"Communication, Culture & Critique"

Click, Melissa A.

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaa036pmid: N/A

I am passionate about representing the breadth of critical/cultural scholarship in communication, and promoting Communication, Culture & Critique as a place for rigorous and impactful scholarship on identities, communities, power, social movements, technologies, and more. Thanks to the editors and co-editors before me, my term as editor begins with CCC in excellent health and with a strong future. To encourage CCC’s continued growth and innovation, I will engage contemporary conversations in our field involving power, race, and nationality to improve transparency and equity in the journal’s reviewing practices, increase representation of marginalized scholars and scholarship, and amplify CCC’s influence outside the field of communication. The May 2019 ICA preconference #CommunicationSoWhite (alongside the debate in the U.S.-based National Communication Association about the selection of “distinguished scholars”) made clear the importance of challenging privilege in our field. At the ICA preconference, plenary speaker Roopali Mukherjee opened with a “critical race archaeology,” encouraging participants to interrogate the whitewashed origin story of our field, which we frequently repeat and sanction as we use it to orient students to the field. At the close of her talk, Mukherjee invited the audience to interrupt the whiteness of our discipline by teaching a revised communication curriculum that places race and ethnicity at its center, giving increased visibility to scholars of color by citing their scholarship, and asking our disciplinary organizations to audit their awards, grants, and journals, looking for the privileging of whiteness. Every panel at the preconference was impactful, but I was particularly influenced by a panel that interrogated the practices at communication journals, including citation, blind review, marginalization of scholars of color and scholarship on race, and selection of journal editors. The event drew me into deeper reflection on my own reviewing practices and the roles I could play in helping to (re)shape our field by decentering whiteness. You can read some of the scholarship from the preconference in CCC’s June 2020 issue. The mission statement for Communication, Culture & Critique describes it as a space for scholarship that places “questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry.” It follows, then, that CCC’s editorial team should reflect upon, and make more transparent, the role power, inequality, and justice play in the functioning of the journal. To ensure that CCC is working to decenter whiteness (and other forms of privilege), I am working with a team of Associate Editors who bring diversity to the journal in a variety of ways—including in their areas of scholarship, methodological training, identities, and nationalities. They are: Ingrid Bachmann (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Jason Cabañes (De La Salle University), Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (University of Iowa), Eve Ng (Ohio University), and Nabeel Zuberi (University of Auckland). To assess policies and practices, and develop new strategies and transparencies, we have begun working to increase equity and inclusion through all stages of the publication process so that the scholarship in each issue, and the processes that bring each issue into fruition, give visibility to critical scholars and scholarship that continue to be marginalized in the field at large. In short, we believe that the practices of a journal featuring critical scholarship should push the same boundaries and endeavor for the same types of change that its contents do. An important component of equity and inclusion involves rethinking and reworking the review process, striving to increase transparency and create an inviting and supportive culture, particularly for marginalized scholars and scholars for whom English is not their first language. We plan to offer authors increased context about the publishing process and instructive feedback designed to help them grow as scholars; I believe greater transparency will deepen scholars’ beliefs that Communication, Culture & Critique is a welcoming and supportive outlet for scholarship, even for authors whose work is not accepted for publication. With respect to reviewers, I am working to provide reviewers more thorough guidance about how to write helpful and detailed reviews that offer specific and constructive suggestions for revision and improvement. Likewise, I want to direct reviewers more explicitly to look for powerful absences in submitted work, encourage authors to cite beyond “expected” scholarship, think intersectionally, and incorporate innovative, non-traditional methods and ways of knowing. Reworking the review process is a challenging and complex task, but I believe it is a worthwhile endeavor that can be accomplished with our team of scholar-innovators, a substantial amount of networking with other editors, and a strong partnership with ICA and Oxford University Press. Connected to my goal of strengthening Communication, Culture & Critique’s commitment to equity and inclusion is a desire to help the journal better reflect the global mission of the International Communication Association. With input from the Associate Editors and members of the Editorial Board, I have already expanded the journal’s Editorial Board to add more than 25 new members who bring their expertise from around the world on a wealth of critical topics. Knowing that ICA continues to struggle with and improve its efforts to de-westernize, I will work with ICA leadership to tap into initiatives that ICA already has underway. I feel strongly that ICA journals should reflect the membership, and I wish to develop strategies to increase submissions from authors based in, and topics focused on, Mexico and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. The increased support for authors that I discuss above will figure prominently into my initiatives in this area. Finally, as editor I will work to increase the visibility and relevance of Communication, Culture & Critique both within and outside of our field. Special issues and forums are great tools for introducing topics, communities, and methods into the journal, especially to cast a critical lens on contemporary concerns. With members of the Editorial Board, I have already begun to develop some ideas for special issues and forums on women of color mentoring in the field of Communication, women in Chinese television, digital South Asia, representations of female masculinity on global television, and transnational activist coalitions in the Global South. Alongside these ideas, I believe it would be strategic to develop a few special issue or forum topics that would draw the interest of scholars and the general public alike. Topics like climate change, mass incarceration, and immigration are broad enough to be explored from a variety of theoretical positions, methodological approaches, and national/transnational perspectives, and also draw interest from other disciplines and the news media. Utilizing this strategy, alongside Oxford’s and ICA’s successful promotion tactics, has the potential to raise the profile of the journal and the scholars who publish in it. I am excited to work with the Associate Editors to shape how Communication, Culture & Critique grows, evolves, and impacts the field over the next four years. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve and support the community of scholars it has already attracted, and also to extend the journal in new ways. I envision CCC to be an influential publication that serves as a model of inclusion for the field of communication, better representing the members of the organization that founded the journal as well as helping to diversify ICA. Please feel free to share your ideas, comments, concerns! © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Curran, Nathaniel Ming

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaa020pmid: N/A

Abstract This article applies theories of cosmopolitanism-from-below A. Appadurai (2011), F. Kurasawa (2004) to an empirical case. Drawing on participant-observation and interviews conducted over the course of 20 months at a Korean-English Meetup group in the United States, this article explores the practices of an explicitly “cosmopolitan” group. Specifically, it focuses on U.S. Americans and Korean interns, and considers their experiences and motivations within the broader structures of neoliberalism. The group is identified as alternately exemplifying and challenging neoliberal logic and the article considers the relationship between neoliberalism and different forms of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan ethos fostered by the group’s founder and reinforced through members’ practice offers preliminary but hopeful evidence of a cosmopolitanism that challenges neoliberalism and the uneven distribution of cultural/economic capital. The English word cosmopolitanism descends from the Greek word kosmopolitês, usually translated as “citizen of the world” and implies an openness to the cultural Other. Cosmopolitanism has recently received renewed attention as a result of ongoing political developments in the West, exemplified by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. These events herald a return to outdated conceptions of national identity that veer toward xenophobia. Addressing these anti-cosmopolitan trends, Castells (2019, p. 35) has recently noted that “fear of globalization leads people to seek refuge in the idea of the nation.” However, alongside anxieties about globalization, neoliberal capitalism continues unabated. Neoliberalism is predicated on the application of market principles to all aspects of life. Cosmopolitanism, with its celebration of community and hospitality, seems unrelated. However, by explicating the similarities and differences between neoliberalism and various types of cosmopolitanism, I demonstrate the complexity of the relationship and consider conditions under which cosmopolitanism reinforces and/or interrupts neoliberal logic. This article situates a language and cultural exchange group’s cosmopolitan practice vis-a-vis the extant literature on non-elite forms of cosmopolitanism practice. Using ethnographic methods, I examine how unequal distributions of capital (cultural and otherwise) are challenged by a specific group in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. The group is convened through Meetup.com, an online platform that connects people with shared (and often esoteric) interests and encourages them to “meetup” offline. I argue that the group succeeds—partially—in fostering a cosmopolitan ethos that celebrates difference and, importantly, deemphasizes the pre-existing unequal distributions of capital that members bring to the Meetup. Specifically, I trace out how the group’s efforts to counter the abstract, market-based individualism of neoliberalism are in fact fundamentally necessitated and constrained by global (neoliberal) economic conditions. I then theorize the relationship between neoliberalism and different types of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism contested Scholarship on cosmopolitanism generally highlights its “origins” with the Greeks, and in particular Diogenes. The concept’s development is also tied to Enlightenment thinkers, and in particular Immanuel Kant (Beck, 2003, p. 16; Cheah, 2006, p. 487). However, with the rise of the modern nation state, the term lost much of its positive valence. Cosmopolitanism became associated with suspect loyalty to the nation and associated with Jews, whose multilingualism and diasporism were seen to index a betrayal of the nation (Harvey, 2009, p. 78; Vertovec, 2009, p. 5). Jews and other mobile populations did not fit neatly into the framework of the modern European nation state, which was predicated on a mythic congruence between land, people, and language (Canagarajah, 2013; Park & Wee, 2017). Despite its close association with the Greeks and Kant in Western scholarship, scholars have pointed out that there are many non-European origins to both cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan practice (Bhambra, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013; Inglis & Robertson, 2011, p. 295). Opposing the Eurocentric universalism of Western cosmopolitanism, postcolonial scholars warn against encompassing and a priori definitions of cosmopolitanism (Harvey, 2009; Mignolo, 2000; Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, & Chakrabarty, 2000). Mignolo (2000, 2011) and Harvey (2009) criticize Kantian (elite) cosmopolitanism as fundamentally flawed, illustrated by its attempts to export as universal the values and norms of a “provincial” Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000), replete with racist hierarchies. Because of elite-cosmopolitanism’s origins in the twin European projects of modernity and colonialism, Mignolo (2011, p. 331) concludes that “any universal cosmopolitan project would be outright imperial.” Mignolo (2000, p. 742) argues that in place of Eurocentric universalism, scholars should embrace the notion of “diversality.” According to Mignolo, diversality (diversity as a universal project) would involve “the relentless practice of critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism rather than a blueprint of a future and ideal society projected from a single point of view (that of the abstract universal)” (744). Likewise, Canagarajah (2013, p. 198) also suggests a dialogical cosmopolitanism, one that “gives dignity to the everyday forms of cosmopolitanism practiced by ordinary people.” Empirical work has echoed postcolonial scholars’ criticisms of traditional Western cosmopolitanism. For example, comparing different types of cosmopolitanism in London, Leurs and Georiou (2016, p. 3703) note that elite-cosmopolitanism is marked by “deterritorialized, postracial, individual choice and singular personhood” and is the “most universalistic and most decontextualized, based in insularity and exclusivity.” Cosmopolitanisms One reason that cosmopolitanism has been criticized is because of its association with elites/elitism. Hannerz (2008, p. 74) notes, “a Bourdieuan perspective suggests that cosmopolitan tastes and knowledge serve as symbolic capital in competitive elite games of distinction.” That is, successful performance of a cosmopolitan identity is often based upon access to the cultural capital necessary to develop the “requisite dispositions” on which cosmopolitanism is based (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004, p. 50; Bourdieu, 2008). This phenomenon extends beyond cultural capital and applies also to identity. More often than not, it is the white U.S. American abroad wo is hailed as a cosmopolitan, even as the cosmopolitanism of the poor, multilingual street vendor is discounted, or worse, makes them the target of anti-immigrant sentiment or even violence. Globalization has done much to unmoor cosmopolitanism from its long association with both elitism and universalism. Hall (2008, p. 346) distinguished between the cosmopolitanism of “jet-setters” and that of “people driven across borders, obliged to uproot themselves from home, place and family” while noting that both were driven by processes of globalization. As a result of globalization, scholars have drawn attention to the possibility of greater opportunities for non-elite forms of cosmopolitanism, born less from leisurely attachment to the foreign, and more from urgency and necessity. Scholars have identified a proliferating number of ground-up cosmopolitanisms. This includes: discrepant cosmopolitanism (Clifford, 1992); vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha, 1996; Werbner, 2011); pop cosmopolitanism (Jenkins, 2006); working-class cosmopolitanism (Werbner, 1999; see also Lamont & Aksartova, 2002); virtual cosmopolitanism (McEwan & Sobré-Denton, 2011; Sobré-Denton, 2016); and cosmopolitanism-from-below (Appadurai, 2011; Ingram, 2016; Kurasawa, 2004). Non-elite cosmopolitanisms tend to share—either implicitly or explicitly—a rejection of the Eurocentric universalism that Mignolo (2000, 2011) criticizes. Cosmopolitanism-from-below is grounded in concrete practice rather than abstract universalism, and it is open to evolution and reinterpretation. Openness to reinterpretation is important because, as Pollock et al. (2000) point out, “specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitively is an uncosmopolitan thing to do” (577). In a similar vein, Falzon (2011, p. 39) writes: “actually-existing cosmopolitanisms deserve our primary scholarly attention, since their actual existence presumably means that they are actually consequential (as opposed to Utopias, which are just that).” Likewise, Robbins and Horta (2017, p. 1) highlight the shift of scholarly focus from cosmopolitanism to cosmopolitanisms, and conclude approvingly, “instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed out particulars.”1 Part of the disconnect between the literature on elite cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism-from-below results from the fact that skills accrued through non-elite cosmopolitan practice are often not rewarded/recognized as cosmopolitan, and they generally do not carry the same cultural capital as elite-cosmopolitan experiences (which are usually highly dependent on the financial situation of one’s family). For example, the language skills of migrant workers or those employed in tourism or service industries in global cities (see Canagarajah, 2013; Curran, 2018) are often not accompanied by the diplomas, certificates, or other forms of cultural capital necessary to gain broader societal recognition as cosmopolitan. Ironically, it is the context-specific “usefulness” of cosmopolitanism-from-below that generally positions it as inferior to elite forms of cosmopolitanism, marked as they are by abstraction and universalism.2 The privileging of the abstract and universal over the specific and particular is itself a legacy of European modernity/colonialism (Mignolo, 2000; Pollock et al. 2000). In their comprehensive account of cosmopolitanism and intercultural communication, Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013, p. 117) note that cosmopolitanism can be operationalized at the level of the individual, the social-group, and the societal/transnational. However, previous empirical scholarship on non-elite forms of cosmopolitanism has tended to