THREE Velocitized Rhetorics

As the assemblage of the body themes blend, the various rhetorics and ideologies associated with those themes—ideologies related to liberation, oppression, universalism, difference, nationhood and geopolitics—also overlap, collide, and fuse together, gaining more and more momentum, and thus more and more exposure to different online users and communities. In this particular section, I show how those moments—the affective collisions of ideology—result in certain assumptions and beliefs about Islam and feminism. The affective circulation of the body-as-protest and the body-as-object themes, for example, as they are used to contrast femen and Sboui, ultimately suggest that protest, and thus femen, corresponds to free-moving, liberated, independent bodies, and the object—Sboui—symbolizes the notion of fixed, detained, oppressed bodies. As users align themselves with these beliefs, they also align themselves with certain bodies and “sides,” such that the rhetorical landscape becomes increasingly bifurcated and polarized. Whereas arguments were still present in the themes of protest and object in the first layer of circulation (which protests and objects worked, why they might work, and so on), those themes become affectively tied to certain kinds of bodies—liberated and oppressed—in ways that make identifications easy, quick, and absent of debate or contestation.

Many posts in this layer of circulation focus on how femen’s protest supports or intensifies feelings and beliefs about the eradication of Islam. For example, another anonymous writer from the blog Kafir Crusaders, a site dedicated to standing up against “Islamization” (and mentioned in the previous chapter), writes in the comment section on a post about femen’s topless jihad day: “My opinion of feminists has gone right up now following Page 74 →them standing up to the Islamic religious bullies.”⁴ Further down in this post are several images of femen members protesting with the following statements beneath the photos: “Feminist babes getting their boobs out against militant Islam,” and “Not a body hair in sight on these sexy feminist nude protesters breaking the mental image of your excessively hairy razor shy traditional feminist.”⁵ Within these statements, the body rhetorics that emerged in the previous layer are used to make claims about the religious practices of Islam. For a writer like this, who is arguably against the religion of Islam (as one can assume from his participation in an anti-Islam website), seeing a topless “jihad” targeting the “bullying” religion triggers a congratulatory emotion, as femen’s protest reflexively affirms and solidifies his own belief that Islam is oppressive and should be eradicated. In addition, the affective projections in these statements get transferred onto beliefs about feminism and women’s bodies. For instance, the celebration of the hairless “sexy” feminists standing up against Islam as opposed to the “excessively hairy razor shy traditional feminist” represents “progress” and a desired future for this writer. The affective charge in the projection of this desired future, however, lies in the fact that this “future” is not only premised on the eradication of Islam, but also on the eradication of a particular kind of feminist body: “the razor shy traditional feminist.”

This kind of affective circulation of the idealized feminist (and thus the eradication of “other” feminist bodies) emerges in another example from a blog post entitled, “Nudity is a Dumb Argument, but at Least the Femen Babes Get Naked for Justice – and They Have Waists.”⁶ Swann goes on to write: “The accompanying 31 photos show the Ukrainian women doing two things American feminists cannot do: 1. Stand up for the oppressed and not the oppressors [and] 2. Look good without clothes. I expect things will get worse before they get better for the women of Islam, but it’s nice to have contemporary visual evidence that the feminine waist is not extinct.”⁷ Once again, the link between the “ideal,” waist-revealing feminist body and the fight for “justice” becomes foregrounded as the main message of this post. Similar to the latter example, this rhetorical construction is perhaps a result of Swann’s righteous anger regarding his ideological beliefs about women’s oppression and his desire for “progress,” as well as his own opinions regarding feminism and women’s bodies. Once again, “progress” becomes associated with feminism, and feminism with a particular kind of feminist—one with a particular waistline and one who can “look good without clothes.” In addition, Swann’s particular claim about things getting “worse before they Page 75 →get better for the women of Islam” reveals a particular kind of elision in his text: that is, the construction of Muslim women, and by extension Sboui, as outside of that progress and thus removed—eradicated—from the feminist project.

Within the slippages between the idealized feminist and the idealized eradication of Islam, Sboui’s protest—the act that ignited these conversations—is completely transformed into a rallying celebration of femen. In just one sentence, the context of Sboui’s protest, as well as the nation of Tunisia itself, becomes irrelevant, and Ukraine and “Ukrainian feminists” become the subjects of circulation. Ultimately, femen is positioned in opposition to Muslim feminists, and thus, by extension, in opposition to Sboui. Swann even goes so far as to position femen members from Ukraine in opposition to “American feminists.” These distinctions are premised on his objectification of women’s naked bodies, and thus on a latent sexist discourse that Sboui’s original protest sought to resist. The body-as-protest, object, and nation themes, then—as they collide and combine—reinforce the exact kind of discourse Sboui opposed.

When Sboui is referenced in this layer of circulation (and those references are few and far between), many of the mentions are blatantly disappointed with her protest, implying that her rhetorical act actually hurts the “progression” of women’s rights in Tunisia. The following portion of Giovanni’s aforementioned article, for example, was re-quoted and retweeted on various social media platforms: “But why does she not hit the streets of Tunis like my other activist friends and protest, or blog, or try to highlight the plight of women in a more productive way?”⁸ The emphasis on “productive” protest is important here and begs the question: what makes Sboui’s protest anti-productive? And conversely, what makes femen’s method of protest more admirable? Giovanni’s statement (and others’ re-citation of it) suggests that Sboui’s body can only be seen and thus represented as an object. Posting an image—a still picture of her naked body covered with provocative statements—becomes only a static physical body. The presumption here is that true protest involves literal “action” or movement (note Giovanni’s references to “hitting the streets” and blogging), which a static image obviously lacks. femen members, others argue, are “moving”: they are standing up for women’s rights by traveling to various places—protesting at mosques, embassies, etcetera. A similar critique of Sboui is evidenced in the following quote from the site Roosh V forum (a site dedicated to global politics): “She didn’t want to change shit. Her cause was herself. She wanted attention, and Page 76 →only attention, from the get-go. If she was serious about advancing the cause of human rights for women in Tunisia or whatever, she wouldn’t go around parading her oddly shaped body on the internet.”⁹ Again, Sboui’s literal body becomes objectified and her bodily protest discounted.

