Stalled Life with Rhetoric: Notorious RBG and the Limits of Feminist Imagery

Abstract

New materialist methods often frame networked images as dynamic, bouncing across the network in contiguous and proximate iterations. Positing that a networked life of an image stalls, this article seeks to understand when and how stasis occurs to articulate what it indicates regarding political messaging of feminism and feminist action. Such an approach involves attuning to serial collectives: spaces that signal regulatory coherence despite variation, where the dynamic networked image coalesces. By tracing images of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I demonstrate how the features of her image in circulation stabilize political meaning even as they move through a dynamic networked ecology. This stasis reveals limits to the discursive power of feminist imagery, eliding potential for productive feminist action within an economy of feminist activism. Further, I argue that scholars investigating feminist imagery must account for the consequences of selling, buying, and performing—commodifying—feminism.