Digital Radical Rudeness: The Story of Stella Nyanzi

"This is the story of a self–described “queer laughist, writer, and critic from the non–core academia” and a “die–hard Facebooker who loudly speaks [her] mind based on [her] banal experiences of life.” This is the story of how one of her poems, published on Facebook and discussing in obscene language the vagina of the Ugandan president’s mother, landed her in jail. This is the story of a scholar, activist, and a mother whose relationship to technology is fundamentally grounded in a tradition of social protest known as radical rudeness — a tradition rooted in Ugandan culture that was successfully deployed in the anti–colonial resistance. As such, it is not only the story of one individual, but a story about the crossroads of resistance to authoritarianism, patriarchy, and homophobia; art, politics, law, and technology; the public and the personal; the global and the local; and the ongoing tension between the empowering and repressive affordances of social media."