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Constructing Feminist Coalitions: Activist Arguments for Membership and Memory in the Women's March Archives
Daugherty, Rachel Elizabeth
Daugherty, Rachel Elizabeth
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2020
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This research examined the activist and rhetorical practices of the 2017 Women¿s March on Washington, specifically the networked communication and archival practices in this social movement coalition. This study analyzed Women¿s March networked communication, including the ¿Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles¿ agenda, the organization-produced book Together We Rise , and networked news coverage of the Women¿s March starting from the 2016 election to the 2018 Women¿s March events. The analysis of Women¿s March networked communication revealed that members felt degrees of inclusion and exclusion based off their knowledge and views of intersectional feminism, which encouraged members to identify (or not) with the coalition¿s vision for action. The Women¿s March networked communication practices resulted in the circulation of archival impulses generated by organizers and members. Data was collected from three digital archives; the official Sister March archive representing the Women¿s March organization, hosted on Flickr; the Women¿s March on Washington Arc hive created by Danielle Russell and Katrina Vandeven, hosted by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project at the University of Florida; and the Art of the March Boston , a digitally interactive archive of salvaged Boston Women¿s March signs created by interdisciplinary researchers who attended the Boston Women¿s March. The analysis of archival description, metadata, digital displays, and digitization practices of three digital Women¿s March archives illustrated that archives serve coalition goals through archival construction : the networked rhetorical practices of archiving, specifically connections between structure, collection methods, and archivist goals. The archival construction analysis of the Sister March archives showed that Women¿s March organizers used submission to guidelines to selectively archive memories that reinforced their agenda and ensured the coalition¿s continued existence. The analysis of member-initiated, digital Women¿s March archives revealed that archivists framed materials through their own activist stances by using - meta-archival narratives , or storytelling devices, to describe how archives and their construction contribute to archival activism. Thus, meta-archival narratives demonstrate how activist archival practices expand social movement rhetoric through networked feminist discourse. This project offers coalitional rhetoric as networked characterization of coalitional ideology and actions that influence membership to and memory of contemporary movements.
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English