Soft targets: missing women, insidious violence and proxy performance

Abstract

This article draws attention to a gestural poetics in activist screen culture where proxy performance, on behalf of missing women and schoolgirls, prompts a rethink of trauma theory’s distinction between working through and acting out. It looks closely at a triptych of short films by Anishinaabe film-maker, Lisa Jackson, where gestures – from writing, to hip hop, to singing the national anthem – ‘work through’ the structural violence of Canada’s policy of ‘killing the Indian in the child’. It turns, then, to the social media campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, focusing on its signature gesture ‘acted out’ by celebrities, activists and ad hoc groups on behalf of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. It argues that Jackson’s film trilogy facilitates the return of ‘the Indian in the child’ through affective performance, while #BringBackOurGirls participates in a gestural politics of equivalence.