Crop Tops and Solidarity Selfies: The Disruptive Politics of Girls' Hashtag Activism

Mediated Girlhoods 2

On May 26, 2015 hundreds of teenage girls in Toronto, Canada went to school wearing crop tops—and it quickly became international news. The midriff-bearing teens were participating in what was dubbed “Crop Top Day,” a protest event organized after 17-year-old Alexi Halket was reprimanded by her school principal for wearing a crop top to class on May 25, 2015. According to Halket, she was told that her top looked “too much like a sports bra” and was “inappropriate” for school (Diblasi). Yet Halket refused to change and instead told the principal that she had similar outfits planned for the week. After receiving encouragement from her girlfriends, who also pledged to wear crop tops the next day in support, Halket formalized the #CropTopDay protest by creating a Facebook page and inviting about 300 people from her school to participate. The event spread throughout the teens’ social media networks, resulting in hundreds of girls and boys across the Greater Toronto Area wearing short shirts to school the next day and over 5,000 people using the #CropTopDay Twitter hashtag to publicize the protest (Luxen). By the time the weekend rolled around, the hashtag had been used hundreds of times, and had attracted substantial attention from the wider public.

Peter Lang
Frankfurt