Gender and Digital Culture

Between Irreconcilability and the Datalogical

Helen Thornham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138569959
• eBook ISBN: 9781351336840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender and Digital Culture offers a unique contribution to the theoretical and methodological understandings of digital technology as inherently gendered and classed. The silences within, through and from the systems we experience every day, create inequalities that are deeply affective and constitute very real forms of algorithmic vulnerability. The book explores these lived and mundane algorithmic vulnerabilities across three interrelated research projects. These focus on recent digital phenomena including sexting, selfies and wearables, and particular decision-making systems used in health, education and social services.

Central to this book are the themes of irreconcilability and the datalogical. It makes the case that feminism and gender politics have become increasingly irreconcilable with not only long-running debates around representation and embodiment, but also with conceptions of the technological, conceptions of the user and of the systems themselves. In keeping with longstanding feminist scholarship, these irreconcilabilities can be productive and generative; they can be used to interrogate the power politics of digital culture.

By studying the lived and routine elements of digital technologies, Gender and Digital Culture asks about the many convolutions that are held together through the everyday use of these technologies, and the implications for how gender and technology are approached, discussed and theorised.

1 Gender, irreconcilability, and the datalogical anthropocene

Irreconcilability

In 1992 Cynthia Cockburn, writing as part of Maureen McNeil’s edited collection on gender and expertise, asks why ‘gender relations survive so little changed through successive waves of technological innovation’ (1992:44). It is a question returned to by Caroline Bassett in 2013, rephrased to acknowledge the work of feminist digital media and STS scholars: ‘why do gender relations wave with waves of technological innovation?’ (2013:201). Both of these questions are a response to what the authors suggest are a reoccurring cycle of technological ‘turns’ that go hand in hand, they argue, with the forgetfulness of feminism.

Gender and Digital Culture is an attempt to answer these two questions, which are asked 30 years apart and at either end of a spectrum of technological, social, and cultural change. When Cynthia Cockburn was writing, she was reflecting on the informatics ‘turn’: when electronics and IT were replacing a human labour force in the 1980s under Thatcher in Britain. When Bassett writes, she is commenting on the computational ‘turn’: the shift to code, software and the beginnings of the ‘post-digital’ in more global (though Western-centric) world. Writing today, we can add another ‘turn’ – that which is usually referred to as ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford 2012) or discussed in relation to the ‘quantified self’ (Lupton 2016) – the datalogical turn. The datalogical turn refers to the way that large-scale databases and dynamic algorithms are reshaping the politics of the socio-technical (Suchman 2007b) and generating what Patricia Ticineto Clough et al. have called the ‘new onto-logic of sociality or the social itself’ (2015:146).

Whilst Clough et al. and Suchman are interested in a new (datalogical, socio-technical) ‘turn’, they also remind us that what is new is not necessarily what we first imagine. Indeed, for Clough et al. the ordering of the social and sociality through the logics of data and adaptive algorithms is not new: the sociological and indeed the social has always fetishised data through a wider recourse to ‘qualitative methods’ – which in fact are modes of measurement that seek to redistribute ‘the human body and the figure of the human subject into datafied terrains’ (2015:148). For Clough et al. the social and the technological have always been enmeshed, big data and the datalogical turn just reveals this quite starkly to us. For Suchman, the socio-technical is also a long running enmeshing of technical systems – government, institutional, bureaucratic – with the social.

