Memory Stones, Corpse Art, and Digital Media Activism: Multimedia Projects to Address Gender-Based Violence in Canada

Abstract

Gender-based violence (GBV) media activism is understudied in the Canadian context. This leaves consequential contributions unexplored in the literature on grassroots callouts of rape culture. To add to the field, my research explores five media projects that raise awareness about GBV and challenge problematic discourses about it. I incorporate poststructuralist feminist theories of discourse and theories of “counter-memory” (Bold et al., 2002; Young, n.d.) to explore my cases: namely, the REDress Project by Jaime Black, Disposable Red Woman by Destin Running Rabbit and Iman Bukhari, the Memory Stones Project by Leah Parsons, Farrah Khan’s annually tweeted obituaries for femicide victims, and the documentary Slut or Nut (2018) by Mandi Gray and Kelly Showker. I first outline how North America’s culture is a rape culture, in which troubling narratives about GBV circulate and hamper official interventions. Then, I interrogate the ways the activists above respond with (counter)discourses of their own. My examination of the five interventions above reveals these projects uniquely combine media forms to amplify their messaging, draw citizens of different generations into their anti-violence feminisms, and even ensure—in part through the technical specificities of modern digital technologies—that the activists’ anti-violence projects won’t be forgotten. Further, while each activist seems to strike out on their own to address rape culture, frustrated by society’s lack of attention to it, each activism is in fact strikingly collaborative—not only as feminists work together, but as citizens support advocates, to address GBV. These activisms use everyday objects, such as dresses, rocks, bedsheets, and social media, to call out gendered violence. The everydayness of these items makes GBV advocacy seem “doable,” which is attractive for participants who wish to help, but feel overwhelmed by violence’s gravity. This, along with the activists’ inclusive approach to advocacy—in which they invite people to borrow their ideas, for example, to produce modified projects of their own—spurs engagement. This study also shows that memorializing is an ineluctable part of GBV activism. By shoring up survivors’ and victims’ narratives against erasure, often adapting traditional Western commemorative genres to feminist ends to do so, activists challenge Canada’s masculinist memory-scape and usher in new awareness of gender inequity and related traumas. While the multimedia projects studied in this research are creative, dynamic, and resonant for citizens, however, they still bear the markings of the dominant (patriarchal) discursive context they seek to unsettle.