Warning: This video contains explicit language and themes that may be disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.
My goal for this project was to create a video that showcased an individual person’s truth through their lived experiences and perception of the world. In this way, I aimed to bring elements of a postmodern identity politics into a tangible and accessible format in the hopes of producing empathy and affinity across groups.
Alec is a fourth year student at the University of Washington studying Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. With an emphasis on social justice and media representation, Alec aims to create content that focuses on the voices and perspectives of marginalized identities.
Situating Glitches: Networks of Knowledge Production
Juliana Luchkiw
Abstract: A glitch of the system is resistant to hegemonic norms, and carves out a virtual space for itself within the system in order to critique it. This paper is a textual and typographical montage (PDF here) that thinks about how technology is feminized, and how glitches in the system queer technology as its abject. It deals with a glitch’s capacity to rupture the White masculinist Order that classifies according to function (“usefulness” for (re)production of dominant relations of power), that standardizes knowledge according to a systematized totality, and that manages and administers this information. Feminist and queer productions of knowledge and interventions into digital platforms can disturb identity, system, and order–they can glitch the system. This discussion is taken further into a case study of the relationships between technology, networks, and the Zapatista struggle. It presents how those who are not legible by the state, in relationship to hierarchies of function, have the possibility of manifesting with/in technology to make connections of solidarity across networks that empower material changes.
We are on the way to a feminine. Not an essence or a goalie’s penalty; just a way. Heidegger has wanted to draw the important distinction between equipment and thing. Technology in some way is always implicated in the feminine. It is young; it is thingly. Thus every instrument of war is given a feminine name. The feminine, in whose way we are, does not arrive. She is what is missing. Constituted like a rifle, she is made up of removable parts. She hinges on the other, like the allegorical symbolics of which Heidegger speaks. The woman has gotten in the way of things, so that the prior mention of her, at a younger stage of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” needs attention. All works have a thingly character. A picture may hang on the wall, asserts Heidegger, like a rifle or a hat (P, 19). Because the thingly element is so irremovably present, it draws allegory to the understanding of the work. The question of the other, of, say, equipment and the other, is not an arbitrary one. “The art work is something else over and above the thingly element” (P, 19). […] While the artwork reverts to a made thing, it nevertheless says something other than the mere thing itself. Manifesting something other, it is an allegory. In the work of art, the reading continues, something other is brought together with the thing that is made. […] Joining one element with another, bringing together what stays apart, the work somehow participates in both these figures, ruling over separation and that which binds. “But this one element in a work that manifests another, this one element that joins with another, is the thingly feature in the artwork” (P, 20). The thingly feature is the jointure, that which joins and, one supposes, separates.(Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book, 207-208)
performativity does not just refer to explicit speech acts, but also to the reproduction of norms. Indeed, there is no reproduction of the social world that is not at the same time a reproduction of those norms that govern the intelligibility of the body in space and time. (Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,” x)
Technology calls to an absent presence. Like woman, it comes after–it is made from and named by man. But unlike man, the machinery is usually interior. The digital and mechanical technological landscapes are “overwhelmingly male-dominated,” (Evans) but the technology is feminized. It usually expresses a particular version of feminine: perfected according to some norm–sleek, new, forever young, always updating, “mostly in service to the patriarchal overlords of commerce, science, educational institutions.” (Evans) It is assumed by many that technology will always function according to a standard, and that humans will relate to it in a mostly determinate manner. These expectations emerge from humanist hierarchies which pre-scribe humans as superior to objects and most heterosexual cisgender white men as superior to other humans. This could impact the ways in which digital and mechanical technologies are feminized in relationship to their made-ness as well as the expectancy for them to follow their classified function–perpetuating the way in which bodies are crafted within structures of reproductive heteronormativity, upon whose hegemonic terms society is Ordered.
The standard way of thinking about technology is in terms of the application of reason in the domination and mastery of “natural” and social environments. Social hierarchies are put to work on “nature” in an orderly way to produce highly organized systems of social and technological power.(Judy Wacjman, Techno Feminism, 64)
Every order is therefore political and based on some form of exclusion. There are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated. The articulatory practices through which a certain order is established and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are ‘hegemonic practices.’ (Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” 3)
As entities within a hegemonic structure, feminized bodies could be the abject of a standardized hierarchy. Following Judith Butler, the abject is formed simultaneously with the exclusionary establishment of the subject. What remains outside of the subject realm is the abject (Butler, Bodies That Matter 3)–deviating from the norm and considered illegible. The abject disturbs identity, system, and order. (Kristeva 4) In the discourse of how digital technology is expected to function, and the relationships to and between devices and platforms, the abject would be a glitch of the system. “Glitches represent the user’s loss of control over the machine; they are often exploited as part of avant-garde art practice because they forcibly remind viewers of the material base of digital events.” (Nakamura) A glitch can emerge spontaneously from the programming of the machine, but it can also be intentionally provoked and programmed by humans. In this sense, relating to glitches embraces failure and alludes to randomness, fragmentation, error, helplessness, the unexpected, and machine-driven processes.
