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Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics—including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist "ethics of care" scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the "vulnerability of ordinary life" (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between "vulnerability" and "crisis" to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders' experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as "call for caring response-ability" through community performance activism that critiques "privileged irresponsibility" (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care's potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D'Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021). Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care "from its messy worldliness" (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a growing group of scholars has begun to draw upon queer theory as they research aspects of LGBTQ folk performances and texts from around the globe. In the process, folklore scholars have become increasingly intrigued by bodies that appear to transgress dimorphism, and complicate binary oppositions like male/female. Performances of gender identity and sexuality by hijras in South Asia have awakened audiences' imaginings since the Kama Sutra period (Gupta 2005:180). In folktale, dance, song, religious epic, and popular culture, the figure of the hijra often evokes a liminal play of "otherness." Commonly known as the "third gender"--a conceptual space outside of typical Western constructs--hijra individuals engage with varied notions of transsexual, transgender, intersex, crossdresser, eunuch, or sexual fluidity. This article focuses on a feminist appropriation of the hijra within Yoni Ki Baat, a South Asian American version of The Vagina Monologues. The authors explore how the figure of the hijra--drawn from South Asian folk narratives, religious discourse, and popular culture--might be used strategically by social activists in political performance narratives to (1) encourage a complicated sense of sexually ambiguous or queer practices and identities, and (2) acknowledge individuals facing social oppression due to their marginalized identities. As such, their approach conceptualizes performance as both a relational space and as a space in which to wonder about questions of relationality (Madison and Hamera 2006; Schechner 1990). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the strategic and sometimes subversive appropriations of Wisconsin Folklore by citizens at the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. These protest events critically played with the ethos of "progressive Wisconsin" and created, for a time, plural political spaces that seriously challenged mainstream discourses and allowed citizens to speak and listen to one another in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics within the issue, including the challenges facing universities in encouraging civic engagement, the relationship between folklorists and social justice, and the history and common themes of Wisconsin folklore.

This article explores the tensions between acknowledgment and recognition in performances by progressive South Asian American activists at the Minnesota Festival of Nations in the year 2000. Focusing on specific South Asian American folk performances that take place within the context of an "India" cultural booth, I argue performers are enjoined to enact cultural practices in ways that foreground a reified sense of "Indian-ness" that is at odds with the multicultural vision of their progressive grassroots school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the performance of an Indian feminist street play that addresses issues of sex-determination testing and sex-selection abortion. In my analysis, I explore the rhetorical competence these activists exhibit as they raise concerns about the ethics of discarding fetuses identified as female and struggle with the constraints of performing the absence of these girl fetuses, given feminist desires to simultaneously maintain the right to abortion and abolish sex-selection abortion. I also focus upon the critical appropriation of traditional women's folk culture to create a compelling feminist performance aesthetic. For activists and audience members, the performance of this counter-narrative holds the potential to open space and time for talk (as well as meaningful silence) that is personal, interpersonal, and significantly political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the use of street theater by grassroots Indian feminist groups to carve out apublicforum and to articulate pressing concerns about rape, inheritance law, and women's representation in popular and historical texts. Focusing on a situated performance of a play titled Women in Search of Their History, I consider the ways that the virangana, an Indian folk heroine type, and the garba, a women's folk dance, are appropriated and reinterpreted, becoming topics for rhetorical invention. Critical play with these folk forms provides these women with the means to persuasively articulate a feminist message to diverse audience members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I trace appropriations of the Bengali bandit Devi Chaudhurani as she is transfigured within the Indian nationalist novel Devi Chaudhurani and the contemporary feminist street play Meye Dile Sajiye or Giving Away the Girl. These representations are characterized by an eclecticism and a hybridity that treat "the bandit" as a hermeneutical resource for rhetorical invention. Each representation draws its force from the tensions and incongruities it strategically manifests, playing with indigenous Indian and colonial notions of criminality in order to advance ideologically complex arguments about the social conditions for women and their roles in colonial and postcolonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the framing strategies and language features of U.S. news coverage surrounding sexual violence and gender issues across the ideological media spectrum at two pivotal phases of the #MeToo movement: (1) during its initial rise as a hashtag-driven social movement in 2017 and (2) during the Kavanaugh nomination and confirmation in 2018. Using structural topic modeling, community detection, and feature extraction, we reveal a heightened employment of political framing during the Kavanaugh accusations. Topical prevalence and language use in news treatment also showed clear partisan differences, consistent with theories of moral foundation and issue ownership. Implications for research on news coverage of gender rights and framing of social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, languages, and social media platforms. By establishing a macroscopic computational approach, we examine the global diffusion of #MeToo as a hybrid communicative process across different language groups (English, Spanish, and Korean) and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Through time-series analysis and comparative descriptions of language groups and platforms, we demonstrate how discourse flows, language characteristics, and actors differ across cultural and platform contexts and how public discourse of #MeToo was reappropriated and re-signified in different parts of the world to localize connective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) "metoo," (2) "sexual misconduct," (3) "sexual harassment," and (4) "sexual assault" from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers "misconduct," "harassment," and "assault" decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did efforts that prompted the sharing of personal experiences of sexual violence and harassment around #MeToo coalesce into calls for action across a range of institutions and communities? We argue that sharing experiences of trauma in digital spaces created a network of acknowledgment, which supported and sustained nascent #MeToo activism based on the logic of connective action. This article attempts to (a) understand the temporal dynamics of these different discourses within the #MeToo movement on Twitter, (b) reveal the accounts animating these discourses and the most prominent themes within them, and (c) model the overtime relationship between these discourses and their relationship to major news event and #MeToo revelations. To do so, we analyze a 1% sample of tweets from the 5-month period following the revelations about Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017, employing a range of computational approaches, including part-of-speech tagging, dependency analysis, hashtags extraction, and retweet network analysis—to identify key discourses, actors, and themes. We then conduct time series analysis to identify the relationship between the two discourses and predict how the ebbs and flows of each discourse are shaped by news events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]