Antagonism: Race, Gender, and Counterpublic Contestation

Violentacrez, Reddit, and the Counterpublic Sphere ¹

Figure 4.1 A vertical comic satirizing misogynistic undertones on Reddit, signed by “2k” and sourced to Wopah.com. The alien puppet is Snoo, Reddit’s corporate mascot. Collected in 2013.

In October 2012, Reddit was embroiled in a controversy that spilled beyond its borders. Adrian Chen, a journalist for the news site Gawker, had just revealed the “offline” identity of Violentacrez, one of Reddit’s “most reviled characters but also one if its most beloved users” (Chen 2012). Violentacrez, whom Chen calls “the biggest troll on the web,” was responsible for subreddits like /r/Jailbait (sexualized photos of young girls) and /r/Creepshots (sexualized photos of women taken in public without their consent). Chen accuses Violentacrez of releasing onto Reddit “an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed.” To Chen, Violentacrez “hacked” social dynamics with his posts, exploiting the Reddit collective for his own amusement.

The unmasking of Violentacrez (who turned out to be an office worker from Texas) inspired extensive debate about the nature and role of public conversation on Reddit. Some condemned Chen for “doxing” Violentacrez. The term—slang for document or doc—refers to gathering information about the offline identity of a participant in a pseudonymous online collective, documenting information about them that they would not want shared. According to these condemnations, the right to pseudonymity online is equivalent to America’s First Amendment right to free expression, and this right should not be undermined, even when someone uses their pseudonymity irresponsibly. Others countered that those posting to /r/Creepshots hadn’t bothered with obtaining consent from the women whose images they posted; why should these posters be afforded more control over their mediated presence than their victims?

The debate stirred. Prominent subreddits like /r/Politics responded to Chen’s article by banning links to Gawker’s network of sites (including Jezebel, Gizmodo, and Kotaku). Parodying that suppression, the metacommentary subreddit /r/CircleJerk began allowing only Gawker network links. Accusations bounced back and forth between participants on /r/MensRights (labeled as “a place for those who wish to discuss men’s rights and the ways said rights have been infringed on”) and /r/ShitRedditSays (which catalogs and aggressively mocks “bigoted, creepy, misogynistic, transphobic, racist, homophobic” content from other subreddits). After much discussion—and little resolution—the controversy eventually quieted and the Violentacrez story retreated from prominence. Left in its wake are persistent questions about the identity antagonisms prominent in an ostensibly “participatory” media collective.

The collectivist vernacular assessed in the last chapter comes with the potential for exclusion and marginalization, as the practices of Violentacrez and others like him demonstrate. Mediated public participation certainly isn’t evenly distributed, and this inequality manifests around age-old identity categories like class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. In particular, race and gender antagonisms abound on participatory media collectives like 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur, as dominant perspectives sometimes silence and sometimes clash with underrepresented perspectives. Figure 4.1, a comic shared on the pro-feminist humor subreddit /r/TrollXChromosomes, addresses the inequalities persistent in participatory media. In the comic, Reddit’s alien mascot (trademarked as “Snoo”) is a puppet employed by a fedora-clad misogynist. The implication is that Reddit is a bait-and-switch, promising a prosocial agora before revealing the vitriolic hate underneath. The populism of the collective is really antagonistic mob rule.

Still, the existence of this comic, /r/TrollXChromosomes, and even all the intense contestation over the unmasking of Violentacrez are a sign of at least a degree of vibrant, open conversation. After all, Jürgen Habermas’s ([1962] 1991) ideal “public sphere” is a conversational space, one that encourages equal discussion of public issues across different perspectives. The collectivism of memetic media doesn’t provide that perfect egalitarian ideal any more than Habermas’s Enlightenment coffeehouses did, but it may be a start. In the very least, memetic logics may facilitate the participation of counterpublics, who use participatory media to find internal support and to challenge dominant antagonisms. Lincoln Dahlberg speaks of the need for “multiple and vibrant” counterpublics within public conversations, which because they stand “in opposition to ‘mainstream’ or ‘dominant’ publics can open up deliberation” (2014, 32). The antagonisms perpetuated by Violentacrez are evidence that the collectivism of participatory media hasn’t produced the perfect agora. However, the massive debate Chen’s (2012) exposé inspired is evidence that counterpublics exist, and can be vocal in their contestation of dominant inequality. If bricolage, poaching, and vernacular creativity are being applied to these ends, then memetic media might be playing a part for public good.

This mediated counterpublic engagement doesn’t always manifest as very polite conversation, and it certainly didn’t during Reddit’s Violentacrez debate. But, even impolite public contestation can serve important public ends. Under a counterpublic model of civic participation, adversarial agonism is a sign of a vibrant democracy, provided that it doesn’t devolve into exclusionary antagonism. Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2009) defines antagonism as “relations between enemies,” but sees a healthier agonism in “relations between adversaries.” Counterpublic agonism is essential to public conversation, Mouffe claims, arguing that “conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated” (2009, 551). The collective reality of public life necessitates the existence of factionist discourse. For Mouffe, “when dealing with political identities, which are always collective identities, we are dealing with the creation of an ‘us’ that can only exist by its demarcation from a ‘them’” (550). Agonistic conflict is the core of a counterpublic model of public conversation. Dahlberg says counterpublics succeed when marginalized groups can utilize “critical-reflexive spaces of communicative interaction” to “contest dominant discourses that frame hegemonic practice and meaning” (2011, 861).

When it comes to gender issues on Reddit, several subreddits have coalesced into counterpublic constellations, especially in the years since the Violentacrez debate. Many subreddits actively antagonize feminist perspectives and women in general. /r/MensRights—the “Men’s Rights Activism” hub mentioned earlier—professes to be a site of measured social advocacy, but other subreddits make little effort to sugarcoat their misogyny, opting instead to engage in open, unapologetic bullying. /r/TumblrInAction mocks the left-leaning, feminist “social justice warriors” said to populate Tumblr. /r/SRSSucks critiques the vocal feminism of /r/ShitRedditSays. /r/TheRedPill—reappropriating a metaphor for awakening from the 1999 film The Matrix—advocates for hegemonic masculinity and a return to traditional gender roles. /r/FatPeopleHate—until it was banned in June 2015—described itself as a space for “shitlords oppressing fatties” and housed photos of individuals deemed worthy of mockery due to their weight. The brunt of the focus was on judging females.

