Embodiment as critique of visual hegemonies

Visuality and mediatization around visual signs and markers played a significant role in the practices of activist and social movements during the 20th century and has continued in new forms into the 21st century around the various orange and green anti-statist movements in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa where for instance the Arab spring, occupy movement and Women’s march have used mediatized strategies such as street art, hash tags and various modes of visual expressions as forms of resistance and dissent. While such mediatized expressions have both been labeled as twitter revolutions and as visual forms of expressing political dissent by design (Traganou 2021), activist forms of resistance has also undergone an embodied, and performative turn in which flash mobs, performances, die-ins and socio-spatial and environmental forms of organizing, play an increasingly important role. In this chapter we will use, what has been termed ‘planetary movements’ (Isin 2021), as a particularly interesting example for demonstrating how embodied enactments of activism and resistance challenge visual hegemonies. By producing and disseminating DIY manuals for standardized costume and mask making (e.g. the red and blue brigades), performing viral performances such as standing man and organizing die-ins in public, such movements use embodied, affective and situated strategies for constructing assemblies and resistance. In doing this they point to new ways of addressing the complexities of visual activism (Johnston and Bonnett 2022). Considering how movements such as Extinction Rebellion has enacted strategies for countering visual hegemonies of global environmental justice with various expressions of planetary coherence and cohabitation, this chapter explores the embodied, affective and regenerative forms of activism present in contemporary visual culture.