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SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism and Media. By Kaitlynn Mendes. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 232 pp. ISBN: 9781137378897.
April 2016 marks the five-year anniversary of the formation of "SlutWalk" in Toronto, Ontario, a grassroots, third-wave feminist movement aimed at challenging cultural attitudes around sexual propriety and gendered/sexualized violence, which has since expanded to become a global movement. Kaitlynn Mendes' SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism and Media provides a necessary intervention into discussions of feminism, global movements and activism, and cultural understandings of sexual violence and sexuality. SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism and Media feels especially pertinent and useful in light of some of the more recent celebrity sexual assault cases seen in Canada and the United States and the subsequent discussions of what a "good"/"bad" victim looks and acts like. This book not only historicizes SlutWalk, including many of its global chapters, but it also situates this feminist movement within discussions of activism, highlighting the ways in which gender and feminism are often erased from media and academic attention to political mobilization.
SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism and Media is comprised of findings from Mendes' research on the SlutWalk movement and of individual chapters and marches held worldwide (including Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S.) In addition to examining some of the specificities of the global chapters through interviews and observation of their online presence, Mendes also analyzes how SlutWalk has been represented by both mainstream news and feminist media. One of the overarching questions that organizes this book is how mainstream media discussions of SlutWalk frame understandings of sexual assault, gendered violence, and rape culture. Do they utilize feminist discourses on these topics? And how do these conversations on sexualized violence differ from feminist media renderings? To answer these questions, Mendes employs a substantial methodology, including frame analysis, interviews, critical discourse and content analysis, and netnography.
The introduction and Chapter 2 provide context for the book, focusing on SlutWalk's inception, initial responses to the movement, and SlutWalk's...