fugitive sound

This isn’t an entry about social movements, although it talks a bit about social contagion. Instead it’s about movement disorders and neurology. A bit of it draws on my own experience of movement symptoms, but mostly it’s some general thoughts about the assumptions of neurology (the practice/science, not necessarily the practitioners, who can be individually fantastic), particularly of its framing of patients (more so than other medical practice, barring perhaps obstetrics) as subjects who cannot know.

I watched a documentary recently called “The Town that Caught Tourettes” which was about some girls (some, though not all, in the same town) who developed a movement disorder or tic disorder (never actually ever diagnosed as Tourettes, but described repeatedly as ‘Tourettes-like’). The documentary was kind of standard TV doco fare, awkwardly structured and often sensationalised.

The neurologists’ diagnosis? “Conversion disorder”, then when more than one person got it “Mass psychogenic illness”. Not “mass hysteria” though, because “that’s an outdated term that we no longer use”. Of course this is a terminological distinction, not a philosophical one, but more on that soon.

Conversion disorder is defined (on the Medline Plus website, a service of the US national library of medicine) as “a mental health condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other nervous system (neurologic) symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.”

“The physical symptoms are thought to be an attempt to resolve the conflict the person feels inside. For example, a woman who believes it is not acceptable to have violent feelings may suddenly feel numbness in her arms after becoming so angry that she wanted to hit someone. Instead of allowing herself to have violent thoughts about hitting someone, she experiences the physical symptom of numbness in her arms.”

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000954.htm

Later in the documentary (and if you follow up on some of the girls’ stories, such as Lori Brownell who has since been diagnosed with Lyme disease) you find out that other neurologists/doctors gave some of the young women alternative diagnoses to explain their illness, but the documentary focuses mainly on the idea of conversion disorder and the illness as a social contagion.

It seems that many neurologists have trouble providing a physical explanation for involuntary movements (regardless of whether they also have a known organic cause). Hence, conversion disorder. A person’s phenomenological experience of stress or anxiety is never taken into account in these explanations. I am an anxious person, but intensifications of my movement disorder often occur at times in my life when I am calm. For example three weeks in February 2013 during which I had periods of violent involuntary movements (I’ve been told I can’t use the word fit or seizure to describe these episodes because I don’t have epilepsy, though visually they were indistinguishable from most people’s idea of a motor seizure). The neurologist’s explanation was my thesis due date in March 2013. Never mind that this was also one of the calmest and stress-free periods in my life. I felt in control, and I had also cut all other commitments in my life in order to finish on time.

“I was just wondering what was going on with me. There was something wrong and I couldn’t stop it” – Lori Brownell

Likewise, the young women’s awareness that their illness wasn’t caused by stress was never taken into account. The girls’ claims that they were happy before they developed the symptoms were ignored or mistrusted, including by a New York Times journalist who ‘uncovered’ trauma in several of the girls’ lives. The girls’ reaction to being diagnosed with conversion disorder is one of anger and despair. But they are considered unreliable subjects, because the idea of conversion disorder itself assumes a split between the self-aware mind, the subconscious, and the physical brain. The existence of the movements themselves makes the young women always-already untrustworthy. They do not know their own minds, and the movements are evidence of this. The movements rob the girls (and they are always framed as girls) of their status as agents in their own lives, as people who (can) know, as people who can tell a story about their lives and what has happened to them. The diagnosis of conversion disorder itself performs this function. The diagnosis of movement disorder at all performs this function. How can you be a subject with agency if you cannot control your body? How can you be a subject with agency if your subconscious converts your neuroses into physical symptoms without your knowledge?

“The electrical shock feeling that I get in my spine is there 24/7, it never goes away, and what it does, I feel like it pushes the tics out. Like, when it goes through my body, I can feel it go through my spine into my arms, into my legs. I can feel it go through my entire back. And then the tics just happen as it pushes itself out. And it’s just a cycle that keeps going on and on” – Lori Brownell

One of the women in the film describes the sensations she feels in the course of her movement disorder. She feels these sensations in her body, and they are metaphors that enable her to understand or make sense of her illness. They may also be entirely accurate. Certainly this description matches my own experience of the physicality of my (involuntary) movements.

The assumption of the split between the self-aware mind, the subconscious, and the physical brain, I think, belies these experiences of involuntary movements. There’s often a sense of premonition before a movement. I can often tell how long the movements will last and what their intensity is likely to be, although if I’m not tuned in they can still take me by surprise. They are involuntary, and unintentional, and yes, I “can’t stop it”, but at the same time they are my movements, insofar as I can feel the premonitory pulse of them, which “pushes them out”. My movements are not called tics, because they have an organic cause and are therefore called ‘myoclonus’, but I suspect they are almost identical to what some of these young women experience. The removal of the self from movement, even involuntary ones, I think is false. You feel it happen, you feel it fire. Your body moves in response, and it’s still your body moving, although you may not have chosen its movements

