Recipient's Department

Communications and Media Studies

Document Type

Award

Year of Award

2018

Awarding Organization

CSCA Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice Interest Group

Reason for Award

CSCA Top Paper in Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice
Understanding the differences between Mirzoeff’s (2012) usage of visuality and Ball’s (2016) usage of invisibility can help us understand how various women’s movements throughout history have shaped and reshaped women’s roles, identities, and power. The women’s suffrage movements at the turn of the 20th century are a provocative place for identifying this shift. Women within the 1912 and 1913 suffrage movements understood the boundary points between (the history of) a women's place within society and the potential for a shift in the engendered power structures, from a patriarchal society to one that finds a balance between the roles and views of women and the roles and views of men. Further, when comparing images from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington we can see the same historical, political, and social issues resurfacing again as an issue at the center of various “notions of visibility as conferring social power” (Jones, 2010, p. 47). Images from both the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913 and the 2017 Women’s March on Washington are uniquely similar and in many ways divergent, both depicting significant moments of visuality for women's rights and women's issues. The struggles and realities, viewpoints and opinions of women have been continuously rendered invisible by the dominating patriarchy and these women's movements, through very public parades and peaceful protests, have attempted to counteract the dominating views with their own version of visibility. In this paper, I conduct an iconographic analysis to illustrate connections between the two movements further demonstrating how women attempted to render the invisible visible.

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