Citation

Rentschler CA. Fem. Media Stud. 2017; 17(4): 565-584.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/14680777.2017.1326556

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The bystander is increasingly being touted as a key agent of change for addressing racialised and gendered violence and street harassment. This essay analyses practices of bystander intervention in Black and indigenous feminist activism against racialised and gendered street harassment that are explicitly anti-carceral and transformative in their approach to achieving justice. I argue that the social media tactics of a transformative justice-informed framework on bystander intervention constitute a particular kind of networked feminist witnessing centred by the experiences of women of colour and a model of justice that challenges police violence and incarceration. Through an analysis of an assemblage of hashtags, Storified narrations of hashtag conversations about bystander intervention, and organised feminist campaigns that centre women of colour perspectives on street harassment and bystander intervention, the social media tactics analysed here model social intervention into racial and gender violence via the transformation of feeling bystanders into media witnesses to gender justice.

Language: en

Keywords

Bystander intervention; feminism; hashtag activism; Storify; transformative justice