But there are also vibrant subreddits supporting feminist perspectives. /r/ShitRedditSays takes an aggressive approach to calling out sexism on other subreddits. /r/TwoXChromosomes—a sister subreddit to /r/TrollXChromosomes—houses “thoughtful, meaningful content” on gender issues “intended for women’s perspectives.” /r/TheBluePill—reappropriating the Matrix metaphor for staying sedated and tricked—mocks /r/TheRedPill’s advocacy. /r/CreepyPMs catalogs unwelcome sexual advances sent through private messages on various sites, most particularly from harassing males.

The predominant discourse on Reddit favors a masculine stance. Still, the prevalence of counterpublic, pro-feminist subreddits means that participants can find support, even while the wider site tolerates the gender antagonisms that Violentacrez embodied most explicitly. Dahlberg writes that counterpublics function as “safe spaces” of “withdrawal and regroupment” that provide a needed respite from hegemonic pressures and antagonisms (2014, 33). Dahlberg’s sentiment is echoed in figure 4.2, which collects stills from a pair of GIFs posted to the image-based /r/TrollXChromosomes after its sister subreddit /r/TwoXChromosomes became a “default” subreddit in March 2014. When subreddits are made default by Reddit staff, new users to the site are automatically subscribed to them. Their content is also more likely to reach /r/All, which catalogs the top posts from across Reddit. With default status comes new participants and new visibility, since posts now spread more easily across the broader Reddit collective. In the case of /r/TwoXChromosomes, default status also came with reports of increased combative misogyny. The poster of the GIFs in figure 4.2 compares the antagonistic tone of conversations on /r/TwoXChromosomes with the supportive tone of conversations on /r/TrollXChromosomes. /r/TrollXChromosomes was framed as a counterpublic safe space, a harbor from the broader antagonisms that had captured /r/TwoXChromosomes when it became a default subreddit.

Figure 4.2 Frames from two different GIFs posted to /r/TrollXChromosomes, which capture two scenes from the 1937 film *Snow White and the Seven Dwarves*. The left image represents conversations in /r/TwoXChromosomes after it became a default subreddit; the right image represents conversations in the smaller /r/TrollXChromosomes. Posted on July 2, 2014.

Addressing agonisms and antagonisms like those that have dominated Reddit since well before Violentacrez, this chapter assesses the public and counterpublic potential of memetic participation. Chapters 2 and 3 established the grammar and vernacular prevalent in memetic conversations. The rest of this chapter will focus on the identity antagonisms and exclusions that so often manifest through that grammar and vernacular. As we’ll see, when it comes to core identity categories like gender and race, the collectivist conversations in memetic subcultures are not value- neutral. Instead, they disproportionately marginalize minority identities. Minorities are often marked objects of derision and contestation, while dominant identities and ideologies often pass invisible as the accepted, implicit norm.

As I’ll argue in chapter 5, there’s reason to be optimistic about the power of memetic media to facilitate voice in public conversations about significant social issues. This optimism, however, comes with a caveat. If participatory media systems do not provide spaces for the everyday expressions of marginalized identities, then the transformative civic potential of memetic media remains unfulfilled. Memetic subcultures, as we saw in chapter 3, are policed by collective conversation, and that policing is political. To further that point, the following section will outline the race and gender antagonisms long prevalent on participatory media, before turning to a discussion of the identity politics on sites like Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, and Imgur. The section after will assess the nature of this counterpublic engagement in a media ecology wrought by ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. The chapter will end with an articulation of the value of vibrant, agonistic counterpublic engagement, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.

The analysis in this chapter evaluates racism and misogyny akin to the antagonisms at the heart of the Violentacrez debate. To do so, it must engage with explicitly racist and misogynistic discourses. Such an endeavor is inherently fraught; even when done in the service of critical assessment, reproducing these discourses continues their circulation, and therefore may continue to normalize their antagonisms and marginalizations. My goal here is a frank discussion of the ambivalent potential of mediated public conversation, one that assesses problematic communication without glorifying it. Meaghan Morris ([1988] 2007) warns against a tendency within cultural studies to either cynically overemphasize the “banality and fatality” of everyday antagonisms on the one hand or to “ventriloquize the popular” until those antagonisms become detached and benign on the other. The arguments on race, gender, and participatory media herein could lean either way—either to undue hopelessness or to unmerited defense. Therefore, in this chapter, I will assess the exclusions and antagonisms prevalent in everyday texts and conversations, while attempting to avoid the trap of normalizing and sterilizing those exclusions and antagonisms. In so doing, I hope to highlight what Morris calls the “aggressive, critical voices embedded in the grit and hardness of day to day life” (119).

Identity Antagonisms and Counterpublic Contestation

Long before Violentacrez, participatory media collectives have been associated with the white, male, and privileged. In Lori Kendall’s (2002) analysis of a multiuser domain called BlueSky MUD, she observes that whiteness is assumed unless explicitly stated otherwise, as is class cohesion. BlueSky participants argue that they are not racist, instead saying that they hardly notice whether anyone they talk to is “black.” After all, how could they, in a “disembodied” online environment? But, Kendall points out, “in these statements, the ultimate test of whether race matters online is the ability of black people to pass unnoticed as black. This emphasizes the presumed desirability of hiding blackness and the assumption that people online are white” (210). It also boils race down to an easy binary: white or black, white or not white. This echoes the claims of Ronald Jackson, Chang Shin, and Keith Wilson (2000), who call whiteness a “constructed centrality.” The problem is that “if whiteness is unmarked, it becomes distributed throughout social spaces and eventually functions as a ‘universal insider’” (72). Because of this, “white people do not have to change who they are, how they talk, or how they behave. The talk and behavior of whites occupy a legitimized cultural space of social interaction, in which the identity of whiteness is acknowledged as normal and standard” (82).

