The Blog: The FemTechNet blog houses many of the ongoing conversations happening within the network. Blog posts have included reflections on the DOCC process, preliminary outcomes from grant work, and invited posts from friends of the network.
Books and Articles: Members of the network have written book chapters and articles about everything from the nature of the evolution the DOCC to the work processes of the network.
Media Mentions: FemTechNet has been talked about in the press for various projects and outcomes. Learn more on our media mentions page.
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook: The goal of the workbook is to produce a collection of freely shared and open materials to help new and returning FemTechNet DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) instructors in tackling the difficult job of teaching race, gender, and technology.
As part of our 2014-15 Collaborations in Feminism & Technology programming, FemTechNet has hosted two online Town Hall meetings. These two Town Hall meetings are an opportunity for FemTechNet to gather — students, faculty, interested community members — and to consider two key issues: 1. Building International Collaborations and Online Feminist Networks, and 2. the relationship between Open Learning and Feminist Praxis.
Questions?
Contact T.L. Cowan, Chair of FemTechNet’s Pedagogy Committee (cowant AT newschool.edu)
#FemTechNet #DOCC14 #FTNTownHall
Town Hall 1 – Feminist Digital Media Praxis & Safety/Risk
Facilitators: Tara Conley, Jade Davis, Alexandra Juhasz and Veronica Paredes
Tuesday Nov 25 3-4:30 EST (noon-1:30 PST)
Register by sending email to cowant AT newschool.edu: subject line – Safety. Please write a 1 or 2-sentence description of why you want to participate.
Town Hall 2 – Building International Collaborations through Online Feminist Networks: FemTechNet and the I Never Ask For It movement.
Date and Time:
Tuesday, Dec 16 8:30am, Bangalore, India.
Monday, Dec. 15th at 10pm EST (7pm PST).
90 mins.
Facilitators:
Radhika Gajjala
Jasmeen Patheja – contact: jasmeen.patheja AT gmail.com
T.L. Cowan – contact: cowant AT newschool.edu
In this Town Hall meeting, Radhika Gajjala, Jasmeen Patheja and T.L. Cowan will discuss a potential collaboration between the “I Never Ask For It” transnational anti-violence campaign, which Patheja coordinates, and FemTechNet, which Cowan helps to direct. We will consider how cyberfeminist practice can help us build collaborations across difference, but also how digital collaborations can obscure non-equitable distribution of resources and the global hierarchies at play in this kind of work. We will push on the hierarchies within international feminist collaborations, discuss a tiered process and action plan and brainstorm strategies with Town Hall participants for building a trans-local and transnational anti-violence movement.
Please email Jasmeen Patheja or T.L. Cowan to register with Subject Line “Town Hall.”
Live-tweeting or to post a question: #INeverAskForIt #FTNTownHall
Town Hall 3 – Online Feminism and Safety
Date & Time: TBA; details are being worked out now (November 2014)
Town Hall 3 – Open Learning as Feminist Praxis [planned for early 2015]
Date & Time: 90 mins. TBA
Facilitators:
Penelope Boyer – contact: penelope AT penelopeboyer.com
Andrea Rehn – contact Arehn AT whittier.edu
Feminist educators have long been committed to open learning projects (even before the Internet!) and eliminating systemic access barriers to education. Today, digital and mobile technologies offer increased possibilities for open learning, while also posing new problems of access, and economic questions about labor and profit. In this Town Hall meeting, Penelope Boyer and Andrea Rehn will facilitate a discussion prompted by the following Guiding Questions:
What can Feminist Praxis bring to Open Learning projects?
What happens when Open Learning is not informed by feminist and other social justice principles?
What can academia-based feminism learn from Open Learning projects?
What are some examples of Feminist Open Learning projects (including but not limited to FemTechNet’s DOCC)?
How can FemTechNet’s DOCC build *sustainably* as an Open Learning project? What does ‘openness’ mean in this context?