focus on either organizations/networks of organizations (e.g., Appadurai, 2011; Kurasawa, 2004; Vertovec, 2011) or on individuals (Cappeliez and Johnston, 2013; Lamont & Aksartova, 2002; Leurs and Georiou, 2016). Although there are important works that analyze cosmopolitan practice at multiple levels (e.g., Sobré-Denton, 2011) there is still need for scholarship that examines how cosmopolitanism is articulated at different scales in daily life. In keeping with Sobré-Denton and Bardhan’s (2013, p. 119) observation that understanding cosmopolitanism often necessitates studying multiple levels simultaneously, this article attends to cosmopolitanism at the individual, group, and transnational levels, I present empirical evidence from a Meetup group whose mission is explicitly cosmopolitan and which actively cultivates cosmopolitan practice. In addition to explicating the way the group embodies non-elite forms of cosmopolitanism, this article also offers a theoretical articulation of the relationship between neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism. Although the extant literature recognizes that contemporary cosmopolitanism is a result of globalization and that current instantiations of globalization are neoliberal in nature, there is little work which uses real-life examples to theorize the relationship between neoliberalism and different forms of cosmopolitanism. This article thus contributes to understanding the relationship between neoliberalism and different forms of cosmopolitanism. It illustrates how cosmopolitanism and neoliberalism are complexly imbricated in daily life and it maps out places of both overlap and divergence. Cosmopolitan from below in practice I draw explicitly upon the literature on cosmopolitanism-from-below. I adopt the specific term “cosmopolitanism-from-below” both because this particular term is used by several of the authors I cite (e.g., Appadurai, 2011; Kurasawa, 2004) and also because the term implicitly suggests the existence of an opposite: cosmopolitanism “from above.” Cosmopolitanism-from-below is thus an inherently oppositional term that recognizes the marginality of its practitioners along multiple axes (including race, language, and nationality) while simultaneously recognizing the existence of elite forms of cosmopolitanism, embodied in the image of a well-heeled jet-setter (Polson, 2011, p. 146). In one of the most compelling account to date of cosmopolitanism-from-below, Appadurai (2011) examines cosmopolitanism-from-below vis-à-vis a network of organizations formed by precariously positioned members of Indian society. The grass-roots organization Appadurai documents comprises a broad coalition of urban sex workers and slum dwellers in Mumbai. Appadurai (28) notes that the form of cosmopolitanism they practice is “more or less independent of advanced education and privileged access to the means of travel, leisure and informed self-cultivation” but also notes that this cosmopolitanism shares with more privileged varieties the “urge to expand one’s current horizons of self and cultural identity and a wish to connect with a wider world in the name of values which, in principle, could belong to anyone and apply in any circumstance.” Like the cosmopolitanism which I document at the Meetup, the cosmopolitanism-from-below that Appadurai describes is a natural byproduct of everyday experience and interaction. It is a variety of cosmopolitanism distinct from the cultural and economic-capital-based “frequent flyer” (Calhoun (2002) and it is based not (only) on the affective desires of individuals but on their material necessity. Method Setting The site for this research was a Korean-English language and cultural exchange group in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. The group was affiliated with Meetup.com. The group met once-a-week at a Korean franchise café, instantly recognizable to anyone who has visited Seoul. The weekly meetings had an average of 20–40 attendees. However, this number did not reflect the total number of unique attendees in any given month because, besides a handful of core regulars, attendees would attend on-and-off as their schedule permitted. Thus, in the 20 months that I regularly attended, there were more than 100 unique attendees. In addition to the weekly meetings, there was also an active online chatroom, hosted on the Korean messaging app, Kakao Talk. Participants The Meetup was attended almost equally by Koreans and U.S. Americans. The overwhelming majority of Koreans were women in their early twenties. These women had come to the United States on J-1 visas that allowed them to stay in the country for up to a year, and they were almost all employed as interns and earning a low wage. Most of them were from lower-middle-class families and had attended lower-ranked Universities. The remainder of the Koreans (roughly 20%) had Green Cards and been working in the U.S. for some time. The U.S. Americans were roughly equally divided between men and women. However, while only two or three of the male attendees were non-Asian ethnic minorities, roughly half of the woman attendees were Black/Latina. Socioeconomically speaking, these Black/Latina attendees tended to be from more working-class backgrounds, and their interest in Korea was motivated by K-pop and Korean dramas, known more generally as Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave” (Jin & Yoon, 2016). The white members of the group (20% of the total) tended to be professionals, and most had either visited Korea or had studied Korean formally. While the majority of the non-intern members of the group tended to be in their late twenties or early thirties, the white members occasionally included people in their fifties and sixties. There were also a number of international attendees from various countries around the globe. The largest single group of attendees were the Korean interns, who often comprised half or more of the weekly attendees. The group’s racial and economic diversity mirrors that of other Korea-focused Meetup groups in the U.S. (Ter Molen, 2018). Data collection My method was essentially ethnographic, in that I was deeply embedded in the goings-on of the Meetup. Ethnography involves “[participating] in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions; in fact, collecting whatever data are available” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983, p. 2). Ethnography avoids superficial descriptions and formulaic explanations of human behavior in favor of rich, emic, “thick description” that offers contextualized insight into people’s motivations and actions (Denzin, 1989; Geertz, 1973). However, although my methods were generally ethnographic, I was not privy to members’ private lives, and I did not observe them outside their interactions with the group. My data was collected primarily through participation in the Meetup, which I attended weekly for almost two years. Although I was absent during the summer and winter holidays, my attendance was consistent enough that I became known as one of the “regulars.” My data included: recorded interviews with the group’s founder and several members; over sixty hours of participant observation; analysis of the group’s Kakao group-chat; and dozens of informal interviews with attendees. My research was aided by the structure of the Meetup. The group convened once weekly, under the direction of its original founder, Thomas,3 an ethnic Korean in his late forties who had emigrated to New York as a teenager. Every week, under Thomas’ careful supervision, two native English speakers and two Korean speakers were paired together to form a small group. I joined these small groups as either a fourth or fifth member. In this way, I participated in the conversations of more than fifty members, split nearly evenly between U.S. Americans and Koreans. In addition to collecting data directly at the meetings, I also closely followed the conversations on the group’s Kakao chat-room and read all emails/messages sent to the group through Meetup by Thomas. In addition, I was able to collect rich ethnographic data by joining members during their weekly ritual of heading to Korean pubs after each meeting, and by attending near-weekly outings, including bowling, bonfires at the beach, and even a trip to the local ping-pong parlor. By the time I stopped collecting data, I had dozens of pages of hastily scrawled field notes and after-the-fact reflections about the group, and several hours of audio-recorded interviews and conversations. It is important to note that my participation in the group was aided by my own positionality. My heritage is not Korean; I am mixed Asian-American and white. My racial ambiguity, combined with the authority conveyed by my institutional identity, allowed me to productively navigate insider/outsider boundaries in my interactions with different members of the group (see Sherif, 2001). I had also lived and conducted research in Korea for several years, which meant both that I could interview Korean attendees in their native language and that non-Korean members would often ask me questions about the Korean language or living in Korea as a foreigner. I was forthright with members about my primary role as a researcher, and new members quickly learned that I was “writing a paper.” Cosmopolitan(s) striving The group’s overall goal was language and culture exchange, as described on its Meetup page. This extended beyond Korean culture, as listed in the final point of its four-point mission statement: “To promote deeper understanding of each other’s culture, whether it may be Korean, American, or any other culture.” This cosmopolitan ideal was reiterated regularly by Thomas, the group's charsmatic founder Thomas played an outsized role in the group, both convening its weekly meetings and guiding its cosmopolitan trajectory. Despite not having been back to Korea in thirty years (his outdated Korean slang was often poked fun at by the younger Koreans) Thomas possessed a zealous desire to share Korea’s language and culture with anyone who visited the group. However, sis interest in culture extended beyond Korea and the U.S., and he was quick to invite Moroccan, Mexican, French, and Chinese attendees of the group to share their culture and language. Thomas’ cosmopolitan ambitions were further reflected by the fact that he had recently started both a Korean-French and a Chinese-Korean Meetup group. The café explicitly advertised that patrons were expected to buy a drink, and this point was mechanically reiterated by Thomas at the beginning of each meeting. Yet, I never once saw Thomas or any other member of the group tell someone to buy a drink. In light of the considerable cost of the drinks (a miniature ginger-ale cost $4), the implicit sanctioning of not purchasing anything was a first, yet important way, that the Meetup welcomed the group’s more financially precarious members. This egalitarian ethos was also reflected in the “membership drives” that occasionally happened in order to finance the $10–15 monthly fee owned to Meetup.com. Thomas would make an announcement every few months to raise and collect money, but students, interns, and the economically precarious were not expected to contribute and their money was usually quietly but firmly refused. The group provided assistance to members that they otherwise would have struggled to procure as a result of their socioeconomic position, such as finding inexpensive places to live in Los Angeles’ rapidly gentrifying Koreatown. The Meetup additionally functioned as a transportation service, and members with cars ferried those without; this extended beyond weekly excursions to the Meetup, and included camping trips and bonfires at the beach. Members often turned to the group when they needed help. For example, Michelle, a Black woman in her mid-twenties, told me that when she got “greenlit to do [my] movie on a Warner Bros set for a film contest,” she turned to the Meetup not only for moral support but also for her background actors. The Meetup’s support was crucial for Michelle, who worked several part-times jobs to make ends meet but aspired to become a filmmaker. Many interns used the Meetup to crowdsource advice. This went beyond the confines of the weekly meetings, and extended into the group’s Kakao chat-room, which was frequented by both the U.S. American and Korean attendees. In the online chat-room, members exchanged tips about life in Los Angeles, crowdsourced answers to English grammar and email writing questions, and coordinated bulk purchases. Purchasing in bulk in order to receive discounts was one of the chat-room’s primary uses, and I was once successfully peer-pressured by the interns into buying a ticket to a street-festival; other members found themselves swept along by the interns to baseball games and amusement parks. Members were encouraged to share their knowledge for the benefit of the group, about topics from legal advice to real-estate and Black culture/English. One member, Amber, who was a lawyer, found herself regularly volunteering legal advice. In particular, Amber was called upon to supply information about immigration-law and visas, which were matters of great concern to the group’s Korean members, almost all of whom were on short-term visas. For their part, the Korean interns were all de-factor Korean instructors, readily supplying answers to any questions related to Korea’s language or culture. In turn, the U.S. Americans volunteered their much-desired native English to assist the Koreans. One day, Thomas interrupted the Meetup so that a Black member, Tiff, could explain some of the characteristics of Black English to the Korean interns, whose English education in Korea had overwhelmingly focused on hegemonic varieties of White English (Jenks, 2017). While many of the Meetup members were in situations of financial precarity, including the majority of the Black and Latina women, the group was also attended by several white, male, highly-paid professionals. One, Matt, attended because he would soon be marrying a Korean woman whom he had met while studying for an advanced degree in Europe. He admitted that his original decision to move to Europe had been motivated by his boredom with his job in the tech industry. Matt traveled regularly to Korea and his cultural and financial capital, as well as his romantic relationship, provided him both the motivation and opportunity to study Korean. Another white U.S. American, Bill, was a county prosecutor, who related (to the shocked horror of the two young Korean interns with whom he was paired) that he liked Korea specifically because of its strict cultural hierarchy, in which older, socially powerful men—like Bill—were revered. Both Matt and Bill had been to Korea before and planned to go again. The white professionals tended to have higher levels of Korean language ability than the women of color, a fact that I attribute in part to their access to (expensive) Korean language learning classes/material. Matt and Bill embodied a more traditional, elite-cosmopolitanism. Their cosmopolitanism was different than the Black and Latina female attendees, the majority of whom had never been to Korea and lacked the capital to make a trip there. Nonetheless, these women’s cosmopolitan ambitions were no less than Bill’s and Matt’s, as evidenced by their enthusiasm for the Meetup and for Korean culture. For many of the U.S. American women of color, the Meetup prompted them to reject a superficial cosmopolitanism based upon capitalist consumption and jet-setting, and embrace a grounded, interaction-based cosmopolitanism predicated on cultural openness. For example, Michelle related how the Meetup made her “actually want to learn about their culture and not just be a typical tourist.” Stephanie, a Latina woman in her mid-twenties, credited the Meetup for motivating her to change her major to linguistics at the local community college. She told me that the Meetup showed her how “we live in our little bubble without thinking about how big the world really is and how much more we can learn about it.” She added sheepishly, “[the Meetup] helped me have a different outlook on life, as weird as it sounds.” (Thomas’) Cosmopolitan vision Thomas played a crucial role in fostering the Meetup’s cosmopolitan ethos. As mentioned above, Thomas had moved to the United States in his teens and although he spoke English fluently, he often made grammatical errors. Likewise, his Korean was old-fashioned, which was a source of much amusement to the interns. However, despite his language foibles and his ethnic-minority status in the United States, Thomas was in many ways an elite, with a stable office-job, a house, and a sports car. Thomas’ position as a comparative elite adds complexity to assessing the group’s cosmopolitanism-from-below, because without Thomas it is possible the group would have A) failed to persist; and B) lacked many of its most progressive and egalitarian practices. One of Thomas’ most important contributions as the Meetup’s convener was to focus the Meetup less on providing attendees with language ability, and more on highlighting the differences and commonalities between cultures. This was important because in other language/cultural exchange groups I have attended in both Korea and the United States, the group’s focus on language competence has tended to privilege those members who are the most traditionally “cosmopolitan” (i.e., possess the highest degrees of mobility and multilingual competence). This can have a silencing effect on those who lack travel experiences and also usually possess lower levels of foreign language ability. By placing less emphasis on language ability and more emphasis on the process of learning, Thomas largely succeeded in preventing the group from privileging the experiences of members like Matt and Bill over that of members of color like Michelle and Stephanie. Later, in an effort to provide the Meetup with more focus and direction, Thomas began an ill-fated effort to place greater emphasis on more conventional, level-based language learning. However, this well-intention intervention inadvertently brought into focus the large differences in formal language levels, and had precisely the exclusionary effects I alluded to above: Stephanie confided in me that one of the reasons she had recently stopped attending the Meetup was because she “heard from a friend that [Thomas was] changing the way things were set up. Like, it’s for more advanced speakers.” In light of this change, Stephanie, who possessed a comparatively low level of Korean competence, felt