The starting point for this book, then, is a recognition in part that we have been here before. Neither the technological ‘turns’ nor their accompanying gender relations, with their almost simultaneous cautious optimism and rapid disillusionment are new (see Firestone 1979 on technology in the 1960s, for example). Like feminism (and its waves), we can also note cycles of technological change with a promise of novelty and change and the accompanying critical and cautionary voices. They work to remind us, as Cynthia Cockburn notes, that ‘technology itself cannot be fully understood without reference to gender (1992:33). While we may well have been here before, we also need to recognise that every ‘turn’ is also a return, and in the act of returning, some issues have more salience than others: some issues continue and some seem to disappear. Sophie Day and Celia Lury, for example, in their discussions about biosensors and self-tracking, argue that we need to understand such phenomena as part of wider ‘recursive fractals’ (2016:60). This directs us to think about the wider and durable politics and practices at work here, rather than on the novel technology and its functions or interface. It is a sentiment echoed by scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles (2017) and Ned Rossiter (2017), who both critique contemporary tendencies to focus on consequential outputs, such as dashboards or content, to the detriment of a critical inquiry into the affective, datalogical, socio-technical infrastructures – the recursive fractals – that not only condition and generate such outputs, but invite us to elevate them as meaningful and therefore direct us away from deeper interrogation. For Ned Rossiter for example, it is no surprise that the turn towards (big) data and data analytics happens in the context of what he calls a ‘certain neo-positivist epistemological and institutional anxiety around the production of “evidence-based” research’ (2017:61). Rossiter directs us to think about why we are interested in data, data visualisations, and analytics now. This is in many senses the same caution that Day and Lury raise when they note that the recursive fractals in which biosensing and self-tracking occur are increasingly organised through constitutively meaningful metrics – a logic that perpetuates itself through the continual premise of, and through, tracking (2016:60). In other words, our contemporary datalogical ‘turn’ is both part of a continuum and a return. It poses new questions and offers new directions, but in so doing stabilises and makes ‘durable’ (to borrow from Latour 1990) certain relations and assumptions – such as those around gender – whilst also reconfiguring them in ways that make their histories and politics already seemingly accounted for.

At the same time the contemporary datalogical turn is generating and perpetuating a number of profound and affective algorithmic vulnerabilities. Algorithmic vulnerability is a concept borrowed from Engineering and Computer Science disciplines, where it refers to the vulnerability of algorithms within dynamic systems usually because of hacking, faults in code, or the use of third party software where source code is inaccessible (see for example, Foreman 2010; Vacca 2017). The presumption within these disciplines is that vulnerability can be reduced through the creation of more robust and secure algorithms to increase optimisation, efficiency and security. Within these disciplines, vulnerability refers to inefficient, insecure and slow systems and the attempts to erase vulnerability is a move to speed up and optimise systems in terms of processes and decision-making. But the creation of more robust and secure systems, which are always designed to meet specific goals and objectives, also creates, and may intensify, inequalities and exclusions, not least by black boxing algorithms, or rendering them less available to public scrutiny of any kind. The silences around carer responsibilities or early pregnancy discussed in Chapter 2, for example, are entirely logical for a system designed for measuring amount and action, but are entirely inappropriate for the young women of my study. User experience design, which underpins the design and build of systems, models patterns of behaviour, goals and motives exhibited by individuals in the context of a specific use case. Yet this goal- orientated approach neither accounts for systems as everyday and lived, nor closes the increasingly widening gap between individuals, operators and engineers that is occurring as a result of automated processes. The result is that vulnerability is shifted (rather than negated) – onto the humans positioned by, and the subject of, such systems. For this book, algorithmically vulnerable communities are those whose lives are overly determined by algorithms and automated systems, for whom the decision-making power of algorithmic systems is felt in a lived and embodied sense, and who are conceptualised and identified (‘dividuated’) by systems in ways that rarely match up with their own sense of identity. The women of Chapter 2 are counted as NEET rather than as carers or pregnant women, for example. The women of Chapter 3 are counted as online content rather than as caring and thoughtful partners. The young mothers of Chapter 4 are atomised into productive amounts – fluid ounces, hours of sleep, amount of nappy changes – rather than in relation to the painful and exhausting affective experiences of cracked and bleeding nipples, mastitis, insomnia. For these groups, the power of the systems is affectively profound not least because the irreconcilabilities between their own lived experiences and the powerful decision-making datalogical systems are felt everyday and on and through their own bodies.