Live-tweeting or to post a question: #FTNTownHall
You can drop in, or register with the facilitators. Don’t hesitate to write with a question or topic you would like to discuss during this Town Hall meeting. Please use subject line “Town Hall.”
Video Dialogues & Online Open Office Hours Schedule
Each week from Sept 22-Dec 1st we will feature a Video Dialogue on the FemTechNet website and host an Online Open Office Hour (OOOH) for anyone involved or interested in FemTechNet to join. The OOOH times differ from week to week, so please take note of these dates and times.
There is a Town Hall Meeting scheduled for Nov 25 on the topic of Feminist Digital Media Praxis and Safety/Risk. A second Town Hall on the topic of International Feminist Collaborations is scheduled for Dec 15/16.
Unless otherwise stated, we will host the OOOH and Town Hall Meetings on Bluejeans. All OOOH and Town Hall links will be posted to the FemTechNet website.
Questions?
Contact the course director: T.L. Cowan, Chair, Pedagogy Committee, FemTechNet (cowant AT newschool.edu)
September 26, 2014
Wk 1: History of the Engagement of Feminism, Technology and Issues of Women’s Labor
Judy Wajcman interviewed by Anne Balsamo. See video here.
Office Hour Discussion led by: Elizabeth Losh and Melissa Gregg
Date/Time: Friday September 26 1-2PM PST (4-5PM EST)
Manderson, Lenore (2012): Material Worlds, Sexy Lives, in in Manderson, Lenore: Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health”, Routledge. file:///Users/maria/Downloads/Material_worlds__sexy_lives-libre.pdf
Traweek, Sharon (2000): “Warning Signs: Acting on Images”, in “Revisioning Women, Health, and Healing. Feminist, Cultural, and Technoscience Perspectives”, edited by A. Clark and Virginia Olesen: https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/traweek/Warning.pdf
Suggested reading: Buchanan, Holly, Rei, Frank & Couch, Murray (2012): “The Re/Making of Men and Penile Modification”; in Manderson, Lenore: Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health”, Routledge. (Please email mariagaguadoATgmailDOTcom to get the pdf)
(For readings on the topic in Spanish, please, contact mariagaguadoATgmailDOTcom)
October 20, 2014 Wk 5: Feminism, Technology and Race
To discuss VIDEO DIALOGUE with Lisa Nakamura and Maria Fernandez, moderated by Anne Balsamo.See video here.
Office Hour Discussion led by: Lisa Nakamura and Veronica Paredes
Date/Time: Monday October 20 | 11:00am-12:00pm ET (8:00-9:00am PT/ 10:00-11:00am CT)
Discussion featuring video dialogue with Dorothy Roberts and Karen Flynn moderated by Sharon Irish.
Office Hour Discussion led by: Sharon Irish, combined with TL Cowan and K Surkan, above
Date/Time: Wed. Oct 29, 4-5pm EST
November 4, 2014
Wk 7: Difference
Discussion with Shu Lea Cheang and Kim Sawchuk moderated by Sara Diamond. See video here.
Office Hour Discussion led by: Karen Keifer-Boyd
Date/Time: Tues. Nov. 4, 3-5 pm EST
How to join via Adobe Connect:
Participants to this OOOH will be joining Karen Keifer-Boyd’s class discussion and already should have viewed the FTN Difference video dialogue. Go to https://meeting.psu.edu/oooh_difference/ (Adobe Connect Penn State, no sign-in or download needed. Go to the URL and turn on your mic when speaking, and mute while others are speaking. The webcam will be enabled to see each other, and we’ll use screen share when we watch Dr. Ordóñez’s class recording of their response to FemTechNet’s “Difference” Video Dialogue and then back to viewing the seminar table with students in the class to discuss with all joining us. The Penn State students will be preparing their performative research videos in response to the FTN Difference video dialogue and present this on Nov. 11. There are 7 graduate students in the course, Including Difference. Refer to Nov. 4 details at https://cyberhouse.arted.psu.edu/difference/topics/11_subjectivity.html for links and other details during the OOOH discussion.