discouraged from attending. Despite these occasional missteps, Thomas played a central role in ensuring that differences, based in particular upon access to particular types of experience (i.e., cultural capital) were not assigned hierarchical (i.e., market) value. Too often in ostensibly cosmopolitanism spaces, only certain types of difference are ascribed value, while others are marginalized or shunted aside as undeserving of recognition or exploration. However, the Meetup was by-and-large successful in preventing a co-option of white, professional experiences from distinguishing themselves, ala Bourdieu (1984/2008), against/above the lived experiences of members of color. It was here, in democratizing the value of members’ different experiences, that the Meetup was most successful. This can be read as a victory of the particular and grounded over the abstract and universal. Some of Thomas’ efforts to prompt discussion about difference were spurred by his discomfort with racism within the Korean community. He confided to me that he saw the difference in treatment of Black women and white women by the Korean interns as “night and day.” He also expressed his frustration with what he saw were persistent issues with the ways in which cosmopolitanism (globalization, in his words) is constructed in the Korean social imaginary. Thomas’ frustrations with Korean articulations of cosmopolitanism/globalization are unsurprising, given the ways in which global discourses of Whiteness/cosmopolitanism circulate (Shome, 2006), especially in Korea (see Ahn, 2018). However, through the Meetup, many of the Korean interns were exposed to diversity that contradicted the images of the United States that they had consumed in Korea. Members of color played a crucial role in this process; Michelle told me that she struggled to answer some of the interns’ questions about “American” culture precisely because the interns “associate American culture with the white community.” She continued, “I then have to explain that the beauty of American culture is that it is a melting pot of peoples and cultures.” Thomas made efforts to combat racism through a variety of means, including ensuring that the small groups were diverse, and raising for discussion important topics like Black English. Thomas’s cosmopolitan vision was illustrated by an email exchange that took place in late 2017. Using the group’s official Meetup email, Thomas sent out a mass email in the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville: I want every meetup members to remember the importance of being a piece of puzzle(puzzle of mosaic, I would like to call) and it requires every one of the puzzle pieces tobe there to complete the big picture. We are America because of everyone here withus…therefore, I declare that (as a proud citizen of USA) whether you are black, Hispanic, Asian,and White, I want people to know everyone is appreciated and welcomed in thismeetup… I feel this is my small way of being a American patriot and contributing to build true American society…” Thomas’ email was greeted by a flurry of supportive replies, including from members of color. Particularly noteworthy about the email is the way in that Thomas advocated an encompassing cosmopolitanism—reflected by his use of phrases such as “true society” and “big picture”—while also explicitly referencing his own particular identity as an “American” and a “proud citizen of the USA.” Such comments are especially noteworthy considering his own status as a non-native English speaker and a racial minority. Thomas exemplified a sort of “rooted cosmopolitanism” wherein one retains appreciation for one’s national identity while maintaining a cosmopolitan openness (see Appiah, 1998). This form of grounded/rooted cosmopolitanism, embodied in Thomas’ email, formed the backbone of cosmopolitan practice in the group, in which members were not expected to abandon their local identities and traditions, but merely to additively celebrate the identities of others. Neoliberalism Neoliberal global capitalism structured both Korean and U.S. American participation in the Meetup. The Korean female interns had come to the U.S. on short-term J-1 visas, through which they worked long hours at close to minimum wage. The Department of State website touts the intern program as improving interns’ English skills, and the opportunity to improve their English made participation in the program especially attractive to the women. This is because English fluency is increasingly a necessity in finding a job in globalization—and English—obsessed Korea, in which workers bear ever greater burdens to gain not just English competence, but the requisite cosmopolitan experiences which signal that competence (see Curran, 2018; Lee, 2016; Park, 2010). In addition to improving their English, many of the interns were using their time in the U.S. as a way to avoid graduating from university “jobless,” which they feared would negatively impact their chance to find employment. Many of the interns told me they were essentially “stalling” while they waited hopefully/hopelessly for the Korean job market to improve. Desire to participate in the internships was so high that several of the interns admitted that they had secured their internships through expenditure of several thousands of dollars paid to companies that then helped match them with intern-sponsoring U.S. companies. The J-1 visa program prohibits interns from working “unskilled or casual labor positions” and no more than 20% of their work is supposed to be in “clerical or office support work” (U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 2018). However, in reality, many of the young Korean women engaged heavily in such duties. Allyssa, a Korean-fluent Black woman who had grown close to multiple cohorts of interns, confided to me that although the interns arrived with “high expectations,” they in reality “end up getting coffee and making copies.” Most of the interns stayed between six months and a year, which meant that I had the opportunity to speak with multiple cohorts of interns during my time at the Meetup and could witness first hand their gradual disillusionment with their internships. While the interns’ desire to accrue overseas work experience is the result of Korea’s highly neoliberal and competitive labor market, they were not alone in neoliberal conditions influencing their participation in the Meetup. Although U.S. American members were less likely than the interns to explicitly ground their motivation for attendance in terms of economic opportunities, many of the U.S. American members discussed learning Korean within a similar neoliberal logic of self-improvement. In addition, it was neoliberal economic conditions in general that brought many of the U.S. Americans to the group; unable to find stable, full-time employment, many of thewoman members of color lacked the financial means to study Korean via other means. Further, the Meetup also served as an affordable form of entertainment for the many members whose low-paying and part-time employment in the service-industry did not provide them enough money to engage in other forms of cosmopolitan consumption, such as dining at Korean restaurants or buying K-pop concert tickets. Several of the U.S. Americans’ (white and Asian) interest in Korea was the result of having taught English in Korea. However, most seemed to have taken low-paying English teaching jobs in Korea not because of any prior interest in the country, but simply because they were unable to find full-time employment in the U.S. Other U.S. American members had more direct economic motivations for learning Korean. For example, one Black U.S. American, Richard, wanted to work in entertainment in Korea, and Michelle told me that part of her motivation to learn Korean was to communicate with the many Korean customers at the store where she worked. Neoliberal subjectivity As illustrated above, the members of the Meetup are confronted by neoliberalism in two interconnected but distinct ways. First, they are embedded in structural conditions that have been deeply affected by the deregulation of financial capital and the roll-back of the welfare state (Harvey, 2007). This is evidenced in the United States by declining wages and the increasingly dominant position of financial capital post-Reagan, and in Korea by the structural reforms to the economy that came as condition of Korea’s bailout from the IMF following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (Crotty & Lee, 2006). These macro-conditions can be conceptualized as “neoliberalism from above.” On the other hand, members also confront neoliberalism in terms of their own subjectivity, in the form of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2008 ; Read, 2009). That is, their “vision of the future is embedded in neoliberalism as a structure of feeling, or rather as an existential imperative that compels one to ‘invest’ in oneself, to compete relentlessly so as to arrive at a future of prosperity” (Wang, 2017, p. 179). In light of these dual pressures, at the structural and individual levels, this article might have been more pessimistically titled “Neoliberalism from above and Neoliberalism from Below.” The Meetup itself could be pessimistically read as an imitation of more elite forms of cosmopolitanism; Koreatown itself as an easily accessible “other” to be consumed by those who lack the time and/or capital to travel to Korea. Likewise, for those Koreans who cannot afford to study abroad in the US, the J-1 Visa offers them the opportunity to embellish their resume with the next-best-thing. In this light, the Meetup appears to be merely attempting to replicate the traditional allowance structures of (cultural) capital, thus reifying the underlying structures of neoliberal capitalism. In judging whether the Meetup exemplifies neoliberalism—from above and below—or cosmopolitanism-from-below, it is necessary to consider the relationship between cosmopolitanism and neoliberalism. Cosmpolitanism vs. neoliberalism Although cosmopolitanism-from-below and neoliberalism are oppositional, elite cosmopolitanism and neoliberalism overlap and converge. As discussed earlier, elite-cosmopolitanism involves the acquisition of cultural and symbolic capital, or in neoliberal terms, human capital (Park, 2018, 479–480; Read, 2009). One’s human capital is increased through the linguistic and cultural skills accrued through elite-cosmopolitan practices and it is through cosmopolitan imagery that neoliberal logic circulates (Shome (2006, p. 259). Elite-cosmopolitanism is abstract, based on a universal(izing) neoliberal market that motivates/necessitates investment in human capital; the more languages one speaks and the farther one has traveled, the closer one approximates an abstract, universal cosmopolitan who is completely untethered from local relations. As the Leurs and Georiou (2016, p. 3703) quote earlier highlights, elite-cosmopolitanism is “deterritorialized,” “postracial” and “privileges “individual choice and singular personhood.” These markers are also at the heart of neoliberalism, which subjects all relations to market logic, and treats homo economicus as the unit of all analysis (Foucault, 1978-79/2008; Lemke, 2001). Neoliberalism’s basis in universalism and abstraction provides it a meritocratic veneer that obscures the structural biases (along axes of class, nationality, and race) that ultimately contour both market success (Curran, 2020) and claims to an (elite) cosmopolitan identity. As Mignolo (2000, 2011) and Pollock et al. (2000, p. 581) have warned, universalist goals -both cosmopolitan and neoliberal- mask their own provincialism. Mignolo (2000, p. 743) cautions against the “abstract universal” provided by “hegemonic perspectives…be they neoliberal or neo-Marxist.” Likewise, Theodossopoulos (2010, p. 6) acknowledges the “neoliberal, global face of [elite] cosmopolitanism.” These authors' scholarship highlights the ways in which the universal, abstract aspects of traditional cosmopolitanism accord with neoliberalism. On the other hand, cosmopolitanism-from-below is rooted in local identities and immediate actions (Appadurai, 2011; Hannerz, 2008, p. 72). Cosmpolitanism-from-below does not seek to establish universal ideals. Rather than oriented toward future profits or proficiencies, cosmopolitanism-from-below is achieved in the process of cultural negotiation for the purpose of achieving concrete, immediate goals. This was exemplified in the Meetup by arranging rides and housing, navigating issues of cross-cultural and cross-lingual communication, and in more banal tasks like buying tickets in bulk. These mundane interactions helped form the basis of a critical, dialogical cosmopolitanism (Canagarajah, 2013, 198–199; Mignolo 2000, p. 743). Despite scholarly recognition of the importance of practice in the constitution of cosmopolitanism, it is competence which is still too often taken as an indicator of cosmopolitanism. In contrast, transformative cosmopolitanism can be identified instead in the miscommunications and missteps along the way to cross-cultural understanding. Based upon my time with the Meetup, it is recognitizing and embracing awkwardness—as opposed to the competence and mastery of elite cosmopolitanism—that marks cosmopolitanism-from-below. What I call awkwardness bears similarities with Kurasawa’s (2011, p. 282) “moment of in-betweenness, whereby one negotiates and attempts to make different socio-cultural worldviews intelligible to oneself.” It other words, it is the process of making intelligible, rather intelligibility itself, that is the goal. The Korean interns struggled to understand the words that Tiffany taught them, and Tiffany likewise struggled to pronounce the interns’ name. Nonetheless, they struggled forward, together. In doing so, they were engaging in the type of “conversation” that Appiah (2006) sees as fundamental to the cosmopolitan project. The Meetup fostered connections that well embodied the dialogical cosmopolitanism that Canagarajah (2013, p. 198) theorizes as “developed from forms of lingua franca encounters and contact zone interactions taking place both in the East and West.” At the Meetup, individuals from different cultural backgrounds navigated complex and materially significant situations using a variety of linguistic resources, and in service of achieving shared goals. The Meetup’s overall embrace of “in-betweenness,” or the initial awkwardness and then subsequent embrace of discomfort, is readable in Stephanie’s quote above about adopting “a different outlook on life, as weird as that sounds.” This weirdness, I posit, is a constitutional element of non-elite cosmopolitanism. It is their awkward embrace of “different outlooks” that the Meetup members embody the critical, dialogical cosmopolitanism theorized by Canagarajah (2013) and Mignolo (2000). Of course, the power imbalances that members brought to the group were not entirely negated. White men like Bill and Matt left the Meetup space just as economically and socially privileged as when they arrived, and no amount of sharing rides or purchasing in bulk could overturn the Koreans and minority U.S. American women’s own financial precarity. However, the cosmopolitan practices of the group did demonstrate that power is open to “negotiation and realignment” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 196). By placing the emphasis on the process of learning rather than already acquired language ability, the playing field was momentarily leveled. Likewise, although discussing Black English did not directly challenge the dominance of White English, its dominance was, at least momentarily made open to contestation. The cosmopolitanism of the group could be observed at multiple levels. At the individual level, members like Stephanie and Michelle gained a cosmopolitan outlook from their participation, and the interns learned about the diversity of the United States. The group itself was explicitly cosmopolitan, and constantly strived to reproduce its ethos/culture. At the macro-level of the Meetup itself, Thomas played a crucial role, ensuring that those with the greatest amount of cultural and linguistic capital could not co-opt the Meetup. The Meetup also functioned transnationally, primarily through its Kakao group chat, which kept the group in contact even when members were not in the same country. Via Kakao and the Internet, the friendships persisted even after the interns invariably returned to Korea. Occasionally, members were able to visit Korea and reconnect with old friends they made via the Meetup, sharing their reunions with the group. Conclusion Despite the potential for the Meetup’s practices to be read as a reflection of neoliberal logic, I suggest that a more appropriate reading is to consider the group’s practice as a form of cosmopolitanism-from-below; a type of cosmopolitanism that is born from the material conditions of neoliberalism, yet is neoliberalism’s opposite. Where neoliberalism and elite cosmopolitanism are based on abstract universals and an abstract future, the cosmopolitan practices of the Meetup are grounded in specific material practices and communicative exchanges, and are orientated toward specific and immediate goals. Perhaps most encouragingly, through the Meetup, language itself became unmoored from its position as a qualification and signal of cultural capital, and was instead deployed creatively as a means to foster genuine communication and connection. In this way, the Meetup was able to successfully celebrate process over outcome, cosmopolitan specificity over neoliberal abstraction. Whereas the relationships were often formed as a result of the economic precarity engendered by neoliberalism, themembers' friendships fostered new types of grounded cosmopolitan practice that logically oppose neoliberalism’s and traditional cosmopolitanism’s abstract universalism. More research is needed in order to document the outcomes of similar groups, and to ascertain how they alternately foster cosmopolitanism and/or reinforce the commonsense of neoliberalism. To what degree grounded dialogical cosmopolitanism might challenge the abstract universalism embodied by both neoliberalism and elite cosmopolitanism remains unclear, and further inquiry is necessitated. Acknowledgement I offer my sincere thanks to: the members of the Meetup group for sharing their time; the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions; and to Henry Jenkins for his tireless mentorship. 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Lawless, Brandi; Cole, Kristen L.

