Digital Contention in Latin America. Material and affective infrastructures to address online activism as performance
2023 / On Protest, Performance Research
Research article

In this article I focus on the ways
contemporary theorizations in performance studies
have dealt specifically with digital activism in
their models of interpretation: from the pervasive
optimism of the late 1990s and early 2000s, passing
through the renovated discussion brought up by
the intense cycle of online contention in 2011,
mainly through engaging with Gerbaudo’s Tweets
and the Streets (2012), to get to recent work by
Fuentes (Performance Constellation, 2019) and
Vlavo (Performing Digital Activism, 2017), which
represent a new take on online activism. This
body of work, among other contributions, shows
how the field has maintained a performative lens
when addressing online political participation.