Along with being white, participatory media collectives have also historically been seen as male-dominated. These spaces have been masculine, if uniquely masculine. As Charlie Gere explains, “the early hackers at MIT and Stanford established one of the central archetypes of computing subculture, which continues to this day, that of the intellectually advanced but socially and sexually awkward male, who is prepared to devote most of his time to an engagement with the possibilities of digital technology, to the exclusion of almost anything else” (2002, 132). Examining this alternative masculinity, Kendall (2002) analyzes how participants on the BlueSky MUD joke about their chances with women. She finds that “the joke is intended to be on the participants themselves, regarding their nonhegemonic masculinity, but women are the ultimate butts of the joke” (87). Women are still detached objects, even if they’re unattainable ones. Even in these jokes—meant to be commentary on atypical masculinity—inequality is reproduced.

The problem is that masculine forms are—as with whiteness—the constructed centrality dominant in mediated collectives. Feminine forms are the marked minority and are essentialized in ways that masculinity isn’t. Even if the participants on collectives like Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, and Imgur do skew white and male (and the demographic makeup varies by site), the common practice we saw in chapter 3 of labeling memetic subcultural spaces as “The Internet” does the discursive work of covering up the multiplicity and diversity of mediated participation. “The Internet,” of course, is an endless series of decentered conversational knots. The metonymy of substituting just a few sites and practices for “The Internet” as a whole reinforces a false standard of white masculinity. Such demarcations can lead to a hostile environment for marginalized groups, souring participatory potential. In this way, a cycle continues which normalizes partial forms of understanding. Engaging in participatory media collectives often means performing whiteness and masculinity, thus embedding the ideologies further. The rest of this section will assess the memetic dimensions of this white, male centrality, before turning to a discussion of its counterpublic contestation.

Identity Antagonisms and Memetic Media

Beyond facilitating an implicit white, male centrality, memetic media can also facilitate explicit identity antagonisms. In these contexts, race and gender minorities are vocally antagonized as a threatening outgroup. A few pockets of Reddit and 4chan have earned a particular reputation for explicit antagonisms of minority identities, but those boards are not the only participatory media collectives antagonizing identities outside of the white, male centrality. Systemic racism and misogyny manifest themselves across media, and the tone of these aggressions precludes the adversarial encounters that Mouffe (2005) finds so essential to counterpublic agonism. Instead, these antagonisms cast outsider identities as enemies, working to push those identities out of public conversations.

Memetic logics guide the flow of these identity antagonisms just as they guide the flow of other texts and ideas. If racism or sexism resonates collectively, then participants can choose to memetically spread dehumanization just as they spread “Sad Batman” or #TBT. In some ways, stereotypes lend themselves readily to this memetic spread. They’re a fixed heuristic shortcut for assessing novel information, and they’re an unfortunate cultural touchstone for making new quips, observations, and arguments. Figure 4.3 collects three images that perpetuate resonant racial stereotypes, memetically applying them to novel commentary. If racist cultural associations did not exist, these images would not resonate. But stereotypes linking African Americans to monkeys, Jewish people to greed, and Middle Eastern nations to backward savagery are persistent enough that even those who do not sympathize with their stereotypes understand these images. In this way, all three images perpetuate a meme of dehumanization. The easy spread of that othering meme only tangles it more thoroughly into cultural conversations; hegemony is exacerbated with every reproduction of the ideas evident in figure 4.3. And in this process, minorities are consistently marked for their minority status in ways that whites are not. Racism, from this read, is itself memetic, and memetic logics underpin its prevalence.

Figure 4.3 Three images antagonizing racial minorities. Top: photo-editing software is used to give American President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama simian features; bottom left: an image of an elephant seal adorned with Semitic stereotypes and the annotation “gief moniez plox,” translating to “give money, please”; bottom right: a quotation from the 1977 film *Star Wars* is used to argue that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on America’s World Trade Center, since Middle Eastern “sand people” lack the sophistication needed to carry out the attack. Collected in 2011.

This memetic racism furthers the white centrality long evident in participatory collectives. Minorities are treated as the other across participatory conversations, reifying the implicit understanding that the default participant in the collective is a white male. Figure 4.4 collects two images from a 4chan thread that explicitly hailed a white, male identity, asking that its participants “build your fort” to keep away a horde of minorities; contributors were challenged to fill in the space between the white “you” and the threatening mob with a creative illustration. The premise assumes that participants are white and male (a few images proposed using “white women” as bait to deflect the ravenous black males) and that interaction with the uniform minority masses is undesirable. In the thread, racism became a memetic game. Most solutions played on prevalent stereotypes about African Americans, as in figure 4.4’s bottom image. These contributions were premised on racist essentialisms of a homogenized outgroup, and hailed their reader into the ingroup antagonizing that outgroup.

Figure 4.4 Two images from a thread on 4chan’s /b/, in which participants annotated a template image with strategies for keeping away a threatening minority mob. The top image is the template; the bottom is an annotation employing a stereotype about African Americans. Posted on December 28, 2011.

Memetic stereotypes expressing explicit misogyny are as persistent as racist ones. For instance, figure 4.5 collects three images furthering the “women belong in the kitchen” meme. They perpetuate gender roles that cast women as domestic caretakers, making them wards of the men who “provide” for them and—in the case of the bottom image in figure 4.5—punish them when they don’t comply. Each image depends on a narrow cultural understanding of “a woman’s place,” and each image asserts male dominance as it recreates that narrative. The narrative hails women as the other, outsiders who are subject to male critique and control. The addressivity of these images implies that the reader is male, and content of the images furthers the hegemony of that implied reader.

Figure 4.5 Three images antagonizing women. Top left: a sexist joke is applied to a scene from the 1950 Disney film *Cinderella*; top right: the image caption argues that a woman “sees the world” through the kitchen; bottom right: a stock photo portraying domestic violence is captioned with a command to do the dishes. Collected in 2011.

This antagonizing addressivity is also employed in memetic subcultures during interactions with participants declaring themselves to be female. On 4chan’s /b/ board—which Whitney Phillips calls “unquestionably androcentric” (2015b, 54)—participants are regularly othered as soon as they announce they’re female. On /b/, it’s common practice to tell a female participant posting her picture to also show “tits or GTFO” (get the fuck out) (see figure 4.6), a persistent memetic phrase that serves as shorthand for both sexual dominance and subcultural boundary policing. The oft-repeated warrant for the demand is that “there are no girls on the internet,” so a female participant wanting to make her gender identity salient during a discussion must make it physically explicit. The demand overtly reifies the board as a male space. The assumption is that if you’re specifically referring to your female gender (or “your story of gaia-faggotry” in figure 4.6’s top image), then you must only be looking for validation (or coming to “ask for our attention”).