Regardless of the existence or non-existence of conversion disorder (I personally believe it is a bullshit illness, but if anyone ever has felt that the diagnosis adequately answered their questions about what was going on in their body then great), the philosophical underpinnings of it (it is derived from the concept of hysteria) make it hugely problematic in practice, and I think colour the entire neurological profession with some really problematic understandings of self, mind, and brain/nervous system. And also women. Conversion disorder is more common in women (or more accurately, more commonly diagnosed in women), a fact uncritically reproduced on its Wikipedia entry. I think this is part of the sense in which women are already considered to be lacking capacity to understand their own experience, and as people who do not and cannot know themselves. Doctors know (what is) best for and about women, particularly adolescent girls, who are already framed as problems. In the film, the lingering shots over their prom dresses and cheerleader pasts give the documentary a Heathers flavour. The contagious suicide “problem” in that film mirrors the concern trolling that goes on around these young women in this documentary.

 Link to an interesting analysis of conversion disorder by a psychiatrist, meanwhile

“Politics is being expressed through images and phrases in internet culture, and it is being expressed through these images or memes in an increasingly complex vernacular, or vocabulary” (Cole Stryker). Cole Stryker said in a recent book that memes are “a new visual way that people succinctly communicate emotions and opinions”. So, in this way, memetic images and text become part of political communication.

Although these are things that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, the link between my previous work on feminist blogging networks in Australia and my currently developing work on memetic politics had an unexpected catalyst a couple of weeks back with the Julia Gillard ‘misogyny’ speech and the furore around that political moment. 

Suddenly it became clear to me that although I saw these two projects as in some sense in productive disagreement, in fact they were clearly linked. 

I think part of that comes out of the fact that my current research interests are derived from, in part, some of the tensions that arose from my doctoral research project. 

Although the concept of discursive politics and discursive activism in these networks is, in my opinion, very important and generative of understandings of online political networks, my previous work had a number of limitations. 

The first is that it was quite a partial study. Methodologically I was forced to make a number of decisions about what to exclude. The networks had to be meaningfully mapped and visible to me. For that reason the private and semi-private networks of Tumblr and Livejournal were excluded. As well, although I discussed at length in interviews with feminist bloggers their uses of Twitter, I did not collect Twitter data unless some particularly important case study arose, such as the activism around Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time, which is documented in an upcoming paper in Australian Feminist Studies which as far as I know will be out this month.

I had this sense about the submerged networks (to use Alberto Melucci’s term, from social movement theory) and the way that they were part of what eventually made it back into the iceberg of the blog network’s visible content. I had this sense because of the fact that I was very much part of the same Twitter and social networks as the participants in my study. 

So I would see ideas germinating, percolating, spreading, being reconfigured and negotiated for hours and sometimes days. This might be in response to a media event. Or Someone’s blog post that  people disagreed with but they couldn’t quite yet articulate why. 

They would say things to their Twitter followers - I don’t like what this person has said but I can’t quite put my finger on why - and others would get caught up in the discussion and respond and Twitter users were able to collectively articulate a response. 

Then gradually over the next few days to weeks I would start to see blog posts around this particular issue appear in my data collection. I had a Feed Reader set up to follow all the blogs in the blog network. I saw the way the network functioned to collectively set the agenda and then respond to those issues. Not everyone would participate in every agenda item, to continue that metaphor, but enough people would write a post on that issue to push a little at that issue and develop a discourse around that issue. That would then be included in the downunder feminists carnival.

To use the example of Tony Abbott, a statement of his might come out in the press, a picture of him in budgie-smugglers or standing next to a ditch the witch sign, and feminist bloggers would nut out their feelings together, which in the case of Tony Abbott were usually fairly straightforward!

This is why when the Gillard speech happened, it was immediately all over my Twitter feed and Facebook news page. These networks that I’d studied were once again mobilised, and I witnessed, not for the first time, the stunning disconnect between these social movement networks and the opinion makers of the mainstream media. 

But what was most surprising about this - to me - was people’s surprise. There was a sub-section of responses in the media that seemed to think that Gillard had set off a new wave of feminism lying latent in Australian society. Amazingly it was the fact that international feminist blogs like Jezebel which is so highly influential in international media had covered the story. Amelia Lester covered it in the New Yorker. There’s something a little cultural cringe-y about this trajectory still. People rung their hands. How had this happened? How did our media miss the story and its true importance? When the international media hadn’t.

Well. Someone else hadn’t missed the story, and that was the Australian feminist blogosphere.

http://hoydenabouttown.com/20121009.12437/quick-hit-about-bloody-time/ 

This is the post on Hoyden About Town, AUSTRALIA’s most popular feminist blog, which was up the same afternoon of the speech. Quick hit denotes the fact that it’s just a quick and dirty post without much analysis, and then there’s the title: 

• “About Bloody Time”

But Jeff Sparrow, writing in Overland, thought that:

• The virality of the speech, then, suggests the existence, both here and abroad, of a huge constituency fed up with sexism and hungry for a fight back against it. To put it another way, the speech might have been made in parliament but its reception suggests the need for, and the possibility of, extra-parliamentary activism. 

http://overland.org.au/blogs/new-words/2012/10/sexism-and-the-left/

Writing in New Matilda, Ben Eltham speculated whether: 

• The sheer vitriol directed against Gillard may prove to be something of a catalyst for the reinvigoration of feminism as a social movement in Australia.

http://newmatilda.com/2012/10/10/gillard-rides-new-wave-feminism

The Gillard speech was not a catalyst for Australian feminism, or the start of a new wave, as the media has (retroactively) portrayed it. Australian feminism is blatant, not latent. It’s already galvanised. It is present in the networks of feminist blogs that I studied. 

