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.

Keywords:

• Circulation
• feminist activism
• new materialism
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• visual rhetoric

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Michelle C. Smith for her patience and persistence in shaping this project for publication. Thank you also to Dr. Marissa J. Doshi and the anonymous reviewers of this work for their insightful feedback and detailed critiques. Finally, the author wishes to recognize the late Dr. Noemi Marin, whose guidance and mentorship influenced earlier versions of this project. Portions of this article are derived from the author’s master’s thesis, defended at Florida Atlantic University in 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Prominent examples include the books Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Carmon and Knizhnik), My Own Words (Ginsburg), I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark (2016), and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Case of R.B.G. vs. Inequality (2017). Films include RBG (2018) and On the Basis of Sex (2018).

2 Vicky Tolar Collins inspires this intervention with her work in material rhetoric, particularly her theorization of rhetorical accretion, whereby rhetors are “respoken” by layers of meaning that accrete over time, evolving the message of the original text.

3 I completed image searches for my initial data collection between September 18 and September 30, 2020. Following Gries’s iconographic tracking, I began with a broad search using “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” as the initial search term, and subsequently refined my term (a move Gries suggests) to “Notorious RBG” to focus my search on illustrations and images rather than official portraits.

4 In her jurisprudence, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had gestured toward the outcome of Dobbs vs. Jackson Memorial by joining feminist legal scholars who have criticized Roe v. Wade for framing abortion as an issue of privacy (see Gibson, “In Defense”).

5 A Google Trends analysis of the search terms “Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” “Notorious RBG,” and “RBG” from June 1, 2013, to September 30, 2020, shows increased interest in Ginsburg at points correlating not only to Supreme Court decisions but also to the release of Carmon and Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG book, the biopic, and especially to some of Ginsburg’s more colorful public comments including her 2016 assessment of then-candidate Donald Trump (“a faker”) and of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests (“really dumb”). Of course, Google Trends shows the most interest in Ginsburg surrounding her death on September 18, 2020.

6 In the data collection phase, I engaged in what Gries calls data hoarding by initially collecting all nonrepeated images, looking at the data “only long enough to assemble folders, set provisional research boundaries, and generate key terms and tags” (112). Following this lead, I tagged and organized images by product site and product type. From this exercise I found the most diverse collection from the popular e-commerce website Etsy, which served as my primary source of data.

7 To create the collection, I included images chronologically in my search, first selecting only those products that included a pictorial representation of Ginsburg or elements of her persona (such as the collar, crown, or glasses). I then discarded duplicate products, such as different styles of T-shirts with the same image, and I limited the reproduction of the same image across different products to three to showcase the diversity in the images’ manifestation while still maintaining a variety of products. For each image, I captured the website data including the seller and tagged the image with descriptors for type of product as well as type of image.

8 Ginsburg used a similar line of argument in her second dissent in 2007, Gonzales v. Carhart. This case addressed reproductive rights; the decision upheld an abortion restriction without an exception to safeguard women’s health. In her resolute dissent, Ginsburg “targets the sexist and political nature of the majority decision” by citing the Court’s history of the subordination of women and exposing the Court’s patriarchal reasoning (Gibson, “In Defense” 128).