As this contrastive construction continued to circulate and gain more velocity, headlines like Duke’s, “Boobs, not Barbarity: Women Across the World Urged to Bare Their Breasts Against Islamism,”¹⁰ for example, moved rapidly throughout Twitter/X and Facebook. On the Kafir Crusaders blog, many users responded to the idea of “titslamism,” making statements like, “A host of beauties from around the world are taking part in topless jihad day by showing their breasts in protest against the barbaric backward nature of Islam,” and “The killjoy sexist cleric thinks that a female getting her tits out deserves the punishment of a slow and painful death. It’s amazing how these backward Islamic nut jobs take offence at something pretty much trivial like a pair of boobs as though they have some huge amount of morals. Then call for her to be killed in the next breath in a painful and barbaric manner like its nothing.”¹¹ On the Roosh V forum, the user comments responding to the post about Sboui and her “oddly shaped body” reveal just how quickly the femen vs. Sboui binary becomes repositioned as femen versus Islam, and in many ways, “feminism” versus Islam. Below are a few other comments that appeared in the Roosh V thread:

Below a reminder of the violent and sexist nature of Islam.

Islam is actually a reaction to the female dominated snake worshipping lunar society that was prevalent in the middle east before Mohammed. The continued dichotomy of extreme gender tyranny between Islam and feminism exists to this day.

Common sense’ is not how repressive, ignorant elements of society get changed. Rosa Parks should have caved in and gotten off the bus? There’s no progress without nonviolent civil disobedience. Why are you silent on the boobs who are advocating KILLING her for this?

Do you really think the Arabs can keep the suffocating restrictions on women they have now? Seriously, do you think that can continue, and would you want it to?

Even the Saudis with their repulsive morality police who go around bullying women physically (and I don’t mean the bullshit like that Pycon cunt complained about) are liberalizing because they know it can’t last.

Page 77 →If you don’t like women (I often don’t much) and think they’re inferior, at least beat them in a fair fight of intellect and effort, not ignorant bullying.¹²

These responses serve as useful examples of what happens when the velocity of messages undergirded by affective energies leads to both fusions and conflicts of ideology. Bound up in these messages are sets of relationships produced from the conflation of emotions (anger, antagonism, resentment), ideologies related to religious intolerance and beliefs about oppression (particularly men’s perspectives on the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men), as well as personal contexts in which oppression and gender roles signal different meanings and experiences. When these elements fuse together, affective charges involving misogyny and Islamophobia get circulated in the form of evaluations and judgments. As a result, the moments of rhetorical encounter here produce particular kinds of affect that result in exclusionary groups and “us vs. them” relationships. This is partly because the emotional expressions of anger and resentment in the texts, alongside the personal attachments to beliefs about women’s oppression in the Arab world, lead to an impassioned argument about why that oppression is wrong, and thus why Islam is wrong, resulting, then, in Islamophobic and misogynist rhetoric. The last Roosh V comment is perhaps one of the starkest representations of the kind of affective impact that results from such heightened velocity. The blatant misogyny in his statement, alongside the harsh criticism of the “Islamic nutjobs,” reveals how the slippages in meaning, which result in a contemptuous affect directed at both Islam and women, contribute to the reinforcement of certain social relations designed to marginalize groups of people based on gender, race, and religious affiliations. This kind of relational construction sets the stage for the feminist debate to become affectively processed through an Islamophobic lens. As a result, the oppressed v. free nature of religion becomes even more pronounced in the subsequent construction of alliances and estrangements, as these rhetorics continue to circulate and move throughout the digital sphere.

As illustrated in the last chapter, the body rhetorics circulating within this digital public generate a question not amplified at all in the initial response, but rather one that emerges with the image’s increased velocity: that is, whose body? Ironically, as these rhetorics collide, other Muslim women, Page 78 →who may have previously allied with the national context of Sboui’s protest, come to protest against her based on the amplification of certain messages regarding gendered and racially marked bodies that purportedly speak for all women. In this case, amplification obfuscates in such a manner that the velocitized message focuses on the mode of protest rather than what is being protested. The Facebook group, Muslim Women Against femen (a group that formed in response to femen’s call for a topless jihad day) points out that the “bodies” protesting are not the bodies of brown women, nor the bodies of Muslim women.¹³ Because of this, they resist femen’s idea of a “global sisterhood” and critique femen’s attempt to operate as a “collective mouthpiece.” Central to these newly created social relations is an analysis of the ways in which both femen and MWAF’s messages contain rhetorics of the body that generate particular reactions based on the assemblage of emotion, ideology, and place in each text. As a result of this affective circulation, femen and MWAF become polarized, further resulting in the polarization of Western feminism and Islam, and finally, as the last section indicates, the West and the Arab world (the MENA region).

