On a warm October day, nearly three years ago, a group of feminists at the University of Oregon got together to talk about shared research interests in gender, new media, and technology. We kvetched, as academics are wont to do, about publishing, about how so much of our work was locked away in journals and books that weren’t accessible on the internet, and about the amount of labor we perform (publishing, reviewing, reading) these publications with so little compensation, of either economic or intellectual varieties. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick put it in Planned Obsolescence, which some of us were reading during its online peer review, we found ourselves “entrenched in systems that no longer serve our needs” (2011, 13), if indeed they ever did.

The seeds of the Fembot platform and its online journal Ada were planted that day. As ideas for the project began to germinate, those of us located in Oregon knew that if Fembot was going to work, it had to move beyond a single institutional host – we had to grow organically, rhizomatically and horizontally, rather than institutionally and vertically. And we did not want to create an Old Girls’ Network made up of affinity networks that sprouted from individual members. Instead, we wanted to avoid the pitfall of many feminist organizations – what Jo Freeman described so many years ago as a “tyranny of structurelessness,” which enabled affinity groups rather than transparent rules and procedures to govern organizations.

So we began to hold meetings at conferences – at the International Communication Association’s conventions in Boston and Phoenix, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ conference in New Orleans, at Console-ing Passions in Eugene and Boston, at the Crossroads Conference in Paris. Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford, and Mat Wall-Smith of Fibreculture spent an inspirational coffee hour with us in Sydney, talking about their project and process, and how they had so effectively, in Chris’s words, “performed legitimacy.” With a group of visionary professors and graduate students at Concordia who connected with us at an early meeting in Boston, we began to map out a possible platform. At every meeting, participants came up with new ideas for creating interest and collaborations. At a preliminary meeting in New Orleans, Carrie Rentschler from McGill commented on the dearth of short, teachable pieces of feminist media criticism. And like that, Laundry Day was born! Graduate students at UO mentioned how hard it was to find sample dissertation prospectuses – our Professional Potpourri now has two of those samples and plans to expand to include grant applications and job letters. Hye-Jin Lee and Carol Stabile had a conference hotel lobby coffee break that produced the idea for Books Aren’t Dead, which has become one of our most popular features. There isn’t a single feature of Fembot that wasn’t the product of collaborations like these.

Throughout our conversations, we heard one unified call: smash open the black box of publication. This has led to the formation of an interdisciplinary, open access, multimodal journal committed to innovation, experimentation, and creating leadership possibilities for feminist graduate students and faculty members. Many of us can recount stories about not ever feeling at home in institutional spaces, about difficulties with peer review processes that stemmed from our political orientations. Indeed, feminism is threatening enough to the status quo. When you add to that a feminism that critically allies itself with digital culture and new media, the combination can be downright terrifying to non-feminist or anti-feminist academics. Our experiment in open access publication would need to create a support system for feminists engaged in this kind of research, as well as leadership possibilities for feminist graduate students. It would also – centrally – need to transform how we work. Ada was born of this shared sense of the need for feminist platforms for creativity, collaboration, and mentoring. It addresses the need for a new kind of intellectual home.

Of course, our conversations have been tempered by reservations, qualms, and a host of uncertainties. How could we model the forms of inclusivity the project requires? How can we attend to relations of power and hierarchy in academia, which measures and assess the value of academic work through metrics and indices that are take seriously by hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees? How could we confer legitimacy on the kinds of conversations we wanted to have, while avoiding abstract references to “excellence”? How could Fembot and Ada be truly international, given our limited translational capacities? Why would graduate students and assistant professors want to publish in a new online journal? How would we get work done, given how overcommitted we all feel? And why now? Why not wait until some of these issues could be more systematically addressed and more funding secured for the project?

This inaugural issue reflects our decision to be bold – to take this opportunity to seize the means of production (albeit in a limited fashion). In this spirit, we launched Fembot’s Laundry Day in January 2012 and now this first issue of Ada. In addition to this first issue, “Conversations Across the Field,” we have committed to the following issues, which take us into 2016!