Systems: Games Discussion with Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray moderated by Anne Balsamo. See video here.
Office Hour Discussion led by: Sandra Gabriele & Mia Consalvo
Date/Time: Friday November 21 at 13h00 (1pm EST)
Register by sending email to cowant AT newschool.edu: subject line – Games. Please write a 1 or 2-sentence description of why you want to participate.
On the date of the event, you will get an email with an invitation to join the online discussion via BlueJeans. When you first work in BlueJeans you will need to install a plugin, which happens almost automatically when you follow the invitation directions.
Readings:
Consalvo, M. (2012). Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for Feminist Game Studies Scholars. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. https://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-consalvo/
Part II features the live question and answer session following the presentations from Donna Haraway and Catherine Lord about Beatriz da Costa’s work, moderated by Alex Juhasz.
Office Hours for both videos led by: Alexandra Juhasz
The link above is an interactive reader that is available free online and is comprised of these three readings:
Donna Haraway, “Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
Beatriz da Costa, “Reaching the Limit When Art Becomes Science,” in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, eds. da Costa and Kavita Phillips (MIT Press, 2010).
Catherine Lord, Summer of Her Baldness, (University of TX Press, 2004).
DOCC 2014: Collaborations in Feminism and Technology
The DOCC 2014, Collaborations in Feminism & Technology models 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.
Each week features a scheduled Online Open Office Hour (OOOH!) in which FemTechNet participants gather to discuss one of our Video Dialogues along with a set of open source readings based on the week’s theme. Everyone is welcome!
The series also includes four Town Hall Meetings on the topic of Feminist Digital Media Praxis, International Collaboration, and Safety/Risk.
The Online Open Office Hours and the Town Hall Meetings are hosted and moderated by FemTechNet faculty and are open to anyone who wants to engage in feminist collaborative, distributive teaching and learning.
In November 2012, Anne Balsamo sent this email message to a group of us who had earlier expressed interest in developing Distributed Open Collaborative Courses:
I am writing to you because you indicated your interest in teaching a nodal course in the proposed Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOCC) called “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology.”
At this point, we have instructors from more than a dozen schools who have expressed interest in the effort. We are hoping that you are still interested and able to participate. This letter describes the process for building the course collaboratively with a group of diverse instructors, students, and institutions. We also provide an overview of our current understanding of the networked learning experiences we are hoping will structure the DOCC.
With a series of emails, then, and amazing energy on the part of our co-founders, Anne Balsamo and Alex Juhasz, the DOCC and FemTechNet were launched!
In 2013, FemTechNet initiated a networked learning experiment involving instructors and students from several institutions in the creation of a collaborative open course structure called a DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course on the topic of Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.
The first iteration of the DOCC 2013 took place from September-December, 2013. Ideas for DOCC courses to interact are listed here, with instructions.
Feminism and feminists have been integral to technology innovation, yet as recently as June 2012, the New York Times carried an article about Silicon Valley that opened with the line: “Men invented the Internet.” As technology remakes academia and the arts, critical analysis of gender, sexualities, and race have been absent in much of this re-thinking of disciplines and practices. Since the early years of Internet availability, cyberfeminists have explored the use of the Internet for dialogue and participation across various socio-economic layers worldwide. Access and skills for women and various economically underprivileged communities of the world (such as populations from the developing world and inner cities of the U.S.) were central concerns for feminists in developing distributed and participatory environments for learning, training and information exchange.
Since the mid 1990s, cyberfeminists have spent significant time and energy in developing methods for inclusive teaching. The DOCC 2013 has been created as an alternative genre of MOOC, to demonstrate the innovative process of feminist thinking that engages issues of networked infrastructures for learning, learner-centered pedagogies, collaborative knowledge creation, and transformational practices of design and media making.
