myusen

[myusen]

On Ethics

I want to start off this ethic chapter with sharing an anecdote. It is a regular Friday night, and I have spent the better part of the last eight hours obsessing over my data – obsessing over my playlist of Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity (RMEM) memes in an attempt to see and write down the emergent patterns hidden within them. The particular visually and auditory overstimulating style and form of these memes, that often underscores deeply misogynistic narratives with hardstyle bass and flashy edits, paired with its ridiculous and almost self-ironic messaging, has fried my brain. My phone rings, and as I talk and vent to my friend about the exhausting details of my day, I start to explain one particular RMEM meme from the playlist that had gotten stuck in my memory to her. After I finished explaining, she stops me and asks:

"And what are you feeling when you look at those memes all day? Because only listening to you describing those memes, makes me incredibly angry. Are you also angry?".

For a moment, I am not really sure what to respond. Luckily, we are talking on the phone, otherwise she would have easily read it of my face, that I am trying to bide time as I am answering her question. Because if I were to be entirely honest, I would not only have to say that I am not feeling any animosity, anger or anything of significance, but also that I sometimes find these memes to be hilarious and what would she think about that? After the initial stammer, I ended up confessing these complicated feelings, but not without feeling ashamed for them. Knowing my friend as a person that is a vocal advocator for feminism in her local community, and hearing her anger and to some extend pain through the phone, made me question my loyalty in this matter.

Should I be angry, when I see and engage with memes that dismiss even the slightest chance that a woman could form a valuable opinion? And what about those that are overtly racist and antisemitic or colonialist? Shouldn't I be researching with vindictive energy in my heart? Shouldn't I be attempting to work against such communities of disinformation, attempting to show the many wrongs – deconstructing and dismissing their hateful reality to its very core?

Perhaps I am too well versed in the vernacular of anti-feminist and androcentric, misogynistic discourse to see RMEM memes for what they are – rage inducing attacks on people identifying as LGBTQIA, women, people of color, people who are overweight and many more. Growing up on/with the internet in the early 2000s as a white, cis-man (at the sad top of the intersectional pyramid), I am used to the content and the style of these memes playing video games and perhaps my positionality in all of this makes me blind to these attacks and thus inadequate to research RMEM memes.

Especially because I am not simply researching RMEM memes by means of describing their narrative and rhetoric construction, but more so because I am suggesting an empathetic approach to understanding RMEM memes. An approach that builds on and takes guidance in feminist theory (D. Haraway, 1988; D. J. Haraway, 2016; Harding, 2009; Harding & Hintikka, 1983) as well as a feminist ethics of care approach (Schrader, 2015). In an attempt to lay bare and take seriously the sensemaking practices of such communities of practice that create, recreate, share and circulate such memes. And what could be more macabre than a white cis man employing a feminist approach to make sense of explicitly anti-feminist spaces of disinformation?

Another point of contention apart (and embedded in) from my own positionality is the question of whether the topic of RMEM memes even should be researched? One could say their androcentric and misogynistic messaging is so on the nose, that it would be unjust to extend the loving care which is requires to see faithfully from their position (D. Haraway, 1988, p. 582), not to speak of the very real monetary resources allocated to me as a researcher, which I use to listen, understand and ultimately write and disseminate the narratives of such communities of practice, whose larger narratives are already widely represented and part of the hegemonic world view of today. Why not use the resources I have been given to a more just cause? Researching and letting more subjugated people's positions speak?

Whilst a fair question, and one I have posed to myself multiple times – at times answering with more, at times with less conviction to myself – I do believe it is important not to engage in one-upmanship of whose position is the most subjugated, as the basis of where research should be done as that line of argumentation could end in the fetishization of the subjugated position. I also believe it is important not to forget that class is also an important axis in the intersectional understanding of oppression, and that, although the perceived majority of members of such communities of practices portray themselves as hyper hetero masculine, they suffer just as much under the sad reality of 'late-stage capitalism'. Namely disenfranchised, underpaid, and about to take over a dying planet after decades of anthropocentric abuse.

And yet, as all of those thoughts swirl in my head, I do have a strong aversion for the vindictive approach to studying disinformation. An approach that sees only the malicious intent, reads only the face value and condemns. I mean no harm to anyone that feels attacked, I can totally understand that memes such as RMEM memes can be understood as a personal attack, and that one would want to take a stance against such an attack, and to some extent just fire back – specifically if one is the overt victim of such an attack. And, I mean, there is more than enough material to fire back with, and to ridicule RMEM memers. The jokes literally write themselves, as RMEM memers appear to have collectively decided that the best way to show their hyper traditional heterosexuality is by remixing half naked, muscular men over hardstyle beats. If one was not aware of the context of RMEM memes, one could easily be fooled into thinking that RMEM memes celebrate open homosexuality.

I disagree with the oversimplistic understanding of 4chan being the spawn of all evil and that RMEM memes are inherently anti-feminist and racist, as I lean on the writings of Donna Haraway, and the concept of situated knowledge and feminist objectivity, which "resists simplification in the last instance" (D. Haraway, 1988, p. 590). But how does one do that, without humanizing those who dehumanize others, nor look for reason, where there is none to be found?

How does one approach communities of practice such as those around RMEM memes or spaces such as the_donald or 4chan not as the enemy to decent public discourse but just as much part of it as anything else? Or should one even? Should one extend empathy?

Perhaps one piece of guidance can be found in the ideas of Paolo Freire's (2000) (1970), dialogical actions; as he describes it the role of the oppressed to be to refuse the logic of the oppressors, to go the extra mile, and it is thus that I believe extending empathy towards communities of disinformation, which are elsewhere called "fringe" or "alt-right" communities is the only way forward to breaking the cycle of oppression.  

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Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Harding, S. (2009). Standpoint Theories: Productively Controversial. Hypatia, 24(4), 192–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01067.x

Harding, S., & Hintikka, M. B. (Eds.). (1983). Discovering reality: Feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science. D. Reidel ; Sold and distributed in the USA and Canada by Kluwer Boston.

Schrader, A. (2015). Abyssal intimacies and temporalities of care: How (not) to care about deformed leaf bugs in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 665–690. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715603249