GIFs from Feminists: Visual Pleasure, Danger, and Anger on the Jezebel Website

Abstract

The Jezebel website employs animations and still images as key components of its news stories and politics. Jezebel staff interrogates contemporary culture, including women's magazines, by deploying these graphic interchange format representations (GIFs) in stories. Individuals who are hostile to Jezebel's feminist and women-focused project have also disrupted the website with rape GIFs. Nevertheless, Jezebel proposes that individuals post GIFs to comment sections of stories as methods of pleasurably communicating and critiquing intolerance. I argue that some Jezebel contributors adopt these practices because GIFs allow them to critique misogyny and racism, such as the practices of men's rights activists (MRAs), and establish varied forms of pleasure. This includes women of color's employment of GIFs as a means of encouraging Jezebel and white participants to address intersectional feminism and race. However, these strategies have not fully enabled communication between Jezebel staff and women of color contributors. In this article, I contextualize Jezebel's practices with feminist inquiries about pleasure and danger and studies of MRAs and online threats. While there has been some research on visual pleasure in Internet settings, I point to the ways pleasure, danger, and anger are conveyed through GIFs and can be used to conceptualize intersectional feminism and Internet practices.