Extending the Body: Exploring Protest Posters as Feminist Media in South Africa’s Am I Next? Movement

The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics -- at all scales -- with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting.

Content Warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.

The Space Between Words and Bodies

Am I next? asked my sister, who had called to find out if I had heard about the new anti-femicide movement brewing in the streets of South Africa. Alone in her Johannesburg apartment, news of the brutal rape and murder of 19-year-old University of Cape Town (UCT) student Uyinene Mrwetanya had left her shaken. I opened my twitter app instantly. Upon doing so, I learnt that Nene (as she was affectionately referred to on social media) had been raped twice and murdered by a teller named Luyanda Botha at a Cape Town post office on August 24, 2019. More than 2,700 women were killed, and 30,626 rape cases were reported across South Africa that year. Nene’s case was another addition to alarming statistics that moved thousands of women and allies to the streets. Still on the twitter app, I scrolled through photo after photo of bodies and protest posters weaving between one another outside Cape Town’s parliament. In close up shots, people held their own posters with the words Am I Next? printed across paper.

In others, posters with trending hashtags or names of victims were shared and held between several people.

Figure 2: Image via Twitter @MyLifeAsSne

In aerial shots, it was hard to tell which poster belonged to which body. And, at times, difficult to identify where one body ended and another began.

Through these photos, my curiosity about the relationship between bodies, posters, and words in spaces of protest was born. As a graduate student of global media and communications, I began to ask questions of sexual assault protest methods. When thinking about South Africa’s Am I Next? movement, I realized that the protest poster is a tool that feminists use to turn their own bodies into feminist media. When used in protest, the poster becomes an extension of the body. This highlights the body as a site of transformation. It’s a site of potential and power.

Reading Black Female Pain

So, what is feminist media? It’s rooted in an interdisciplinary understanding of feminism, the media, and the spaces at which they overlap. At its simplest, a feminist medium is a material with transmittable qualities that operates in favor of liberation. Initially a hashtag, the Am I Next? movement began as a digital tool to raise awareness and an online space for feminist expression. Understanding the origins of the movement allows us to understand the ability of feminist mediums to evolve across time and space. The viral hashtag is what moved many bodies from behind digital devices to the streets of Cape Town. With this in mind, I wonder:

How do viral hashtags transform when attached to the human body?

Does attaching text to the Black female body in protest make Black female pain easier to read?

And if so, how does this complicate our understanding of what it means to write and read with the body?

Writing the Body by Writing with It

On the African continent, scholars often say that women who riot and women who write have historically been different kinds of women. Feminist scholar Smimakele Dlakavau (2017) rejects this idea and tells us that writing women and rioting women can occupy the same body. Another feminist scholar, Pumla Mqola (2017), takes this a step further by suggesting that writing and rioting is the same thing. The act of holding a written sign during protest, I believe, is a direct manifestation of this argument. Protest signs can be thought of as transforming the human body into an always-on media exhibition. In doing so, the text of a poster is humanized by the person who holds it. At the same time, the body is transformed into a text. These transformative processes are especially powerful when we think of the body as a site of social control. In the context of a sexual assault and femicide protest, claiming control of the body’s form is a type of resistance worth recognizing.

Many of the slogans onAm I Next? protest posters spoke directly to quotes and tweets that were widely circulated online. This included phrases such as “no means no,” “enough is enough,” “stop killing us” and more.

Figure 4: Photo via Facebook/Michelle Shelly Borrusso

Expressions that mostly existed in the digital world were brought to life in physical form. This was achieved through the act of feminist making. Scholars often discuss feminist making as a practice that connects online communication with creative craft work.

In an attempt to honor this act of making, I created a spoken word poem. The poem speaks to my own experiences with assault and the collective experiences of those who took part in the movement. The piece is named after scholar Dorothy Ko’s (2005) haunting question: What does the body leave behind after life expires? This question, followed by the first section of the poem, is a eulogy for what is lost when a body is subjected to such violence. The second section of the poem uses words pulled from Am I Next? protest posters to suggest a collective state of protest and a collective act of writing. In the final section of the piece, I emphasize the strength of body memory. I also speak to the constant precarity of the female body through the final line of the poem: Am I Next?

The Power of the Collective

I used my voice—and therefore my own body—to write my spoken word piece. Despite this individual act, my goal is to move attention towards the collective nature of the poem. This collectivity underscores the power of gathered bodies in symbolic and physical space. By gathering outside parliament and the streets of Cape Town, Am I Next? protestors strengthened the effect of their bodies as feminist media. By showing up with posters (many of which had the same slogans) protestors chose to appear in identical written form. This act of repetition and the use of words borrowed from movements such as The Fallist Movement and anti-Apartheid protests created the opportunity for collective protest that reached across the boundaries of bodies and time.

Shedding Light on Shortcomings

That said, it is important to recognize the risks and limitations that accompany a movement such as Am I Next? In the words of scholar Sarah Ahmed (2017), a movement requires us to be moved. Ultimately, it is necessary for us to be critical of what exactly it is that moves us. Among the many assaults and murders that took place in South Africa in 2019, why was Nene’s particular case the final straw? Which bodies are granted the privilege of commemoration when subjected to violence? And in the end, whose body carries enough weight to break the camel's back? I don’t suggest that her social position as a young student at an elite university is the only reason for the popularity of her case. But I do believe that such factors should not be ignored in the quest for feminist protest that honors the struggles of all types of people. In some ways, even this blog post falls short. Here, I present the literate body as a norm. To applaud the use of protest posters is to applaud a form of protest that excludes those who cannot read and write. The use of the protest posters, and my transformation of them into poetry, limits reading and writing with the body to that which is written and verbalized. There are plenty of other important ways to communicate.

The Body as a Feminist Material

The body is a feminist material that Am I Next? protestors used to build a world where violence against women was called by its many names. A world most alive in the very moment of protest, it followed in the footsteps of many other street protests. The protest poster was the canvas on which this renowned social movement was nurtured. Both transmitter and receiver, the protest poster inspired the essence of a new movement and reflected the survival of those that came before it.