• Issue 1: Conversations in the Field Issue (November 2012), co-editors Kim Sawchuk and Carol Stabile
• Issue 2: Feminist Game Studies (May 2013), editor Nina Huntemann, Suffolk University
• Issue 3: Feminist Science Fiction (November 2013), editor Alexis Lothian, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Issue 4: Open Call (May 2014), co-editors Kim Sawchuk and Carol Stabile
• Issue 5: Challenging the Ideology of the Digital Divide: Feminists of Color and New Media Studies (November 2014), editor TBA
• Issue 6: Open call (April 2015), editor TBA
• Issue 7: Archives and Archiving (November 2015)
• Issue 8: Militarism and Technology: Fighting the War Machine(s) (May 2016), editor TBA

This first issue is comprised of articles we solicited from feminists whose work we valued and respected. From the start, we imagined this issue as a wide-ranging conversation across fields. The conversation begins, as it rightly should, with Krista Geneviève Lynes’ compelling call for vigilance in understanding the “frictions between media activists and media objects in the global sphere.” Lynes effectively challenges the “presumption of solidarity among feminist media activists around the world,” cautioning us to continue to seek affinities or resemblances between media works and media activism in the global system with care and attention to the centrality of very different material and historical contexts.

Sarah Kember’s contribution to Ada enacts the question of feminism as a writing practice, invoking the idea of the manifesto, re-considering the vital contributions of previous generations of feminist writers, like Hélène Cixous and Donna Haraway. In her pointed reflections on the need for a genealogical approach to media history, she asks us to consider interventions into with science and technology through a consideration of “feminist methodologies” as forms of intervention that take us “from dissent to dialogue back to what Derrida calls dissension – the internal revolutions or overturnings that might afford us non-entrepreneurial opportunities or spaces for some serious play.”

Together, Mia Consalvo and Lisa Nakamura look at persistent harassment in video games and other online environments, calling for more feminist work in those areas, but also increased understanding of the structuring roles of gender, race, and class. By linking the constituent elements of what she describes as a “toxic gamer culture” in a time line, Consalvo vividly illustrates the systematicity of these behaviors, asking feminist scholars to continue the work of documenting these abuses, as well as continuing to research related topics and work on strategies for intervention. Nakamura would also have us direct our attention to the myriad ways in which race and gender privilege play out in videogame culture, analyzing the important role played by very gendered and raced forms of gaming capital.

Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo’s contribution addresses pedagogy, another key component of a feminist project for the transformation of the university. Written as a dialogue, they recall their reasons for creating FemTechNet, a sister project to Fembot, that is a transnational experiment in online feminist course delivery that uses virtual space to create new collaborations and connections between different nodes of intellectual activity. A crucial feminist intervention into the growing field of online education, FemTechNet emerges from the crosscurrents and yearnings for feminist community that also inspired Fembot.

Importantly, Vicki Mayer’s contribution reminds us of the materiality of more privileged people’s device-driven worlds and the increasing fragility of the infrastructures that support these. Mayer begins with her recent experience following Hurricane Isaac in New Orleans, a city that has seen much more than its share of climate change driven sorrow over the past decade. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of parts of the Caribbean and the US northeast, Mayer offers us the cogent and always necessary reminder that our ventures into the brave new world of digital publication are fundamentally linked to a material infrastructure grounded in harsh economic disparities.

In the spirit of building a community of critics, readers, and engaged students, we hope that you will participate in this inaugural conversation across the field by commenting on the contributions, tweeting links to it, and engaging with the ideas and research featured in this issue. Because we wanted to invite speakers to comment on broad issues in the field of feminist media studies, this first issue was not peer-reviewed. Our next issue, on Feminist Game Studies, will be fully peer reviewed in a system designed to make the process open, accessible, and useful to all those who participate in it.

Because of the collaborative nature of this project, we have many people to thank for making it possible. Thanks first to our good-natured contributors for their lively and thoughtful contributions to this, our first issue, and for their patience with the process.

A longstanding debt of gratitude to the librarians at UO who made Fembot possible: Karen Estlund, who is also a member of the Fembot Advisory Board; Annie Zeidman-Karpinski, who attended many of our early meetings; Andrew Bonamici, who was a booster from the start.

Many professors (full, associate, assistant) gave freely of their time, enthusiasm, support, and advice: Alisa Freedman, Joan Haran, Nina Huntemann, Polina Kroik, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Tara McPherson, Lisa Parks, and Carrie Rentschler.