To quote one of my interviewees, who is also one of the two main bloggers at Hoyden About Town: 

• I get the feeling that there’s actually a lot less reluctance with women to identify as some sort of feminist now than there was three years ago, simply because there’s so much feminist discussion online. And I think there’s a huge number of women lurking and reading that discussion and absorbing it and considering it. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

For Australian feminists in online networks, this moment was one of relief, signalled in the “ABOUT BLOODY TIME” of that blog post title. It was relief that these identifications of misogyny and sexism had finally, all-of-a-sudden made it in to what a feminist blogger might call BIG “P” POLITICS. That is in spite of the many ways that Gillard’s politics conflict with those of many a feminist blogger. These networks were instrumental in the virality of that video and people’s response to it. Discourses that originated in or gained much of their push from the feminist blogging network were mobilised in that response. 

These articles and analyses show how networks of feminist bloggers and Twitter users have been all but invisible in current understandings of social movements, and yet their influence on the responses of social media to cultural events like this belies that invisibility. 

In fact although these articles suggest that feminist discourses are new to recent Australian politics, my research on feminist blogging networks showed that the opposite is the case. The ‘misogyny’ speech was a moment that made visible existing Australian - and global - feminist networks, and the introduction of these themes to the broader public sphere.

I’m Frances Shaw and I’m a Research Assistant at the University of Sydney. I completed my PhD in August at the University of New South Wales. A little about my background: my doctorate is in the discipline of Politics and International Relations, and the majority of my research work has been in the area of Media and Communications. I’ve worked on a number of different research projects now, one on Twitter during the Queensland floods early last year, one on political spin and political advertising in the Australian media, and I’m currently working with Gerard Goggin on a project looking at oral histories of bulletin board use, situating bulletin boards in Australian internet history. 

My own research, for my PhD and beyond, has focused on networked politics and social movements in new media. I’ll start this seminar by talking briefly about my prior work on feminist blogging networks in the Australian context. Then I will bring in a number of issues and tensions that resulted from that research, and the ways that these tensions made me start to think a bit differently about internet social movements. 

Then I’ll go on to discuss some political memes and recent events that took on the character of memes. I’ll think aloud about some ways to approach the study of memes and politics, and talk a little about the methods that I plan to use to study memes in politics. 

Finally I’ll throw out a couple of questions and provocations about this work. I’m going to leave quite a bit of time at the end for questions and discussion because I really want to provoke some questions and challenges and ideas. I can’t promise I’ll have all the answers, since this research is quite new for me, but I would definitely like to hear your questions. 

During my doctoral candidacy, I researched feminist blogs as a social movement in Australia.

• I followed 40-60 blogs at any one time
• Held 20 semi-structured interviews
• But in addition to these 20 people: the community has 100s, perhaps 1000s of active commenters
• Vast amounts of data - To narrow this down: I used the findings of my interviews as a lens to understand several different case studies in the network. 
• These included
• Feminist parenting
• Feminists with disability
• Fat acceptance
• I also looked at particular debates
• Where are the women bloggers? (2009)
• Triple J Hottest 100 of all time (2009)

Main argument: That feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism. By this I mean that feminist bloggers disrupt mainstream discourses that are repeatedly used, and participants develop alternative discourses within their own spaces. 

Blogging becomes a strategy for developing rhetoric and arguments that work in order to feel able to deploy these arguments in everyday life. Knowing that other women feel the same way, and creating analytical concepts around particular themes, helps feminist bloggers and readers build a rhetorical repertoire. By solidifying their responses to mainstream discourses, they not only respond to things that are upsetting or distressing to them personally, they are also analysing what is wrong with those discourses, and developing ways to combat those ideas in everyday conversation. By sharing experiences, articulating problems, and proliferating feminist ideas, they are generating new feminist claims. 

So I found that Australian feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism, in which they aim to change the shape of discourse around women, feminism, and a number of other intersecting political issues. 

I argued that feminist bloggers maintain a space for feminist thinking in Australian culture. I argued that Australian feminist blogging networks constitute an active feminist movement. These blog networks critique the ideology of mainstream discourses at least partly with the aim of changing them, by changing the kinds of conversations that are possible. My analysis focused on discourses generated within Australian feminist blogging networks that respond to events in Australian popular media. While not always acting with purely political intent, bloggers act politically through the discursive interventions that they make in response to discursive crisis, that is, the disjuncture between discourses in feminist blogs and circulating political and social discourses in popular media.