A technological glitch reminds the human that the technology is not passive. This disruption of humanist Order can be thought of in terms of Karan Barad’s theory of agential realism, which says that objects within an apparatus have agency. They cannot be reduced to a determinate “nature.” The relationships between objects within an apparatus is the phenomena which produces knowledge. Apparatuses can construct standardized systems that subjugate objects to their hierarchical order. (Barad 132-185) For example, humanist Order assumes that digital and mechanical technologies can be programmed to behave deterministically according to the human. However, glitches crack open these hierarchies by disrupting the structure that establishes them. A glitch of the system is not only a metaphor or an allegory in this sense but also has the capacity to affect and effect.
After all, power cannot stay in power without reproducing itself in some way. And every act of reproduction risks going awry or adrift, or producing effects that are not fully foreseen. (Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,” ii-iii)
“An unexpected occurence, unintended result, or break or disruption in a system, cannot be singularly codified, which is precisely its conceptual strength and dynamical contribution to media theory. From an informational (or technological) perspective, the glitch is best considered as a break from (one of) the protocolized data flows within a technological system.”(Menkman 26) What may appear to be a systematized totalization can glitch, illuminating the constructedness of the apparatus. Further, “breaking” something intentionally can also be a statement that resists the system that tries to contain it. As a glitch’s behavior departs from an expected, “useful” function, it is a not-yet-defined rupture of teleology that opens up a critique of the system from which it breaks.
In this sense, a glitch, which can occur “organically” and be a performative gesture, queers technology by resisting norms and intelligibility: the body/technology does not align with its prescribed function, so it is deemed unrecognizable, illegible. Queerness is not stagnant, but porous, mutable, existing in a space outside of the dominant norm. It breaks from the rationalized schema that builds a taxonomized hierarchy, according to function, in order to perpetuate (re)production that is beneficial to neoliberalism/capitalism. Technology as well as feminized bodies are entangled in this system–subjugated to ordered regulatory systems and standardized totalities that have been established by White Male hegemony. Within the technological realm, a glitch resists functional norms by embodying “failure”–that something has gone wrong–which calls to its queerness as “a mode of critique rather than as a new investment in normativity or life or respectability or wholeness or legitimacy.” (Halberstam 110-111)
We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined “they” constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories. The imagined “we” are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles (Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” 575)
We are the malignant accident which fell into your system while you were sleeping. And when you wake we will terminate your digital delusions, hijacking your impeccable software. (VNS Matrix, “bitch mutant manifesto”)
A feminized human body relating to technology could also be a glitch of the system when it is an unexpected occurrence, fragmented, blurring boundaries, and withstanding classification. With the availability of digital technology and the internet, different bodies with access are able to communicate across webs of relations and join together in virtual dimensions. Digital platforms can provide a space for those who may not be intelligible subjects, and those in solidarity with them, to convene for acts of resistance and to manifest a multiplicity of subjectivities and worlds against the majority of rapidly assimilated in-formation.
In part, cyberfeminism needs to be understood as a reaction to the pessimism of the 1980s feminist approaches that stressed the inherently masculine nature of technoscience. In contrast, cyberfeminism emphasizes women’s subjectivity and agency, and the pleasures immanent in digital technologies. They accept that industrial technology did indeed have a patriarchal character, but insist that new digital technologies are much more diffuse and open. Thus, cyberfeminism marks a new relationship between feminism and technology. (Judy Wajcman, Techno Feminism, 63)
“The abject and subversion of the clean and proper [human and technological] body” (Evans) emerges from within the system to critique it. Cyberfeminism is such an emergence. In a way it reclaims the feminized body that has been subjugated to the masculinist scientific Order, but it also infiltrates the webs of cyberspace. The first cyberfeminist interventions, such as those of VNS Matrix who coined the term, seemed necessary, as the technological landscape was cartesian and uncritical: “It was a masculinist space, coded as such, and the gatekeepers of the code (cultural and logos) maintained control of the production of technology.” (Evans) Cyberfeminism confronts the initial false conceptions of the internet as a space of neutrality, anonymity, and unbridled access by resisting totalizing, hierarchical taxonomies and the need to form a legible subject. Its infiltration into cyberspace signals to how technology is plastic–the same platforms and devices can be oppressive and liberating depending upon the social relations and contexts in which they are implemented. (Wacjman 72)
Music/noise? Wanted/unwanted? Meaning/non-meaning? May our noise remain incompatible with neat, dualistic logic: that which has sought to abate us.