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaa035pmid: N/A

Abstract This case study proposes a method of troll tracking to analyze how right-wing media attacks circulate and contribute to increasing anti-intellectualism in the United States. Given the increase in right-wing political “news” sites as originators of trolling activity and their propensity to espouse anti-intellectualism, we are interested in understanding more deeply how particular instances of this targeted outrage become rhetorical. Our analysis reveals how metaknowledge circulates misinformation through commentary that carries anti-intellectual ideologies rapidly across time and space. This process of detachment reveals important implications about the (re)production of anti-intellectual ideologies, the evocation of collective outrage that manifests as sexism and transphobia, and the gatekeeping of academic knowledge production. Targeted right-wing attacks on faculty have become commonplace in the academy, prompting fear among academics (Straumsheim, 2015). A quick review of Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals the pervasiveness of online harassment, including death threats and warnings to stay away from campus (Daniels & Stein, 2017; Mangan, 2017; Ray, 2017). Conversations about targeted harassment and academic freedom have increased in scholarly discussion (e.g., Lawless, Rudick, & Golsan, 2019). More attention to how such information is distributed and spreads will help us to understand and account for the theoretical and practical consequences of targeted outrage against academic intellectual pursuits. We draw on literature in communication, media, and rhetorical studies to explicate theories of online trolling in an age of outrage, characterized in part by white supremacy and anti-intellectualism. As a case study, we name a method of troll tracking to analyze a case of online harassment targeted at Dr. Brandi Lawless, the first author on this publication. Through a collection of over 700 media messages, we analyze a complex socio-material media network and reveal how the composition, production, distribution, and circulation of right-wing discourse detaches academic knowledge from its original context and transforms it in service of anti-intellectualism. This process constitutes and mobilizes a conservative collective of outrage that authorizes sexism and transphobia. This case study demonstrates how fragmented and out-of-context information, curated by obscure sources, can become a powerful source of political rhetoric. Trolling, outrage, & anti-intellectualism Online trolling is defined as “repetitive, disruptive online deviant behavior by an individual toward other individuals and groups” (Fichman & Sanfilippo, 2016, p. 5). It provokes strong reactions from targets and other readers through a variety of tactics such as hyper-criticism, shaming, sarcasm, blackmailing, and the publishing of private information (Golf-Papez & Veer, 2017; Parson, 2019). Trolling can be an individual or collective act (Kirkwood, Payne, & Mazer, 2019), and a part of coordinated disinformation campaigns (Linvill, 2019; Ong & Cabañes, 2019). Social media attacks on academics can be considered a form of political trolling, which includes “partisan baiting of ideological opponents into arguments” (Sanfilippo, Yang, & Fichman, 2017, p. 1802). Literature on trolling tends to focus on social media as the primary space where such disruptive communication occurs. Twitter and Facebook are frequent sites of trolling (Hannan, 2018; Kirkwood, Payne, & Mazer, 2019; Linvill, 2019; Morrison, 2018) as are readers’ comment spaces (Coles & West, 2016; McCosker, 2013). We extend an understanding of trolling to include right-wing media articles as agents of this behavior. Given the literature’s emphasis on intentional ideological baiting, articles published on websites like Campus Reform, whose mission is to “expose leftist thugs” on college campuses (Campus Reform, 2020), fall within the realm of trolling. As Ferber (2018) notes, these smaller “news” sites exist to feed the “Outrage Machine,” hoping to go viral (p. 307). The success of such sites is measured by how many articles get picked up by larger news-generating sites like Breitbart or how many times their news breaks result in Fox News interviews (Ferber, 2018). This outrage machine starts with a small catalyst with divisive intent, which is replicated over and over by automated software that tweets every-hour-on-the-hour, in hopes of being recirculated through larger news sites, social media sharing, and reader commentary. Machines are well-oiled, fast moving, and made up of parts that work cohesively to perform an action or manufacture a product. This metaphor is well adapted for virality because of the coordinated effort of organized collectives to modify dominant publics. In their analysis of Swarmfront (a group circulating white supremacy) as a “parasitic public,” Larson and McHendry (2019) explain that the group is able to “engage in patterned behaviors to organize hate,” through which they actively recruit members, offer trainings on creating and circulating messages, and provide copy/paste databases for members to use in their online messaging (p. 524). Ott and Dickinson (2019) note that such rage (particularly white rage) carries an “affective aesthetic” that “works to trigger racist rage in individuals and to do so at a nonrational, embodied level” (p. 31). The machine mobilizes rhetoric “intended to limit discursive space for others and strengthen its own circulatory, material power” (Larson & McHendry, 2019, p. 519). Through this circulatory process, messages become rhetorically detached from their original meaning, thus primed for spreading misinformation and coordinating outrage. Scholars who discuss the outrage machine give particular focus to the circulation of white supremacist ideologies and messages (Larson & McHendry, 2019; Ott & Dickinson, 2019). We add to this conversation attention to how the outrage machine also functions to produce anti-intellectualism, which is a sociomaterial-political endeavor that, among many consequences, triggers sexist and transphobic rage. Anti-intellectualism is a growing ideological sentiment among those who participate in right-wing online trolling. Sengul (2019) explains that anti-intellectualism is linked to populist communication meant to “appeal to a people against an elite” (p. 89). Populism is characterized by distrust of an arrogant/ignorant out-of-touch elite class that does not promote the will of the people. Anti-intellectualism, then, is the populist resistance to and distrust of intellectuals (e.g., academics). Such taken-for-granted beliefs bolster the notion that college campuses exist for and are controlled by leftist elites who do not understand the average U.S. American. Anti-intellectual sentiments also fuel disinformation campaigns that frame climate change as a hoax, vaccinations as autistic catalysts, and intersectionality as a snowflake joke. The assumption that colleges and universities are a tool of liberal indoctrination has led to the delegitimization of higher education (Friedensen & Kimball, 2018). Anti-intellectual ideologies are circulated through coordinated rhetorical efforts by those on the right. Trolling academics has become a tool used to fuel anti-intellectualism, promote conservative ideologies that exist in a post-truth society, and undercut the long arc of academic truth-making characterized by rigorous debate and critical engagement (Lawless, Rudick, & Golsan, 2019; Peters, 2019). Thus, rampant anti-intellectualism as a byproduct of trolling is rhetorically dangerous, not just for those individuals who are the target of these attacks, but for knowledge production and higher education as a whole. Therefore, this article seeks to examine and explicate the circulation of such ideologies. Troll tracking as method Given the increase in right-wing political “news” sites as originators of trolling activity and their propensity to espouse anti-intellectualism, we are interested in understanding more deeply how particular instances of targeted outrage become rhetorical. While many methodologies study the symbolic nature of communication as it emerges in an initial context, Gries (2015) notes that in the context of viral Internet content—which spreads “quickly, uncontrollably, and unpredictably” (p. 2)—focusing predominantly on symbolic meaning risks missing the complex and significant material manifestations of such content, including “the logics, structures, practices, collectives, and platforms” that facilitate circulation (p. 3). In this study, we examine the dynamic life of right-wing rhetoric to better understand trolling as a complex mobilization of sociomaterial actors that momentarily cohere as recognizable, ideologically-charged rhetorics that are significant to the continuation of a collective of outrage. To collect, organize, and analyze data for our case study, we adapt Gries’ (2015) method of iconographic tracking as a method of troll tracking to investigate coordinated media attacks against Dr. Brandi Lawless in the wake of her publication of a journal article on emotional labor in academia (Lawless, 2018). On 6 March 2018, the article written by Lawless was made available online by an academic journal. On 19 March, Lawless was contacted by a student journalist at Campus Reform, requesting comment on an article they intended to publish about Lawless’s arguments. Lawless did not respond to this request based on advice from her university’s communications office and Campus Reform published their intended article on 22 March. The particular assemblage of media attacks we analyze began on 22 March 2018, with the publishing of the “news” article by Campus Reform. To gain a full understanding of this case, we examine the Campus Reform article and its broader platform as well as subsequent trolling by several conservative news sites, readers’ comments, and social media posts (which lasted a total of 15 days). Most cases of virality manifest in moments of networked intensity, complicated by a range of material factors, rather than as linear and static symbolic artifacts. In order to account for this complexity, we adapt the various stages of iconographic tracking to conduct troll tracking: (a) data hoarding—collecting as much data as possible via digital searches, (b) data mining—“assembling data into a collection” (Gries, 2015, p. 111), (c) recursive data hoarding and mining—using search terms gleaned from the original data hoarding and mining process to conduct a narrowed round of data collection and organization, and (d) close study. We engaged in data hoarding using search engines and employing the search terms “Brandi Lawless,” “emotional labor,” and “University of San Francisco.” This resulted in 742 flames (pieces of trolling rhetoric), including articles, reader comments, and social media posts dated between 22 March and 10 May 2018. Data was mined into a spreadsheet, listing the flame, date, time, and source of publication. Recursive data mining was achieved by narrowing the data set to a time period in which inflammatory communication was most intensified (22 March–4 April 2018). This narrowed the data set to 730 flames, including 10 news articles, 70 social media posts (e.g., Twitter and Facebook), and 650 reader comments on published articles or blog posts. A teaching assistant, along with the two authors, coded the data through a close study of composition, production, distribution/circulation, transformation, and collectivity/consequentiality. A close study of rhetorical composition in the context of viral media content accounts for “the articulated exigence and purpose for rhetorical design” (Gries, 2015, p. 114) as well as the conditions of design, including “social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces” (p. 115). Whereas composition is concerned with context and conditions of design, a close study of production orients researchers toward how “materials, activities, people, technologies, institutional infrastructures, and bureaucratic forces” intra-act and yield the actualization of composition (p. 116). In attending to composition, we coded for rhetorical exigence, purpose, sociopolitical context, framing, and espoused culture values. To understand production, we noted networks of influence, journalistic practices, and underlying ideological forces. Distribution and circulation account for “how something flows” (Gries, 2015, p. 120). Flow refers to the relationship between “intentional strategies deployed” (p. 120) by various human and nonhuman actors involved in the distribution of online content (e.g., journalists, commentators, bots, and algorithms). To track flow, we coded for elements of distribution and (re)circulation that contributed to the acceleration and deceleration of (mis)information, including the intervening activity of journalists and bots. Relatedly, an analysis of transformation allows scholars to account for how meanings and material manifestations of media content change and proliferate beyond the capacity of its originator(s) in ways that are unforeseeable but are also directed and appear unintended, thus removing the consequences of virality from the original source. Specifically, transformation is a consequence of “ensuing metacultural activity that emerges, often unpredictably” in the process of distribution and circulation (p. 123). To trace transformation, we coded for this metacultural activity, which is communication that carries ideas and interpretations about culture but is detached from the original cultural object that elicited such commentary. Finally, one of the central consequences of rhetorical circulation is how media content “reassembles collective life” (Gries, 2015, p. 124); meaning, how different associations become meaningful and facilitate change as they coalesce through sociomaterial intra-action. The central question that undergirds an investigation of collectivity and consequentiality, in this case, is: how does trolling “induce others to respond and enter into relation” through specific instances of trolling while also “changing the purpose of that place where it temporarily appears?” (p. 125). The latter half of this question accounts for how digital spaces facilitate contagious rhetorical actions in the places where trolling appears as well as where it lands, such as in the homes and offices of those who are targeted. Our discussion of implications addresses this process of collectivity and consequentiality. Looking under the bridge: how right-wing trolls are born Shockingly, all of the data in this case study stems from a single article written by an undergraduate student at a small university. The content of this original article was circulated and transformed rapidly. This instigation of virality launched us into a close analysis of intent, sociopolitical context, parent organizations, political values, funding infrastructure and circulation strategies as they relate to Campus Reform. These contextual factors undergird the composition and production of the conservative media in this case. As a conservative media outlet, Campus Reform articulates an increase of liberal bias and indoctrination on college campuses as its rhetorical exigence. The outlet claims it “exposes liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses,” further explaining their mission is “to report on the conduct and misconduct of campus administrators, faculty, and students” (Campus Reform, 2020). Campus Reform describes itself as a “conservative higher education watchdog” urging readers to “help us continue to expose incidents of liberal abuse, intimidation, and indoctrination and restore America’s campuses” (Campus Reform, 2020). Their purpose is to expose this liberal bias, which is accomplished, in part, through the creation and circulation of anti-intellectual rhetoric. Campus Reform’s purpose is bolstered by its socio-political context. The Trump presidency ushered in an era of politics marked by extreme polarization, increased racism, distrust of media and academic institutions. This polarization, or distancing of ideological standpoints, is reinforced through rhetoric that positions groups as “us” versus “them.” For instance, McCoy, Rahman, and Somer (2018) explain, “an increasingly common polarizing rhetoric today is populism’s juxtaposition of the people versus the elites” (p. 20). Political polarization increases in conversation with like-minded individuals (Bekafigo, Stepanova, Eiler, Noguchi, & Ramsey, 2019), giving insight into why click-bait articles, such as those originating from Campus Reform, are composed and produced. Moreover, self-disclosure of racist beliefs has increased (Konrad, 2017; Lajevardi & Oskooii, 2018) and incivility in online spaces has spiked (Nithyanand, Schaffner, & Gill, 2017). The current political moment informs the composition of right-wing messages and the subsequent circulation of and participation in online trolling. To generate participation, Campus Reform and its parent organization, The Leadership Institute, are framed as grass-roots activist organizations seeking to match the efforts of liberal organizing. On The Leadership Institute website, it states, “While many liberal organizations exist to increase the involvement of liberal activists, few similar organizations exist to serve conservatives (…)” Additionally, student participants are referred to as “student activists.” The current Editor-In-Chief of Campus Reform, Cabot Phillips, lists his prior experience as a “Digital Grassroots Director” for Marco Rubio, and cites his qualifications as amassing “over 100 million views across varying online platforms” (Campus Reform, 2020). Rhetorically framing this work as “grass roots” activism appeals to a populist collective that can be mobilized. Finally, conservatism is the primary cultural value informing the composition of messages that