In 2020, as a global pandemic enters its eighth deadly month, Black Lives Matter protests continue across the world and the US presidential campaign nobody wants ramps up, cutting through the noise of social media with a campaign is near impossible.
So it was with incredulity that this Tuesday past I watched as a rapidly increasing number of women on my Instagram feed posted beautiful photos of themselves. Of course, hot selfies are the bricks upon which the house of Instagram is built, so this alone wouldn’t have piqued my interest.
But these were different. These stood out. They were all black and white, they were all aggressively artful and they almost universally opened with #ChallengeAccepted. Each woman acknowledged having been “challenged” by another woman and subsequently nominated 10 more. Most praised “strong women”, exalted empowerment and ended with #WomenSupportingWomen.
These weren’t just random selfies. This was a movement. But for what?
While the intention seems pure and intellectually feminist-lite, there was, at first at least, no groundbreaking or even mildly new point being made. The overarching message seemed simply to be that women are beautiful and wonderful and we should help each other out. But as an awareness campaign, it seemed futile at best. We’re already aware.
Plus, where’s the challenge? It would surely be a greater challenge to half of Instagram to not post a selfie for a day.
I’m totally here for celebrating and empowering women, strong or otherwise, and I encourage everyone to post selfies to their heart’s content. I do it, sometimes with gusto. It just intrigues me that an exercise in armchair activism, with seemingly no meaningful call-to-action, has been so successful at this exact historical moment.
Police officers are killing Black people, Covid-19 is killing all people, and poverty and unemployment are reaching giddy heights around the world. Communities and victims’ families are asking us to amplify photos of Black people who’ve died in custody such as Tanya Day, David Dungay and George Floyd. And a local campaign to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 is encouraging people to post childhood pics of themselves and sign a petition so Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids stop being sent to prison at alarming rates.
But let’s detract from these literal life and death matters for a fleeting sense of narcissism and sisterhood? Did we learn nothing from #BlackOutTuesday and its problematic black tiles? Or am I reading the room wrong?
The exact origin of the current selfie chain remains a bit of a mystery. Speculation ranges from pure ego boost, to an adaptation of a cancer awareness campaign, to a celebration of American congresswoman and feminist superhero Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez protesting misogynistic remarks, and another theory that it all started in Turkey. With one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, black-and-white photos of murdered women are splashed across Turkish newspapers, televisions and social media on a daily basis. It is alleged that the women of Turkey were called on to post black-and-white selfies “To stand in solidarity with the women we have lost. To show that one day it could be their picture that is plastered across news outlets with a black and white filter on top”.
An Instagram spokesperson however told the New York Times this week that the current cycle began less than a fortnight ago with a post from a Brazilian journalist.
Got more info directly from Instagram who dug into this for me. They investigated the origin of the #ChallenegeAccepted hashtags in Turkish/Turkey. "While we found b&w posts relating to women's rights, it doesn't appear related to the more recent #ChallenegeAccepted resurgence"
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) July 28, 2020
Even if it started or borrowed from something more substantial, the campaign, as it swept across social media, seemed to be the most banal of performative western pseudo-feminism. But the tide appears to be somewhat turning, at least in small, positive waves.
Initially, the #ChallengeAccepted posts on my feed were all by white women – white friends, white peers, white celebrities and white influencers – and cis heterosexual white women at that. And while I expected it to remain as such, this is far from the case. As the number of posts approaches eight million, thousands of Indigenous Australian women, Black women, WOC, trans women, non-binary women and other LGBTQI+ women around the world are taking part.
And thankfully, many women have begun using the trend to steer the discussion around to Black Lives Matter, trans women’s rights and other issues affecting women. Black and white photos of American women who were killed by police such as Breonna Taylor and Michelle Cusseaux are appearing in place of or alongside selfies, the hashtag #WomenSupportingTransWomen is catching on and many women worldwide are now raising awareness about murdered Turkish women too.
To me, this is what women supporting women in 2020 should really look like, rather than a Miss Instagram photo pageant. But, I begrudgingly concede, perhaps there’s room for both.