Let us make a MesS. Let us use our noisy, machinic collaborations for Destabilizati0n NoT DOMinatiON. Let uS use them to UnDerMi.ne the power structures that have rendered us noise.(Marie Thompson, “M*anifesto f0r Interfer!ng Wom/en”)
Although science and technology are the products of capitalism, militarism, colonialism, racism (etc.) and their insistent male domination, cybertechnology has liberating possibilities. (Wacjman 72) Donna Haraway evokes the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 516) The cyborg dissolves the idea of an origin because it is unable to be defined, asserting that identities are not easily classified, but fragmented and complex. “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 532) Subverting structures of language, gender, and therefore the (re)production of dualities, through the complication of boundaries–their construction and deconstruction–the cyborg can become “a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination–in order to act potently.” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 534)
first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. (Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 535)
Haraway also introduces the idea of “situated knowledges,” which involve communities but avert from essentialist notions that claim there is a universalized women’s experience–that instead these knowledges are circumstantial, particular to a specific position within and breaking from existing infrastructures. “The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions-of views from somewhere.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 590) For Haraway, a feminist analysis is a form that breaks and works with the enabling constraints of knowledge-producing infrastructures. “In Haraway’s hands, feminist standpoints of hybridities become consciously chosen political and social locations, a range of possible vantage-points.” (Wacjman 87) Situated knowledges map experiences that make connections through affinities between “the politics of knowledge, and the spaces, places and locations that we occupy.” (Alexander and Mohanty 27) They glitch the system by calling for “contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing [to form a] knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 585)
Once a procedural flow is broken, there are two possible ways in which the glitch tends to move. If the cause of the machine’s erratic behavior becomes known, the glitch tips and becomes a simple bug report of a failure, in which it will be described under its technological name (which at that point is often a compression artifact). However, if the cause of the glitch remains unknown, the glitch can either be ignored and forgotten, or transformed into [a critique] on a phenomenon (or the memory thereof) defined by a social or cultural context (conventions, histories, perspectives) and the technology that is malfunctioning. (Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), 27)
queer theory opposes those who would regulate identities or establish epistemological claims of priority for those who make claims to certain kinds of identities, it seeks not only to expand the community base of antihomophobic activism, but, rather, to insist that sexuality is not easily summarized or unified through categorization. (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 7)
“the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word “objectivity” to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 581)Although the unintelligibility that marks queer bodies withstands many classificatory systems established by hegemony, these ordering processes still try to organize “malfunctions” in behavior according to “objectively” delineated pathologies that standardize subjectivities with specific signifiers. Queer theory resists these taxonomized hierarchies with forms of knowledge production that insist upon identities that cannot be defined, since they are not fixed, and that signal to how queerness ruptures (glitches) teleological systems.
If dominant relations of power are not something that “naturally” seethe, but are structural developments that regulate identities and administer this information, certain forms of resistance to and within digital technology and cyberspace can deconstruct the Order. With situated knowledges, this involves a multidimensional subjectivity–a splitting, not being. (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 586) “‘Splitting’ in this context should be about heterogenous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among subjects.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 586) Forming constellations of cracks that open multiplicities and fracture the facade of a systematized totality, these forms of resistance queer technology. They cannot be easily categorized by resisting the rationalized hierarchies of humanism and the concept of language that structures them, and they offer a performative critique that virtually evokes a specter of an absent presence. These evocations do not only exist virtually, but also flow over to disturb the Order of the material realm. Subverting the ways in which humans relate to technology with the performativity of unintelligibility, different intersecting interventions can break the Order that governs over information and, within this, legible subjectivity.
norms are made and re-made, and sometimes they enter into crisis in the remaking; they are vectors of power and of history. (Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,” xi)
“Performativity was, to be sure, an account of agency, and precarity seems to focus on conditions that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside of one’s control.” (Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics” i) “Precarity is a rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless.” (Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics” xiii) Butler thinks about precarity mostly in relationship to material social relations. But if science and technology move within these social relations as well, the ways in which these bodies are silenced by the systematized process of exclusion affect who has control over and access to information and technology. For Butler, performativity links with precarity with the question of who counts as a subject and who does not–“who counts as a life, who can be read or understood as a living being, and who lives, or tries to live, on the far side of established modes of intelligibility.” (Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics” iv) For example, a lack of access to digital communication technologies would make up a new “uninhabitable zone,” or abject realm, as the subject constitutes those who rely on these technologies in their social and/or professional daily life, and would quite literally find an area without Wi-Fi connection or cell towers as uninhabitable–and the lives of those who are inhabiting these zones might be “unlivable.”
