‘The small girl with the huge dildo is what we needed’: The politics of sex toy in Cocks Not Glocks protest

The University of Texas at Austin became the epicenter of the gun debate in fall 2016 as a student-led protest against the campus carry law grew into a movement known as Cocks Not Glocks. Utilizing humor and slogans, the activists adapted the dildo as a symbol of defiance. This article focuses on how the dildo as a protest tool gained agency. The subversive potential of the dildo was in its affective ambivalence, which was augmented in Texas, where the state law censors the public brandishing of sex toys. Through an analysis of media coverage and interviews with activists, students and faculty belonging to the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) community, the article demonstrates the cultural meaning-making and complex relationality of the dildo, an object shaped by competing meanings in relation to obscenity laws, sex-positivism and debates on gendered gun culture. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s theorization of how objects may become sticky as an effect of substitutions, the article argues that the affective ambivalence of the dildo worked in the protest as a gesture that moved between sexual desires and political demands about gendered gun culture and public security in the United States.