Abstract
This chapter introduces the key focus of the book: the contradictions, tensions, and often-paradoxical aspects of feminist and queer politics in a digital world of dense connections. How can feminism and queer activism articulate a political response to the new forms of governmentality that result from digital technologies, while using these same technologies in order to circulate their counter-narratives and inhabit their versions of the world? By crossing through the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer social life, I visit some of the inherent contradictions of this political project and stress that, between empowerment and vulnerability, feminism remains today a necessary and passionate struggle for social justice. The Introductory Chapter clarifies some of the key theoretical premises of the book and introduces two key interdisciplinary analytical tools for future research, by drawing critically from existing innovative research in the fields of media theory, political science and feminist science, and technology studies. The chapter outlines the book’s general approach to the question of materiality, and its emphasis on the material, social and embodied aspects of digital media technologies and activist practices. First it analyses how the notions of labour and communicative practice are central aspects of materiality in relation to the digital, which shape the very conditions of political organising, and how we understand what it means to be political as feminists. Then, it highlights theoretical work that challenges representationalism by looking at the ideas of, amongst others, Tiziana Terranova (2004), Hardt and Negri (2000), and Jodie Dean (2009); then, it moves on to examine ‘posthumanist performativity’ (Barad, 2007) as a way of thinking about embodiment in digital networks beyond the matter/representation binary. Through this exploration, the chapter introduces the concept of biodigital vulnerability, which positions vulnerability as a precondition for enabling feminist and queer political subjectivity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
‘Web 2.0’ is a term used to describe contemporary convergence and it refers to wikis, social networking platforms, weblogs and other user-generated content platforms and practices.
- 2.
Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural categories interrelate. See Fotopoulou (2012) for an overview.
- 3.
Guha (2015) explains how the campaign hashtags never really took off, or as they say, trending, and this for them is indicative of how the campaign did not manage to engage concerned citizens and policymakers.
- 4.
Resource mobilisation theory is a theory of collective action, which focuses on organisational dynamics and the importance of resources such as time, money, technical and organisational skills for social movements. It has been employed in order to understand the role of social networking and other digital media technologies as new resources for activism, not only in terms of organising protest, but also for collective identity formation and fostering community bonds. See Eltantawy and Wiest (2011).
- 5.
There are a few notable exceptions, such as Touraine (1981) who wrote about the women’s liberation movement as a new social movement.
- 6.
The authors extend Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) notion of ‘connective action’ here.
- 7.
As Gill and Pratt (2008) explain, precarious employment in neoliberalism has a double meaning: on the one hand, it creates uncertainty, and on the other, the potential for new subjectivities and political possibilities.
- 8.
Mapping as a methodological approach is explained in the following section.
- 9.
In a later analysis, Andrejevic (2013) also notes how the internet has been understood as an empowering technology precisely because of its capacity to allow information production and distribution.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
According to the theory of remediation, visual digital culture presents itself as an improved version of older media in an effort to respond to them. Remediation is a process in which new cultural and media forms carry in and with them conventions, practices and ways of thinking which belonged to older cultural forms. They call the encounter and collocation of multiple cultural texts within any given digital text ‘hypermediacy’, whereas by ‘immediacy’ they refer to the concurrent invisibility of the medium in these texts. See also Kember and Zylinska (2012).
- 13.
The Quantified Self (QS) is a community of people who use wearable devices in order to log personal information and improve various aspects of personal life, such as mood, physical and mental performance, or other aspects of everyday life, such as air quality.
- 14.
The Gamergate controversy relates to the misogynistic campaign that was launched with the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate and involved the direct targeting of game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian. The case sparked a feminist response and examination of issues of sexism in the video game industry.
- 15.
A good example here is how the 2014 YouTube video about a woman who got ‘catcalled’ 108 times while walking in New York went viral with 43 million views (10 hours of walking in NYC as a woman). Although not directly linked to gender, the use of mobile phone cameras to expose police brutality against black people in the USA is at the time of writing another illustration of how publicity can empower marginalised communities.
- 16.
- 17.
Topology derives from Greek, where it means an account of a conceptual structure or space, or according to The Oxford English Dictionary (1989), it is simply ‘the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged’. However, as a distinct mathematical field that focuses on continuity between objects it has informed numerous studies in network architecture (Elahi and Elahi 2006; Naimzada et al. 2009), music (Mazzola et al. 2002) and art (Kalajdzievski 2008; Martinot 2001).
Bibliography
Ahmed, S. (2002). Communities that feel: Intensity, difference and attachment. In E. Larreta (Ed.), Identity and difference in the global era (pp. 414–448). Rio de Janerio: UNESCO.
Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. J. (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Andrejevic, M. (2009). Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of user-generated labor. The YouTube Reader, 413.
Andrejevic, M. (2013). Infoglut: How too much information is changing the way we think and know. London: Routledge.
Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (1983). Contextualising feminism: Gender, ethnic and class divisions. Feminist Review, 15, 62–75.
Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. London: SAGE.
Baer, H. (2015). Redoing feminism: Digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism. Feminist Media Studies, 0777(January), 17–34.
Barad, K. (1998). Getting real: Technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10(2), 87–91.
Barad, K. M. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28, 801–831.
Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barassi, V. (2015). Social media, immediacy and the time for democracy: Critical reflections on social media as temporalizing practices. In L. Dencik & O. Leistert (Eds.), Critical perspectives on social media and protest: Between control and emancipation. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boler, M., et al. (2014). Connective labor and social media: Women’s roles in the ‘leaderless’ occupy movement, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
Bolter, D., & Grusin, J. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.
Bray, A., & Colebrook, C. (1998). The haunted flesh: Corporeal feminism and the politics of (dis)embodiment. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24(1), 35–67.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.
Cavarero, A. (2005). For more than one voice toward a philosophy of vocal expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cochrane, K. (2013) The fourth wave of feminism: Meet the rebel women. The Guardian, December 10. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women
Cohn, J. (2013). Female labor and digital media: Pattie Maes, postfeminism, and the birth of social networking technologies. Camera Obscura, 28(2), 151–176.
Colebrook, C. (2000). From radical representations to corporeal becomings: The feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15, 76–93.
Colebrook, C. (2008). On not becoming man: The materialist politics of unactualized potential. In S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Collins, P. H. (2000). It’s all in the family: Intersections of gender, race, and nation. In U. Narayan & S. Harding (Eds.), Decentering the center: Philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Couldry, N. (2004). Theorising media as practice. Social Semiotics, 14(2), 115–132.
Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society, 10, 373–391.
Couldry, N., Fotopoulou, A., & Dickens, L. (2016). Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world. British Journal of Sociology, 67(1), 118–137.
Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 14, 538–554.
Darmon, K. (2014). Framing SlutWalk London: How does the privilege of feminist activism in social media travel into the mass media?. Feminist Media Studies, 14(4), 700–704.
Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as buzzword. Feminist Theory, 9, 67–85.
Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Della Porta, D., & Mattoni, A. (2012). Cultures of participation in social movements. The Participatory Cultures Handbook, 170–181.
Dickens, L., Couldry, N., & Fotopoulou, A. (2014). News in the community? Investigating emerging inter-local spaces of news production/consumption. Journalism Studies, 16(1), 97–114.
Dickenson, D. (2007). Property in the body: Feminist perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Downing, J. (2001). Radical media: Rebellious communication and social movements. California: Sage Publications.
Duggan, L. (2002). The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neoliberalism. In R. Castronovo & D. D. Nelson (Eds.), Materializing democracy: Toward a revitalized cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Elahi, A., & Elahi, M. (2006). Data, network, and Internet communications technology. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson Delmar Learning.
Elsen-Ziya, H. (2013). Social media and Turkish feminism: New resources for social activism. Feminist Media Studies, 13(5), 860–870.
Eltantawy, N., & Wiest, J. B. (2011). The Arab Spring|Social media in the Egyptian revolution: Reconsidering resource mobilization theory. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1207–1224.
Erel, U. (2007). Constructing meaningful lives: Biographical methods in research on migrant women Sociological Research Online 12.
Fenton, N. (2016). Digital, political, radical. Cambridge: Polity.
Fortunati, L. (2007). Immaterial labor and its machinization. Ephemera, 7, 139–157.
Fotopoulou, A., & Couldry, N. (2015). Telling the story of the stories: Online content curation and digital engagement. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 235–249.
Fotopoulou, A. (2012). Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: Methodological frameworks for social research. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 13(2), 19–32.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. Vol. 1: The will to knowledge. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fox, S., Ulgado, R. R., & Rosner, D. K., (2015) Hacking culture, not devices: Access and recognition in feminist hackerspaces. ACM, CSCW 15, 14–18 March 2015.
Franklin, S., & Lock, M. M. (2003). Remaking life & death: Toward an anthropology of the biosciences. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
Gajjala, R., Zhang, Y., & Dako-Gyeke, P. (2010). Lexicons of women’s empowerment online. Feminist Media Studies, 10, 1.
Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto Press.
Gill, R. (2001). Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity.
Gill, R. (2007). Gender and the Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Gill, R. and Pratt, A., 2008. In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. Theory, culture & society, 25(7–8), 1–30.
Goddard, M., & Parikka, J. (2011). Editorial: Unnatural ecologies. Fibreculture Journal, 17.
Gordon, J. (2007). The mobile phone and the public sphere: Mobile phone usage in three critical situations. Convergence, 13, 307–319.
Grosz, E. A. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Guha, P. (2015). Hash tagging but not trending: The success and failure of the news media to engage with online feminist activism in India. Feminist Media Studies, 15(1), 155–157.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599.
