Decoding Black Feminist Hashtags as Becoming

Conley describes a street encounter that happened one year after two black women, Feminista Jones and @BlackGirlDanger, introduced the hashtag #YouOKSis" during a conversation on Twitter. The hashtag transformed into a national rallying cry for women of color to share intimate stories of witnessing and experiencing dehumanization by way of sexual violence in public view. Conley states that whenever she writes about processes among assemblages, she starts with a vignette of thick descriptions ("the doing of ethnography"). She begins with a non-fictive encounter of witnessing street harassment and details the process of relying upon technologies to intervene. She does this in order to orient the reader around Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage, a conceptual tool and vocabulary for understanding encounters among social formations and complex systems.