The start of this polarization can be seen in the texts produced by MWAF. Through the mediums of Twitter/X and Facebook, MWAF responds to and re-appropriates femen’s protest with a “#counterprotest,” reshaping and recontextualizing the body-as-object and the body-as-protest themes within a more localized, context-specific framework. femen’s message—driven by an affect involving righteously angry expressions of Western feminist beliefs about global feminist solidarity (the binary above)—is interpreted by MWAF as an attempt to actually disenfranchise and marginalize a group of women. MWAF locates their difference in place: in the lived experience of those femen seeks to free. On its Facebook page, MWAF makes it known that femen’s invocation to form a “global sisterhood” through participation in a “topless jihad day” not only disregards the lived experiences of Muslim women but also obfuscates the differences that make those lived experiences a reality. As a response to femen, MWAF circulated a call for a “Muslimah Pride Day,” responding to the Western feminist affect undergirding femen’s texts. The group used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter/X to organize and coalesce support. Below are a few examples of the tweets that arose from this counterprotest:

Counterprotest against #toplessjihadday, Join muslim women in #muslimahpride day. Reclaiming agency.

Page 79 →Muslim women stand up for their rights without ripping off their clothes or exploiting other women.

We don’t accept the stereotypes enforced on us by the west. Nor do we need #Femen to become our collective mouthpiece.¹⁴

MWAF’s re-appropriation of femen’s protest as a “#counterprotest” and femen’s “topless jihad day” as a “#Muslimah Pride Day” speaks to the ways in which MWAF reshapes and re-characterizes femen’s texts within a more localized, context-specific rhetorical framework. In their response to femen’s emotion (i.e., righteous anger) and the affective pathways that emotion makes possible (i.e., anger directed at globalized oppression), they ultimately disrupt femen’s affective ecology by overlaying a different ideological and geographical framework onto a similar emotion (i.e., righteous anger at Western feminism). Such a redirection of affective circulation is supported by an ideological critique of Western feminism premised in lived experiences involving racism and religious intolerance. This kind of move, then, contributes even further to the construction of both alliances and oppositions (note the use of “counter” in MWAF’s hashtag).

A similar move takes place in MWAF’s circulation of their “Open-Letter to femen,” which appeared on personal blog sites, Twitter/X and Facebook pages, and later, Huffington Post and the Atlantic.¹⁵ Not only does this “open letter” advance the “social link” between femen’s rhetorical claims and those of MWAF’s, but it also attempts to mediate those rhetorics and move them into a different arena. In their letter, MWAF argues that femen’s rhetorical practices signify yet another kind of “First World attack against Third World peoples.” They articulate this further by noting, “The liberation pushed by privileged First World women is a cynical ploy to secure their own aristocratic position within global gender hierarchies.”¹⁶ This same message becomes more apparent in the embodied texts circulated by MWAF. As another form of “counterprotest,” Muslim and non-Muslim women posted photos of themselves to Facebook and Twitter/X in response to femen’s topless images.¹⁷ Some women took photos of themselves wearing hijabs, others with signs reading: “Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving!,” “Do I look oppressed to you?!,” “Shame on you femen. Hijab is my right!” and “I am a Muslim and a Feminist” (figure 5).

The reappropriation of femen’s rhetorical mediums (the open letter and the use of images and bodily messages), as well as the reappropriation of the language and words used by femen (words such as “feminist,” “liberation,” and “oppression”), increases the velocity of these texts. But this velocity is not merely an act of resistance; this circulation is also an act of revision, an act that challenges, changes, and destabilizes previous rhetorical meanings. Rather than “universal solidarity” among all women, MWAF implores femen and the larger public to acknowledge difference, to take on a critical consciousness by recognizing that the universalizing rhetorics of Western feminism do not speak to or for all women. Furthermore, MWAF’s redistribution and revision of femen’s rhetoric operates as a mode of resistance to the dominant discourses of globalization interarticulated in femen’s rhetoric. By calling attention to femen’s reinforcement of a “global gender hierarchy,” MWAF points to a larger, global context in which ideas about power and gender are discussed using the problematic binaries of “First World” and “Third World.” In this sense, they point out a blind spot in femen’s rhetorical praxis—the ways in which the organization’s attempt to speak for “Third World” women serve as a kind of colonizing move, one that perpetuates damaging perspectives of women outside of the “West.” In recharacterizing femen’s essentializing rhetoric—their idealistic notion of a “global sisterhood”—MWAF, in their open letter to femen, take on femen’s constant use of the third person plural to signify a different “we,” alluding to a solidarity among “Muslim women and women of colour from the Global South.”¹⁸ Moreover, the “we” for MWAF encompasses not just relations of gender but also of race, religion, sexuality, geographic location, and class. This kind of affective circulation showcases both femen and MWAF’s efforts to redistribute and revise ideologies related to “liberation,” “freedom,” and “oppression.”

Page 81 →The most notable of these moves for rhetorical action and rhetorical efficacy is the potentially productive response of a Western feminist who acknowledges colonizing moves within femen and the body-as-protest theme. For example, in an opinion piece entitled “Why I, As a Muslim Woman, Don’t Support femen,” from the alternative political site, PolicyMic, the following is written of femen and MWAF by self-identified “Muslim feminist,” Areej Elahi-Siddiqui:

The femen movement has been gaining momentum all across the globe, with April 4 being declared the official “International Topless Jihad Day.” In response, however, Muslim women — both, those who wear hijabs and those who do not — launched an online campaign called “Muslimah Pride Day” to show that contrary to what many non-Muslim women are claiming, they aren’t being oppressed by Islam, Page 82 →but instead are offended by femen using them to propel their own Western-liberal agenda. And as a young Muslim woman growing up in the United States, I fully agree with the latter group.¹⁹