A MOOC (massive open online course) is typically organized and branded by a single (elite) institution. A DOCC recognizes and is built on the understanding that expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants situated in diverse institutional contexts, within diverse material, geographic, and national settings, and who embody and perform diverse identities (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics, for example).
The organization of a DOCC addresses the collaborative nature of learning in a digital age. A DOCC is an alternative genre of MOOC. A MOOC (massive open online course) is pedagogically centralized and branded by a single institution. The fundamental difference is that a DOCC recognizes and is built on the understanding that expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants situated in diverse institutional contexts, within diverse material, geographic, and national settings, and who embody and perform diverse identities (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics, for example). The organization of a DOCC addresses the collaborative nature of learning in a digital age. The DOCC2013 engages participants (from North America in this version) to teach NODAL courses, each of which is configured within a particular educational institutional setting. There is no single credit granting institution. Credit is offered to students through mechanisms that are already established within particular/situated institutions.
Instructors at fifteen universities and colleges participated in the DOCC 2013. Each instructor of a NODAL course created a course that suited her or his students, institution, locale, and discipline. FemTechNet delivered ten weeks of course content covering both the historical and cutting edge scholarship on technology produced through art, science, and visual studies. The core content consisted of 10 Video Dialogues that feature discussions among prominent and innovative thinkers and artists who address the question of technology through feminist frameworks. Course content grew through the exchange among participants. Dialogues on Feminism and Technology used technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversation while privileging situated diversity and networked agency.
FemTechNet facilitated a shared pedagogical activity called Storming Wikipedia designed to write women and feminist scholarship of science and technology back into our web-based cultural archives. By engaging in the practices of editing and revising Wikipedia pages, participants address the gendered division of labor of online encyclopedia authoring and editing which is skewed now toward male participation. Through the Storming Wikipedia activities we also seek to engage a wider group of participants in the effort of writing and maintaining a digital archive of feminist work in science, technology and media so that the histories of the future will be well populated by the ideas and people who took feminism seriously as a source of inspiration and innovation in the creation of new technocultures.
Because FemTechNet is a network, we refer to our convenings–whether institutional or community-based–as nodes. Below are the locations of the 2013-14 nodes.
The DOCC 2016-2017 iteration spans from August of 2016 to June of 2017. These courses 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. If you would like to start your own node, please visit “how to get started.” For 2016-2017, the DOCC are being taught at these nodes below.
August – Dececmber 2016
Nodes
Bowling Green State University
Instructor(s): Erika Behrmann
Course Title: Gender, Media, & Culture
Level: Undergraduate
Colby-Sawyer College
Instructor(s): Melissa Meade
Course Title: Gender, Culture and Technology
Level: Undergraduate; 12 students (mixed level)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Instructor(s): Karl Surkan
Course Title: Sexual and Gender Identities
Level: Undergraduate; 20 students
New Hampshire Art Institute
Instructor(s): Heide Solbrig
Course Title: Foundations in Art
Level: Undergraduate
OCAD University
Instructor(s): Maria Belén Ordóñez
Course Title: Dialogues in Feminism and Technology
by Melissa Meade, Colby-Sawyer College and Cricket Keating, Ohio State University
Comedian Tina Fey has recently foregrounded two key tenets of successful improvisation. The first she dubs the “Rule of Agreement.” In her words, “the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you” (Fey 2011). The second rule is that in addition to saying yes, you should add something of your own; that is, you should say “YES, AND.”
As an experiment in learning, the FemTechNet DOCC has been marked by an improvisational ethos. Indeed, from its open-ended organizational structure, which encourages educators of all sorts to join the collective, to its open-ended network of classes, to its key learning projects distributed across the network (such as Feminist Wiki-storming, Situated Knowledges Map, and Exquisite Engendering), FemTechNetters have said again and again “yes, and.”
In adding our “yes, ands” to the improvisation, we partnered the undergraduate students at Colby-Sawyer College (a private, liberal arts college of about 1400 students in central New Hampshire) and the Ohio State University (a large state university in central Ohio with about 44,000 undergraduates on a campus with about 58,000 students).
