Access copy of the talk below.

“Maybe She Can Be a Feminist & Still Claim Her Opinions?”

Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Findlay, OH
June 4, 2017

I am reflecting on all the ways in which I am a target who is not targeted.

1.

When compiling posts aimed at me for this talk, I stumbled across a recent thread on troll scholars Whitney Phillips, Gabriella Coleman, and Jessica Beyer, who recently critiqued the idea that “alt right meme magic” led Trump to victory. All three, all women, all at some point tacitly or explicitly accepted as individuals with insider knowledge, were outgrouped as sensitive liberal crybabies and frauds. The greentext is most significant, snarkily emphasizing what is obvious to 4chan and 8chan /pol/: the logics of reputation underpinning this list of credentials, necessary for academic credibility, is anathema to anonymous imageboard culture, which anyone embedded in that culture ought to know.

2.

This is who these authors are. These authors claim, rhetorically, to be able to speak for a community where rhetorical claims are always met with skepticism, and which is sensitive to misrepresentation. Maybe it means something that the reason for targeting these women, beyond their gender, was their “inability to 4chan.” Maybe it means something that popular publications historically misrepresent subcultures to fit with moral panic narratives, and that normative, mainstream logics of self throw meritocracy to the winds, instead conflating a list of credentials with authority.

3.

This is both easy and hard to talk about. I am always made to feel that I’m apologizing for something awful, when really I’m trying to point to work we sometimes fail to do: define our terms, learn the languages of those we study from a distance in horror. So far, I’m a former 4chan researcher who goes unscathed. I want to say something about taking personal responsibility for trolling. But how, without sounding like I’m the toxic element in an idyllic, and dare I say white, feminist space?

I think it’s a problem that they’re willing to swallow their disgust at us, to observe and exploit the tensions of our making, and we retaliate with the mute button, bots, the tactics of feminist digilantism, but like we are exceptional or something, we have trouble sitting still long enough to learn from them.

Maybe put another way, if we create spaces of solidarity where people who foreground race in their analysis are called the real racists, we are giving the trolls ammo for free.

4.

So then there’s me. Mostly for this article, my work is treated with grudging admiration. I “get” it. Before they glance at the author’s name, they seem to have a fantasy about me, based on my insider knowledge and rhetorical style: I’m straight, male, one of them, pretending to be queer-friendly and feminist to “redpill” the academic community.

I think what I’m trying to say is, I’m a troll who writes like a troll, worth defending from other trolls, and by *chan logic, presumed white male until proven otherwise.

5.

Their reading practices seem to be ordered like this: title, body, ctrl-F for “misogyny,” “hate speech,” “toxic,” “safe space,” words associated with liberal sensibilities and lack of understanding of a transgressive space.

Then they look at my name. They Google me. They are confronted with the reality.

By then, though, they have adopted me as a scholarly mascot, so much so that abruptly outgrouping me would have imperiled their sense of self. Rhetorical acrobatics ensued to rationalize how they could have been so stupid as to like me. They frame me as committing career suicide for their cause, as an acceptable kind of brown. They assessed how “pozzed” an academic I was. They read my bio silently and out loud to analyze tone. In the end, preserving their value system ultimately demanded flexibility in their beliefs.

They had to conclude I was a woman of color feminist who understood and accurately represented their culture, but didn’t share their agenda.

Deemed “a high-knowledge threat,” I remain on their radar. Just in case.

6.

The title is a lie. I am in fact afraid.

7.

Trolling is not an appropriate descriptor for what we’re talking about today. This is the convergence of the white supremacist alt-right with imageboard culture, Gamergaters, the manosphere.

Trolling has always consisted of complex variables: the troll’s motivations, the victim’s perception, the act itself, the overarching context. On 4chan, trolling adheres to tricky rhetoric, offensiveness, unreality, contingency, all of which are built into the site’s structure. The online alt-right exports this dynamic to places where it’s incompatible with the existing culture, like Twitter, which operates on reputational prestige and also flaunts all the cracks in online feminism’s alleged solidarity.

Claiming *chan culture permits a false equivalency between post hoc rhetorical defenses like “I was just trolling,” which deflects responsibility onto the victim, and intimidation tactics meant to chill free speech.

What we have here is closer to gendertrolling, which Karla Mantilla defines as a distinct variant of generic trolling in that it isn’t done for the lulz but to express sincere beliefs held by the trolls; as a massive coordinated action that endures over time; on forms of gender-based insults and credible threats like doxing, rape, torture, murder; and tellingly, uniquely, in response to women speaking out against sexism.

8.

And maybe there are deeper rhetorical appeals being made here, much as we kneejerk respond with stupid or learn to constitution when they invoke First Amendment protections to justify hate speech. Maybe there’s this: American exceptionalism, since most 4channers have been located in the U.S. Insisting on the self-contained authority of our domestic rights tradition, it’s the last imperial ideology left standing, and thus is accompanied by a messianic conviction that American values are, or ought to be, universal, and that we don’t need our values corrected. These values bear the evangelical hallmarks of a historically strong, conservative tradition that has diverged from the human rights values of other liberal democratic states, and rhetoric pertaining to national identity seeks to protect those values.

