Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

Between Empowerment and Vulnerability

Aristea Fotopoulou

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137504708
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137504715
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in relation to identity and to activist practice. Aristea Fotopoulou examines how activists make claims about rights online, and how they negotiate access, connectivity, openness and visibility in digital networks. Through a triple focus on embodied media practices, labour and imaginaries, and across the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer social life, she advocates a move away from understandings of digital media technologies as intrinsically exploitative or empowering. By reinstating the media as constant material agents in the process of politicization, Fotopoulou creates a powerful text that appeals to students and scholars of digital media, gender and sexuality, and readers interested in the role of media technologies in activism.

© The Author(s) 2016

A. FotopoulouFeminist Activism and Digital NetworksPalgrave Studies in Communication for Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50471-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

Aristea Fotopoulou¹

(1)

University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom

Keywords

Biodigital vulnerabilityDigital feminismNetworked feminismLabourMaterialityMedia practice

End Abstract

Feminist and queer activism are guided by strong visions of social change in which digital and network communications feature prominently. The invisibility, normalisation and ubiquity of media in our everyday lives, and the strong influence of imaginaries, make it important to question their role and impact on contemporary political identities and action. What does it mean for network technologies and network logics to become incorporated in the everyday lives and spaces of activists, as a preferred and often even default mode of interaction? Are these technologies just tools used concurrently with media and cultural forms of political expression that were dominant prior to Web 2.0,¹ e.g. protest marches, mailing lists and zines? Or do they reconfigure feminist politics and cultures in more fundamental ways?

In this book, I approach these questions by delineating digital networked culture as a space of tensions and contradictions. There are contradictions between inclusion and exclusion in new communicative environments; between representation and materiality; between articulations of opportunity and realisations of impossibility; and, perhaps the most important tension for activists in the digital era, between vulnerability and empowerment. These tensions and contradictions are prescribed by the ways in which our lives increasingly take place in digitally saturated environments – and by this I refer to both online spaces and the widespread digital saturation of virtually all aspects of our lives. But far from assuming that digital technologies are the most central aspect of our cultural and political lives, and resisting the myth of the internet as a priori democratic, I maintain a focus on the embodied, lived, material and socially situated aspects of feminist and queer activism. Such attention involves a reflection on the intersections of age, class, race and disability in specific social and cultural contexts, and as they operate at larger scales online. Media technologies, social media and the internet do not exist as a space beyond and independently of the situated practices of feminist activists. They inform and shape each other. In fact, as I argue in this book, doing feminism and being feminist implies enacting ourselves primarily as embodied and social subjects through media practices and imaginaries of technologies and the internet, but also as citizens and users of these technologies.

In examining what forms of feminist and queer political engagement are culturally and historically specific in the context of networked communication, I find it necessary to think about political subjectivities and agency, and the media practices that inform them. What does it mean to be a feminist in the digital age and how do we understand being political? Posing this question entails resisting the assumption that feminism is one movement, or one unified identity. When talking about gender and sexuality politics, we need to be reminded of the immense diversity of feminist cultures, and the passionate commitment to self-reflexivity that characterises feminism as a social movement with a long history. These are key aspects of feminism that are especially neglected in accounts clinging to a taxonomy of waves. Feminist activism is not one thing. As I show in this book, it is a complex set of identities and cultures, whose different investments in, and practices with, media technologies mean different organisational structures and even political priorities. For some, social media and other new media technologies are strategic – they provide opportunities for direct engagement with civic life. For others, digital media delineate a space where certain gendered bodies, such as those of older women or trans people, experience new forms of precariousness and marginalisation. For example, in Chapter 2, I examine how women’s groups, like other contemporary civil society actors, participate in the online public sphere (Downing 2001; Gordon 2007) to different degrees; age, lack of resources and media literacy are the three most important factors that modulate this participation, and in some cases become new types of exclusions of access to publicity and recognition. Being neither hackers nor artists, these activists could not really work ‘through protocol’ (Galloway 2004) to achieve recognition. They lacked the necessary skills and resources that would allow them to resist the ubiquity of protocol. But the picture is very different for the so-called digital natives in many women’s organisations that have emerged after the domestication of internet technologies and social media, and for whom media technologies are a form of cultural and social capital. Meanwhile, postporn transnational networks, geeky feminist cultures that use selfies as a political tool, queer feminists who create a pedagogic activist media practice and academic feminist networks whose focus is the production of knowledge are all different political formations entering the discussion of this book with different stakes and expectations from the digital. And we must not forget that this diversity of feminist cultures and identities operates within a wider cultural and political context of neoliberalism, in which discourses of autonomy and choice challenge any kind of collective identity.

