Saving Private Manning?: On Erasure and the Queer in the I Am Bradley Manning Campaign

This article seeks to understand erasures, instability, and queerness in the I am Bradley Manning campaign. As social media increasingly provides digital places for people to create, convene, and participate in social movements and protest, there is a corresponding need to understand how these movements work, what they mean for individuals as an exercise of citizenship, and what they mean as movements in communities, cultures, and states. This article explores the I am Bradley Manning campaign on Tumblr as an important object of study in understanding new forms of public protest and social movements. Many of these movements are not disruptive in the same sense of traditional forms of protest as we have understood them: protests in physical spaces and places that disrupt everyday life and living. Instead, these are protests that take place in virtual digital places, which at times provide little physical or material disruption of the everyday. This article is an attempt to begin understanding new ways we might frame or understand disruption and protest in light of digital movements.