‘I wanna kill my rapist’: Margaret Cho’s #12DaysofRage campaign as promotional digital activism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On November 1, 2015, comedian Margaret Cho announced a two-part campaign inspired by her history as a sexual-abuse survivor, to promote her new music video ‘I Wanna Kill My Rapist’. This included the creation of the hashtag #12DaysofRage. In this article, I explore how Cho used her status as a celebrity to circulate #12DaysofRage which acted as a discursive intervention in rape culture. I used content analysis and thematic analysis to identify themes in the archive of 2401 tweets I collected. I also performed a feminist discourse analysis on both the tweets and news coverage of the campaign to situate the hashtag within its historical, social, and political context. I argue that Cho performed what I call ‘promotional activism’, a subsection of celebrity activism where a celebrity promotes a cause as part of the promotion of a particular project or product. Cho’s choice to centre herself in the campaign made it impossible to separate Cho from the hashtag, preventing #12DaysofRage from greater viral potential, but still acting as a resonant, but ephemeral, gathering point for survivor-focused advocacy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it