Elahi-Siddiqui not only highlights both campaigns, adding to their heightened velocity (she literally “links” to each campaign), she also aligns herself with the rhetorical practices of MWAF in her critique of femen’s exclusionary tactics. Other sites, including various feminist blogs, make similar connections. For example, certain texts respond to MWAF’s call by circulating and linking to articles on Western feminism and Western liberalism. An article by Houria Bouteldja entitled “White Women and the Privilege of Solidarity” circulated on both Twitter/X and Facebook and was re-posted thirteen times on people’s personal blogs. Articles addressing the historical context of bodily aesthetics and religion, as well as articles on white privilege, colonialism, and “decolonizing feminism,” moved throughout these digital spaces in an effort to “realize” and “characterize” specific rhetorical purposes. Such movements formed a kind of affective circulation in that they emerged as a result of individual nexuses of emotion, ideology, and place. For example, in the following excerpt, Hana Riaz, a writer who identifies as a “Black South Asian Muslim Feminist” living in the United Kingdom, reacts emotionally to the Western feminist ideologies of universalism embedded in femen’s texts. Taking on a similar emotion to femen—that of anger and critique—Riaz circulates an affect premised on difference. She writes:

Reducing women to a homogenous category without sociohistorical embedding, risks losing indigenous meanings or alternative understandings of gender–sexuality based on location, or social and sexual destinies that differ from both Western male-centered and feminist visions. Furthermore, it leaves women with multiple identities, such as Muslim women, unable to “pick” and “choose” one. These identities are inextricably defined by one another and we cannot simply drop or alter what are core tenets of our experiences.²⁰

Through modes of affective movement, there is an attempt to “realize” the world in a particular way, as these instances of circulation attempt to “re-situate” local contexts, as well as certain cultural and political beliefs. This moment in particular includes emotional expressions of critique and anger regarding Western feminist ideologies (as seen throughout MWAF’s texts) fused with Riaz’s own experiences as a Black South Asian Muslim Page 83 →feminist. Her reference to the multiple identities of women contradicts the universalizing ideologies embedded in femen’s texts and also calls attention to the failure and problematic marginalization implicit in such ideologies. To illustrate these ideas, she uses herself—a body is that both gendered and raced. In many ways, Riaz’s comment, like many of MWAF’s texts, reveals how the various interactions that comprise a text’s circulation involve efforts to understand, resist, and revise ideologies related to difference and lived experiences.

Although these responses prescribe ways of bringing feminists together across difference, this attempt at new social relations also sidelines other possible alliances. In these moments, MWAF, and others like Riaz, render the body rhetorics as generalizable to women across the globe, erasing again the specific Tunisian context of Sboui’s original post. Although I cannot know for sure, MWAF’s posts suggest that as a group, they may be sympathetic to Sboui’s goals, if not the means by which she executed her protest. But due to the velocity of the amplified themes, this original context gets lost and instead becomes recontextualized by MWAF as a response to white Western feminism. Thus, the problematic slippage in these responses is always already invoking a “world” where differences become both strategically obscured and emphasized, and experiences, agencies, and histories become something universal and singular.

As this critique of white Western feminism gained more velocity in social media, particularly from other feminists, many supporting and responding to MWAF never end up referencing Sboui’s protest at all. The second social relation associated with velocity, then, is not the formation of a new relation but the forestalling of one that was once possible. In allying with specific experiences and thus ideologies, the responses to MWAF seem to open up possibilities for new alliances—but those alliances remain locked within identifications of sameness against the Other. These ideologies are premised on emotional and personal attachments, attachments that then help to construct connections and disconnections—“awayness” and “towardness”—between femen, MWAF, and others. As was the case with femen’s reaction to and circulation of Sboui’s image, MWAF’s circulation of their countertexts demonstrates an affect with roots in different material and historical contexts and differing evaluations of collectivity and solidarity. To put it differently, MWAF’s moments of affective circulation—the fomenting anger regarding femen’s silencing, universalizing moves— represent instances of critical confrontation regarding women’s lived experiences and differences. But rather than a completely new affective relation, Page 84 →it responds to the earlier binary (femen vs. Islam) such that it creates a new binary: Muslim feminists versus Western feminists. Affectively, MWAF’s rhetoric uses similar emotions and affective pathways, producing a new polarization. The social relations are unchanged even as the affect seems to take a new direction.

This rhetorical encounter is crucial to my discussion of the affective charges undergirding both femen and MWAF’s texts. Whereas femen’s earlier emotional connections to bodily protest (women’s naked bodies as symbols of liberation) obscured the Muslim context (e.g., Sboui and the context of Tunisia), femen’s righteous anger regarding the “need” for women’s bodily freedom results in a kind of colonizing affect when encountered, experienced, and evaluated by MWAF. This ideological clash thus fuels MWAF’s angry emotional response to a perceived colonization by Western feminists, anger that is directly at odds with femen’s own use of righteous anger. As these circulating rhetorics continued to move outward, they prompted other kinds of rhetorical engagements, ones that brought some feminists together and some apart (the latter being much more prevalent). Ultimately what emerges from this affective circulation is the belief that the ideals of white Western feminists and Muslim feminists are irreconcilable. This move creates and reinforces certain kinds of social relations, making certain collectivities possible while forestalling others.

