1. Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California in 2014, murdering 6 people. He was angry about being rejected by women. 2. The #NotAllMen hashtag emerged on Twitter in response, seeking to remind women that not all men are violent. However, women responded with #YesAllWomen to share their personal experiences facing constant vulnerability and violence as women. 3. #YesAllWomen gained popularity as women told brief stories and snapshots of living in constant fear as women, facing sexual assault, harassment, and vulnerability. This embodied storytelling brought attention to women's real lived experiences in a way that arguments could not.

1. Looking at twi+er, speaker 6 argues that #yesallwomen represents a different kind of
digital ac<vism: construc<ve, viral, embodied tes<mony rather than epistemic
interven<on.
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2. Isla Vista Murders
On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old student at Santa Barbara City College,
murdered his three roommates, then drove to the sorority houses just off the
campus of the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara. There, he shot three
women outside their sorority house, two of whom died of their wounds. From there,
he drove around Santa Barbara – seemingly at random – shoo<ng at buildings and
bystanders (one of whom died) and hiUng pedestrians with his vehicle. When police
finally located his vehicle, they found Rodgers inside, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.
Between murdering his roommates and shoo<ng the three women in front of their
sorority house, Rodger uploaded a video to YouTube and emailed out a diatribe in
which he details his mo<ves for the series of personal and random a+acks that leZ six
dead and fourteen wounded. He had been, he said, rejected by women, who “gave
their affec<on, and sex and love to other men but never to” him.
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3. As things oZen do in the 2010s, fear, anger, and explana<ons for the murders
exploded onto Twi+er. In the immediate aZermath of Rodger’s spree and the
widespread discovery of his misogynist YouTube uploads and manifesto, online
conversa<on quickly returned to an all too popular theme when it comes to violence
against women: the defensive reminder that not all men are like Rodgers.
#NotAllMen, already an established hashtag prior to the Isla Vista murders,
reemerged.
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4. men concerned that women’s anger would become too broadly strewn, they sought
to pre-emp<vely remind women that #notallmen were murdering women. Not all
men were angry and abusive. Not. All. Men.
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5. Instead of pre-emp<ng conversa<ons about the role of men in the perpetua<on of
misogyny, #NotAllMen produced an almost immediate response from women weary
of the all-too-predictable conversa<on turn. These first responses, hashtagged
#YesAllWomen, tell the story of what it’s like to be, to live, to work, to act, as woman
constantly face with your own physical and emo<onal vulnerability.
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6. As #YesAllWomen gained steam online, Sarah Weiss, wri<ng for the New Yorker,
argued, that the emerging conversa<ons and narra<ves were a func<on of Twi+er as
a rhetorical and composi<onal space: “There is something about the fact that Twi+er
is primarily designed for speech—for short, strong, declara<ve u+erance—that
makes it an especially powerful vehicle for ac<vism, a place of libera<on.” As Weiss
also notes, the kinds of tweets making up the #YesAllWomen space were uniquely
personal, specific, and narra<vely powerful.
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7. Instead of making arguments about the harm of misogyny, about how it does
violence – physical, emo<onal, mental, and emo<onal – to women and to men,
women told stories on #yesallwomen.
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8. They offered brief snapshots of their daily lives.
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9. They described the fear – inculcated from puberty or before by well-meaning adults –
that accompanies growing up as a woman.
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10. They talked about their own sexual assaults. They talked about what it’s like to feel
constantly, consistently vulnerable.
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11. This kind of storytelling is a way, I’d argue, of re-embodying themselves in digital
space. As Jenny Sundén notes in her 2003 book Material Virtuali0es, “the virtual does
not automa<cally equate to disembodiment” (5).
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12. Lissa Holloway-A+away makes a complementary argument. Wri<ng in Digital
Humani0es Quarterly in 2012, Holloway-A+away argues that social media spaces can
best be seen as mixed reality spaces, neither fully digital nor fully bodily. Because of
this “mixed reality” orienta<on, she says, these spaces offer “possibili<es for dis/
playing one’s self, for performing one’s experiences” in complex ways (Holloway-
A+away).
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13. themselves in endless combina<ons and rela<onships. These acts of rela<on create
"complex mediated life worlds where inscrip<on is no longer a metaphoric prac<ce
but an act of (pre-)self/real-world environmental coupling, inadequate to be viewed
from the perspec<ve of discursive representa<on" (Holloway-A+away).
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14. Similarly, Sunden argues, the virtual might best be seen as an “extension of the
corporeal” rather than an “incarna<on of the textual” (109). The storytelling we see
in #YesAllWomen calls our a+en<on to the movement of bodies in space; it forces us
to a+end to the corporeal rather than just the textual.
Instead of a wispy ephemera, these women-rhetors have heZ. They…
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15. Walk alone
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16. Make eye contact and take lunch breaks
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17. Speak back and have bodies
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18. They need to protect those bodies.
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19. They are stared at by strangers as they walk the streets.
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20. They go to bars.
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21. They carry keys and walk home.
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22. They wear glasses.
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23. They wear shorts.
They are groped. Harassed.
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24. Violated.
The say yes. They say no.
These are concrete women. They tell stories, and with these stories, reinscribe their
bodily iden<ty in this virtual space. And in doing so – in making themselves more
physically present, they force us to see them more clearly.
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