fuel populist mobilization. The Leadership Institute claims they “actively support the entire conservative movement” and promotes this support by sharing contact information of all connections with other conservative organizations to help fortify the conservative movement (Leadership Institute, 1979). While Campus Reform and the Leadership Institute do not clarify what conservativism looks like, their official partner, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), states they “promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government” (Turning Point USA, 2020). Conservative cultural values inform the topics that Campus Reform “reports” on and the types of responses that will be garnered by the primary audience of these sites. These aspects of composition cannot be separated from their conditions of production. Production accounts for the ways that people with differing ideas and purposes might coalesce around specific media content in order to achieve collaborative goals. Several institutional infrastructures and ideological forces helped to facilitate the production in this case. Significantly, the catalyzing website, Campus Reform, is listed as a “project” of the Leadership Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that takes tax-deductible donations. Though individual donor names are not listed online, notable foundation donations include those from Charles Koch Foundation and DeVos Urban Initiative Program, among others (Conservative Transparency Project, 2020). The Leadership Institute describes itself as a “non-partisan educational organization” and describes its role as “training conservatives since 1979” (Leadership Institute, 2020). The conservative funding of the Leadership Institute, and subsequently Campus Reform, inherently informs the production of the messages that are created and disseminated through this medium and those that follow suit. Conservative donors fund an ideological bias that matches their own. Seeing this strategy work encourages them to donate year after year. This monetary infrastructure allows a small project to have a large impact. This facilitates the circulation of Campus Reform articles through an increased ability to recruit “reporters” across the country and to access funds that can be used to maintain the website, control social media, and increase exposure and readership. The Leadership Institute’s strategy of production relies on a “college campus network” housed in over 1,700 college campus groups and newspapers (Leadership Institute, 2020). The “non-partisan” and nonprofit status allows them to exist on college campuses and recruit students. The organization’s website encourages students to “launch your journalism career” through Campus Reform by becoming a correspondent, investigator, or tipster. Donor money is used to pay students for their participation. Each year, 20–30 students receive journalistic training from the organization and, at any given time, approximately 50 correspondents work across a variety of college campuses (Schmidt, 2015). Advertising these jobs as career and educational opportunities authorizes the organization to recruit and train college students to be mouthpieces for conservative think tanks. The Leadership Institute is an official partner of TPUSA, the conservative organization that created The Professor Watchlist, a list of liberal professors across the United States. Notably, Campus Reform contributes the bulk of professors to this list based on their articles. Their interweb of conservative organizations, shared funders, and partnerships comes together to create a well-oiled conservative machine that has the bandwidth to not only constitute their rhetoric but also spread that content onto multiple platforms reaching thousands of users. In this case study alone, the original Campus Reform article was picked up by small blogs and larger platforms including Breitbart News, Daily Wire, Reddit, TexAgs, The MAGA News, and Spero News. Though the composition and production of media content are largely intentional processes undergirded by the aforementioned sociomaterial factors, once this content enters a digital, participatory network its transformation is inherently unpredictable. Who goes there? How right-wing trolls takeover When the original Campus Reform article was posted online, the outlet’s Twitter feed was boosting readership with a constant stream of Tweets that shared a link to the article along with one of three different clickbait headlines (see Figure 1). The timestamps of the first four Tweets are unremarkable. However, each of the subsequent timestamps follows a pattern, where the last minute ends in the number nine. This could be a coincidence but we are more inclined to believe that an auto-system was set up after the initial Tweet to repost the same stories throughout the day, ultimately increasing readership. Programs such as Hootsuite or Buffer can determine optimal times for posting and automate Tweeting. This is important as Gries (2015) notes, “we need to expand our investigation into the socio-technical systems that influence circulation” (p. 120). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Campus reform tweets. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Campus reform tweets. In addition to the initial strategy used by Campus Reform to induce virality, this analysis of troll tracking revealed several patterns of circulation such as highs and lows of intensity, a three day pause in communication, and redistribution on larger news sites. The publication of the Campus Reform article, in conjunction with the robotic Tweeting of the article caused an initial spike in flames (n = 207). These numbers drop off and pause for three days before spiking again after the redistribution of the same article on the Breitbart News platform (n = 385). Paramount to Gries (2015) description of distribution/circulation is the way in which circulation detaches communication from its original form. In her description of the circulation of cultural objects she explains: Metaculture often occurs at a faster rate than the actual cultural object circulates (Urban 2001, 227). As such, expressed interests, criticisms, rumors, and so forth can be totally detached from the cultural objects on which they comment. This explains the reasons people can know much about a certain image without even having encountered that image in the physical realm (226). (Gries, 2015, p. 121) In the context of our case study in trolling, the object being distributed is an object of knowledge production, which elicits metaknowledge—commentary that carries ideas and interpretations about knowledge—that is largely (almost entirely) detached from the original context and substantive content of Lawless’s original research and claims. Adapting the notion of metaculture, our analysis reveals that the Campus Reform article takes Lawless’s academic article out of context to the point of detachment, creating a form of metaknowledge that moves at a faster rate of consumption than the academic article itself (See Figure 2). This metaknowledge manifests as comments and criticisms that carry anti-intellectualism and triggers sexist and transphobic rage, rapidly and across time and space. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Distribution flow. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Distribution flow. Transformation occurs through the deployment of this metaknowledge. The original knowledge-content simultaneously moved from an academic journal article to reporting to social commentary, collectively transforming into and constituting trolling, in which discourse and material resources were changed and adapted along the way to facilitate individual and collective response. Most obviously, we see trolling manifest through the transformation of an argument regarding affective exchange in the academy to a public frenzy regarding capitalistic transactions in gendered contexts. By debasing an intellectual project in order to channel populist outrage, this rhetoric devolves swiftly into anti-intellectualism. The original journal article found in its literature review that women, especially women of color, were expected to perform more emotional labor than their white male peers. Given these findings, Lawless argues that academics should recognize emotional labor as academic labor, document such labor, pursue the issue through scholarly research, and make arguments for compensation by way of reduced service loads or course releases. Although Lawless did not argue that we should stop doing emotional labor, she does not condone increasing emotional labor loads or making it a written part of the job description. These arguments are important to note, given the way that the original arguments transformed through rhetorical circulation. The original Campus Reform article was titled, “Prof wants colleges to pay women extra for ‘emotional labor,’” a headline that was taken out of context from the academic article, which argued for documentation of emotional labor as academic labor and fair compensation for service hours that go above what universities require. In the academic article, these arguments were not directly linked to gender, rather, gender was mentioned in the literature review. By combining the literature review and the arguments about compensation, Campus Reform transforms the discussion of emotional labor as academic labor into emotional labor as women’s work. This forms a foundation for other rhetorical transformations including emotional labor → coddling, compensation → extra pay, and discussing gender → sexism. The click-bait headline ignores this context of research and presents an argument to the readers that is detached from the original research. This transformation is evident in the changing titles of subsequent “news” articles. Whereas the Campus Reform article highlights “Prof wants colleges to pay women extra for ‘emotional labor’ [emphases added],” TexAgs adds a subline, “Because of feels.” Breitbart and MAGA News use a similar headline, substituting the word “female” for “women.” The Daily Wire highlights the gender of Lawless, using the headline, “Female prof: Let’s pay female professors more for their ‘emotional labor.” The use of the word “extra” to talk about compensation for those who perform emotional labor recirculates Lawless’s arguments about reduced service loads and course releases as a cry for increased salary. In one reiteration of the article by TexAgs, the author also added to their report, “We have way too much coddling in college as it is. They should be compensated on job placement success of their students,” which both transforms emotional labor into “coddling” and shifts the argument from affective exchanges to capitalistic transactions. The changing use of language and identifiers in these headlines moves the arguments of the original article further away from its intent and begins to frame them in capitalistic and gendered ways—discourses more recognizable to a conservative populist audience. Another phase of transformation occurs through comments and social media posts that recirculate the content of the aforementioned “news” articles. The original academic article makes claims about how universities should resist a neoliberal agenda, thus advocating for institutional reform. However, social commentary transforms this broader argument into a pattern of claims about university/college policy, which elicits individual reactions regarding the everyday activities of professionals, including how professors should act and how organizations should compensate those actions. A further shift occurs when individual commenters project themselves into these latter arguments by way of example, such as, “I smiled at a student today. Where’s my money? Cause only females can be nice and caring to students. F’ing sexist.” These comments reflect a process of transformation that moves from digression to detachment quickly by replacing calls for institutional reform with attention to neoliberal labor values, espousing explicit anti-intellectualism, and triggering deeper outrage that manifests as: (a) claims of (reverse) sexism, and (b) transphobia. Commenters participate in this transformation by replacing arguments about academics and intellectualism with claims for professionalism. One commenter asserted, “The bottom line is that someone trying to run a company isn't going to cut you as much slack as a coddling college professor.” This assertion demonstrates a perceived disconnect between intellectual endeavors and professional work-life after college. This was echoed by other commenters who claimed, “Let’s stop employing female professors instead, since they are saying that the job is too hard for them,” or “If professors do receive extra pay for ‘emotional labor,’ can they be fired for not providing it? Can students get a refund if they don’t receive the ‘emotional labor?’” These comments equate intellectualism—the pursuit of knowledge (with neoliberal professionalism)—a perspective that values profits over people and a resolute understanding that work should be difficult and laborious. Though these comments might seem innocuous on their face, by detaching intellectualism from the context of higher education they strategically trigger and mobilize an ideological base emboldened by a commitment to anti-intellectualism. Examples of explicit anti-intellectualism include, “Shutting down many useless Colleges and Universities is coming” to “Many years ago, college professors were considered to be a part—perhaps the majority—of the intellectual elite. This apparently is no longer true. If you are looking for a fool proselytizing stupidity, go to a college campus,” or “All professors should be paid less.” Detached from the original knowledge object, arguments that academics should document their emotional labor and time spent handling student traumas, mental health concerns, or consoling students when they are crying are perverted. Commenters who have not read the original article participate in a conversation inspired by click-bait headlines. Moreover, such ideological assertions become re-attached to outrage directed toward the ideological left. A conservative audience base then (re)circulates the (now detached) arguments from the original article as evidence of (reverse) sexism. While the original article argued that women and people of color were bearing the brunt of the unwritten expectations for increased emotional labor as part of the job, readers’ comments implied that Lawless was sexist by suggesting women “should get paid more.” This suggestion was never made in the original article, rather, these comments are an echo of the transformation that occurred in the recirculation of the rhetoric by the “news” websites. These secondary transformations prompted retorts such as, “So in other words men and women are not equal (…),” “BS women want to be treated EQUAL so suck it up,” “What a terribly sexist woman. I have these qualities as a man. How dare she suggest I don’t. Off to the reeducation camp for her until she learns some objectivity and sensitivity. They can teach her some sandwich making skills while they’re at it too,” and “That sounds sexist. Is the professor implying that women are ‘emotional’?” By not reading the original article and, instead, relying on out-of-context headlines, these readers carry forward a detached understanding of the arguments of emotional labor that highlight gender and extra pay, fueling sexist reactions. These examples demonstrate how insidiously Lawless’s arguments are transformed and used against her in a cacophony of conservative populist outrage. The transformation away from an intellectual argument also prompted trolls to (re)circulate transphobic rhetoric. Social commentary included remarks such as “No wonder people are trans now. I don't want to be female if this is how it's going to be,” “But what about men professors who identify as women on Monday, Wednesday & Saturday evening? (…) Should they get a proportional increase in pay also” and “What if a biological male identifies as a woman? Does he get the higher pay?” These comments demonstrate how quickly (re)circulated reactions to detached (mis)information can mobilize an argument intended to promote equity in service of promoting essentialized views of gender identity instead. All of the aforementioned examples demonstrate how rhetoric is transformed both in form and content, which distances production and meaning from their original sources in divulgent and unexpected ways, thus mobilizing outrage. Who pays the toll? The consequences of collective anti-intellectualism Through troll tracking, we see how online political harassment is not singular, linear, and entirely discursive but rather a complex and dynamic socio-material process. Trolling requires a coordinated collective effort among those who share cultural values and perceive the same exigence. It requires the employment of digital resources and human labor to facilitate a decontextualization of information and a detachment from original knowledge objects. This prompts individuals to react collectively to constructed and perceived elitism through networked outrage. In this case, that outrage perpetuates anti-intellectualism and devolves into sexism and transphobia. Outrage networks may result in the spread of disinformation if it is in the best interest of reinforcing collective ideologies. Troll tracking also reveals material consequences of collective rage. The Internet bends time and space, making participants feel like they are in the same physical place and ideological community. It prompts response in such a way that changes (either through reinforcement or disruption) the physical and psychic realities of those involved. Though well-funded, visible opposition to liberal ideologies requires minimal substance and labor on the part of the troll. Individuals who are targeted by the