Potential allies for Sboui are preoccupied with their response to Western feminists, suggesting that the possibilities for alliance are either with Muslim feminists, white feminists, or some combination (as described above). In this case, the choice for many Muslims is with Muslim Women Against femen, a move that results in the erasure of the Tunisian context of Sboui’s protests. In allying within difference, the possibilities for alliances across difference are negated; thus, what is forestalled is an alliance with a feminism that does not erase race, ethnicity, colonialism, or religion /or a Muslim feminist alliance comprising differing protest modes (e.g., the clothed body, the naked body). The choices quickly reduce to “Muslim feminist” or “white Western feminist.” For example, on a blog entitled Badass Muslimahs, an anonymous writer makes the following claim: “I’ve had enough of the sensationalist, exoticised, demeaning portrayals of Muslim women seen all throughout the media, and this is my way of countering all the nonsense. This is not an attempt at ‘breaking stereotypes’ or trying to enlighten people, if you’re ignorant enough to believe that Muslim women are oppressed Page 85 →and subjugated by Islam then that’s your own problem.”²¹ It’s important to note here the reference to “countering.” This writer puts forth the same kind of assertion as MWAF’s counterprotest: a critique of the white Western feminist discourse that problematically situates Muslim women as silent and oppressed. In yet another example, a post from the tumblr “Tashabilities” presents a similar rhetoric. Although this unidentified writer refers to the “topless jihad day” as a movement in support of Sboui, there is no mention of Sboui’s individual protest or the context from which her protest emerged:

I’m posting this because that Topless jihad really irked me. If few Muslim women want to be liberated or what not, that doesn’t mean they speak for the rest of the millions and millions of us. As a Muslim woman, I really love my religion and whole heartedly accept to cover up. That does not make me oppressed!! I CHOSE to dress this way so did millions of others. Why cant that be respected? ... We don’t need such support, we can defend ourselves with our cloth on. We don’t need to get naked to be heard. Somehow these people thinks, to be free is to be able to cover less, be almost naked. Not to mention no one is protesting other important issues that really needs attention in the world, but somehow getting Muslim women to not cover seams very important to them. ... Have the bleachers, white women, have the bleachers.²²

Here, the focus on protest and the question “whose body?” quickly becomes foregrounded as the main concern of these texts. This is because affect colors messages with particular kinds of emotion that ultimately alter the meanings embedded in these messages, creating an “us–them” relationship, and thus prompting more emotional responses that then reinforce that us–them relationship. The Tashabilities tumblr, for example, has the following statement in the “About” section: “Southern by birth. Black by the grace of G-d. Nothing here is about you or for you, so before you reblog, don’t. If you’re white and you’re here to tell me your opinion on my belief that white people should be banned from transracial adoption, kill yourself first.”²³ The level of emotion here perhaps stems from certain beliefs and experiences related to race and white privilege. Hence, by reading the About section alongside the blog post, one can better understand the blog writers’ position through their affective use of anger toward white liberalism, and specifically, white feminism.

In a different, and arguably problematic move, other “feminists” responded to MWAF, critiquing and discounting their rhetorical acts as misinformed and counterproductive. The idea of counterproductivity is Page 86 →important, as the focus of these texts is more about “sides” and solidifying the “us–them” relationship, rather than building coalitions and feminist solidarity (which was the original goal). The rhetorical construction of “us–them” further reinforces that construction—a kind of affective circulation—as it prompts more emotional than objective responses. Emotional reactions (quick, knee-jerk responses prompted by reading a text solely from one’s own context) result in an affective circulation that only bifurcates, preventing alliances across difference completely. For example, Namazie, on her personal website, put forth the following statement:

A group of women have set up a Facebook page called Muslim women against femen. ... Muslimah Pride Day. They just don’t get it (or obviously choose not to). On a day that has been set aside to defend a 19 year old woman who has been threatened by an Islamist with death by stoning, detained, drugged and restricted from communicating with her friends and femen all for merely for expressing herself, they choose to mark the day by calling on women to oppose femen and to veil. As I have said before, nudity is the antithesis of veiling. Also it is clear that you cannot defend women’s rights and defend Islam and Islamism at the same time. You have to choose. femen and we have chosen to side with women’s rights and equality; they have chose to side with the veil, Islam and Islamism no matter what it does to those who do not submit.²⁴

In this statement, the same kind of argument that emerged in the first layer resurfaces: the belief that nudity is analogous to the fight for women’s rights, as well as the belief that feminism and Islam are antithetical. However, as Namazi’s rhetoric comes into contact with MWAF’s, what ultimately develops is an “us–them” dichotomy—“sides”—that then becomes the main focus of the circulation that follows, due to differing ideas of nudity and “freedom.” Namazi’s claim that members of MWAF “don’t get it” and “choose” not to “get it” perpetuates the kind of liberal feminist discourse that, in practice, actually marginalizes and excludes others. This exclusion and marginalization are reinforced in the following comment (in response to Namazi’s post):

I think they are mutually exclusive. You can be a Muslim or an atheist and defend women’s right of course. That is one of my main points always. But you cannot defend Islam and Islamism and also defend women’s rights because they are antithetical to each other. If you want to Page 87 →defend women’s rights from an Islamic perspective it just doesn’t work. Because women’s rights go beyond that which is religiously sanctioned. Moreover religious sanctions violate plenty of rights and is fundamentally misogynist. Islamism is altogether another matter—it is misogyny and barbarity with political power; there is nothing pro-woman about it—quite the opposite. Defending women’s rights has to be done from a universal and secular perspective. I don’t want rights Islam has “given me”; I want more than that.²⁵

While there appears to be in both the latter comment and in Namazi’s post a genuine concern for women’s rights, the clashing rhetorics result in an indifference toward difference and a complete disregard for what women’s rights mean for women coming from different contexts and experiences. This rhetorical “clashing” is furthered by the affective element undergirding the circulation of these texts. All throughout femen’s texts users see, and perhaps even feel, an emotion of righteous anger in their call for feminist solidarity. That sentiment also appears in MWAF’s texts and the texts in support of MWAF, yet the purpose differs. The same righteous anger emerges ultimately in the texts seen on Namazi’s site—a righteous anger in favor of “universal” feminist practices and in opposition to Islamic practices, ultimately resulting in feminist discord and estrangement, the antithesis of global solidarity.