Theoretically, the book sits within recent debates in critical social theory and network politics, which have well identified a decline in representation and traditional political life. Approached as part of technoscientific capitalism, digital network culture is often seen to contribute to this decline, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to form collective and sustained forms of politics in a culture that is characterised by ephemeral – though abundant – content production and circulation of media texts. However, it is not enough to denote such decline. I find it essential to identify and account for forms of organisation that have within them the potential for a progressive politics of social equality. In my project of mapping such politics, and the entanglement of feminism with communicative practices and paradigms, I rework notions of biopolitics in digital networks, mainly through the work of Hardt and Negri, and Terranova; while I am informed by key concepts in feminist science and technology studies from key theorists, including Barad, Braidotti, Colebrook and Haraway. In thinking about feminist politics and digital media, I start my exploration in this book with emphasis on

• situated activist media practices,
• the relationship between activism and communicative capitalism and
• the cultural/historical contexts and social visions shaping this feminism and their digital media practices.

My aim is twofold: first, since this is an empirically informed project, I seek to provide a substantial but by no means exhaustive account of contemporary gender and sexual politics, and to understand how ideas of networks, citizenship and community are perceived by activists. Second, the book theorises the interchange between digital media and feminism and develops a set of 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 first one, networked feminism, describes the collective identities and communicative practices of activists as they are shaped by the social imaginary of the internet (understood as the network) and digital engagement. The concept of networked feminism helps us rethink media technologies and their role in feminism by reflecting on how activist cultures negotiate five key aspects of digital media technologies: access, connectivity, immediacy, labour and visibility. Through these negotiations, activists critically rethink and problematise rather than accept digital media as intrinsically exploitative or empowering technologies. Biodigital vulnerability helps us understand the complex dynamics of content production and control that constitute online networks as contradictory spaces of both vulnerability and empowerment for feminist and queer politics. In particular, my argument is that corporeal vulnerability, and the new forms of governmentality that appear due to technoscientific acceleration, when made public can have great political potential and can be empowering for communities and individuals that have been marginalised or victimised due to sexuality or gender. But let me start by clarifying some of the key theoretical premises of the book.

Digital Feminism?

Following the more generalised optimism about the role of social media in uprisings around the world such as those in Tunisia and Egypt, many writers have celebrated digital feminist activism as a turning point for feminism as a social movement, particularly because of its seeming horizontality and capacity to facilitate intersectional debate.² An article in The Guardian has gone as far as to exclaim that digital media technologies are so important to building a strong and reactive movement that they signify a ‘fourth wave’ in the feminist movement (Cochrane 2013). The hopefulness regarding social media and their capacity to facilitate feminist activism is by no means unsubstantiated. There are, indeed, many examples of feminist activism happening online since 2010 to draw from: Twitter actions and hashtag feminism in relation to the actions of PussyRiot are perhaps the most popular and recognisable ones. But even less prominent cases, such as FEMEN, have been considered to operate as reflexive critical spaces where tensions such as those arising from white privilege can be revisited. In an examination of Slutwalk Berlin, FEMEN, and Muslima Prida, and the associated hashtags, Baer (2015), for instance, notes how these digital feminist campaigns make visible the tensions that have characterised feminism as a social movement for years. But Baer (2015) goes as far as calling this a ‘redoing of feminism’, because of the interplay between local embodied struggles, protest and the more discursive and disembodied activity online. One may here recognise a response to Angela Mcrobbie’s (2007) key argument that neoliberalism and post-feminism in particular are ‘undoing feminism’. This optimistic response to a bleak diagnosis is attractive, but this book is neither ‘redoing’ nor ‘undoing’; my interest is rather in the ‘doing’ of feminism in digital media. As I argue throughout the book, doing feminism and being feminist involves enacting ourselves as activists – as embodied – and political subjects through media practices, technologies, the imaginaries linked to these new technologies and the internet.

There are a number of important questions that dim the optimism of digital feminism accounts. First of all, is it media technologies, old or new, digital or analogue, that are doing feminism (or redoing or undoing it)? Can we not detect in such a claim a cultural bias, in our ‘culture of connectivity’ (Van Dijck 2013), that places social media or otherwise visible-on-the-screen networks as the vanguard of feminist political action? Because of their celebration of the technological rather than the social, accounts of digital feminism largely disregard questions of cultural specificity and do not allow an investigation of agency in the multiple ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks
• 2. Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism: Digital and Networked by Default?
• 3. The Paradox of Feminism, Technology and Pornography: Value and Biopolitics in Digital Culture
• 4. From Egg Donation to Fertility Apps: Feminist Knowledge Production and Reproductive Rights
• 5. Space, Locality and Connectivity: The End of Identity Politics as We Know It?
• 6. Epilogue: Looping Feminist Threads
• Back Matter