Figure 4.6 Three images demanding female participants show their breasts or leave the conversation (“Tits or Get the Fuck Out”). Top: a parody of Vito Corleone from the 1972 film *The Godfather*; bottom left: Darth Vader threatens Leia Organa in the 1977 film *Star Wars*; bottom right: American politician Michele Bachmann. Collected in 2011.

For participants who “out” themselves as female, displaying their body is the “penance” demanded for the transgression of interrupting the board’s normalized masculinity. The process is intentionally antagonistic and coercive. In one oft-shared screenshot, a 4chan participant claims that the only reason to come out as female is to “get your girl advantage back” through sexual manipulation (this statement displays a common tendency to deny male dominance by arguing that “pretty girls” get whatever they want). Therefore, according to the screenshot, displaying female anatomy “is, and should be, degrading for you, an admission that the only interesting thing about you is your naked body.” This tendency echoes an established problem. In Kendall’s analysis, “the gendered social context on BlueSky casts women as outsiders unless and until they prove themselves able to perform masculinities according to the social norms of the group. Women who are able to do so find acceptance within the group, but their acceptance reinscribes masculine norms, which continue to define women as assumed outsiders and outsiders, by definition, as not men” (2002, 100). On 4chan’s /b/, marking gender means marking the “feminine” against a male centrality. To be an “anon” is to be discursively male. To mark one’s self as “femanon” means reifying outsider status, linguistically modifying the root word and socially modifying the assumed population. Being female is a transgression punished by coercive and dehumanizing conversation, and a meme of dehumanization spreads.

Stereotypes are leveled against majority populations in memetic collectives as well. However, they still reify the white, male, and Western as the constructed center and implied ingroup of the collective. For instance, a few 4chan boards have conversations about differences between Europe and the United States (the two dominant population centers on the site). In these threads, both sides in the easy binary are critiqued by stereotype. Americans are critiqued for being unintelligent or overweight (a variation of figure 4.4 once asked participants to “Stop the Americans before they reach the McDonald’s”); Europeans are critiqued for being weak or pretentious (they’re often reminded of America’s role in World War II or how many times Americans have walked on the moon). But even in these stereotypical critiques—ones that do feature disparaging images of people with light skin—geographic stereotypes are emphasized, not dehumanizing racial stereotypes. Even in their antagonisms, these conversations keep the white centrality intact. Portrayals of light-skinned people—even negative ones—label their subjects as “Americans,” “Brits,” “the French,” etc., whereas portrayals of dark-skinned people label their subjects as “niggers,” “spicks,” or “towelheads.” In these conversations, the race of minorities is explicitly emphasized, critiqued, and denigrated in ways that the race of whites is not. The idea that people of color are “others” is a resonant one, and it collectively spreads each time it’s invoked.

And this white, male centrality still exists in less explicitly antagonistic texts. It can subtly spread even when the conversations don’t seem hegemonic. For instance, several stock character macros employ race and gender stereotypes in their memetic premises, and do so in ways that reproduce the invisible insider status of white males (see figure 4.7). In the “Successful Black Man” macro, a racist premise is established in the top clause of the added text; the bottom clause inverts that premise to deliver the punch line. In the “High Expectations Asian Father” macro, stereotypes about domineering Asian parents are lampooned. In the “Sheltering Suburban Mom” macro, hypocritical class comfort is critiqued. Each of these macros exhibits complicated intersections of race, class, and gender. “Successful Black Man” explicitly connects a “black man” with deviance, even as it inverts stereotypes about that deviance. The name of the macro itself creates a racially presumptuous association. If a “black man” is successful, he requires a modifier in front of his name to set him apart from a “normal” black man. His “success”—often a white American version of success—is considered novel enough to premise a joke.

Figure 4.7 Six examples of stock character macros emphasizing race, class, and gender identities. Left: two images of a stock character called “Successful Black Man”; center: two images of a stock character called “High Expectations Asian Father”; right: two images of a stock character called “Sheltering Suburban Mom.” Collected in 2011.

In “High Expectations Asian Father,” racial minority and class comfort coexist in a single portrayal. The emphasis is predominantly on education—a class mobility concern—but race is the marked attributive category. Despite the class emphasis of the content, the title of the macro and the nonstandard English often applied as part of the joke foreground race rather than class. As in “Successful Black Man,” race is the salient characteristic, even when the premise also relies on class to make its joke. In contrast, “Sheltering Suburban Mom”—with its white subject—isn’t marked for race. Even as it critiques a political and social class sheltered from complex inequalities, the macro reinforces the invisibility of dominant whiteness. Instead, “Sheltering Suburban Mom’s” female gender is marked, while her race remains the unnamed centrality.

These stock character macros—which spread most prominently between 2010 and 2012 and are still sometimes used in 2015—are less explicitly antagonistic than the texts collected in figures 4.3–4.6. However, there’s still danger in the spread of “acceptable” identity antagonisms. The fecundity and longevity of these characters—eclipsing the more explicit antagonisms seen in figures 4.3–4.6—speak to their memetic success, but also to the resonance of their encoded stereotypes. The fact that these images seem so “everyday” helps perpetuate their spread and in the process furthers their skewed representations. Morris writes that the banal intertwines “lordly pronouncement” and “mimetic popular performance” ([1988] 2007, 143); predominant inequalities are thus reinscribed in everyday interactions. Racism and misogyny are in this way memetic, serving as a fixed premise for novel contributions that reinforce the dominance of that premise. The participation structures imbedded in antagonistic texts and conversations work toward exclusion. These images reflect the dominant discourse—the banal standard—and in this way participation can shelter bigotry.

Identity Politics and Agonistic Counterpublics

But everyday texts can challenge these norms as well. Memetic participation can facilitate counterpublic contestation and the creation of counterpublic safe spaces for marginalized identities. In this way, participatory media can evidence vibrant agonism. This, to André Brock (2012), is one of the strengths of the African American perspectives and vernacular prevalent on Black Twitter. Brock argues that “white participation in online activities is rarely understood as constitutive of white identity; instead we are trained to understand their online activities as stuff ‘people’ do. Black Twitter confounded this ingrained understanding, even while using the same functions and apparatus, by making more apparent through external observation and internal interaction how culture shapes online discourses” (534). Black Twitter—by its mere existence—shines a light on the manufactured, invisible white centrality that dominates participatory media.