Technological hegemony marginalizes those who do not adequately fill its subject position–those who are not “worthy” to control the code. If “white heterosexual masculinity [is] consonant with the identity of the institution against which racialized and sexed others are made, imagined, and positioned [and …] the diffusion of ways of knowing […] are informed by the fictions of European Enlightenment rationality,” (Alexander and Mohanty 28) critiques and interventions into digital platforms would break apart the fictions of this rationality and the dominant modes of knowledge production and re-presentation. “Feminism is about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision. Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. […] There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 589) Hosting multiplicities, feminist and queer critical cuts and performative gestures transgress the masculinist space to destabilize its authoritarian order of knowledge production, bringing it into crisis.
How does the unspeakable population speak and makes its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require? (Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,” xiii)
Imagine that since you were born, the entire system tells you repeatedly that you are something strange, abnormal, sick, that you should feel sorry for what you are and that, after blaming it on bad luck and/or divine justice, you should do as much as possible to modify this “production defect”. (El EZLN Anuncia Pasos Siguientes, La Fuerza del Silencio 21-12-12, 57)
Cleaver counsels, the reason the frontier metaphor [of the internet, which ‘encourages exploitation by corporate capital’] exists is because it inspires “not surrender, but resistance.” This, Cleaver argues, is the excitement of any frontier, and is the reason the metaphor survives. Cleaver points to the Zapatistas in Mexico as an example of such resistance, pointing out that during the peso crisis of December 1994, certain international investors tried to buy “inside scoop” information on the Mexican political scene, only to be rejected by those in the know who were also on the Net: The offers were refused, so this autonomous “frontier” of resistance and discussion of the Zapatista alternative continues. (Theresa M. Senft, “Introduction: Performing the digital body—a ghost story,” 21-22)
Emerging from the encounter between poor indigenous communities and urban guerrilleros in the land that is Chiapas, Mexico, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) exists as a political militant organization with a broad popular base in Chiapas. With the internet and the active participance in spreading the messages of the EZLN by different activists and journalists, the EZLN “burst onto the world stage and quickly inspired [movements] around the world.” (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 22) Their struggle participates in a network of transnational solidarity that goes beyond material borders. According to the EZLN, they were driven to an armed uprising “by the domination, marginalization, humiliation, by the injustices and by the norms or laws of corrupt government and by the exploitative landowners.” (EZLN 134) The Mexican government’s response to the EZLN’s initial uprising in January 1994 provoked NGOs (non-governmental organizations) “to ‘swarm’–electronically as well as physically– from the United States, Canada, and elsewhere into Mexico City and Chiapas. There, they linked up with Mexican NGOs to voice solidarity with the EZLN’s demands and to press for nonviolent change.” (Ronfeldt, Arquilla, Fuller, and Fuller xi) They assembled highly networked, loosely coordinated, cross-border coalitions that restrained the Mexican government in defense of the Zapatista cause. These coalitions were composed of many different struggles and gestures of solidarity.