collective may experience affective responses to the personal and political attacks waged against them. Lawless was not just attacked for her scholarship, but also received physical threats, comments about her body, and a threatening voicemail from somebody with a pending court case for “stalking and intentional infliction of emotional distress.” Moreover, several members of the trolling collective contacted university officials and Board of Trustees members urging for Lawless’s dismissal. It is worth noting that while the collective appears “out there,” the very real material consequences of emotional trauma and threats to employment status exist for the individual being targeted. Just as problematic is the reinforcement of dangerous conservative ideologies such as anti-intellectualism, especially when they operate as vehicles for identity-based oppression, such as sexism. Though the attacks seem to be targeted at an individual, the development of a collective that congregates around rage and conservative ideologies reinforces the populist notion that academics are elites who cannot be trusted and that women should not participate in knowledge production. As one member of the collective explained in a personal voicemail to Lawless, “I am starting a small business and I will never hire somebody with a college degree if I can help it. You feminists are pussy whipping your students.” The buy-in to anti-intellectualism and subsequent sexism displayed by the collective is dangerous for a democratic society that wishes to achieve social justice. By exploring the intersections of communication, media studies, and rhetoric, this analysis highlights how the process of rhetorical detachment fuels the circulation of anti-intellectualism. While recent literature has explored the propagation of white supremacy, this study reveals how the outrage machine can rapidly circulate metaknowledge—messages that are detached from original knowledge objects (e.g., scholarly publication)—in service of sexism and transphobia as well. This metaknowledge is exacerbated by academic publishing paywalls that prevent outside readers (e.g., Campus Reform and Breitbart News readers) from reading the original source. Even if a link to the journal article is included, in most cases it is not accessible for free. This means that even if targets of trolling want people to read the original knowledge object, readers would not have open access. Thus, rhetorical detachment circulates misinformation, amplifies anti-intellectual sentiments for those who do not have access to pay-walled scholarly publications, and subsequently triggers sexist and transphobic reactionary outrage. This analysis reveals how composition, production, transformation, and circulation all work together to facilitate trolling and its potential for virality. In this case, the spread of anti-intellectualism, espoused as conservative cultural values, is a complex, coordinated, but also unpredictable effort that requires material resources such as hefty financial backing and a system for cheap, exploitative “journalistic” labor; cohesive messaging across media platforms that establishes collective ideological identity; automated technology that circulates information beyond the capacities of a single person; and buy-in from a waiting public that transforms information (un)predictably. When this rhetoric becomes detached from an original knowledge object, decontextualized or falsified metaknowledges are produced, access to the original knowledge object becomes limited, and a collectivity spurred by the current political moment creates a network of rage. This process of rhetorical circulation is significant not only for its situational implications but also for understanding the broader dissemination of increasingly polarizing right-wing media. Though not meant to be generalizable, the process used to examine these texts is transferable to future case studies seeking to understand the process of circulation in instances of trolling, anti-intellectualism, and/or attacks on academic knowledge. We would like to thank Claudia Leist—a Teaching Assistant who helped to collect and store all of the data (at a time when Brandi couldn’t look at it). We’d also like to send our sincerest gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who suggested ways to improve the structure of this manuscript and provided tremendous support. References Bekafigo M. A. , Stepanova E. V. , Eiler B. A. , Noguchi K. , Ramsey K. L. ( 2019 ). The effect of group polarization on opposition to Donald Trump . 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( 2018 ). ‘Are you willing to die for this work?’ Public targeted online harassment in higher education . Gender & Society , 32 ( 3 ), 301 – 320 . doi:10.1177/0891243218766831 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Fichman P. , Sanfilippo M. R. ( 2016 ). Online trolling and its perpetrators . Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Friedensen R. E. , Kimball E. ( 2018 ). The professoriate and the post-truth era: A historiographic analysis of expert judgment and the destabilization of objective truth . Education Policy Analysis Archives , 26 ( 149 ), 1 – 18 . doi:10.14507/epaa.26.3357 T Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Golf-Papez M. , Veer E. ( 2017 ). Don’t feed the trolling: Rethinking how online trolling is defined and combatted . Journal of Marketing Management , 33 ( 15–16 ), 1336 – 1354 . doi:10.1080/0267257X.2017.1383298 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Gries L. ( 2015 ). 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Addressing social media dangers within and beyond the college campus . Communication Education , 68 ( 3 ), 371 – 398 . doi:10.1080/03634523.2019.1607885 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Mangan K. ( 2017 ). Georgetown U. professor doesn’t shy from a fight with the alt-right. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Georgetown-U-Professor/240143. McCosker A. ( 2013 ). Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics . Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 20 ( 2 ), 201 – 217 . doi:10.1177/1354856513501413 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat McCoy J. , Rahman T. , Somer M. ( 2018 ). Polarization and the global crisis of democracy: Common patterns, dynamics, and pernicious consequences for democratic polities . American Behavioral Scientist , 62 ( 1 ), 16 – 42 . doi:10.1177/0002764218759576 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Morrison A. ( 2018 ). Of, by, and for the Internet: New media studies and public scholarship. In Sayers J. (Ed.), The Routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities (pp. 56 – 66 ). New York : Routledge . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Nithyanand R. , Schaffner B. , Gill P. ( 2017 ). Online political discourse in the Trump era. In 7th Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet . Retrieved from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05303.pdf Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ong J. C. , Cabañes J. V. A. ( 2019 ). When disinformation studies meets production studies: Social identities and moral justifications in the political trolling industry . International Journal of Communication , 13 , 5771 – 5790 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Ott B. L. , Dickinson G. ( 2019 ). The Twitter presidency. Donald J. Trump and the politics of white rage. New York : Routledge . 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( 2015 ). Higher education’s Internet outrage machine. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Educations-Internet/232879/?key=HmsidgRiZSRHM3wxOGoWOGpRPCZvYx0kN3dIangmblBUGA==. Sengul K. ( 2019 ). Populism, democracy, political style and post-truth: Issues for communication research . Communication Research and Practice , 5 ( 1 ), 88 – 101 . doi:10.1080/22041451.2019.1561399 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Straumsheim C. ( 2015 ). Survey reveals concerns about attacks on scholars on social media. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/14/survey-reveals-concerns-about-attacks-scholars-social-media. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. 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Zimmerman, Heidi

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaa021pmid: N/A

Abstract This article examines the ongoing effort to “take down” Vani Hari’s activism-cum-lifestyle brand, the Food Babe, with particular attention to the viral success of Yvette “SciBabe” d’Entremont’s 2015 Gawker post, “The Food Babe Blogger Is Full of Sh*t.” Popular discourse pits the two babes against each other. However, by examining both babes’ multiplatform branded personas as technologies of self-governance under postfeminist, neoliberal brand culture, I show that the Food Babe/SciBabe case is more than a struggle over “science versus pseudoscience.” This case study illuminates a gendered double bind that is intensifying in the so-called “post-truth” era as obligations to maximize oneself and one’s family come into conflict with longstanding and deeply classed anxieties about feminized media culture. Health enthusiast and self-styled “food investigator” Vani Hari operates under the moniker Food Babe. After being hospitalized for appendicitis, she stopped eating processed, conventionally grown, and genetically modified foods. On her new diet she lost weight, her skin cleared up, and she felt terrific. Inspired, she launched the Food Babe website in 2011 (Hari, 2011–2016). Those who visit the site can find recipes and tips for deciphering food labels. They can shop, read about Hari’s “investigations” into food products, and join campaigns to demand that companies remove ingredients Hari deems problematic. She’s marshaled her legions of followers, whom she calls the “Food Babe Army,” to get food giants like Kraft, Subway, Anheuser-Busch, and many others to change their recipes. She’s appeared widely in broadcast and print media and boasts over a million Facebook “likes.” In 2015, Time Magazine named her among the “30 Most Influential People on The Internet” and her book, The Food Babe Way (2015), became a New York Times bestseller (Rubin, 2015). But on 6 April 2015 a Gawker headline announced, “The Food Babe Blogger Is Full of Shit.” The article pilloried Hari for her “Google University” credentials and scientific mistakes—most notoriously her 2011 outraged revelation that airplane cabin air was mostly nitrogen (just like Earth’s atmosphere, the article pointed out). It dismissed Hari’s worries about artificial food additives and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as irrational and dangerous. This line became a meme: “Hari’s rule? ‘If a third grader can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.’ My rule? Don’t base your diet on the pronunciation skills of an eight-year-old.” The post’s author was Yvette d’Entremont, aka the SciBabe (short for Science Babe). Her website says she created the SciBabe blog and social media brand in 2014 when Hari campaigned against d’Entremont’s favorite Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte (its offenses: caramel color and pumpkin-less-ness). Equipped with her BA in chemistry and MSc in forensic science, d’Entremont would devote the blog to battling pseudoscience, with a side of raunchy humor. “Come for the science,” says her homepage, “stay for the dirty jokes.” D’Entremont already had a modest following, largely from YouTube videos “debunking” alternative medicine (one time she took 50 homeopathic sleeping pills at once and reported feeling nothing; another time she got drunk from homeopathic dog medication). But with the Gawker post, her popularity soared. Within six hours, it had been viewed a million times (Brown, 2015). By the time of Gawker’s 2016 demise, views had reached 5.19 million. Soon, high traffic to SciBabe.com crashed the website. Each minute, hundreds more people “liked” SciBabe’s Facebook page—at week’s end, “likes” had risen from 23,000 to 100,000 (Brown, 2015). She was profiled in Elle (Wischhover, 2015), Cosmopolitan (Malia, 2015), and the L.A. Times. She secured a book deal, now has a busy speaking schedule, and contributes to Cosmopolitan. D’Entremont’s “takedown” of Hari was widely celebrated as a win for “truth” and “science.” She continues to be celebrated as anxiety has ramped up that “truth” and “science” are under siege in the Trump-era United States. Food Babe, on the other hand, is increasingly upheld as representative of the problem of self-styled experts offering up falsities in the unruly space of Web 2.0. While popular discourse pits the two babes against each other (e.g., Peddie, 2015), in fact they have much in common: both have cultivated branded personas to carve out space to succeed in digital media culture while offering their readers tips—from diet advice to guidelines for ferreting out “pseudoscience”—to assist them in self-governing as informed consumer-citizens in the realm of lifestyle (even if what counts as “informed and rational” is a site of intense struggle). While I am sympathetic to concerns about systematic efforts to undermine peer-reviewed scientific research, such concerns should not disallow inquiry into the politics of the way Science is mobilized as a value-neutral and authoritative source of truth—it is in this sense that I use the capitalized word throughout the remainder of this article. In fact, reducing the Food Babe/SciBabe faceoff to a matter of “truth versus lies,” fails to grasp its significance. Critical media scholars have shown that in contemporary digital culture, brands like the Food Babe and SciBabe operate as what Foucauldian scholars call “technologies of the self”; they model the skills necessary for competing in a postindustrial labor market while also providing templates for self-governing as the kind of risk-avoidant, self-responsible, enterprising, and privately empowered subjects on which neoliberalism relies (Hearn, 2008; Ouellette, 2016). While the context of neoliberalism is important for understanding the Food Babe/SciBabe case, what I believe is central to its significance are the classed anxieties and attachments circulating around it in contemporary U.S. culture. Although there is a rich feminist literature investigating the intersection of classed sensibilities, lifestyle, and neoliberalism in the United Kingdom (e.g., McRobbie, 2013; Skeggs, 2005), in a U.S. context, this intersection remains undertheorized. Yet, in my view, the appeal, productivity, and the anxieties brands like the Food Babe and SciBabe trigger cannot be understood without attending to the U.S. liberal educated middle class, a class whose interests at times align and at times are in tension with the rationalities of neoliberalism. This article is based on in-depth analysis of the Food Babe and SciBabe brands, their social media presence, as well as the mediated discursive explosion surrounding them from 2014 and 2018—both critical and celebratory—in news sources, magazines, and blogs, from mainstream sites to niche “science communication” media, some of which could be characterized as “passion projects” of those who identify as “science-minded” and some of which issue from science professionals who head up any of the relatively young foundation-funded institutes housed at large universities (for example, Cornell’s Alliance for Science, McGill’s Office for Science & Society, UC Davis’ Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy) that are concerned with, among other things, the defense of science from the misinformed and vociferous.1 I will begin by demonstrating that the critical discourse circulating around the Food Babe brand appears to problematize Hari and her brand as a morally urgent matter of “lies,” but it in fact betrays classed anxiety about threats to credentialed expertise in the digital age—anxieties structured by longstanding, and equally classed, fears about feminized media culture. Second, I show that by understanding Food Babe in terms of trickery and manipulation, this discourse entirely disregards her significance as a classed technology of the self in postfeminist neoliberal brand culture. Third and finally, I show that the critical discourse surrounding the Food Babe set the stage for d’Entremont’s SciBabe brand to resonate as a solution: a corrective technology for self-governance that inserts itself into gendered and classed struggles over who has authority to speak in contemporary culture. Ultimately, I argue that the Food Babe/SciBabe case displays the way contemporary classed anxieties are not only getting hashed out in a struggle over “science versus pseudoscience,” but also intensifying a gendered double bind as neoliberal imperatives to self-maximize come into conflict with worries about the (un)governability of feminized consumers. “Crusade of the Food Bimbos”: Classed anxiety and feminized media culture In order to understand the cultural politics of d’Entremont’s breakout success, it is necessary to situate her Gawker post in the context of a much broader critical discourse about Food Babe. While on its surface this discourse frames itself in terms of moral matters of “Truth” and authenticity as opposed to what Hari’s critics view as profiteering, hypocrisy, commercialism, and manipulation, I will show that it is better understood in terms of contemporary classed anxieties that are deeply entwined with fears about feminized media culture. The critical discourse circulating around Food Babe began among a cohort of passionate Science defenders, d’Entremont among them, for whom Hari was emblematic of a broader assault on truth. Galvanized by her unscientific recommendations and wild popularity, these critics have for years combed her media for mistakes, conflicts of interest (e.g., when she promotes products that advertise on her site [Calahan, 2015]), and other contradictions (e.g., when