This discord becomes more apparent in the mainstream media’s circulation of these texts. On the International Business Times site, for example, the following headline appeared: “Anti-Femen Topless Jihad Day: Muslim Women Slam ‘Racist’ Feminist Activists.”²⁶ Aside from the contrastive description—“anti-Femen”—the quotations around the word “racist” next to the unquoted description, “feminist activists,” imply insincerity and a lack of understanding toward MWAF’s position. This stylistic choice also suggests that the idea of racism, and MWAF’s experience of racism, can and should be called into question. Following MWAF’s open letter to femen, Huffington Post UK circulated a response from Inna Shevchenko, leader of femen, entitled “Inna Shevchenko Responds To Muslim Women Against Femen’s Open Letter In Wake Of Amina Tyler Topless Jihad.” The response begins with a third person addressing the larger public—not MWAF. In describing her opinion of MWAF’s open letter, she writes: “The letter is obviously written not in feminist rhetoric at all, as they are making accusations of racism.” A few sentences later, the distant third person “they” becomes represented as addressed “sisters” and then as “you”: “So sisters ... You say Page 88 →to us that you are against Femen but we are here for you and for all of us, as women are the modern slaves and it’s never a question of colour of skin.”²⁷ In terms of affective circulation, particularly Inna’s attempt to circulate a text in response to the circulation of MWAF’s open letter, it is important to note how the rhetorical meaning of “feminism” shifts and changes. Whereas in the MWAF letter, they attempt to point out the intersections between race and gender (among other markers of identity), femen’s letter uses a rhetoric that distinguishes gender and race as separate experiences. More specifically, femen suggests that feminism does not include, or cannot allow for, discussions of race and racism and that gender can and should be conceived of universally, regardless of other differences. Further down in the letter, Shevchenko attempts to characterize this idealistic, universal world:

And do you know what I see? I see a world without Serbs, Croats and Muslims being massacred, without 9/11, without witchhunts, without 7/7, a world without suicide bombers and without the Taliban, without Israeli-Palestinian wars, without persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers,’ without Northern Ireland troubles, without Crusades, a world where are no public beheadings of blasphemers and no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. See you on the battle lines!²⁸

In this excerpt, several affective moves take place. First, this letter attempts to affectively circulate and characterize a rhetorical imaginary—a “world” in which people are no longer subjected to violence. Yet, because it is performed without addressing MWAF, difference is immediately obscured; only “sisters” remain. Moreover, in this projection, slippages between rhetorics of solidarity and rhetorics of geopolitics occur, particularly in Shevchenko’s own rhetorical incitement of violence (e.g., her references to war and “battles” in describing femen and their activist pursuits). In short, within her assertions about violence, other rhetorics emerge that produce other kinds of affect involving terror, war, and the nation. By resituating and, in many ways, dismissing MWAF’s rhetoric around race and difference, Shevchenko’s response uses a “positive” concept of collectivity to suggest that the “negative” focus on difference originates from emotional responses orchestrated by others (men, religion, nationhood) rather than from femen itself. The affective collision becomes one that is suggestive of geopolitical solutions and oppositions, geopolitical arguments that the mass media then foregrounds and circulates in the form of fear-mongering rhetorics around terrorism and 9/11.

Page 89 →While the media played a large role in circulating the texts of both femen and MWAF, more media attention was given to the former. News and entertainment sites such as Huffington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, Guardian, National Post, and NY Daily News, to name a few, reported on the protests and counterprotests, making note of the various circulating discourses. Most, if not all, of femen’s statements were published initially through the Huffington Post and the Guardian whereas MWAF’s statements were first posted on their Facebook and personal blogs and then reposted by news sites. Following femen’s references to “battle” and 9/11, warfare took on metaphorical significance in both the rhetoric of femen, and the mainstream media. For example, the headline in one of femen’s published articles reads: “We are Femen, the naked shock troops of feminism. Femen is at war with the patriarchy that sees women as objects. What weapons do we have? Our bare breasts.”²⁹ Throughout the rest of the article, militant language is used to describe the goals of the organization and their rationale for organizing a “topless jihad day.” The continuous use of words and phrases such as “troops,” “spearhead unit of militants,” “attacks,” “destroy,” and “revolt” seem to suggest that war is a useful, thematic metaphor for the kind of resistance they hope to enact.

In other media texts, journalists circulated femen’s use of “battle” language to describe the group’s protests, praising femen’s campaign for Sboui and claiming that femen’s “battle” is over the “persecution of women” (e.g., Atlantic, New Yorker, Huffington Post, National Post). And yet what becomes clear in these distinctions is the way in which the media uses and (re)cites femen’s “warfare language” to talk about the “war on terror.” This affective, and arguably more deliberate, move—the media’s repurposing of femen’s claims about war—produces rhetorics of fear and anxiety surrounding race and religion, particularly in the contexts of Muslims and Islam. To put it another way, this language of war makes it easier for the mainstream media to shift their focus from women’s rights to terrorism. In a Huffington Post report entitled, “Muslim Women vs. femen” (note the oppositional construction of the headline), writer Paul Schemm offers the following interpretation of an interview with a femen member from Tunisia about femen’s burning of Islamic flags: “She (femen member from Tunisia) expressed no regret for burning the flag since it is closely associated with the jihadists and Salafis who have been the most vocal in the region about repressing women. Page 90 →‘For me this is not the Muslim flag,’ she said by phone from Paris. ‘It never hung in mosques, just in the hands of Bin Laden and his colleagues.’”³⁰ The decision to end the article with this specific quote and its explicit reference to Bin Laden suggests a rather problematic affective link between women’s rights, terrorism, and the fate of the nation-state. Such constructions arguably reflect certain anxieties about race, national relations, and geopolitical tensions. Similarly, in an article from the London-based news outlet Middle East Online, journalists argue that femen’s “Free Anima campaign” is spreading “like wildfire” due to the “Islamist crackdown on Arab women’s rights.”³¹ The authors also contend that “Tunisia was once seen as one of the Arab world’s most progressive countries on women’s rights ... but the Islamist party keeps ‘seeking to roll back women’s rights.’”³² Once again, implicit affective moments emerge, moments relating to national and transnational discourses—both the metonymic connection between women’s rights and nation building, as well as a constructed dichotomy between Islam and national “progression.” In addition, the recirculation of the Tunisian connection materializes, particularly the nation’s “affiliation” with the Middle East (as part of the MENA region), in order to reinforce the opposition between national interests.