Likewise, Frances Shaw (2013)—interviewing feminist bloggers about identity antagonisms—outlines how those bloggers create safe spaces for pro-feminist discussion on their sites. Shaw asserts that “trolling and harassment are both silencing practices” (94) and that feminist bloggers demonstrate counterpublic agency when they vocalize their perspectives and resist silencing practices. These counterpublic spaces challenge hegemony by their very existence. For instance, the /r/TrollXChromosomes subscriber count as of mid 2015 proudly reads that there are “154,667 girls on the Internet.” These are 154,667 counters to the silencing logic behind “tits or GTFO.”

And those counterpublic spaces and perspectives do not exist on islands. Instead, they frequently engage with broader hegemonies, and do so by employing the same memetic logics that further the hegemonies they counter. Reddit housed not only Violentacrez and his vocal supporters, but his detractors as well. Whitney Phillips and I (forthcoming) discuss how Twitter’s #YesAllWomen hashtag connected women sharing stories of discrimination and violence in the wake of a 2014 misogynistic shooting spree near the University of California, Santa Barbara. The hashtag was a reappropriation of the memetic phrase “Not all men,” which men’s rights activists had previously employed to argue against the idea that gender-based and sexual violence is a systemic, pervasive reality. Not all men may perpetrate gender violence, the #YesAllWomen hashtag granted, but, yes, all women have had to contend with some form of that violence.

Similar memetic contestation came with another hashtag in 2014, as citizens gathered in Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the shooting of an unarmed African American named Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. In memetic solidarity with protests over Brown’s death—one more minority death at the hands of police in a long line of similar cases—participants on sites like Instagram and Twitter began posting pictures of themselves with their hands in the air, filed under the hashtag “#HandsUpDontShoot.” The visual shorthand for surrender—something Brown was reportedly doing as he was killed ²—was not limited to participatory media. Physical protestors, NFL players, and politicians threw up their hands during street marches, pregame entrances, and Congressional proceedings. In this way, #HandsUpDontShoot ties to other memetic protest iconography, like the Black Panther raised fist that spread in the 1960s and 1970s. #HandsUpDontShoot also connects to the broader #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which has come to name a broader movement advocating against systemic racism. These rallying cries for racial justice carry counterpublic weight, connecting marginalized participants and bringing attention to their perspectives.

Such acts of counterpublic contestation are not, of course, without pushback from dominant ideologies interested in maintaining that dominance. #YesAllWomen was critiqued by #NotAllMen, which reproduced the memetic phrase as a hashtag response. #BlackLivesMatter was critiqued by #AllLivesMatter and #CopLivesMatter, which sought to rob momentum from the hashtag by appropriating it. But these critiques were met with critiques of their own, creating layered public conversation, even in the midst of dominant antagonism. Figure 4.8 collects panels from two different comics created for a tumblog entitled “Razzytastic.” The first comic (the left side of figure 4.8)—focusing on how unequal gender norms hurt women—was created in response to the UC Santa Barbara killings. “I drew about my opinions on sexism to channel my rage,” the creator wrote in the caption to the post, after providing some context on the killings. “I’m very happy the #YesAllWomen tag is going strong on U.S. Twitter right now.” The second comic (on the right)—made a few weeks later—extended the first to show how patriarchy also negatively influences men. The comics resonated in the months after their creation, spreading across Tumblr and beyond.

Figure 4.8 Selected panels from a pair of vertical comics posted to http://Rasenth.tumblr.com. Left: a selection from a comic portraying how unequal gender norms hurt women; right: a selection from a follow-up comic portraying how unequal gender norms hurt men. Posted respectively on May 25, 2014, and June 15, 2014.

As the comics spread, they inspired new counterpublic conversations. In March 2015, the second comic—the one focusing on how sexism hurts men—made it to the front page of Imgur as a response to alleged sexism on the site. While many supported the sentiment, some protested that only the male-centered iteration of the original comic was shared. “I need feminism because feminism is only taken seriously when it’s explained how and why it affects and benefits men,” one commenter posted below the image. “Hey! Here’s the source and all the pieces in support of women you left out!” another commented, before linking to the first iteration of the comic. In its resonance, the comic series facilitated vocal engagement with dominant inequalities, both on Tumblr and on Imgur after.

Debates over identity essentialism occur on participatory media through memetic logics. As dominant discourses butt against dissenting perspectives, counterpublic contestation is in evidence. Factions can coalesce around these counterpublic perspectives. In one Reddit post, a participant created a chart that outlined perceived identity differences between Reddit and Tumblr. According to the chart, the Reddit collective saw itself as containing “thought-provoking and serious discussions about science, technology, politics, etc.,” while they saw Tumblr as containing “social justice warriors and radical feminists.” Conversely, the Tumblr collective saw itself as housing “important social commentary; pro-feminism, anti-racism, pro-LGBT, etc.” while they saw Reddit as housing “sexist, racist man children.” According to the chart, “anyone else” saw both Reddit and Tumblr as “privileged teenagers whining on the Internet about things they don’t even understand.” The shorthand, of course, is more social imaginary than factual reality, but it reflects the perception that public conversation on participatory media is not a monolith. It acknowledges that the public sphere has its counterpublics.

Despite evident antagonisms, Dahlberg argues that participatory media—at their best—allow marginalized people “to link up with other excluded voices in developing representative, strategically effective counter-discourses; and subsequently to contest the discursive boundaries of the mainstream public sphere” (2011, 861). Conversations about race and gender on participatory media are problematic because they predominantly further hegemonic antagonisms, just as they so often do beyond participatory media. However, by harnessing these same participatory media, minority perspectives have the power to antagonize in return. In this way, multiple participants can express multiple views, and counterpublics can vibrantly engage with identity issues. Still, we’re left with questions on the nature and tone of this engagement, and whether it’s closer to adversarial agonism or to the antagonism of enemies. Those questions will be the focus of the next section.