Irreconcilability and algorithmic vulnerability play key roles in the long interweaving of gender and technology. In what follows I highlight some key ways they are enmeshed, which have particular resonance for this book. They are interwoven when we think about how we conceptualise and imagine technology (on an individual and on a cultural level), where the possibilities for alternative understandings of our relationship with technology, for digital expertise and knowledge are always-already shaped by normative gendered presumptions about both technology and humans. This argument runs throughout the book but is centrally tackled in Chapters 3 and 5. Gender and technology are interwoven when we think about our representations through and of technology and gender (through images, content, screens and dialogue), where the screen is highly and aesthetically gendered, following a long trajectory of representational practices within our culture. That these images are highly gendered, misogynistic, banal, normative and everyday is a central issue for the book and centrally tackled in Chapters 3 and 4. Gender and technology are interwoven when we think about everyday practices (the quotidian and mundane mediations with and through technology), where our everyday digital practices make normative the gendering of the digital and further generate uneven consequences that are also highly gendered. And they are interwoven when we think about the digital and technical infrastructures ‘themselves’ (algorithms, code, data, structure), where the power relations embedded in our dashboards and algorithms promote and generate gendered images, discourses, practices and cultures and actively shape what can and cannot be imagined, represented and experienced. This latter issue forms the central argument of Chapter 2 and is returned to in later chapters to think about what this means for issues such as expertise, knowledge, automation and the everyday (Chapters 4, 5 and 6).

When we unpack this further, we find not only that gender and technology are interwoven in complex and nuanced ways, we also find that at the heart of gender and technology relations there is an inherent irreconcilability that has underpinned much feminist scholarship not least because it is these irreconcilabilities that frame many of the cultural anxieties and moral panics around technology. Gender and technology, as this book explores, are irreconcilable because there is a tension at the heart of gender-technology relations that both feeds into, and is generated by, imaginings, representations, practices and digital infrastructures. These irreconcilabilities have been discussed in a range of ways by feminist scholars: Elizabeth Grosz talks about a particular kind of gendered ‘fantasy’ that is revealed as exclusionary and as highly gendered through closer interrogation (2001:41–47). Caroline Bassett discusses what she calls a ‘discontinuity’ at the heart of technofeminism, which is set aside at different technological ‘turns’ and sets aside issues of gender and technology, which returns us again and again to an impasse (2013:201–202). Judy Wajcman talks about the ‘absence’ of women as a condition of their presence in writings about technology (2004:40–45). Aristea Fotopoulou talks about the ‘contradictions’ and ‘tensions’ between what she outlines as inclusion and exclusion, representation and materiality, opportunity and impossibility, empowerment and vulnerability (2016:1). All of these scholars are tackling an irreconcilability that is at the heart of gender and technology – an issue also centrally engaged with throughout this book. Taking a longer view, we may well conclude that these irreconcilabilities are at the heart of longstanding social, cultural, political, and technical relations, that they generate and feed algorithmic vulnerability. But we also need to note that these irreconcilabilities – these ruptures, tensions or interventions – are also, crucially, generative in terms of opening up disruptive and productive spaces in which we can interrogate and intervene into the power relations of the socio-technical. Indeed, as Mary Jacobus argues:

To propose a difference of view, a difference of standard – to begin to ask what the difference might be – is to call in question the very terms which constitute that difference.

(1979:10)

Jacobus’ argument is one that is precisely about the generative possibilities of irreconcilabilities. She suggests that we need to do more than argue from withinthe dominant discourse not least because this fails to question the terms of that discourse. Instead, we need to step outside it in order to attempt to move beyond the terms of ‘reason’. We can see this work in the feminist scholars discussed previously where they use the irreconcilabilities to open up new spaces and to propose new approaches to the political questions and issues they discuss. In keeping with this work, I suggest that acknowledging irreconcilability is the first step in questioning the terms that constitute the dominant paradigms of gender-technological relations. In a similar vein to earlier scholarship, thinking about irreconcilability in relation to our contemporary (datalogical) ‘turn’ can richly and powerfully generate new understandings of technology as always-already, inherently gendered.