In favor of direct democracy, “zapatismo situated itself as a mode of liberation and leftist struggle that rejected hierarchy, party control, and aspirations to create a State apparatus,” and it inspired many other movements such as the Kurdish resistance in Rojava. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 22) “Zapatismo from the indigenous peoples of Chiapas worked as a model for a new generation of social movements that are difficult to characterize, sustained in networks, geographically dispersed, diffused, multi-thematic, intermittent, and not formally organized.” (Rovira) The Zapatista networks hosted by technology are the jointure of a hybrid, intergalactic struggle that complicates boundaries and evokes the other in different spaces, times, and dimensions. They call to situated knowledges as a community formed by positions of “partial, […] critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 584)
Protests and encounters in many cities of the world in order to get to know the situation in Chiapas, to influence the local public opinion and to put the pressure on Mexican diplomatic delegations. […] Lobbying campaigns towards the local elites who in turn put the pressure on the Mexican government: in the Parliament, with the politicians, with the most renowned intellectuals. […] The flood of foreigners to the indigenous communities, now are like portadores [messenger/weapon bearer] of material solidarity and productive projects or are like simple companions to the Zapatista communities. They served as proliferators of the cause and wove interpersonal relations. […] Electronic civil disobedience on the internet, provoked by Critical Art Ensemble […] These forms of action of the zapatismo transnacional are inextricably imbricated(Guiomar Rovira, “El Zapatismo y la Red Transnacional”)
Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. (Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” 586)
Zapatismo manifests a specter of an absent presence–collective appearances speak with/in technology to string together webs of communications that activate a network. In support of democracy, liberty, and justice, the Zapatista struggle reaches a global level against neoliberalism. As altermundialista, the EZLNmaintains the vision of a world different than current neoliberal globalization. Itwants one world that fits many worlds, and these can be encountered in the dimensions of the virtual realm. Unbound from very limited, local terms, zapatismotransnacional occupies a space of convergence for encountering intersections between manifold and dispersed issues and forms of and activism. Although zapatismo may have particular political implications, the Zapatistas do not have a strict definition of their politics. They are open and inclusive to all who may be involved in the network. (Rovira) Unforeseeable and fragmented, zapatismo is a glitch of the system. It resists hegemonic structures that designate who is a legible subject and who has access to and control over technology and knowledge production. It draws “the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” 590) Unpredictable, unable to be absolutely defined, dissolving borders and deconstructing hierarchies,zapatismo works with these aims to intentionally break the system as a disruptive statement of resistance that has material and virtual resonance.
In the case of zapatismo transnacional, what unites the actors is the exchange and the circulation of information for solidarity action. It is in this sense that the Internet, just like other tools for communication, like the fax, the telephone, or the mail, plays a relevant role as infrastructure of its own movement. In zapatismo, just like in altermundismo, the internet will play a key role as the medium that facilitates the appearance of these types of reticular relations throughout the planet, and it will say that the Internet is more than a medium. (Guiomar Rovira, “El Zapatismo y la Red Transnacional”)
The internet and its networks are mediums, not mediators, that actively and dynamically evoke zapatismo. As the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or a force acts on objects at a distance, the medium can host multiplicities, calling to different times, spaces, and dimensions. The internet as a medium hosts the channels for encounters through which those who have been silenced by their illegibility may be able to speak. With zapatismo, web-like intersections emerge not only virtually, but also have material effects in relationship to the State and society. Virtual manifestations across the zapatismo network participate in global actions against capitalism amongst cyberactivists. (Rovira) These actions call to the other through channels of communication where different spatiotemporal dimensions can flow simultaneously. They implement “hacktivism” in resistance to the different corporations and institutions (Rovira) that perpetuate the hegemony that standardizes knowledge, administers information, and decides who is a legible subject. Zapatismo is amovement with/in systems of communication. “The intergalactic network is more powerful than any gun.” (Rovira)
Moving as a collective and dispersed form, zapatismo, as a glitch, cultivated the capacity to have material impacts with the transmission of messages through technologies with/in its networks. The movement is indefinable and disturbs the “natural” Order. The participants in these webbed connections produce knowledge in relationship to the Zapatistas that is situated within various infrastructures. They work with these structures and make cuts into them, in order to diffuse messages and resist rationalized neoliberal policies that perpetuate the hierarchical totality that sways corporations and the Mexican government. As the medium, the internetted network conjures up those who are silenced by States and institutions–bodies unrecognizable, determined “invisible” and “useless” according to the standardized, systematic hierarchy of function and (re)production. The access that indigenous communities have to the internet and other technologies in relationship to the Zapatista struggle, which is mostly remotely (activists and journalists publish letters sent from Chiapas), queers the way in which these technologies are “supposed to” have relations, causing the system to glitch. Zapatismo reclaims autonomy and forms agential relations through technologies to overturn the apparatus of a systemic hierarchy which silences the Zapatista voice and suppresses the people. As a glitch of the system, the unintelligible and stateless oppressed have attained, with an “unexpected” technology, the capacity to produce their own knowledges through the intergalactic networks of resistance. “Immersed in the rhizome of flows, the networks become unstoppable and unpredictable.” (Rovira)
P.S. TO CLARIFY UNNECCESSARILY. We also do not have a twitter or facebook account, or email, or telephone number, or PO box. What shows up on the page is from the page, and these comrades support us and send us what they receive, just as they send what we send to them. Otherwise, we are against copyright, this way anyone can have their twitter, their facebook, or however you call it, and use our names, although, clearly, they are not us and do not represent us. But, according to what they have told me, the majority of them clarify that they are not who one might think they are. And the truth is that we have fun imagining the amount of insults and mentions […] that they have received and will receive, originally directed at the ezetaelene and/or at whom writes this. (El EZLN Anuncia Pasos Siguientes, La Fuerza del Silencio 21-12-12, 110)
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Juliana Luchkiw is a hybrid creature, interested in intertwining agential affinities of fiction, theory, and lived experience. Her work evokes specters of deviance and abject beings by relating to memory and trauma, and drawing constellations that echo silenced bodies with text, performativity, video, sound, collage, interactive creatures and an-architecture. printmaking, design, and web-based projects are also a part of her practice. She is a part of nadahada collective, and she has a BA in The Arts from Eugene Lang College and BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design.
