Livestreaming Election Day: Political Memory and Identity Work at Susan B. Anthony’s Gravesite

Abstract

Social media platforms record and fuel the construction of memories and social identities through discursive processes of memory work—or reconstructing the past in the present—and identity work—or representing individual and group characteristics. In this article, I interrogated sites of intersection and friction between mediated memory and identity work to uncover their shared political potential. I conducted a visual discourse analysis of Facebook Live videos and Instagram photos captured at the gravesite of famed women’s suffragist Susan B. Anthony during the 2016 US presidential election. In a long-standing Election Day tradition in Rochester, NY, local women visit Anthony’s grave after casting their ballots to pay tribute to her suffrage activism. However, when the nation saw its first woman presidential candidate nominated by a major political party in 2016, the gravesite drew an unprecedented crowd. The resulting media texts both capture and shape memory and identity work as they unfold. Ultimately, I identify a collection of four discursive practices that illustrate distinct modes of interdependence between memory and identity work in the gravesite livestreams and photos: (a) representing commemoration, (b) displaying affect, (c) regulating “respect,” and (d) personalizing political imaginaries. Together, these practices illustrate how memory and identity work can spark collective sentiments, encourage political sense-making, and invite discord or social regulation. They also demonstrate how competing politics of memory and identity coincide and clash to envision participatory futures across digital and physical spaces.