The same kind of distinction is circulated by the New Yorker in an article entitled “How to Provoke National Unrest with a Facebook Photo.” Emily Greenhouse not only positions the nation of Tunisia as “ill-equipped to deal with the possibilities of public broadcasting afforded by the World Wide Web,” she goes on to strategically counter the Human Rights Watch belief that “Tunisia has long been viewed as the most progressive Arab country with respect to women’s rights,” with the following claim: “Yet in the two years since the revolution, Islamism has been on the rise.”³³ Here, Greenhouse’s text directly invokes an opposition and disjuncture between national development and Arab nations. In support of femen, and arguably in support of Western modernity, Greenhouse ends the article with a re-characterization of femen’s call: “Femen has issued a call for a new Arab Spring in a strongly worded statement against the ‘lethal hatred of Islamists—inhuman beasts for whom killing a woman is more natural than recognizing her right to do as she pleases with her own body.’ It pleads, ‘Long live the topless jihad against infidels!’ To borrow their vernacular, ‘sextremism’ in the name of ‘titslamism.’”³⁴

In examining the ways in which affect permeates these circulating rhetorics, one can see how the media’s use of femen’s texts—particularly femen’s righteous anger with regard to women’s rights—constructs an “us–them” Page 91 →relationship, in which the powerhouses of the West (the United States and Europe) directly oppose the MENA region. This change in meaning—from a narrative on universal freedoms and rights (femen) to a fear-mongering narrative about 9/11, terrorism, and national progression (mainstream media)—illustrates the disjuncture between textual content and emotion. femen’s use of the emotional language of warfare in discussions surrounding universal women’s rights (and their attempts to align with MWAF, even though their purported blindness to difference negates this) actually undermines femen’s call for universal rights—as that call is an affective circulation of war rhetoric that emotionally “sticks” to terror as much as it does universal women’s rights. What gets recirculated by the media, then, is this affective pathway—the fear and moral outrage at the heart of femen’s message alongside discussions about terrorism and the Arab world. This affective pathway results in a fear-mongering narrative of blame, furthering already existing racial anxieties about Muslims, Islam, and the Arab world.

This narrative of blame, and the “us–them” construction that is so central to the texts in this layer of circulation, can be seen in the following example from the Atlantic. The headline of the article reads: “Topless Jihad: Why femen is Right.” In this piece, US-born journalist and Russian correspondent Jeffrey Tayler describes a conversation with femen leader, Inna Shevchenko: “‘We demand human rights for all women, for Arab women and American women,’ Shevchenko told me a few days after the emotional debate. ‘The idea of a Muslim feminist is oxymoronic.’ Her position could not be clearer—or more provocatively stated.”³⁵ Tayler ends the article with the following statement: “Activists are charting a new route for public discourse about women and religion, and making it an unabashedly universal discourse, venturing into realms where they may be hated, and they may yet pay a high price for this. But that they have gotten people talking, even shouting and crying, is undeniable, and it is good. ... Far from discouraging the discourse they have initiated, we should welcome it.”³⁶ Tayler offers several interesting points in these statements. First, he argues that femen’s universal discourse got people talking (and yes, it did). And second, he argues that such a discourse is “good” and “right” because central to it is the fight for human rights “for all women.” And yet what Tayler does not acknowledge—what he completely ignores—are the consequences of this rhetoric. Although he calls attention to MWAF at the beginning of the article, he dismisses their rhetorical goals by categorizing their responses to femen as “nothing less than ‘Sit down and shut up.’ Your skin color and Page 92 →European provenance disqualify you from expressing views on Islam and how Muslim women are treated in the Islamic world.”³⁷

In Tayler’s dismissal of MWAF, an affective pathway marked by conflicting ideologies around difference and also around the production of difference emerges. What Tayler’s article tells readers is that public rhetoric must have a particular ideology to be transformative—it must be “universal.” It cannot be fragmented. It cannot be localized. It cannot be marked by differences. This rhetoric of universalism, which echoes femen’s rhetoric, reflects a neoliberal ideology that asks us to strategically ignore difference in favor of the utopic notion of equality, but only differences beyond that of gender. Neoliberalism’s claim to universality is dependent on the belief that the economic policies involving free markets and trades, as well as the securitization and militarization of our nation-states, have led us to a “color-blind,” gender-neutral world. This apolitical and ahistorical imaginary, then, purports the belief that feminist measures and acts against racism are no longer needed because neoliberalism promises to protect and ensure individual rights. In the case of femen, gender matters, but only a universal definition of gender. Race does not.