Agonism and the Ambivalence of Irony

The structures of participation on collectives like 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur complicate the agonistic dimensions of public conversation. While agonism embraces adversarial debate, the debates in memetic collectives often come with ambiguities in their tone and tenor, which might mute their vibrancy. For example, the subcultural trolls that Phillips (2015b) studied employ an “adversarial method” of public argument that doesn’t seem too far from agonistic engagement. However, this method of engagement invokes a cold and brutal brand of male-gendered “rationality” over what trolls critique as a soft and feminine “emotionalism.” It is adversarial engagement that is encoded with marginalizing values, ones that denigrate any signs of “sadness, frustration, or distress” (125) in public conversation. Adversarial or not, this method favors an antagonistic engagement.

Further, while agonistic models assume that counterpublics are invested in their arguments and the identity politics they’re engaging, ironic, distanced critique often resonates in participatory media conversations. The shorthand for this distanced, ironic register is lulz, from a corruption of the slang acronym lol (laughing out loud). Phillips describes the term as labeling an “unsympathetic, ambiguous laughter” (24). As a concept and mode of engagement, lulz are popular both within subcultural trolling circles and more broadly across participatory collectives. This amusement at others’ distress shades counterpublic contestation on participatory media. It can be employed both to commit great identity antagonisms and to defend those antagonisms as “just joking.” Phillips says that “I did it for the lulz” is a “catchall excuse, explanation, and punch line” (27) for trolling behaviors, one revealing the emotional distance facilitated by such a framing. The rest of this section will assess the implications of similar forms of ironic, adversarial counterpublic contestation that resonates in memetic media collectives.

Identity Antagonism and Lulz

We’ve already seen how playful vernacular creativity can be employed to further antagonistic stereotypes. The images in figures 4.3–4.7 all depend on marginalization to make their jokes. This constructed centrality is why ironic resonance can reinforce oppressive ideologies and repress minority voice. Lisa Nakamura (2014) makes similar claims about “scambaiting” photographs, a memetic genre born from tricking African “scammers.” Scambaiters play along with Africans running phishing scams, often promising to send along financial information after their targets “prove themselves” by dressing oddly, performing bizarre actions, or even tattooing themselves. The game is to collect photo proof of a target doing something as embarrassing as possible and then to share that photo with other scambaiters. To Nakamura, even if scambaiting is ostensibly about “punishing” scam artists, “this ‘fun’ occurs at the expense of people whose racial and ethnic identities as well as their intention to connect with better-resourced Internet users … is made violently visible” (261). It is adversarial engagement premised on antagonistic othering.

Playful practices can target vocal counterpublics as well, in attempts to silence and denigrate pushback. Lulz are employed to reduce counterarguments to stereotype. Figure 4.9 collects four frames from a GIF that reappropriates a scene from the 2012 film The Avengers in order to mock the “social justice warriors” who advocate for feminist issues. By denigrating the individuals expressing these concerns, and by turning their counterpublic contestations into blanket caricature (in this case, being easily “offended” and “triggered,” and angrily “smashing the patriarchy”), the GIF reproduces memetic practices used to marginalize feminist perspectives. Fitting with Phillips’s (2015b) observations about the adversarial antagonisms of subcultural trolls, these denigrations critique feminist arguments for being weak and soft compared to the cold rationality of “healthy” public conversation.

Figure 4.9 Four frames of a GIF reappropriating a scene from the 2012 film *The Avengers*. In the film, Bruce Banner tells Captain America that his secret for being able to transform into the monstrous Hulk is that he’s “always angry.” He then turns into the Hulk and smashes an alien invader. In the GIF, Banner is “always offended” instead of “always angry,” he is “triggered” instead of hulking out, and he smashes “the patriarchy” instead of an alien. Collected in 2015.

But humor, irony, and play can counter dominant antagonisms, even if they also predominantly reinforce those antagonisms.³ Shaw (2013) outlines tactics “from playful to serious” employed by feminist bloggers to counter harassment (one blogger she interviews changes the spelling of “nasty comments” to make the poster seem less intelligent). Through their use of resonant humor and irony, texts countering racism and misogyny can spread via the same multimodal reappropriations that spread more dominant antagonism. Several GIF sets shared on Tumblr reproduce content from shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Key & Peele, and RuPaul’s Drag Race, all of which have progressive stances or foreground marginalized identities. As an example, figure 4.10 collects four frames from a GIF set reproducing a skit from a 2015 episode of Inside Amy Schumer. The skit is a faux birth control ad satirizing reactionary attitudes toward women’s sexuality. Humor is a resonate emotion for memetic texts, and that humor can carry both antagonism and its counter.

Figure 4.10 Four frames from a GIF set transcribing a skit from a 2015 episode of *Inside Amy Schumer*, satirizing restrictions on access to birth control. Collected in 2015.

Sometimes counterpublic contestations explicitly employ the aggressive adversarial humor that characterizes lulz and trolling in order to push against the white, male centrality prevalent in participatory media collectives. On Reddit, /r/ShitRedditSays has long had a reputation for “ruining” Reddit’s agora by pointing out its antagonistic white, male centrality. Despite its small subscriber count—only around 68,000 as of mid 2015—its participants have gained notoriety for their brash mockery of mainline Reddit sensibilities and their playfully adamant embrace of the denigrated “social justice warrior” label. The broader Reddit population often accuses /r/ShitRedditSays participants of contributing nothing to productive public conversation, claiming they’re as hegemonic as the patriarchal forces they supposedly resist. Figure 4.11—housed at the bottom of the /r/ShitRedditSays front page—might satirize the subreddit’s reputation for antagonistic engagement, might flaunt it, or might do both at once. The comic portrays innocent redditors being assaulted by /r/ShitRedditSays members; Reddit’s discussions of “funny joeks, post-*ism, logic, reason, and Ron Paul” are all wrecked by flying sex toys.

Figure 4.11 An image housed at the bottom of the /r/ShitRedditSays front page. Redditors are bombarded with dildos by /r/ShitRedditSays participants, who steal their “internet points” (a reference to Reddit’s “Karma” system for tracking how popular posts and comments are). Reddit’s mascot, Snoo, weeps over the death of free speech. Collected in 2012.

