened when both Hong Kong protesters and European activists reacted to the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement following the death of African-American George Floyd by means of police violence in June 2020. For instance, the BLM slogan “I Can’t Breathe” went viral in different countries and led to a dismantling of statues in Belgium of the colonial dictator and slave-owner Leopold II. One image shows a Leopold II statue, with the head of the dictator wrapped in a bloodied cloth painted with the BLM slogan “I can’t breathe.”³ This blood-soaked image suggests that the time had come for victims of colonial violence to speak up and demand an official apology and reparations. While many Belgian activists took part in pro-BLM rallies, white nationalists issued openly racist remarks. Sam Van Rooy of the far-right party Vlaams Belang tweeted that “North African scumbags are ruling the streets.” The Twitter account of Vlaams Belang replied: “We will have to treat these scumbags harshly and clean up the streets. This is the only thing that will work. Only Vlaams Belang knows how order can be restored.”⁴ They reverted to a racialized dichotomy between white homogeneity as order and the chaos or danger created by ethnic others.

The “I can’t breathe” slogan was also used during the annual June 4, 2020 commemoration and candlelight vigil in Hong Kong commemorating Beijing’s Tiananmen Square student massacre of 1989. This annual Hong Kong vigil had been banned for the first time in 30 years after a year of intense crackdowns on the ongoing protests against the perceived injustices imposed on the city by the Chinese Communist Party. The protesters gathered once again in Mong Kok on June 13, 2020 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Anti-Extradition Movement. A police officer was caught on camera making fun of the “I can’t breathe” slogan by endlessly chanting the phrase. The Hong Kong Police Force also issued an official memorandum stating that “If a George Floyd case had happened in Hong Kong, he would have been treated exactly the same way.” Here, the police force defends their own law and order, while Hong Kong rioters are equated with the black victim of police violence (Grundy, 2020).

The slogan enabled the victims of colonization in different European countries to come together and state their grievances. But the slogan was also employed by patriotic activists who stated their own “grievances” of feeling threatened and overrun by ethnic minorities. This type of populist xenophobic sentiment was intensified by the BLM movement and reached as far as Hong Kong and China. On the Chinese social network Weibo, netizens condemned the BLM movement and wrote that black people in the USA should be “beaten up and enslaved again.”⁵ Hard-hitting racist and sexualized comments accompanied a reposted video showing female BLM protesters dancing, such as: “Black people jumped straight from the tribal era to industrial civilization, there are too many old-time elements in their genes.” “They are in heat even in a public space, are they going back to their origins?” “Question: Why do they like to shake their butts? Answer: they aren’t completely evolved” and “They are a bunch of animals.”⁶ These deeply racist comments validate a Chinese sense of ethnic firmness and superiority. Similarly, the solid Chinese nation wards off the threat of “degenerate” Hong Kong protesters. Racist slogans have traversed cultural borders and became a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Buffalo-Man and the Pink Lion: White Male Suffering and Sexual Redemption
• 3 Femininity, Fluidity and Floods amongst the Flemish New-Right
• 4 Pepe the Frog, Emotion Politics and Gender Inclusivity at the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement
• 5 Tit-for-Tat Nudity and Female-Figures at the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement
• 6 Hyper-cute Characters and Gender Wars in Mainland China
• 7 Conclusion
• Index