Not forgetting

Taking on board the arguments of previous feminist scholars and responding to the initial arguments at the start of this chapter around the forgetfulness of feminism, it is useful to briefly sketch out some of the ways irreconcilability has been conceptualised and is understood across the wider spectrum of gender and cultural studies. Indeed, irreconcilability is (of course) a term that I am consciously using to evoke not just earlier feminist scholarship around gender and technology, but also wider feminist scholarship around gender identity and subjectivity. In relation to the latter, it is the ‘fleshy’ (Battersby 1998:11; Shaw 2012:121), ‘viscous’ (de Beauvoir 1988:407) ‘semi permeable’ (Mol 2008:30), ‘interrupted’ (Baraitser 2009) female body that is always-already irreconcilable with a lived and imagined whole subjectivity. A lived, imaginary and whole subjectivity is, in turn, the whole, unified, mobile, stable authorial body of neoliberalism, modernity and, of course, masculinity (see McRobbie 2009; S. Thornham 2007). Set against this is the female body, which is ever-changing and itself encompassing of, and constructed through, a range of embodied relations (e.g. a young body, a pregnant body, a mothering body) which also continually shift – quite often relationally – and are constantly reconfigured. Within feminist theory, this ambiguous state has been critically discussed in relation to terms such as ‘ paradoxical’ and ‘inconsistent’ (Battersby 1998:11), ‘abject’ (Westfall 2006:264) and ‘intra’ (Barad 2009:170), which together work to highlight the anxieties caught up in the wider popular imagination around female embodied subjectivity (see, e.g. Kristeva 1980:237). As S. Thornham suggests (2013:9) it is difficult to reconcile Julia Kristeva’s (1980) account of cells that ‘fuse, split and proliferate’, of tissues that ‘stretch’ and body fluids that ‘change rhythm, speeding up and slowing down’ (1980:237) with a Cartesian subjectivity that underpins so much contemporary neoliberal philosophy.

As feminist scholars argue (see also Battersby 1998; Hirsch 1992), the embodied, lived, corporeal female subjectivity is at odds, then, with a ‘free’ and ‘autonomous’ neoliberal subject, who is the fantasy – interestingly and obviously – of both gendered subjectivity and technology (as I detail later). Indeed, in relation to the latter, the trend towards individualism – a long-term facet of discourses of technology (see Livingstone 2009) and neoliberalism – creates what O’Reilly calls a ‘liberal fiction’ of female agency and autonomy that is also fundamentally bound up in, amongst other things, the contradictory postfeminist discourse of ‘choice’ (2010:208, see also Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009; Negra 2009; Thornham 2015). Seen here, and through the lens of a universal and benign construction of an apolitical and ungendered technology (which is also, of course, a fiction), the female subject can choose to be who she wants online, she can go where she wants, she has control, choice and agency. This construction of a mobile active user of technology is bound up in, as I have argued elsewhere (see Thornham 2013, 2015), the discourses of technology and particularly Web 2.0 and its promise of user-generated content, control and malleability (see also T. O’Reilly 2005; Jenkins 2006). Most often encapsulated by the term ‘digital native’ (see Thornham and MacFarlane 2011), but also through terms such as ‘born digital’, or the ‘netzien’, the ideal user of technology is constructed as a powerful agent able to direct and navigate through the technologies on offer (see also Fenton and Barassi 2011:191; Castells 2009:129) and the technology (as I have argued elsewhere, see Thornham 2013) is constructed variously as either a ‘supportive facilitator’ (Thornham 2013:190) or in relation to the imagined possibilities on offer (see Östman 2012). This constructs the technology in particular ways – not only as a facilitator, but also as a separate space that can be acted onto and into, as known and compliant. The user, by comparison, is a mobile and whole subject able to direct navigation, contribute content and, importantly, choose (e.g. friends, goods, services). She is also, and in keeping with discourses of maternal subjectivity (see Wajcman 1991:70, see also Minden 1987; Crowe 1987; Lawler 2000; Shaw 2012; Franklin 2010), facilitated by, supported by and also constructed by technology, which understands, measures and values her in particular ways. These discourses locate power with the user, and – and here we come to the ‘liberal fiction’ – as long as the user engages with this technology in keeping with the politics of the system she can ‘choose’ (e.g. where, when and what to buy/participate/contribute). The central irony here, of course, which I discuss in Chapter 3, is that even as mobility and agency are valued in the digital, the notion of a whole – and embodied – subject is maintained – and ‘set aside’.