/r/ShitRedditSays is certainly not an example of narrowly “reasonable” or “polite” public conversation. However, agonistic contestation doesn’t always have to be narrowly “reasonable” or “polite.” Zizi Papacharissi (2004)—examining political discussion in newsgroup forums—argues that there’s a difference between being civil and being polite. Civil conversation can be very impolite, but still enrich public deliberation. However, to be civil, counterpublic critique must not include abuse by dominant groups or repression of minority perspectives. To Mouffe (2005), agonism is achieved by embracing adversarial pluralism, acknowledging that disparate perspectives have an equal right to clash. Emphasizing this adversarial pluralism, Adrienne Massanari (2015) contends that agonistic “meta commentary” subreddits like /r/ShitRedditSays serve an essential public function through their parody and critique. Silencing practices are the real threat to agonistic pluralism, not impolite barbs. /r/ShitRedditSays counters silence, and in this way has counterpublic value.

But /r/ShitRedditSays might also be considered counterproductive to agonistic public conversation because it disregards open public debate, implying that it also denies the clash of perspectives central to agonism. /r/ShitRedditSays rules explicitly forbid participants from arguing that a post made to the subreddit is inoffensive or not worthy of its attention. The moderator introducing the rule change expressed frustration because so many comments questioned why something belonged in /r/ShitRedditSays, and insisted that “we are not a debate club.” The prevalent perspective on /r/ShitRedditSays is that the subreddit does not exist to explain to nonparticipants why Reddit’s hegemonic discourse is problematic. Instead, /r/ShitRedditSays is meant to be a counterpublic space to commiserate about the hegemony that flares up on the mainline site whenever a pro-feminist perspective is espoused. The debate can happen in that mainline space; /r/ShitRedditSays is a counterpublic backstage.

Perhaps /r/ShitRedditSays isn’t a space for rational debate, but it is a space for participants to employ criticism, irony, and play to counter the dominant Reddit discourses. Peter Dahlgren sees value in these agonistic practices, arguing that “adherence to what we might characterize as a ‘straightjacket’ of rational speech for the civic subject … undermines the potential richness and vibrancy of political discussion in favor of an illusory ideal, and is likely to deflect civic engagement rather than enhance it” (2013, 75). Memetic play can be politically resonant creative expression. For instance, when Erik Martin, then Reddit’s general manager, became a candidate for Time’s “Time 100 Poll” in 2012 (Time Staff 2012), participants on /r/ShitRedditSays took the photo accompanying the nomination and added multiple layers of annotation to reflect a sentiment they found appropriate for the site (see figure 4.12).

Figure 4.12 Three iterations of a photo of Reddit’s former general manager Erik Martin. Left: an image taken from Reddit content for a *Time* magazine profile; center: a graphic manipulation mocking Martin; right: a macro created in the wake of the Violentacrez debate. Collected in 2012.

Morris ([1988] 2007), borrowing from Michel de Certeau (1984), labels such reappropriations of banal hegemonies “the arts of making do.” Working within the lingua franca that predominates mainline Reddit, participants on /r/ShitRedditSays make do with what they have, critiquing collective memetic norms from within. Humor and play can be tools for pluralistic clash and counterpublic recuperation, as much as they can be tools for exclusionary hegemony.

Poe’s Law and Ambivalent Irony

But lulz and trolls and the resonance of distanced, mean-spirited humor come with implications for agonistic pluralism. Troll itself is an ambiguous term, and this ambiguity is why Chen’s (2012) proclamation that Violentacrez was “the biggest troll on the web” could be problematic. As BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin (2012) argues, “posting disgusting sexist shit on the Internet does not make you a troll if you’re playing to the home audience: if the people who view that content enjoy it and want more, it isn’t trolling.” In the case of Violentacrez, the “troll” moniker might have worked to hide very earnest antagonism under a cloak of irony. For these reasons, Phillips advocates against the term’s blanket popularity, saying that she prefers “to describe online antagonism in terms of the impact it has on its targets. So, if someone is engaging in violently misogynistic behavior, I call them a violent misogynist, as ‘troll’ implies a level of playfulness that tends to minimize their antagonistic behaviors” (2015a). Likewise, Christina Xu worries about conflating “people who are actually being aggressive and threatening online with people who are being playful online” (in Hwang and Xu 2014, 386). The space between those two registers—the narrow spectrum between play and hate—can hide multiple silencing antagonisms, even if it can also facilitate healthy adversarial engagement. In that space is the thin line between ironic expression and earnest exclusion. Blurs around that line haunt the agonistic potential of participatory media.

The difficulty in separating “ironic” antagonism from “earnest” antagonism is prevalent enough that it comes with a name in memetic subcultures: Poe’s Law. According to Know Your Meme, Poe’s Law “is an Internet axiom which states that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent” (“Poe’s Law” undated). It was named for a 2005 forum thread on Creationism where a poster going by “Poe” declared that “without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.” The term has become a way for participants to express confusion or skepticism over seemingly antagonistic content. Poe’s Law indicates the difficulty in parsing out “ironic” and “legitimate” identity antagonism when lulz resonate so powerfully. Know Your Meme also highlights a variation of Poe’s Law, which combines it with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous aphorism that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; Clark-Poe’s Law tells us that “any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.”

4chan’s /b/ addresses that tension head on; it comes with a boilerplate warning at the top of its page, reminding participants that the board is subject to Poe’s Law. The warning proclaims that “the stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” In early 2013, a participant on the subreddit dedicated to collecting 4chan content, /r/4chan, shared the suicide note a self-described pilot had posted to /b/. The pilot promised that the suicide would come as a plane crash during a full flight. Participants in the thread wondered if the crash would really occur. When one poster cited the boilerplate warning as evidence the suicide clearly wouldn’t happen, another responded by asking, “you don’t seriously believe that cop-out disclaimer is always true, do you?” The discussion turned to the difficulties in parsing out the Poe’s Law “bullshit” on 4chan.

/r/ShitRedditSays’ status as a “troll” subreddit inspires similar debate. In a thread on the subreddit /r/BestOf accusing /r/ShitRedditSays of negatively influencing Reddit, one poster commented that “my take is that SRS is full of people who think they’re complete trolls, but don’t understand that it doesn’t count as trolling if you actually believe the things you say.” The next poster speculated that participants on /r/ShitRedditSays really didn’t believe anything they posted, and “if that’s true, they may well be some of the best trolls Reddit’s seen.” A third exhibited further confusion: “I don’t think even THEY know any more if they’re joking or they’re not.” No matter the message, participants in memetic collectives live in the shadow of Poe’s Law.