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signal/noise take-down policy: an author of a published project may at any time contact the editors to request to have their work removed from signal/noise.
Email FTNPedProCom@gmail.com to contact the signal/noise editorial collective, for information on how to submit to signal/noise or if you would like to participate in the peer review process.
i. FemTechNet is an activated network of scholars, artists, and students working on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields including Science & Technology Studies (STS), Media and Visual Studies, Art, Gender, Queer, and Ethnic Studies.
ii. FemTechNet collective members collaborate on the design and creation of feminist technological innovations.
iii. FemTechNet seeks to foster digital practices and literacies among women and girls, and to encourage their writing and sharing technocultural histories of the future.
2. Pedagogical Framework – Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC)
The DOCC is…
a model for multi-situated connected courses in which participants collaborate in designing curricula around a shared theme (FemTechNet’s theme is “Feminism & Technology”).
an experiment in Connected Learning.
a practice of distributed expertise.
an innovative pedagogical technology.
a digital course structure informed by both feminist educational innovations of the past and contemporary online feminist pedagogies.
a commitment to dialogue, accountability, horizontally oriented, peer-engaged transformative learning.
Built and sustained by many faculty and students, the DOCC uses collaboratively designed Key Learning Projects and shared, open resources (Video Dialogues; readings; guest lectures from within the network), based on the feminist praxes of distributed expertise and methods.
The DOCC works across difference: across public and private institutions, across rank, across undergraduate and graduate courses, across national/state/economic borders, across professional status and knowledge bases.
The DOCC is a feminist alternative to The MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) model of connected learning. Whereas a MOOC uses digital technologies to increase the teacher-to-student ratio (1 teacher to many students) and to concentrate expertise in one “star” teacher, the DOCC model resists this trend and operates through a network that uses digital technologies to constellate our pedagogies, to circulate distributed expertise, and to increase teaching and learning resources: many teachers and students working together to build and sustain an educational environment.
3. The Course –
Collaborations in Feminism & Technology (2016-17)
Collaborations in Feminism & Technology (2015-16)
Collaborations in Feminism & Technology (2014-15)
Dialogues in Feminism & Technology (2013-14)
Collaborations in Feminism and Technology will model collaboration as a feminist technology through a series of connected, open learning events that will allow participants to explore DOCC resources in conversation with other FemTechNet learners.
FemTechNet is run through a series of committees. For more information on committees, please see our committees page.
Q: What if I wanted to fund a student (or few) to work with FemTechNet?
A: Excellent! More funding for students is always better! Graduate and undergraduate students are doing amazing work in and as FemTechNet – that is, the network would not exist without the research, teaching, programming, designing, artistic, political and cultural work of undergraduate and graduate students. Faculty in the network are sometimes able to find and use funding to pay students for some of this work, and to help encourage and grow this kind of funding, we have come up with a set of tips for helping students and faculty understand and develop RA-funded work within the network. NB: FemTechNet does not currently have funding for student work, but if you manage to get some on your own, here are some tips on how best to use it.
1) FemTechNet is an ever-shifting network of scholars, artists, makers and activists that can provide camaraderie and collaborative energy, but cannot provide supervision. That is, student workers are supervised/advised by the faculty, staff or employers who have arranged funding for the student’s work.
2) The supervisor/advisor should be (or have been) a working participant in FemTechNet (having worked on a committee, working group or as a DOCC instructor).
3) Undergraduate students need to be supervised/advised by someone who works in the same institution, and who can have regular contact with the student.
4) Ideally, students who are working with FemTechNet will have a working knowledge of anti-racist, decolonizing queer, trans- feminist practices in addition to their interest/skills/energy to participate in the network.
