‘I wanna kill my rapist’: Margaret Cho’s #12DaysofRage campaign as promotional digital activism

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.