And yet what is clear, at least from this particular layer of circulation in this study, is that universality as an affective rhetoric—the kind of rhetoric Tayler and femen argue for—actually perpetuates the dichotomy of what Ahmed calls “towardness” and “awayness,” an attempt to align bodies with certain communities, and other, “different” bodies, outside of those communities.³⁸ As Brown argues, the promise of protection, collective acceptance, and the right to make choices within the rhetoric of universal human rights actually “produces a certain kind of subject in need of a certain kind of protection.”³⁹ For writers, rhetoricians, and activists, Brown’s point illustrates the need to understand and examine how rhetorics, in their circulation and movement through spaces such as the web, have the potential to produce social relations that appropriate certain kinds of “political subjects and political possibilities.”⁴⁰

To make clearer how this affective process works, I offer a brief overview of Catherine Chaput’s study of the controversy over Elizabeth Warren’s claim to American Indian ancestry.⁴¹ This example is useful in that it helps illustrate how affect circulates through discourse and material bodies in ways that exceed rational persuasion. As Chaput explains, Warren’s attempt to resolve criticism with a DNA test and family narrative did not quell opposition; instead, it intensified it. Groups like the Stop Pocahontas PAC seized on the racialized nickname popularized by Donald Trump to parody Page 93 →Warren and discredit her policies. Chaput shows that the repetition of “Pocahontas” did not function as a fact-based argument but as an affective trigger. The circulation of this insult across media and political spaces generated physiological and emotional responses—pleasure, outrage, solidarity—that cemented opposition to Warren’s progressive agenda. Signing petitions, retweeting attacks, or donating to anti-Warren efforts became practices that sustained this affective circuit, attaching bodily satisfaction to political identity and orienting participants more deeply toward neoliberal convictions. In this framework, affect operates like a contagion: the “Pocahontas” epithet spread through social networks, producing embodied orientations that shaped collective politics while blocking deliberative engagement.⁴²

Chaput’s study highlights the embodied dimension of political struggle. Warren’s critics’ bodies, Chaput suggests, “scream hate” when confronted with her policies, and the “Pocahontas” insult functions as the catalyst for this reaction.⁴³ As with the discourses surrounding femen and MWAF, the Warren controversy also exemplifies how racialized and gendered affects organize diverse anxieties—economic fears about labor, cultural commitments to American exceptionalism, religious concerns about socialism—into a unified opposition. For Chaput, this demonstrates that political controversies cannot be reduced to ideological debates or rational exchanges; they are material-symbolic struggles sustained through the circulation of affect at the level of physiology and discourse.

The Warren example thus connects to a broader pattern, such as what we saw in polarizing rhetorics between femen and MWAF, where affectively charged discourse either unites audiences in bodily solidarity or distances them because of certain bodily attunements. Ultimately, these examples call for rhetorical theory to take seriously this circulation of affect, recognizing that political alignments emerge not only through symbolic argument but through the embodied experiences that produce and reinforce them.

As I have shown throughout this chapter, examining the velocity of textual movement and analyzing the elements of affect that undergird that movement enables us to see how rhetorics travel and how they bring about certain kinds of change as a result of their movements. Sboui, femen, and MWAF’s rhetorical acts struck a particular affective nerve as they formed circulatory chains—affective pathways—throughout social media and news venues. These pathways—these affective charges, to put it more strongly—propel certain messages, endowing them with a level of power necessary to Page 94 →the construction of certain knowledges and social relations. The image of Sboui that circulated throughout Facebook and Twitter/X represented an individual message about control over women’s bodies. That image was then repurposed by femen as a rhetoric of collective resistance to global anxieties over women’s roles and rights. Upon MWAF’s encounter with femen’s rhetorical claims, rhetorical meanings shifted and moved into new contexts. In their efforts to repurpose femen’s rhetoric, MWAF circulated a feminist rhetoric aimed at “decolonizing” femen’s rhetorical practices, calling for a feminist praxis in which differences rather than similarities are addressed. femen’s universalizing response used the language of fear, leading to the conflation of women’s rights–bodies with the nation-state.

This analysis points to the ways in which circulation is a porous process that cannot be described solely in terms of original intent. femen’s responses to MWAF’s open letter, for example, used war rhetoric to describe their desire to fight for women’s rights. This war rhetoric was then coopted by the media for geopolitical purposes. This kind of circulation elicits many questions for the field of rhetorical studies about affect and its relationship to rhetorical action. While this analysis reveals that velocity, as part of affective circulation, has the potential to transform meaning and produce different kinds of knowledge, it also reveals that the kind of knowledge production that takes place, and the kind of social relations that result from this process, have a lot to do with the neoliberal context of which we are a part.

Moreover, viewing circulation as an affective process helps to further illuminate how funneling and polarization occur by foregrounding the role of intensities and bodily attunements in shaping rhetorical movements. As messages circulate and recirculate, they do not merely convey content; they carry with them affective charges that resonate differently across audiences. These intensities “stick” to certain signs—such as protest, objectification, and nationhood—because they activate and align with existing emotional investments and cultural imaginaries. As Ahmed notes, affects do not reside within subjects or objects but instead move between them, binding bodies together or pushing them apart. In the second layer of circulation, these affective movements operate like attractors in a dynamic field, clustering attention around specific rhetorics and foreclosing alternative interpretations. The more these affects accumulate around particular discursive nodes, the more likely they are to produce alignment or antagonism—what Lauren Berlant might describe as “cruel optimisms” or affective stickiness that keeps bodies oriented toward (or against) specific political formations.⁴⁴ As such, the velocity of circulation is not just a measure of speed but also of affective Page 95 →pull—how quickly and powerfully certain messages shape orientations, affiliations, and antagonisms. This helps explain why the earlier openness to multiple readings is replaced by a narrowing of interpretive possibilities, as affective economies do the work of organizing rhetorical fields into emotionally charged and polarized terrains.

As I discuss in the next chapter, the kind of rhetorical repurposing that takes place within digital spaces is unique in that those processes are always already immediate, rapid, pervasive, and widespread. But more important, those processes have the potential to ensure that certain rhetorics that stick through amplification and velocity ultimately solidify and endure—they become part of a body of knowledge and social relations, but they also reinforce and maintain those relations.