Animating Feminist Anger: Economies of Race and Gender in Reaction GIFs

GIF use in digital platforms offers community space for humour, play and joy. Focusing on reaction GIFs, this chapter examines how feminist anger can be digitally expressed, represented and circulated by looking at the process of meme-fication within online affective economies of anger. While reaction GIFs can function as performative gestures and rhetorical devices that animate feminist anger, GIFs must also be contextualized within the racial and gendered body politics around “whose” bodies animate anger and whose bodies circulate within the digital visual economy. Taking up Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “feminist killjoy”, I analyse the form and aesthetics of killjoy and “white male tear” GIFs.