Hari warns people away from titanium dioxide in food, but recommends it in sunscreen [Alsip, 2015]). They condemn her click-bait-y post titles, lack of scientific training, emotional appeals, and habit of blocking detractors from posting on her social media (Raff, 2015). A Facebook group called “Banned by Food Babe” was founded in 2014. Devoted to deriding Hari and her claims, the group gains moral legitimacy from the false notion that the Internet is a kind of democratic public sphere.2 For these critics, Hari has breached a civic line by deleting comments and blocking commenters (for more nuanced discussion of digital culture and the public sphere, see Reed & boyd, 2016). In 2014, d’Entremont created this image: Hari’s smiling face, photo-shopped onto the body of Saddam Hussein’s infamous information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, captioned, “I welcome open debate. But only with people I don’t ban” (d’Entremont, 2014). What initially struck me about this discourse—in addition to the racially charged imagery, to which I will return later—is that it seemed to issue from a formation that has historically taken up the lifestyle Hari recommends, from eating organics to criticizing multinational agribusiness corporations: the U.S. liberal educated middle class (Carfagna et al., 2014; Finn, 2017; Johnston & Baumann, 2010; Matchar, 2013).3 Of course, a few of Food Babe’s critics are industry spokespeople (e.g., Cathryn, 2015; Nebraska Corn Board, 2015), but most are, like d’Entremont, self-identified educated liberals ranging from academic scientists (e.g., Schwarcz, Novella, Gorski, Folta, Ronald) to journalists, bloggers, and freelancers (e.g., Alsip, Senapathy, Draco, d’Entremont, Belluz). As early as 2014, the liberal media organizations Alternet.com and DailyKos had called Hari out for “anti-science” (Senapathy, 2014; Weathers, 2014) After d’Entremont’s Gawker post, vitriolic criticism of Hari became commonplace within media targeting this class and got hitched to broader—and not unfounded—concerns about the collapse of truth under Trump (see, for example, Lee, 2017; Senapathy, 2016). By 2018, one Trump critic jokingly recommended that the president appoint the Food Babe “Chief Conspiracy Theorist” (Solovieva, 2018). Thirty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich (1990) traced the transformations of what she called the “professional middle class” or “professional/managerial class” from the 1960s to the 1980s in the United States. She described an educated class who, as neoliberalism took hold, came to view itself as liberal (as she writes, it might “flinch” at a racial slur and favor “natural” lifestyle choices), yet remained deeply invested in social inequalities. I am interested in a contemporary manifestation of this formation. From the time Ehrenreich was writing to the present, this class has, in many ways, benefited from neoliberal policies—particularly its white members who have simultaneously enjoyed norms, practices, and legal decisions that favor and protect their interests, including the failure to implement and enforce robust affirmative action policies (Harris, 1993). Yet because its capital lies in credentials rather than wealth or property, Ehrenreich argues, this class is marked by anxiety about downward mobility, what she calls a “fear of falling.” I believe the intensity of the vitriol hurled at Hari is rooted in a “fear of falling” specific to contemporary conditions. In the face of neoliberal rollbacks of the social safety net, deregulation of industry, and privatization of formerly public goods and services, many in the educated middle class, thanks to its social, cultural, and economic capital, have continued to thrive. However, funding cuts to the public sector alongside increasing reliance, across professional organizations, on temporary and contract-based labor have created new forms of instability. So too have widespread layoffs precipitated by the Great Recession. Among its post-boomer generations, many enter adulthood with overwhelming college debt, often pinning hopes on unpaid internships, freelancing, and blogging as they struggle to make ends meet in the country’s liberal cities, while housing costs skyrocket (Thompson, 2014). Of course, this remains a privileged class. But economic recession and the ongoing upward redistribution of wealth and opportunity enabled by neoliberal economic policies—and the fears of falling it produces—make up a crucial backdrop to the anxieties Hari triggers. For her critics, Hari has become a focal point for worries about the cultural, economic, and political status of scientific authority with the rise of the Internet and Web 2.0. She is among a multitude of self-styled, non-credentialed experts promiscuously opining across media platforms (this multitude often also includes credentialed experts, like Dr. Oz, whose commercialism and emotional appeals in feminized media invite similar criticism; it also includes purveyors of “fake news,” likewise enabled by a radically deregulated economy and a range of flexible workers vying for clicks). As one Science-Based Medicine blogger wrote: “While the Internet is the most fantastic piece of technology ever devised for spreading knowledge and empowering anyone to speak up, there’s a dark side. That dark side consists of people like Vani Hari (…) [and her] chemically illiterate, scientifically ignorant rabble rousing” (Gorski, 2014). This discourse frames science as a value-neutral system of knowledge, but what is unstated is that this proliferation of self-styled experts in digital media culture—often internal to this class—is increasingly felt as a threat to the primacy of credentialed expertise, historically the purview of educated liberals—their capital, and claim to authority (Zimmerman and Eddens, 2018; Ehrenreich, 1990). As one registered dietitian told AdAge: “I stay awake at night worried that my profession is going to become a hobby because of these people” (Upton, cited in Schultz & Morrison, 2014). It makes sense that threats to the primacy of Science, whether real or perceived, would trigger anxiety for this class. Yet the way this anxiety gets focused on “people like Hari” and her fans is about more than economics alone. As Bourdieu (1984) has shown, culture is as crucial to class reproduction as economics. For him, central to this is the habitus: the context where individuals acquire dispositions and cultural competencies that help to legitimate social differences. While often misrecognized as “tastes,” these are actually learned through upbringing and education. As a number of scholars have shown, the liberal educated middle class’ framework for making “classifying judgments” has long been structured by a moral apparatus that elevates rationality over emotion, authenticity over superficiality, and “legitimated” culture over “mass” or commercial culture (Ehrenreich, 1990; Newman & Levine, 2013; Ouellette, 2002). This framework gets rehearsed in the critical discourse surrounding the Food Babe and suggests that the classed attachment to legitimated Science as a source of authority, here, is thoroughly entangled with fears of feminized media culture. Further, as I will discuss shortly, in the specific criticism of Hari, who is Indian American, critics heighten the affective intensity of this entanglement by conjuring anxieties rooted in specific shape that the Othering of ethnically South Asian bodies has taken in dominant U.S. culture: “simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, magical and menacing” (Bald, 2015). Critics relentlessly focus on Hari’s looks and compare her to a terrorist, while dismissing the notion that the criticism might be racist: “No Food Babe, Your Detractors Aren’t Racists, Sexists, Haters, or Shills,” writes Kavin Senapathy (2015), who calls herself Hari’s “most outspoken Indian-American, feminist critic,” condemns overt racism and sexism against Hari (e.g., 2014). Other critics regularly mention Senapathy as confirmation that the discourse is not racially charged (e.g., d’Entremont, 2105). This sensibility is most blatant among Hari’s core critics. For them, though Hari is a “telegenic” (Gorski, 2014), “attractive young lady” (Schwarcz, 2014), and though her brand has a lot of “sex appeal” (Alsip, cited in Berry, 2016) that people respond to “instinct[ively]” (Draco, cited in Berry, 2016), she is a “fear monger” (Senapathy, cited in Berry, 2016), “charlatan,” and “pseudoscience predator”; her advice is “manipulative” and “mind-numbingly stupid” (Gorski, 2014). With her “corrupt message of bogus science and abject food terrorism” (Folta, cited in Rubin, 2015) she’s “one of the biggest misinformation vectors of our time” (Senapathy, cited in Berry, 2016). Evoking the specter of the celebrity anti-vaxxer, she is regularly called the “Jenny McCarthy of Food” (Gorski, 2014; Novella, cited in Calahan, 2015). Yet even in more mainstream press sites targeting educated liberals, criticism of Hari’s tenuous grasp of science is likewise made meaningful through thinly-veiled contempt of her feminized associations—contempt that often taps into Orientalist anxieties couched in a purportedly post-racial discourse. For example, in 2014, commentators on the liberal-leaning National Public Radio (NPR) (Godoy, 2014) and Charlotte Observer (Purvis, 2014), though awed by Hari’s success in putting “big food” on the defensive, actively distanced themselves from her “emotion-based tactics,” from her commercialism, and from her preoccupations with fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. Reporter Duane Stanford describes Hari’s NPR interview like this: “Food Babe breezes into a public radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, clutching a $10 jar of raw juice and dressed from her morning workout—Lululemon tank, sequined black Uggs and a charm necklace blessed in India” (Stanford, 2014). He thus whitewashes Hari by suggesting that her Indianness is an inauthentic and appropriative fashion choice, while folding this suggestion into a broader critique of her superficiality. While the conservative daily the Washington Times ran a piece on Hari and her supporters under the unabashedly sexist headline “The crusade of food bimbos” (Berman, 2015), the liberal-leaning New York Times hardly sounded different when it referred to her fans as “a rabid #Foodbabearmy,” attributed her popularity to her “camera-ready looks,” and qualified Hari’s spot on Time’s “Most Influential” list by noting that it also included two other feminized pop culture figures: Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian (Rubin, 2015). This so-called crisis of pseudoscience on the Internet is felt and expressed through a much older—and equally classed—anxiety about feminized media and the vulnerability-cum-unruliness of their consumers. When one Elle magazine blogger explained, what made her most “mad” was that “Food Babe delivers her message to the masses” by “trick[ing]” and “manipulat[ing]” them (Wischhover, 2015), or when a blogger on Forbes.com was concerned about the “fear fires” Hari fuels among her fans (Senapathy, 2015), they were giving voice to contemporary worries about women’s media use that have a long history within this class. For example, these worries resemble those triggered with the adoption of television in U.S. homes in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, intellectuals and cultural critics worried that television, by appealing to base emotions, would destabilize dominant cultural hierarchies, distract women from their domestic responsibilities (Joyrich, 1996; Spigel, 1992) and “[breed] an ignorant and apathetic body politic” that could not distinguish real from fake (Newman & Levine, 2013, p. 17). Implicit in this critique was an idea of a “mass audience” understood as “the most vulnerable and manipulable members of the society” (Newman & Levine, 2013, p. 16), a feminized Other unable to manage the disruption brought by a new medium (Joyrich, 1996). Of course, the construction of Hari’s #FoodBabeArmy differs from the mass audience fretted over by cultural critics during television’s network era; it is active—and activated—rather than passive, and it is a highly specific lifestyle cluster, not an undifferentiated mass. Yet by assuming Hari’s appeal is the result of manipulation, implicitly false and unserious preoccupations with beauty and consumer culture, and “emotion-based” thinking, her critics repeat the classed anxiety that feminized media users are at once passive dupes (easily controlled) and threats to the stability of the social order (out of control). And this, I argue, does something for the liberal educated middle class. By mobilizing Science as a value-neutral source of facts (rather than, among other things, a site of classed investment), it shores up Science as a source of authority while at once asserting distinction from irrational and feminized Others. As I will demonstrate in the remainder of this article, this not only intensifies a gendered double bind in the context of broader classed obligations under neoliberal brand culture but also sets the stage for SciBabe to resonate as a technology of governance and self-governance. Become “your own food investigator, nutritionist, and food activist”: Food Babe as a technology of the self When Food Babe’s critics presume her popularity is due to manipulation of vulnerable fans who get sucked in by her glitz and emotional appeals, it is sexist, clearly, but I am more interested in the way it creates a specific kind of gendered double bind that, in many ways, is internal to the liberal educated middle class. Although her critics position her as a bad subject, her brand provides an exemplar of postfeminist subjecthood while simultaneously operating as a feminized “technology of the self” (Foucault, 2003) with its tips and techniques to assist individuals in managing the gendered labor of class reproduction under what Stéphanie Genz (following Banet-Weiser, 2011) calls “postfeminist/neoliberal brand culture” (2015). Let me be clear: I am not celebrating the Food Babe. I am troubled by the rise of cultural technologies like the Food Babe and their enabling role in the intersecting projects of postfeminism, neoliberalism, and class reproduction. However, it is impossible to understand the implications of Food Babe without first taking seriously what the brand offers, for better or worse, in this context. The phrase “postfeminist/neoliberal brand culture” (Genz, 2015) encapsulates the entanglements of neoliberal governmentality, the obligations of postfeminist subjecthood, and the demands of self-branding for the postindustrial, digital economy (Arcy, 2016; Banet-Weiser, 2011; Gill, 2007; Jarrett, 2014; McRobbie, 2013). Neoliberalism involves not only policies that favor free trade, privatize the public, dismantle welfare programs, and facilitate corporate profit maximization and the upward redistribution of wealth (Duggan, 2003), but it is also a political rationality and a mode of governmentality that extends a market rationale to all aspects of society, policy, and everyday life (Brown, 2005). Individuals are obliged to become “entrepreneurs of the self” (Rose, 1996) through ongoing self-work and self-discipline. Feminist scholars have shown that these imperatives are deeply imbricated with the ideals of postfeminism (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Gill, 2007). Characterized by both feminist and anti-feminist ideas, postfeminist discourses address women and girls as “subjects of capacity,” who are “free to choose,” but within the terms of hegemonic femininity and consumer culture (McRobbie, 2007). Not restricted by structures of inequality, ideal postfeminist subjects are autonomous agents who empower themselves with the resources at their disposal, including femininity, which must be maximized through constant discipline (Gill, 2007). Under these conditions, lifestyle choices associated with the liberal educated middle class (that is, lifestyle choices that are: (a) more accessible to the middle class than others; and (b) help to reproduce a liberal educated class habitus) are regularly positioned as classless norms against which to measure, not just “good subjecthood,” but also “good motherhood” (McRobbie, 2013). Mothers are expected to address problems from environmental destruction to worker injustice “while fulfilling caring responsibilities” (Cairns, de Laat, Johnston, & Baumann, 2014, p. 103). Being a “fully informed consumer” (p. 103) has become a requirement of contemporary motherhood in a world in which it is rarely obvious which products are “better” (i.e., healthier, safer, more ecologically sound, produced under more just conditions, etc.). Much as she is criticized, Hari aids individuals in governing themselves under these impossible pressures. On Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, a YouTube channel, and her website, Hari invites followers to take up her brand to assist them with everyday activities, from caring and cooking (“How to choose the healthiest chicken for you and your family” and “Tak[e] All The Work Out Of Meal Planning & Finding Healthy Recipes”), to beauty (“Love your skin with this simple [dry brushing] treatment. You’ll be amazed at the results!”), consuming (“labels that really mean something”), and civic (“When Congress screws us over on GMO labeling: The Action Plan to Fight Back!”). Food Babe thus offers individuals guidance for avoiding risks and taking responsibility for their own wellness in the face of a disappearing social safety net and a radically deregulated market (Ouellette, 2016), while at the same time aiding them in crafting classed lifestyles. For Food Babe’s critics, however, the feminized excess with which Hari and her fans attempt to meet these obligations comes into conflict with notions of good subjecthood. The double bind this scenario creates becomes particularly obvious when Food Babe