As instructors coming out of media and cultural history and political and feminist theory, neither of us particularly professionalized or skilled in digital media production, we joined this shared teaching and thinking project with a “DIY” mantra firmly in mind: a do-it-yourself feminist politics that suggests we ought not wait to be invited into circuits, but that we jump in and add our own.
As critical inspiration, we read Riot Grrrls and feminist DIY punk cultural production of the 1990s in our classes. They said, “Because we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings.” Yes, and we say “FemTechNet is a power tool” (FemTechNet Manifesto).
Animating a DIY approach with an improvisational spirit to us underscored that DIY is actually a misnomer. We need others — we need each other — to do the kind of work that will upend hierarchies, eliminate violence, create room for difference in the academy and beyond, and move past individual expressions of identity, the isolated and isolating digital practices. And so began our move from DIY to DWO (doing with others).
Much has been made of the role of the amateur in digital economies. Some have heralded its presence as a liberating creative spirit, with the ability to elide expertise and professionalism directly correlated to increased participation in the marketplace of ideas (see, for example, Lawrence Lessig and Clay Shirky). Carolyn Marvin has also critiqued the rise of the professional engineer and scientist of old technologies as tied to the exclusion of women and minorities in these fields (Marvin 1988). By squashing the tinkering impulse, and the tinkerer, we reinscribe hierarchies of thought, labor, and power.
Others have noted that amateurism is too easily coopted into the logic of neoliberal economies. DIY becomes a brand, and the amateur becomes a creative psychology useful to a growing economy. Astra Taylor has noted that “the grassroots rhetoric of networked amateurism has been harnessed to corporate strategy, continuing a nefarious tradition” and warns, “When we uphold amateur creativity, we are not necessarily resolving the deeper problems of entrenched privilege or the irresistible imperative of profit” (Taylor 2014, 63- 64).
In addition to jumping into the projects already in place in the network, we added some of our own, and invited others to join us. Inspired by the Object Making key learning project, and wanting to render visible what are often invisible gendered technologies, the Colby-Sawyer students developed a Bra Project that would be showcased at a Fem Fair. Inviting others to join us in this improvisation, we put out a “Call for “Bras” across FemTechNet. Here the network said yes, and sent dozens of bras, bindings and underthings through the mail. The students decorated, mutilated, and repurposed these into visual displays of gendered technologies. The Fem Fair took place in rural New Hampshire, while capturing the spirit of the dispersed and distributed FemTechNet.
Celebrating “The Bra Project” at Colby-Sawyer College, Fall 2013
At Ohio State, our class developed the idea of Freedom Recycling Bins. Taking inspiration from the “freedom trash cans” of the feminist protests at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, we repurposed trash cans so that they could be used as depositories of objects that symbolized or that perpetuated oppression. We then brainstormed how each object could be recycled and repurposed to serve liberatory ends. Later, we developed a game based on the idea. Here’s how to play!
Freedom Recycling Bin: The Game
Players: Unlimited
To play, you will need:
A trash can
Markers, paper, playdough and other repurposing supplies
A timer
How to play:
Label a trash can a “freedom recycling bin” and put it in the middle of the room.
Set the timer for five minutes. In that time, each person places an object that represents or perpetuates some aspect of oppression in their lives (either the actual object or a representation of the object) into the recycling bin.
Break up into even-numbered teams.
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Racing against the clock, each team picks an object from the recycling bin and repurposes it for liberatory ends. Keep going until all the objects in the recycling bin are repurposed or until the time runs out.
Groups share their repurposed objects with the others. The team with the most successfully repurposed objects wins the round.
Repeat as often as necessary.
Speaking of the imperative of coalition work, Bernice Johnson Reagon writes: “we have lived through a period where there have been things like railroads and telephones, and radios, TVs, and airplanes, and cars and transistors, and computers. And what this has done to the concept of human society, and human life is, to a large extent… what we have been trying to grapple with” (Reagon 2000, 365).
