After the March: Using Instagram to Perform and Sustain the Women’s March

The January 2017 Women’s March was an example of the paradigmatic March on Washington, part of the repertoire of collective action used by social movements in the United States for decades. Similar marches were held on its first and second anniversary, in January 2018 and January 2019, respectively. One did not need to travel to the nation’s capital to participate in these marches, however; activists also organized hundreds of “sister marches” across the United States and internationally. Yet, a sole focus on these one-day, physical events misses a great deal of activity. In this article, we examine social media activity related to the Women’s March on the platform Instagram that was posted well after the 2017 march was over but before the 2018 march was fully planned. We do so to gain purchase on how individuals and organizations use social media to maintain movements between large events. We analyze a systematic sample of Instagram posts from two sources: (1) individual Instagram users’public posts with the hashtag #womensmarch and (2) posts from the official Instagram account of the Women’s March. Conceptualizing these posts as political performances, we use our findings to draw implications for the study of contemporary protest.