is considered in the context of contemporary demands to brand the self, or transform oneself into “a detachable, saleable image” and “site for the extraction of value” (Hearn, 2008, pp. 198–9), demands felt powerfully among those attempting to compete in the flexible digital economy. Hari follows self-branding’s playbook to the letter. Her website brims with professional photos of herself looking fabulous. The “shop” tab recommends downloadable guides for detoxes and meal plans, high-priced cooking gadgets, beauty products, “pantry staples” (wild Incan golden berries), exercise equipment, books, and documentaries, some of which are sponsored and linked with “buy now” buttons. The brand recently launched a line of “Truvani” products (turmeric tablets, bone broth powder, etc.). Hari is active across social media, posting videos, plugging products, linking to Food Babe blog posts, and responding to commenters. In other words, in addition to operating as a technology of the self, Food Babe is an exemplar of the enterprising subject under post-feminist/neoliberal brand culture. Hari puts on display the (elusive) possibility that health, happiness, wealth, and self-realization can indeed be attained through strategic self-making. Hari has revealed that she regularly receives overtly racist and sexist comments online (Hari, 2015; Senapathy, 2016), a fact that affirms Jess Butler's (2013) observation that the demands of postfeminist neoliberal brand culture not only do not exempt women of color, but also involve “strictly regulat[ing] and polic[ing]” their participation (p. 50). And in the case of Hari, this occurs in spite of the fact that on her blog, she positions herself as a post-racial subject—she does not, for example, appeal to her Indian heritage to “authentically” claim practices like yoga and eating turmeric, instead emphasizing that she grew up on American fast food and views herself centrally as an “investigator” who has arrived at her conclusions through ongoing research and approaching her daily routine as a laboratory. In line with post-feminist and post-racial norms, any evidence that racism and sexism have placed limits on Hari’s chances for success is invisible in the front-facing Food Babe brand. Instead, her brand story aligns with the meritocratic mythology of self-branding under neoliberalism. Seemingly unconstrained by structures like racism and sexism, Hari explains that Food Babe’s success allowed her to leave her banking analyst position to run the brand full time. She loves her job, achieved celebrity, “great skin,” and personal fulfilment, “making a difference” through the brand itself. This isn’t to say that Hari’s achievements occurred in a meritocracy. In the world of blogging and self-branding, success depends on more than strategic self-promotion. It correlates strongly with having start-up capital, culturally legitimated communicative competencies (for example, the writing skills honed during college), the affluent social networks attractive to sponsors, and normative beauty (Duffy, 2017). And even with these, success is hardly guaranteed. Most people’s efforts to self-maximize in the digital realm lead not to wealth and celebrity but to insecurity (Ouellette, 2016). Hari’s critics paint her fans as manipulated dupes, but her popularity is likely more related to the fact that she provides a template for self-maximizing in this precarious environment. In fact, the practices that trouble Hari’s critics are key to the market logics of self-branding: blocking negative commenters from her blog and social media, displaying her body, unabashed self-promoting, and forming strategic partnership with sponsors. While AdAge asks, “Food Babe: Activist or Capitalist?” (Schultz & Morrison, 2014), Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) points out that, in brand culture, such divisions tell us very little; “authenticity” exists not outside the commercial logics of branding, but rather is produced within these logics themselves. Thus, irrespective of whether her advice is based on “science” or “pseudoscience,” the Food Babe plays a supportive role in the making of a self and lifestyle that, in contemporary culture, is moralized on classed and gendered grounds. The brand is functional for the intensive feminized labor of making and re-making this class and its lifestyle in postfeminst/neoliberal brand culture. But for Food Babe and her fans, this has collided with equally classed anxieties about feminized media culture and its threats to the status of scientific authority. And it is into this collision—and the forms of governance and self-governance it demands—that d’Entremont has inserted her SciBabe brand. “The bullshitproof diet”: SciBabe as a technology of governance and self-governance Like the Food Babe, Yvette d’Entremont’s SciBabe is technology of the self, and it is in this technical sense that d’Entremont and her Gawker essay struck a chord. SciBabe’s tips and techniques for governance and self-governance appeal both to classed fantasies of controlling unruly feminized media users and to classed anxieties about the self in precarious times. Yet, no matter how celebrated, d’Entremont hardly transcends the contradictory demands of feminized subjecthood in contemporary culture; like Hari, her brand is managing a distinctly gendered double bind. To understand d’Entremont’s appeal, we must return to the larger critical discourse surrounding Hari. As I said earlier, this discourse is structured by anxiety about feminized media culture. It is also shot through with a controlling impulse long held by the educated classes (Ouellette, 2002; Spigel, 1992): a desire to govern Hari’s unruly and implicitly feminized fans. In 2014, one writer wished the science-literate would “counter [Hari’s] propaganda by educating the public” (Gorski, 2014). The authors of the self-published 434-page tome Fear Babe: Shattering Vani Hari’s Glass House (2015), set out to: “[protect] people who haven’t already encountered the disease of unscientific food claims” (Berry, 2016). However, these critics regularly expressed frustration at the difficulty of their task, blaming their lack of “sex appeal” for their inability to compete with Hari for the hearts and minds of the public (Alsip, reflecting in Berry, 2016). SciBabe’s Gawker piece seemed to offer a solution. As UC Davis biologist Pamela Ronald told the LA Times, “there’s a huge need for bloggers like Science Babe” to combat widespread “fear-mongering” on popular media at a time when people too often turn to “Dr. Google” (cited in Brown 2015). The Times reporter explained that the science-minded hoped “writers like [d’Entremont]—outspoken, informal, relatable—[could] play an important role in teaching the public” (Brown, 2015). “If only Hari’s millions of devoted fans would read this” writes another blogger about the Gawker post (Belluz, 2015). D’Entremont appealed on the basis of this governing desire. She assuages worries about threats to credentialed expertise and unruly feminized web users by promising to improve readers’ subjective abilities, their “bullshit detectors,” to enable them to self-realize as rational subjects. For example, she explains that when Hari “takes innocuous ingredients and makes you afraid of them by pulling them out of context” it is “pseudoscience.” In response to Hari’s upset that a chemical used in the manufacture of yoga mats was also an ingredient in Subway bread in the United States, despite being banned as a food additive in much of Europe, d’Entremont explains, as the science-minded among us understand, a substance can be used for more than one thing perfectly safely (…) it doesn’t mean that your bread is made of a yoga mat (…) It simply means your bread is composed of chemicals, much like everything else you eat. (d’Entremont, 2015a) Some other clues for detecting bullshit: use of the word “toxic” as an essential rather than dose-dependent quality and unsubstantiated claims about cancer. “[G]ood old coffee,” d’Entremont points out, is in the same class of carcinogens as caramel color, and there is “no nutritional difference” between GMO and non-GMO foods. In these ways, SciBabe declares itself to be an intervention into the subjective health of the masses, freeing them from manipulation and empowering them to make better choices. However, this apparently enabling impulse is in tension with a desire to control. D’Entremont promises readers tools for critical thinking, yet simultaneously presumes their vulnerability. Rather than encouraging them to think and act carefully as choice-making consumers, SciBabe urges them to stop worrying so much and submit to experts instead. This tension suggests that unruly feminized “masses” are not, in fact, the target audience. Although d’Entremont appeals to fantasies of governing these feminized others, I believe her Gawker essay resonated even more because it transformed the broader problematization of Hari and her fans into a problem of the liberal middle class self. The Gawker post came out in the context of growing anxiety that attachments to organic, non-GMO foods, and other such things might not be “rational” in a strict sense. In January 2015, a Pew poll indicated “huge gaps” between the U.S. public and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the “key issues” of climate change, the safety of childhood vaccinations, and the safety of GMOs (Funk & Rainie, 2015). The gaps on vaccinations and climate change got some attention, but didn’t trigger new anxiety—liberals had been bemoaning these for years. But the gap on GMO safety was different. It was the largest—51 percentage points—and it suggested that middle class liberals’ historical suspicion of GMOs might undermine their claims to rationality and their distance from the irrational, emotional, and implicitly feminized masses, easily taken in by anti-science. The growing concern that educated liberals’ historical opposition to GMOs might be more “fear-based” than “fact-based” threatened to undermine their status as good rational subjects and seemed to confirm “anti-science” as not just a threat to credentialed expertise, but also a specifically middle-class pathology (see Zimmerman and Eddens, 2018 for further discussion). D’Entremont’s Gawker essay offered up Hari and her Food Babe brand as a container for these anxieties while promising to assist members of this class in governing themselves. Although her presumed audience is a hypothetical Food Babe fan, “pseudoscience” follower addressed as “you,” she actually speaks directly to the liberal educated middle class—a class that has long “propertized” science, in Skeggs’ (2005) sense, as a key asset of the free individual and fully-realized self while actively distancing itself from the (feminized) “masses.” D’Entremont scolds them for falling for “bullshit,” and ups the ante by feminizing “pseudoscience” and its adherents, associating them with vanity, superficiality, vulnerability, and emotion. For example, d’Entremont rejects Hari’s concern about the dangers of sugar as a “goddamn stretch,” except that it might make “your Lululemons stretch a little farther if you don’t ‘namaste’ your cheeks off.” Although she insists her dismissal of Food Babe has nothing to do with gender, writing “If [Hari] thinks she’s being attacked for being a woman, she’s missed that she’s not the only ‘babe’ in this discussion” (d’Entremont, 2015), d’Entrement lays out the do's and don’ts of rational subjecthood in distinctly gendered terms. But despite having found success at the place where anxieties about claims to rationality meet fears of feminized media culture, d’Entremont, too, cannot escape the contradictory demands of feminized subjecthood in neoliberal brand culture. Yes, she has built a brand around seeming to resist the normative requirements to which Hari adheres. For example, she repudiates polite femininity through an ironic high-femme aesthetic and what Butler (1997) might call “rebellious speech.” When you enter the site, you are greeted by a banner with SciBabe’s slogan front and center (“Come for the Science, Stay for the dirty jokes”). It’s flanked by a photo of d’Entremont dancing in a lab coat on one side and, on the other, a pin-up style cartoon SciBabe in thigh-high shiny black boots, a red skin-tight mini-romper, and a lab coat flowing back like a superhero’s cape. The wallpaper reads, “Yeah you’re made of starstuff. But so is garbage, so calm the fuck down.” She also refuses to countenance oppressive neoliberal ideals of the “good life” (Berlant, 2011) and postfeminist mandates toward a “well-planned” existence (McRobbie, 2007) by outright rejecting the impossible promise that careful choices will result in health, longevity, wealth, and happiness (Ouellette, 2016). With blog posts like “Nature doesn’t give a fuck if you live or die” (d’Entrement, 2016) d’Entremont offers little advice while defiantly “sipping a diet coke” and “still not eating organic and still eating GMOs because of course”; she debunks fad diets from Paleo to gluten-free (2015b) and spurns the notion that “good choices” can keep you out of the hospital, much less alive. Reflecting on her struggles with Celiac’s disease and Ehlers Danlos syndrome, she writes, “I do things like rock climb, weight lift, cook most of my meals from scratch, and I even do yoga (…) So if I’m doing all those things, how am I ‘ill?’” (d’Entrement, 2016). However, at every turn, d’Entremont’s often-articulate complaints about the abuses of the status quo get folded back into normative strategies for feminized self-governance. Not only is d’Entremont’s gender performance likely reassuring for a class formation loath to think of itself as sexist, but also, by ironically mobilizing what Rosalind Gill calls “femininity as bodily property” (2007), d’Entremont extends a postfeminist promise that the presence of another “babe in the conversation” renders discussion of sexism irrelevant. Further, by underscoring the unreason of the thinking that exercise and “clean” eating can help one avoid illness, and the reason of casting one’s lot with the medical establishment, not with quacks, d’Entremont stitches her advice to the imperative to make the kinds of “good choices” aligned with dominant norms and institutions—an imperative that also includes contemporary requirements to differentiate one’s brand and self-maximize. Despite being upheld as a foil to the profiteering Hari who hawks products and takes money for speaking, d’Entremont promoted Splenda through a strategic partnership in a “debunk junk science” series (Coyne 6/6/2018) and has done paid speaking gigs for CropLife international, the international trade association of the agrochemical industry (her 2016 talk was sponsored by Monsanto). Like the Food Babe, the SciBabe brand is useful to “dominant paradigms for governing women” (Wilson, 2010). Both babes provide strategies for negotiating the postfemininst “double bind” of discipline and choice (Genz, 2015) while carving out space to succeed in the insecure conditions of the present. Whereas the Food Babe offers techniques for juggling postfeminist obligations to “look and feel great” while meeting caring responsibilities in the risky world of food choices, SciBabe taps into classed fantasies of regulating feminized others while offering tips for self-governing as rational subjects; she proposes ambivalence about feminized media culture as a way for the female-bodied to maintain hold on the right to speak within a liberal educated class in the throes of anxiety about its own authority. Conclusion In contemporary culture, anxieties about the destabilization of the middle class abound. As self-styled experts and “Google University” seem to undermine credentialed authority, and stable, fulltime professional/managerial jobs become increasingly scarce, and forms of class insecurity resulting from a disappearing social safety net creep up the social ladder, SciBabe mobilizes Science as a legitimating discourse (Newman & Levine, 2013). With Science, one can assert distinction from the irrational, feminized masses as well as from an equally feminized kind of loopy aristocracy of celebrity activists like Jenny McCarthy and Vani Hari. To understand Food Babe and SciBabe, we must look beyond “truth versus lies.” As technologies of the self, both babes offer resources for negotiating the tensions between the gendered dimensions of class reproduction and postfeminist/neoliberal imperatives to self-maximize, online and off. And both are caught up in a broader gendered and classed struggle over claims to authority in contemporary culture. Footnotes 1 Sources were collected between 2016 and 2020 using the terms “Food Babe,” “Vani Hari,” “Science Babe,” “SciBabe,” and “Yvette d’Entremont,” in Google and Lexis Nexis back to 2011. 2 This article does not take up Habermasian questions about how we understand the “public sphere” in contemporary culture. However, the manner in which the critical discourse bemoans the Internet’s corrupting bad actors presumes that, without “people like Hari,” the Internet could realize its democratic dream as a space of civil discourse. This fails to take seriously that the Internet is organized by algorithms governed by the logic of capital and branding. The elevation of voices that operate within the Internet’s commercial logic is not an aberration, but baked into the cake of contemporary digital culture. 3 Hari also circulates within this formation: in 2012, a Charlotte-area weekly named her one of the city’s “hottest democrats” (Henshall, 2012); her blog features photos of herself beside Barack Obama (taken at the Democratic National Convention, which she attended as a delegate); and her advice parrots liberal darling, Michael Pollan, much of it verbatim from Food Rules (Pollan, 2009) including the much-derided bit about avoiding foods a “third-grader cannot pronounce” (p. 17). References Alsip M. 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