In Shifman’s (2014) terms, Poe’s Law is born from a source text’s ambiguous stance. Seemingly racist content may be an attempt to “key” satire through a hyperbolic, antagonistic tone, but may also reinforce unequal participation structures while doing so. The banal can carry both simultaneously. When content and form are so grounded in ironic critique, communicative function becomes ambiguous. Shaw echoes this ambiguity in her analysis of harassment on feminist blogs, commenting that some antagonistic participants “couch their comments in civility while simultaneously derailing discussion. For example, a concern troll couches his or her attempts to derail discussion in terms of concern, thereby maintaining ‘civility’ while also engaging in trolling behavior” (2013, 102). Shaw gives the example of concern trolls antagonizing bloggers in the fat-acceptance community by posting their ridicule under the guise of “health concerns.” Though some trolls are more obvious than others, Poe’s Law exists because of the blur between ironic creative play and earnest hateful ideology in participatory media collectives.

Sometimes the extent of this blur—and which side of the irony/earnestness spectrum a text represents—is a judgment call. Memetic texts might resonate to a thousand different participants in a thousand different ways. An ambiguous stance toward identity antagonisms means an ambiguous relationship to inequality. For instance, the “Successful Black Man” image macro (figure 4.7) is steeped in stereotype and could therefore further ingrain inegalitarian perspectives. Familiarity with racist tropes is necessary to get the joke. On the other hand, the macro—in its play on stereotypes—might undermine these stereotypes. The turn of phrase that comes with the second clause’s punch line lampoons readers for unproblematically accepting negative representations. The humorous incongruity “works” because dominant cultural assumptions lead readers astray. Stereotypes ensure that the prosocial behavior in the second clause creates a clash. That clash works as what Christian Burgers, Margot van Mulken, and Peter Jan Schellens (2012) label an “irony marker,” a “meta-communicative clue” that helps readers understand an utterance as ironic. The punch line functions as a “reversal of valence between the literal and intended meaning” (292) of the setup. Readers are taken in by the first clause in the macro, and the bait-and-switch in the second clause reverses a dominant discourse. The mischief might remind us—in a small way—to not take all stereotypes at face value. It might also perpetuate the stereotypes it playfully employs.

Common memetic phrases also demonstrate this ambivalent irony. Pejorative labels for race and gender minorities are frequent in memetic subcultures, often with ambivalent intent (see figure 4.13). On 4chan, “nigga”—with the soft a found in African American vernacular—is often employed in conversations and reaction shots. It might be a nod to the “coolness” of African American vernacular; common memetic phrases like “haters gonna hate,” “u mad,” and “bae” also find their origins in minority terminology. However—as with the “Medieval Reactions” Twitter account we saw in figure 3.11—such appropriations could also further demarcate African Americans from “normal” participants by distinguishing African American vernacular from “normal” speech. The images employing “nigga” in figure 4.13 also apply the slang to unlikely sources, underscoring an ironic, othering use.

Figure 4.13 Six memetic images employing race and gender epithets, reappropriating (left to right, top to bottom): Catholic Pope John Paul II, Tommy and Chuckie from the 1990s show *The Rugrats*, American President Barack Obama, poet and playwright William Shakespeare, NBA star Yao Ming, and a 1788 painting by Jacques-Louis David entitled *Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife*. Collected in 2011.

And gendered language can marginalize minority gender and sexual identities just as racial language can marginalize racial minorities. As evidenced in figure 4.13, on 4chan “bitch” is at times an apparently neutral label for a female (as in the William Shakespeare image); at times labels any denigrated other, regardless of gender (as in the Yao Ming image); and at times specifically denigrates a female (as in Jacques-Louis David’s painting). Racist and sexist language may spread “playfully,” but stereotypes also spread with that play. Pejorative terms—even ironically used—are vehicles perpetuating a history of antagonism and dehumanization.

As we’ve seen, on many 4chan boards, racism and sexism are memetic ideas themselves. They’re a fixed premise by which participants creatively display novel expressions. Invoking “Tits or GTFO” at a humorously appropriate—or, rather, inappropriate—time is a way to further a subculturally accepted in-joke and demonstrate subcultural capital. It’s a way to speak in the hegemonic lingua franca. The “build your fort” images highlighted in figure 4.4 use a racist premise to encourage vernacular creativity, and in doing so inspire jokes based on old stereotypes and inequalities. But the consensus “winner” of the “build your fort” thread (figure 4.14) did not explicitly rely on stereotypes to keep away the minority hordes. Instead, it made its joke by presenting the most complex fort possible, one capable of protecting against any invading threat. Figure 4.14 draws its humor not through narrowly racist associations, but by positing the idea that a few stick-figure African Americans deserve this level of extensive defense. The humor is the overkill. In this way, figure 4.14 reinforces oppressive ideologies on a scale even grander than the easier stereotypes. Posters on many 4chan boards operate in an environment where antagonistic stereotypes are an unchallenged assumption. Even in ironic play, the white, male centrality maintains its prominence.

Figure 4.14 A remix on the “build your fort” premise established in figure 4.4’s template image. For this poster, the minority threat is sufficient enough to merit multiple towers, lasers, underground bunkers, and solid steel reinforcement. Posted on December 28, 2011.

“Lulz” are prevalent enough to blanket a considerable amount of identity antagonism. The racist and sexist texts displayed in this chapter could be the expressions of genuine racists and sexists; they might also be downplayed as a troll on politically correct sensibilities. The line between playful irony, satire, and parody and earnest racist exclusion is a blurry one. This blurriness complicates attempts to gauge the intent of participants who memetically invoke identity antagonisms. The resonance of irony and play in memetic participation means that Poe’s Law looms large, and both hegemonic marginalization and agonistic counterpublic contestation exist in its shadow.

Phillips (2015b) encounters this same ambiguity when assessing the racist talk of the trolls she studied. That talk, she says, does not prove that “trolls are themselves racist. That particular point is unverifiable, and therefore moot” (96). However, Phillips points out that we can verify “the observable fact that trolls revel in explicitly and unapologetically racist language” (96). Practices that silence or dehumanize minority perspectives—playful or not, ironic or not—perpetuate a white, male centrality in participatory media. Counterpublic contestation comes when these same strategies are turned on their head.

4 Antagonism: Race, Gender, and Counterpublic Contestation