Abstract
GIF use in digital platforms offers community space for humour, play and joy. Focusing on reaction GIFs, this chapter examines how feminist anger can be digitally expressed, represented and circulated by looking at the process of meme-fication within online affective economies of anger. While reaction GIFs can function as performative gestures and rhetorical devices that animate feminist anger, GIFs must also be contextualized within the racial and gendered body politics around “whose” bodies animate anger and whose bodies circulate within the digital visual economy. Taking up Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “feminist killjoy”, I analyse the form and aesthetics of killjoy and “white male tear” GIFs.
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Quote of Donald Trump recorded in 2005 and released in 2016. One month after the quote’s release, Trump was elected the 45th president of the US.
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- 3.
In 2015, Mikki Kendall started #RaceSwapExp, where women of colour and white men “swapped” profile images, which demonstrated the virulent online misogyny enacted against black women online.
- 4.
See also Minh-Ha T. Pham (2011) “Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body,” Camera Obscura, 26(1): 1–37, on how race and the political economy of the body frame consumption and circulation of fashion objects and images.
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“I am woman, hear me roar” is the opening lyric from singer Helen Redding’s 1975 single “I Am Woman.” Redding never intended the song to become historicized as a feminist proclamation, yet the lyrics were made significant beyond the creator’s original intention.
- 6.
Ibid., 60, 65.
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Kuo, R. (2019). Animating Feminist Anger: Economies of Race and Gender in Reaction GIFs. In: Ging, D., Siapera, E. (eds) Gender Hate Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96226-9_9
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