That this is a liberal fiction has been discussed by many scholars looking at the underlying capitalist principles of the Internet (for example) (e.g. Lovink 2011; Gehl 2014), the discourses of ‘sharing’ and ‘friending’ (van Dijck 2013; J. Kennedy 2013) or the way the infrastructural logics of the digital shape our capacity for action (Suchman 2007a, 2007b; van House 2011). These scholars all discuss a wider concept of liberal fiction which is about how we readily enter into a sort of ‘suspended disbelief’ (to borrow a phrase from film studies) to conceptualise the technological as bending to our desires rather than vice versa. In thinking about feminist scholarship, and thinking about the implications of this liberal fiction for gender and technology relations, we find a double convolution whereby the female user of technology has to not only align herself with the normative male user of technology, she also has to adopt these frameworks as markers of her agency. This a contemporary iteration in many respects, of the ‘ “freedom” through consumption’ discussed by Ros Gill in relation to advertising and postfeminism (2007:81). At the same time it is important to note that the ‘liberal fiction’, time and time again, generates spaces of optimism at each technological ‘turn’ which in the 1990s is aligned with cyborgian promises of a gender-free, post-patriarchal identity; and in 2017 is aligned with the postfeminist and neoliberal promises of choice, agency and control. As Fotopoulou tells us, neoliberalism works by ‘promoting self-management, self-monitoring, empowerment and individualism’ (2016:6). One of the ironies of contemporary digital culture, then, is that these markers are straightforwardly celebrated as agential rather than being understood as the precise opposite. Again, that these moments are liberal fictions has also been widely discussed by feminist scholars (see Hayles 1999; Bassett 2013; S.Thornham 2007; Suchman 2006) and it is worth briefly extrapolating some of the main arguments here not least because even though they resonate powerfully in contemporary issues of representation, practice and infrastructure, they are nevertheless mostly absent in contemporary accounts of the digital such as those discussed previously. Contemporary digital scholars – such as Geertz Lovink or José van Dijck, for example – clearly highlight a number of liberal fictions at work in our contemporary engagement with the digital. The gender politics of this liberal fiction and the gender politics of the technological infrastructures, though, are not on their horizon and, given the extant earlier scholarship, this absence is notable.

The first argument to outline is the one posited by Sadie Plant (1998), when she suggests that the fragmented digital environment with its multiple speeds and spaces is one that is exactly suited to female subjectivity because she has much experience of oscillatory and contradictory performances that are shaped by contextual demands. Plant is writing at a particular moment of cyberfeminism and optimism but, as Suchman subsequently argues, Plant re-evokes an essentialist gendered identity (2006:323) and sets it aside in favour of an alternative digital ‘space’ or place that is somehow separate f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Gender, irreconcilability, and the datalogical anthropocene
• 2 Being data(logical)
• 3 Being accountable: practices, images, infrastructure
• 4 Being known: autom-data-ed bodies, maternal subjectivity
• 5 Gender and the digital mundane
• 6 Between irreconcilability and the datalogical
• Bibliography
• Index