LGBTQ protesters, cartoon artists with giant cartoon figures, dog owners, and snake and iguana owners. A group of disabled protesters may have been most conspicuous in giving evidence of the myriad positionalities and locations of groups and individuals within society, all lined up to convey the idea that they wanted the democratic era back, to return to the time when diverse groups were allowed to participate in various civic activities.31 Protests created a space for riotous performances of the silly, half-serious, transgressional and irreverent condemnation of the military takeover. Urgency was expressed in terms of the absurd, a disbelief that the peace of everyday life had been or could be shattered. David Graeber explains how the ridiculous can be used effectively as one tactic among many in a protest repertoire.32 For one thing, the optics of soldiers trying to suppress a dinosaur with truncheons, or violently crushing a parade of drag queens, surely has disadvantages for those in power in a hypermediated world. In their critique of patriarchy, gender-normativity, gerontocracy and cultural monism, Gen Z launched a cultural revolution as much as they were setting in motion a political revolution. For example, protest repertoire juxtaposing the hyper-masculinized bodies of soldiers with transgressive gender embodiments—cross-dressed, gay and trans bodies—coded female and weak also contains a critique of militarized, patriarchal state power. One protester, a Femboy wearing a dress and apron, carried a sign in English that read, “Shoot me with the cum, not with the gun”. The feminization of male embodiment here confronts the power of the military through subversion of its assertion of rule by physical violence. The parallel with the 1960s-era American anti-war Interview with Shin Thant, “ အင္အားပိုေကာင္းလာတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတဝန္းက စစ္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈ BBC Burmese, 11 February 2021, https://www.bbc.com/ burmese/topics/c404v08p1wxt/page/19 (accessed 8 April 2021). 31 ဆန႔္က်င္ေရး ဆႏၵျပပြဲေတြ”, David Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture”, http://balkansnet.org/zcl/puppets.html (accessed 5 April 2021). 32 14 21-J07648 01 Trends_2021-7.indd 14 28/4/21 9:34 AM