Reagon stresses that a consequence of these technological transformations is our vulnerability– “there is no hiding place”– and our connection– we have to build coalitions through and across difference in order to survive (Reagon, 365). Yes, and we say animating these coalitions, both on and off-line, with an improvisational spirit will help us to deepen, expand, and multiply them. There won’t be a place oppression can hide.
References Cited:
FemTechNet. “Manifesto.” Femtechnet.org, 2014.
Fey, Tina. Bossypants. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1988.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Bantam Books, 1967.
Freedom Trash Can Photo: https://mediamythalert.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bra-burning_freedomtrashcan.jpg
Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Barbara Smith, ed. ([Kitchen Table Press, 1983] Rutgers University Press, 2000.
“Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” Bikini Kill Zine 2, 1991.
Taylor, Astra. The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Metropolitan Books, 2014.
*FemTechNet Roadshow Blog Series – Over the past couple of months, about a dozen FemTechNet participants have presented work based on our research and teaching related to FemTechNet in a two-part FemTechNet Keywords Workshop at the CUNY Feminist Pedagogies Conference in April 2015, and at the Union for Democratic Communications Conference at the University of Toronto in May 2015. Since these gatherings brought together such divergent modes of FemTechNet engagement, we thought we’d collect and share this new work over the last two weeks of May, leading up to the deadline for our 2015 FTN Summer Workshop. For more information on this series, contact T.L. Cowan
Over the last two decades, we have seen the emergence of a movement attempting to retain (or regain) democratic control of digital communications technologies. I’ve previously written about the activism emerging around this, framing it as a digital liberties movement (here and here), and Hector Postigo’s work on the digital rights movement offers another way of understanding it.
While the digital liberties movement is engaged in an important struggle, its politics create constraints in terms of the kinds of critiques – and solutions – it offers. It’s always tricky discussing the politics of social movements (which are always heterogeneous and fluid), but broadly speaking, the politics of the movement mostly fits within a liberal democratic framework. There are frequently challenges to aspects of the existing political systems activists are working within, but usually these go back to liberal ideals. So, for example, activists challenge state surveillance by appealing to concepts like freedom of association and freedom of speech, rather than by challenging the right of the state to exist. There’s also a strong streak of libertarianism in the movement, in the American sense of a politics which argues for greatly-restricted state power but few restrictions on the power of the market.
This translates into campaigns with a strong focus on individual freedom from government oppression, particularly with regards to protections for ‘free speech’ and limits on government surveillance; tactics that aim at reform, rather than deeper structural change; and appeals to an idealised free market (so, for example, complaints about the ways in which intellectual property law creates monopolies, and claims that more nimble entrepreneurship could balance the power of large corporations).
Many geek feminists work within, or began by working within, this movement: women have been key to the framing, campaigning, and specific projects within digital liberties activism. For example, women (including those who identify as feminists) have had an active presence in free and open source software communities, and in campaigns against online censorship and surveillance. However, many women who were initially involved in the movement have raised important criticisms of it, while others have never found the movement to represent their experiences of online technologies.
Obviously, there is no single political approach in geek feminist politics. There are many different, diverse, geek feminist communities – here I’m talking mostly about North American and Australian geek feminists, and what I say isn’t true for everyone who’d identify in that way. However, again, (very generally speaking) geek feminism often reproduces the focus on liberal ideals, in part because this is the politics which is most visible and available. As Alex Bayley says in a 2014 talk on the history of the Geek Feminist wiki (an important resource for the growth of the geek feminist movement, but not the only site for it), when she first began the wiki she had no education in feminism, gender studies, or related areas, and so the wiki was partly a space to host her own self education. This isn’t unusual, with many women in the geek feminist movement coming from technical backgrounds in which the only ‘activist’ politics present might be those around free software. However, resources like the Geek Feminist wiki, spaces like AdaCamp, and discussions around feminism on Twitter and in other places, is helping to establish a specific (but fluid and heterogenous) politics.