Is it possible gendertrolls might be deftly rhetoricizing based on this tradition of exceptionalism, knowing that conservative values are believed universally applicable, and it’s America’s mission to spread them? That this history implicitly tells them this rhetoric is defensible, if not by the First Amendment then by exceptionalism, as long as it is aimed at the “right” people?

That is: women.

It is sickening, viscerally, to see what transpires in many of these spaces, ironically or otherwise, but I wonder if it’s now our civic responsibility to “learn how to 4chan,” just as they “learn how to liberal,” to trick them into transforming themselves.

9.

At the end of this series of provocations, I have no ready conclusions. My rhetorical strategies, whereby I sound like one of them, spared me. That’s something we can learn. Lurking to learn the culture of the enemy, while horrific, is something some of us may be positioned to do, something some of us can translate for the rest.

Isn’t this how knowledge is meant to travel?

So I wonder if there’s something we can learn by examining the methods used by gendertrolls in selecting their targets and planning their course of action. If we look at the spaces where gendertrolls congregate, style and versatility with style seem to be predominant concerns. How they discuss and critique their reading practices in the same threads they use to identify potential targets. Maybe we should be asking, how often does the academic community diverge from traditional scholarly style? If we read scholarship about these communities out loud, how often does it ride the line between feminist academic and sarcastic troll? How might we differently inflect when addressing the fact we are not an exceptionally great nation, that liberalism is flawed, that our values do not promote inclusivity so much as they assuage white anxieties? That our civility is threadbare and reserved for those like Us, and—problematically, and advantageously for the online alt right—that this is true for both the gendertrolls and the online feminisms they disrupt? How might a different inflection compel self-reflection and transformation in multiple audiences?

We use these social media spaces, we teach our students to use them, perhaps we should be figuring out how to use them kairotically, transformatively, within the classroom, and without. Just as absurd offensive speech once inoculated 4chan from sincere hate, perhaps we can inoculate ourselves by rhetoricizing like the troll.

Daniel Cohen reminds us that “Arguing is always an act; believing is usually not.” Beliefs happen to us. It’s an unintentional trickery on my part, but it’s reminiscent of Dale Sullivan’s discussion of kairotic rhetoric, the transmission of the numinous, transformation through confrontation, judgment, the decisive act in the opportune moment. A spiritual revelation that endures, because the learner habituates the knowledge bodily, instead of being lectured at, talked down to.

I have no answers. I’m hoping we can think through this together.

Postscript/Post-process.

It went unsaid, but background plays a role in what we can tolerate. I make no bones about it on my blog or in my writing. I was born into an oppressed ethnicity that quietly survived an attempted genocide. I grew up with paranoia and the understanding that anyone can turn on you, turn you in, turn a blind eye. I grew up knowing that universities are always a preferred site of slaughter. These days I teach expecting a denunciation. But I am uniquely positioned for this too. I’ve been braced for this my whole life.

I thought to myself as I read the live-tweets that this isn’t bravery, at least not in the sense of acting in the face of fear. My immediate reaction is to say glibly, Well, someone has to do it, when what I really mean is the same thing I mean when I talk about chronic pain. This is my normal. Bravery suggests a deviation from baseline. This is another iteration of how, when I decided to be a creative writer as a kid, I was told emphatically that writing is a reason They kill you.

Maybe this is why I gravitated to Something Awful in its heyday, 4chan when it began, Rotten.com and Ogrish and Stile Project and all the dark corners of the Internet, decades ago, it was an external manifestation of the smoke and shadows of vicarious trauma shaking my voice every time I try to speak.

There are consequences to speaking, but to cite Audre Lorde, your silence will not protect you.

This landscape may sound bleak, which is how this project felt as I dwelled in forums and compiled my screenshots, and I felt, like a strange echo of the usual survivor’s guilt, that as always something terrible reached out to grasp me in its hand, and arbitrarily shrugged by. Why was I called? Aren’t there others, better than I? I saw many of those others, while I stood on that stage, looking out at that room, talking in my shaky voice.

You beautiful, intelligent people, there is nothing brave about me, or this. Haven’t we all been brave, always, for speaking up, out, against?

Maybe it was arbitrary that my parents ended up in the States, trapped when the war started, that I was born in New York, and did not end up raped, dead, impressed into service, used as a human shield. With this talk, the difference I was clumsily shambling towards was that my survival was not arbitrary, and there is hopefulness in that. I take every trickster in folklore and myth as my touchstone. They tell us that the same tactics of chaotic destruction can be used to messily remake, and that rhetorical cunning is the best tool we have.

Metis appears in all the places and qualities we write off as negative. In the spirit of this conference, I hope this talk has at least inspired you to plummet into the messiness of it, these spaces or their more-or-less sanitized constellations, as much as your identities and positions allow you, and that we learn to communicate about our rhetorical practices with as much frequency, fervor, and trickiness as the trolls weaponizing our words.