What we offer
The five co-facilitators of the network this year (the F5 for 2015) can provide an orientation to the network – contact us at femtechnetinquiries [at] gmail [dot] com
Network of scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, designers, makers and activists in camaraderie and collaboration around projects of shared interest.
Working group/committees organized by participant interests.
This year (2015-2016) our committees and working groups are: Steering; Operations (working group is Tech Praxis); Critical Race & Ethnic Studies; Pedagogy Projects (working groups are Wikipedia, DOCC instructors); and Operations. Find out more about each committee at https://www.femtechnet.org/about-the-network/who-we-are/committees/
These committees and groups were decided during the summer workshop (2015) and the network may decide on different groups next year. Also, new projects can be proposed and developed within any committee at any time. Just take the initiative to propose a project and ask for participants with shared interests and go for it!
Working experience and relationships with scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, designers, makers and activists beyond your immediate network.
Weekly or bi-weekly committee meetings via online video conference (through the very functional Blue Jeans software), to move collaborative projects along and check in with everyone about workload and direction.
Monthly steering committee meetings to check in with the rest of the network, share your committee’s work and get to know what’s happening on other committees and propose new ideas and direction for the network
Hello and welcome to the FemTechNet Year 3! It’s hard to believe that it was only in 2012 that Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz began bringing feminist scholars together to form FemTechNet, and that this September marks our third full season of running our Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) – this year offered again as “Collaborations in Feminism and Technology.” We have grown in numbers, projects, and community and our commitment to feminist technologies, including collaboration, care, and humor, have kept us all coming back! Last year co-facilitators Elizabeth Losh, Lisa Nakamura and Sharon Irish held our course steady and continued with the great foundational work of Anne and Alex. This year we have a team of five co-facilitators — the Feminist 5 #F5 — who will be working together and with the whole FemTechNet collective to help shape and sustain our work.
So, introducing the Feminist Five #F5:
Anne Cong-Huyen
T.L. Cowan
Paula Gardner
Veronica Paredes
Jasmine Rault
In addition to a new team of co-facilitators, FemTechNet will be operating under a slightly shifted committee structure: this new structure reflects the work that is being done by our network and each committee welcomes new membership of feminist activists, artists, organizers, makers, hackers and scholars.
Committee Structure & Descriptions:
The Steering Committee is the decision-making, oversight and imagination body for the network. At the Steering Committee, we discuss and resolve topics and plans that affect the whole network. The Steering Committee is also where we gather regularly as a large group to connect with each other and check in on how we’re doing and where we’re going.
Starting in October, 2015, the Steering Committee will meet monthly on the First Friday of each month for two hours (which will include a 30min info session, a 30min social, and a 60min agenda-driven meeting). An open agenda will be posted (location TBA) and anyone involved, or who wants to be involved, with the work of FemTechNet is welcome and encouraged to attend and be part of the collective process.
Each Steering Committee meeting will be 2 hours long:
Dates: (First Friday Monthly) October 2; November 6; December 4; January 8 (second Friday); February 5; March 4; April 1; May 6; June 3
The first 30 minutes will function as an Information session for folks who are new to the network and others who have questions about how to be involved, how to get a FemTechNet project off the ground, etc. These information sessions will be hosted by at least one co-facilitator.
During the second 30 minutes we will host the FemTechNet Ultra Lounge (thanks to Lisa Nakamura for this name), which will be a FemTechNet Online Social – we’ll check in and catch up. Bring your beverage of choice!
The last hour of the meeting will be agenda-driven and chaired by one of the co-facilitators. The agenda will be an open document, posted the week before the meeting. If you would like to add an item to the agenda or if you would like to have input on an agenda item but can’t make it to the meeting, please add your thoughts to the document
All steering committee meetings will be held in FemTechNet Blue Jeans Meeting Room 1: please email femtechnetinquiriesATgmailDOTcom for the link*
The Community Engagement & WWW Committee builds relationships among institutions, organizations and individuals to expand FemTechNet beyond Canada and the US. This may include: offering “orientation”/get to know us sessions; presenting at consortial meetings, expanding the scope of our research activities and actions; outreach, recruitment and networking (especially encouraging DOCC teaching in new locations, and creating new collaborations with artists and activists). Plans for this year: offering “Meet Us!” orientation (live!) sessions; creating a “Meet us!” video with diverse FTN voices; outreach to community partners (advocacy & activist groups; art organizations); encouraging the development of new online town halls/teach-ins/art exhibitions/tech trainings, etc); outreach to new international participants (inviting teaching and action engagements)
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee creates interdisciplinary conversations, curriculum, and workshops by developing materials and activities that address issues of racialization, ethnic and cultural formation, power and identity. Our focus is on intersections of digital media and ethnic studies. Anchored in the legacy of critical race and ethnic studies, we are community activists engaged in practice-based scholarship and cultural work. We aim to engage public audiences with accessible media, community outreach, and feminisms inside and outside of the academy.