One of the key features here is an interest in intersectionality, an understanding of gendered oppression as intersecting with other forms of oppression. While this concept was initially developed specifically in the context of Black Feminism, by Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and others, it’s much more broadly (and sometimes shallowly), understood in the context of geek feminism today. This is leading to important critiques of the digital liberties movement’s work. For example, ‘free speech’ is both central to the politics of many digital liberties organisations, and a key feature of the rhetoric of many of those harassing women online or in other geek spaces. In the latter case, free speech is usually defined in an expansive way, in which any form of moderation of a space is positioned as ‘censorship’: this can be seen as partly the result of implementing the values of liberal democracy in spaces beyond the state (seeing governance of a conference or online community as mirroring governance of the state).
A blog post by Jem Yoshioka summarises the geek feminist critique of free speech discourse well:
The fervent devotion to free speech over everything else ends up alienating me (and many others, I’m sure). Yes, I believe in the vital importance of freedom of the press and the freedom from being censored, prosecuted or incarcerated by governments based on the expression of thoughts. But I also believe that harmful and dangerous abusive behaviour by individuals and hate groups needs to be identified and actively stamped out. It needs to be the responsibility of us all, not just the people who find themselves targeted. This is the responsibility that we take on as members of a community.
This not only critiques the idea that ‘free speech’ should be prioritised over all other values, but also signals a shift towards a more communitarian approach to governance. The appeal here is not to a top down mechanism, but rather to ‘us’: members of the communities themselves. It also represents an important shift away from individualistic liberal framings of atomised individuals, and towards an understanding of communities as shaped by structural inequalities which must be addressed through solidarity and mutual aid.
Geek feminism is also beginning to raise important critiques of capitalism, in opposition to the digital liberties’ tendency to valorise images of more flexible and technologically-enlightened capital. This is, of course, varied: faith in the market as the primary means of resource distribution is not absent from geek feminist communities. However, at the same time, there’s a growing understanding of the ways in which capitalism is inherently linked to structural oppression. This can be seen particularly in the responses to Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book, Lean In, which have begun a broader conversation about the limitations of ‘success’ within a capitalist system.
Finally, whereas the digital liberties movement tends to frame government surveillance as a concern, geek feminists are increasingly arguing that for many women, trans people, queer people, and people of colour, the key threats don’t come from their government, or don’t only come from their government. For example, trans women, and particularly trans women of colour, are at threat of state violence, but they’ve also suffered from sustained harassment online and offline for years from trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Understanding ‘surveillance’ as enacted not just by the state but also by other citizens, and often even by peers (including other activists), radically changes the kinds of resistance we might envisage.
These challenges from geek feminists are broadening the way we think about the politics of digital technologies, and encouraging a more nuanced understanding of how we can struggle for more democratic control of vital technology. They’re not the only source of such challenges, and geek feminism itself is drawing on many other stands of activism, including trans activism and anticolonial analysis. Twitter’s recent policy changes around harassment are one sign of the impact of this work – hopefully there will be others, including more radical changes to communication technologies. I’m really looking forward to exploring this in more detail as I build on the work in Global Justice and the Politics of Information and start writing more about marginalised perspectives on Internet governance and online technologies.
For more on my work, check out my website or follow me on Twitter.
*FemTechNet Roadshow Blog Series – Over the past couple of months, about a dozen FemTechNet participants have presented work based on our research and teaching related to FemTechNet in a two-part FemTechNet Keywords Workshop at the CUNY Feminist Pedagogies Conference in April 2015, and at the Union for Democratic Communications Conference at the University of Toronto in May 2015. Since these gatherings brought together such divergent modes of FemTechNet engagement, we thought we’d collect and share this new work over the last two weeks of May, leading up to the deadline for our 2015 FTN Summer Workshop. For more information on this series, contact T.L. Cowan