Haraway, D. J. (1997). ModestWitness@SecondMillennium. FemaleManMeetsOncoMouse: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin.
Horeck, T. (2014). #AskThicke:‘Blurred lines’, rape culture, and the feminist hashtag takeover. Feminist Media Studies, 14(6), 1105–1107.
Isin, E., & Ruppert, E. (2015). Being digital citizens. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jarrett, K. (2016). Feminism, labour and digital media: The digital housewife. London: Routledge.
Juris, J. S. (2005). The new digital media and activist networking within anti-corporate globalization movements. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597, 189–208.
Kalajdzievski, S. (2008). Math and art: An introduction to visual mathematics. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Kaun, A. (2015). ‘This space belongs to us!’: Protest spaces in times of accelerating capitalism. In L. Dencik & O. Leistert (Eds.), Critical perspectives on social media and protest: Between control and emancipation. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kember, S. (2003). Cyberfeminism and artificial life. London: Routledge.
Kember, S., & Zylinska, J. (2012). Life after new media: Mediation as a vital process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kennedy, H. (2016). Why study social media data mining?. In Post, mine, repeat, 19–39. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Laclau, E. (2001). Can immanence explain social struggles?. Diacritics, 31(4), 3–10.
Lash, S., & Lury, C. (2007). Global culture industry: The mediation of things. Cambridge: Polity.
Law, J., & Mol, A. (2002). Complexities: Social studies of knowledge practices. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lawrence, C., & Shapin, S. (1998). Science incarnate: Historical embodiments of natural knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Love, H. (2009). Feeling backward. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Loza, S. (2014). Hashtag feminism, # solidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the other# femfuture. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 5, np.
Martinot, S. (2001). Maps and mirrors: Topologies of art and politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Massanari, A. (2015). # Gamergate and the happening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society 1461444815608807.
Mattoni, A. (2012). Media practices and protest politics: How precarious workers mobilise. London: Routledge.
Mazzola, G., GöLler, S., & MüLler, S. (2002). The topos of music: Geometric logic of concepts, theory, and performance. Boston, MA: Birkhauser Verlag.
Mccall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs, 30, 1771–1800.
Mcrobbie, A. (2007). Post feminism and popular culture: Bridget Jones and the new gender regime. In Y. Tasker & D. Negra (Eds.), Interrogating postfeminism: Gender and the politics of popular culture (pp. 27–39). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Milioni, D. L. (2009). Probing the online counterpublic sphere: The case of Indymedia Athens. Culture and Society, 31, 409–431.
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review, 61–88.
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. London: Duke University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2005 [1993]). The return of the political. London: Verso.
Munt, S. (1998). Queer attachments: The cultural politics of shame. London: Ashgate.
Murphy, M. (2012). Seizing the means of reproduction: Entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Naimzada, A. K., Stefani, S., & Torriero, A. (2009). Networks, topology and dynamics theory and applications to economics and social systems. Berlin: Springer.
O’Riordan, K. (2010). The genome incorporated: Constructing biodigital identity. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society, 4, 9–27.
Plant, S. (1997). Zeros + ones: Digital women and the new technoculture. New York: Doubleday.
Postill, J. (2009). What is the point of media anthropology?. Social Anthropology, 17(3), 334–337.
Rentschler, C. (2015). # Safetytipsforladies: Feminist Twitter takedowns of victim blaming. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), 353–356.
Rentschler, C. A. (2014). Rape culture and the feminist politics of social media. Girlhood Studies, 7(1), 65–82.
Ruiz, P. (2014). Articulating dissent: Protest and the public sphere. London: Pluto Press.
Shakhsari, S. (2011). Weblogistan goes to war: Representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora. Feminist Review, 99, 6–24.
Silverstone, R. (2002). Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life. New Literary History, 33, 761–780.
Stephansen, H. C. (2016). Understanding citizen media as practice: Agents, processes, publics. In M. Baker & B. Blaagaard (Eds.), Citizen media and public spaces: Diverse expressions of citizenship and dissent. London: Routledge.
Stephansen, H. C., & Couldry, N. (2014). Understanding micro-processes of community building and mutual learning on Twitter: A ‘small data’ approach. Information, Communication & Society, 17(10), 1212–1227.
Stone, A. R. (1995). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Terranova, T. (2004). Network culture: Politics for the information age. London: Pluto Press.
Thompson, C. (2005). Making parents: The ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Touraine, A. (1981). The voice and the eye: An analysis of social movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turkle, S. (1996). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Volkmer, I. (2014). The global public sphere: Public communication in the age of reflective interdependence. Cambridge: Polity.
Wakeford, N. (1997). Cyberqueer. In S. Munt & A. Medhurst (Eds.), The lesbian and gay studies reader. London: Cassell.R.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fotopoulou, A. (2016). Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks. In: Feminist Activism and Digital Networks. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50471-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50471-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50470-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50471-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)