The Pedagogy Projects Committee (PedProCom)supports the various pedagogy projects of the network including the DOCC, our new Introduction to Online Safety & Risk activity; the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Workbook; the Situated Knowledges Map; Keyword Videos; Town Hall Meetings; Online Pedagogy Workshops and any other teaching projects that you might want to initiate and work on. PedProComworks to mentor FemTechNet faculty, develop curricula, coordinate inter-institutional collaborations, and support community engaged learners. We are also a site of collaboration, whether for research-creation or to develop publishing projects on pedagogy related topics.
PedProCom Working Groups: DOCC Instructors (if you are teaching a DOCC, you are in this group); FTN Wikipedia
The Operations Committee facilitates the work of the network. The Committee shapes the virtual organization of FemTechNet’s socio-technical systems used to support FTN as a geographically distributed network that is accountable to differences of access along multiple vectors of power, including global location, race, class, gender, sex, and abilities that influence the network’s collaborative use of information and communication technologies. Specifically the committee manages FemTechNet Communications, Publicity, and Archiving. Currently, the Operations Committee is integrating Slack into the community’s workflow, it is also documenting the network’s uses of communication platforms throughout the collective’s history.
Operations Working Group: The purpose of the Tech Praxis Working Group is to shape, study and improve the infrastructure of FTN and assemble documentation on the interoperability of platforms. Plans for this year include: writing projects including grant applications, technical reports, peer reviewed essays, book chapters, and blog posts focused primarily on research and documentation around FemTechNet’s prototypes in designing, using, and hacking distributed learning systems.
As the renamed Operations Committee and its working group Tech Praxis signal, this year FemTechNet will continue to experiment with various learning and communication platforms, bending and building tools to facilitate feminist collaborations between instructors, researchers, committee and network members alike. The Tech Praxis Working Group is preparing for broader use of the EdCast learning network in FemTechNet courses and communication, which includes plans to study this platform, documenting what it enables and disables for FemTechNet, and situating it as an object of research within the collective’s fields of digital feminist tech praxis and digital media learning, through reports, posts and publications.
We’re also aiming to prioritize the social justice work already being done within the network, and to welcome and invite engagement, participation and partnerships with even more individuals and organizations working at the intersections of trans feminist anti-racist queer disability decolonizing economic social justice and technology. While many (and certainly not all) people who have been involved in FemTechNet are economically and professionally located in the university/college systems, the network is oriented as much (or more) to alter- counter- and anti-institutional impulses, initiatives and potentialities that work beyond, against and sometimes simultaneously within the university. We hope to keep bringing in and bringing out our activist, revolutionary, transformational, hacker movement builders.
More about the 2015-2016 Co-Facilitators:
Anne Cong-Huyen – Digital Scholar and Coordinator of Digital Liberal Arts Program at Whittier College (California); Co-founder of #transformDH, steering committee member of HASTAC, member of FemBot Collective.
Co-facilitator’s Focus: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee
T.L. Cowan – Bicentennial Lecturer in Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and Digital Humanities Fellow at Yale University (2015-16) & FemTechNet Chair of Experimental Pedagogies in the School of Media Studies at The New School; Independent Performance Artist; collective author, “We Are FemTechNet” Manifesto
Co-facilitator’s Focus: PedProCom; FemTechNet Roadshow Blog Series
Paula Gardner– Asper Chair in Communications, Faculty of Communication Studies and Multimedia, McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario); Senior Adjunct Professor, OCAD University (Toronto, Ontario); outgoing Chair Feminist Scholarship Division of International Communication Association, FemBot Collective Member
Co-facilitator’s Focus: WWW activities, Summer School Development and Organization; Seek funds for FTN activities
Veronica Paredes – Postdoctoral Research Associate at Department of Media and Cinema Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. FemBot Collective Member.
Co-facilitator’s Focus: Tech Praxis Working Group; production guidance for new audio-visual materials
Jasmine Rault – Assistant Professor of Culture & Media, Eugene Lang College, The New School; former chair, FemTechNet White Paper Committee; collective author, “We Are FemTechNet” Manifesto
Co-facilitator’s Focus: Operations Committee; Social Justice Practice & Initiatives
