values,” argued that All-American Muslim dangerously “misrepresented” American Muslims by focusing on everyday suburban families. According to the FFA, this focus on the ordinariness of American Muslim lives would “lull” Americans into thinking that Islam posed no threat to the American “way of life.” The group was able to pressure Lowe’s (the home improvement store chain) and other sponsors to withdraw their advertisements. But then American Muslims engaged on social networking sites, using the hashtag #LOWEsboycott to fight back.
Kadir, an American Muslim digital media consultant, recalled how he helped organize the Lowe’s boycott on Facebook. His and others’ initial Facebook posts led to a series of conference calls to discuss next steps. More than 40 activists participated in one of those calls. They started a Google group for the “steering committee.” They put up a website. They created a petition on signon.org. Then they volunteered to organize protests in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and California. Their activities ranged from online petitions and circulated videos to a Hijabi Flashmob staged in a Lowe’s store in the Bay Area. Soon, prominent and established American Muslim advocacy organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gave their support, and news outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post reported the Lowe’s boycott story.
By December 14, the controversy reached The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart voiced his dismay “that some group in Florida complain[ed] that the Muslims on All-American Muslim [were] too normal.” Speaking from a Lowe’s parking lot during that same comedy segment, “Senior Muslim Correspondent” Aasif Mandvi reported that he was “disappointed” because Lowe’s should be shut down completely: “If we are serious about fighting terror, we have to shut down their supply chain, i.e. Lowe’s, aka the one stop jihadi-superstore.” The company did not ultimately reverse its decision; All-American Muslim was canceled after one season due to low ratings. But the networked activists were able to galvanize popular awareness, as other Muslim and non-Muslim institutions, celebrities, and public figures voiced their support.
Stories That Matter
In Why Voice Matters, Nick Couldry (2010) defines voice as the capacity of people to “give an account of themselves and of their place in the world” in terms that are not only personally meaningful but can also be heard and acted on by others. Couldry makes clear that serious work on the politics of “voice” requires us to go beyond “a celebration of people speaking or telling stories,” but rather must be placed in a larger “political context,” one describing the forces that enable or block certain voices from being taken seriously as part of ongoing struggles over power (130). The borders of the political are fluid; different theorists may draw the line at various places. Throughout this book, though, we return many times to the issue of what makes certain practices political and what factors may constrain their potential impact.
Couldry ends his book with a call to reconsider what conditions need to be in place for voice to meaningfully enter public life; the rise of new media platforms has not guaranteed a political outcome, especially when those tools are controlled by corporations more interested in making money than expanding civic participation. Yet the availability of networked communications has given more people access to the means of expressing their voice, increased public and governmental awareness of the diversity of voices that are seeking to be heard, led to new consideration of what kinds of spaces and platforms are needed for effective political exchanges, and fostered what he calls “new intensities of listening” (140) as more participants feel an ethical need to try to process the emerging conversation. More and more, politics requires soliciting participation, getting people to tell their own stories, and also working together to amplify voices that might once have gone unheard. The Peabody Awards, referenced above, describe their mission as recognizing “stories that matter.” In a networked era, more of us have the capacity to produce and circulate stories that matter to us both personally and politically, but this does not insure that all of those stories are equally likely to be heard by those people who have the power and authority to act upon them.
While telling one’s personal story as a means of political consciousness-raising may have been a central aspect of earlier forms of identity politics, such storytelling takes on new significance when that story may be captured on video and circulated through online platforms and social network tools to reach many whom one might never encounter face to face. Many youth are deploying personal storytelling—through, for example, spoken word poetry—in order to link their stories to larger concerns within their communities, speaking for those who are not in a position to speak for themselves. In a MAPP-hosted webinar, spoken word poet Joshua Merchant described how he prepared emotionally to share his own story:
When I started to write about myself as far as my identity of being a queer black male of color from East Oakland, that was terrifying, and it’s something that’s still terrifying. I am also very aware that if I don’t [share my story], hell of a lot of people are still being muted, a heck of a lot of people from my community are not being heard.… You realize that you have a responsibility. Something that started off as just me needing to express myself because I didn’t have nobody to talk to, or I didn’t think anyone would listen to me, becomes “other people need to hear this because I know they’re from somewhere else than where I am from or from a similar place where this can change something for them.”
We will examine many other examples where looking straight into a camera and sharing one’s lived experience contributes to a larger political process—IC supporters sharing how they became concerned about genocide, DREAMers coming out as undocumented, or American Muslims challenging dominant images of what it means to be Muslim.
However, the confessional video—almost the emblematic example of Couldry’s idea of “giving an account of yourself” in the digital age—represents only one genre of political storytelling. Consider, for example, the case of Jonathan McIntosh, a 20-something political remix artist. McIntosh’s “Buffy vs. Edward” video depicts a confrontation between the pale, glittering young Twilight heartthrob and the empowered demon hunter from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. McIntosh created “Buffy vs. Edward” as an expression of his own frustration with the romanticization of “stalking” across the Twilight series. McIntosh uses Buffy to challenge Edward’s misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes, rebuffing his repeated advances and, ultimately, staking him. The video sparked discussion on Twilight fan forums around the series’ gender politics. Speaking at a Transmedia Hollywood event at UCLA in 2013, McIntosh explained:
I think what was most exciting about it for me was that it did create conversations about what was abusive behavior and what was romantic behavior … how the media [is] sort of framing these very problematic male behaviors as romantic. What was exciting about it is that it happened primarily on blogs devoted to Twilight .… For me, it was trying to create a dialogue about something that is quite serious—you know, stalking and abusive relationships through a lens of something people are already talking about.
A subsequent production, “Right Wing Radio Duck,” adopted a more overtly oppositional stance, though still expressed through playful appropriation of images. In it, McIntosh juxtaposed Glenn Beck’s anti-immigrant rants with vintage Donald Duck cartoons. McIntosh (2011) explains:
I felt that Donald Duck would make an ideal pop culture character with which to explore Beck’s messages and impact. Donald seemed an especially appropriate choice for this remix because he was originally created by Disney to represent a frustrated down-on-their-luck “anybody” character during the great depression. The current economic recession many Americans are struggling with today seem to parallel the struggles Donald faced in the old shorts from the 1930s and 1940s. I hoped that through Donald’s situation, viewers of this remix might understand why people are drawn to the Tea Party. They are often very legitimately frustrated and angry people looking for answers. And most of the time they are not getting any real answers from the corporate mass media or from either political party. In the remix
