handout pamphlets describin
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334 JENNIFER A. SANDLIN AND JENNIFER L. MILAM
dance, strip, and handout pamphlets describing the questionable ethics of Starbucks’ business practices. Directions for this jam read:
Gather a large number of party-prone faithful. . . . Print (on two sides) many copies
of the Coverco report (which you can get at Coverco.org). Print it out in both
English and Spanish. There are lousy things in that report about people who bring non-Fair Trade Coffee to market. The study took place in Guatemala, and a lot
Starbucks’ victims are kids. Instruct everyone to stuff the pages of this report into
their trouser legs, stockings, panties, undershirts and bras. Now with this large
throng of the party-prone, fill up a Starbucks until the ratio of people to floorspace is like SOB’s on Saturday Nite. Go with saxophonists, kazoos and squeeze in a
Trinidadian drum. And a blaster with Thelonius Monk on it. Press the ON button.
Ask the musicians to play. Begin to dance. Everyone bumps and grinds while the
shoppers try to sip their $4 non Fair Trade lattes. The bumping and grinding gives
way to increasingly articulate stripping. The reports fly out of the underclothing like
bilingual white ravens. The sipping stops. Bump and grind them beans! (Reverend
Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, n.d., para. 15)
Reverend Billy explains the physical sensations culture jamming ignites when he describes how he delivers his message to his audience. He says he
tries to lead “by example” in order to persuade people that it can be fun not to consume. He further explains that participants have
to
Embody the fun. It all comes down to the decision, what sort of dance am I involved
in here? Where are my arms, where are my hands? How far is my voice reaching, what am I saying? It’s all physical. It’s the physical-spiritual. It’s sacralizing the
ordinary. Once you take responsibility for that and you’re willing to enter a state of
heightened oddness in public space?or even public space that they claim is private
[laughing]?you’re by your example having fun outside their consumer strictures.
(Quoted in Ashlock, 2005, para. 31)
Culture jammers also attempt to engage emotions when enacting culture
jamming. Elsewhere (Callahan & Sandlin, 2006; Sandlin 8c Callahan, 2004) we have argued that culture jammers engage emotion
to initiate action and
interest amongst members of society. We believe emotion plays important
roles in the responses or reactions culture jammers try to elicit in the
spectators who experience their jams. For instance, we
posit that Adbusters
engages viewers emotionally, by transforming recognizable consumer
appeals into images that shock and disturb viewers (Sandlin 8c Callahan,
2004). Drawing upon our earlier work, we illustrate how Adbusters
attempts to do this through the subvertisement below (Figure 4). Upon first glance, the viewer thinks she/he sees an advertisement for Nike shoes.
This subvertisement draws on the recognizable meme distributed as the
Nike “Why do I run?” campaign from the 1990s, which brought together
photos of runners with inspirational explanations of why they run. A viewer
familiar with the Nike memes should then think this subvertisement fea
tures a dedicated runner and that the text contains inspirational phrases
about running. In a kind of double take, however, the viewer sees what the
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