Graduate students made this project hum. For their insights, energy, labor, myriad talents, and tech savvy, we thank Fiona Barnett, Chelsea Bullock, Hye-Jin Lee, M.E. Luka, and Jacqueline Wallace. Mara Williams provided the wonderful cover image for this and several upcoming issues. A huge shout-out to Staci Tucker, who took on the work of designing Ada and helping to get it launched.

Thanks also to Chris Wilde and Milo Miller from QZAP, for advice about building community and the platform at a very early stage of our development.

The Fembot Advisory Board has provided guidance, reality checks, and inspiration over the past year. Our gratitude to:

• Anne Balsamo, who provides a key link to FemTechNet and has shared critical resources with Fembot
• Karen Estlund, who has wrangled designers, domains, and so much more from her vantage point in the UO Libraries
• Radhika Gajjala, who reminds us of the importance of internationalizing Fembot and whose collaborative skills are amazing;
• Mél Hogan, whose Nomorepotlucks has been a design inspiration!
• Sarah Kember, whose commitment to experimentation continues to move us all forward;
• In the midst of completing her own dissertation, Hye-Jin agreed to manage “Books Aren’t Dead,” a series of podcast interviews between authors of new books in feminist media studies and junior faculty members and graduate students that will go live on Fembot on 1 December 2012;
• Bryce Peake, our web mistress, who has made sure that our content is visually compelling and fresh and who has handled crises with aplomb and good humor;
• Jacqueline Wallace, whose creative industry experience has made her a sharp and wonderful reader of this project.

We owe Chelsea Bullock a huge thank you. Chelsea oversaw far more doodles than anyone should, she helped organize a symposium, and is helping us with two upcoming unconferences, among other logistical feats (including the first Fembot baby and a dissertation prospectus).

And finally, thank you to the Fembot Collective. Ada – and Fembot – are meant to be forums for lively discussion: for what Sarah Kember refers to as “dissensus,” in an engaged, respectful fashion. We can’t do that without you.

—CITATION—
Stabile, C. & Sawchuk, K. (2012) Introduction: Conversations across the fields. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.1. doi:10.7264/N3RN35SV

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A scene in Sandra Schäfer and Elfe Brandenburg’s Passing the Rainbow (2008) exposes a compelling predicament in transnational feminist media studies: the search for connections, comparisons or adjacencies between feminist media objects in disparate locations around the globe. Schäfer and Brandenburger’s experimental documentary and art project reflects on and theorizes the media landscape of post-Taliban Afghanistan and the scene in question reveals an interview with an activist from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) about the media activism the group undertakes. In it, the interviewer asks whether RAWA works with other feminist media organizations, referring obliquely to the work of the Self-Employed Women’s Association’s Video SEWA program in India. The question was rooted in an understandable desire to see the connections between the activist use of video for self-empowerment across national and cultural spheres. The RAWA representative, however, responds as follows:

We have no direct organizational contacts with them in the sense that they can force their views on us and we have to conform to them. Unquestionably, a person’s thoughts and mentality depend on his or her social environment. In less developed countries, of which Afghanistan is one, women have been told for years that they should only perform certain activities. In Europe, women already engage in all these activities. […] They say: “Women can neither do agricultural work nor work as an engineer!” But that is simply not true! What a European woman can do, an Afghan woman can do, as well. There are no mental or anatomical differences between us. A European woman, for example, has very different expectations and ideas. Maybe her notion of equality is different. A European woman who works in a factory demands the same wages as a man. But the Afghan woman doesn’t even think about such demands. And why not? Because in Afghanistan there aren’t even the factories in which women could work. Even if some women in Afghanistan do not yet have the self-confidence, for some the main issue is finding work!

The RAWA activist’s response not only reverses the interviewer’s question (shifting registers from cooperation to cooptation), but also used the opportunity presented by a question about transnational cooperation to discuss the failures of equality-based models of feminist politics.[i] Her statement thus poses a challenge both to the presumption of solidarity among feminist media activists around the world, but also to the search for affinities or resemblances between media works and media activism in the global system.

The caution about cooptation is to a great extent grounded in RAWA’s experience working with Western feminist partners, particularly the Feminist Majority Foundation. In the spring 2002 issue of Ms. Magazine, under the new ownership of the Feminist Majority, an article entitled “A Coalition of Hope: How the International Feminist Community Mobilized around the Plight of Afghan Women” proposed that the Feminist Majority itself was the primary force behind the shift of U.S. policy toward the Taliban. The Feminist Majority Foundation Board Chair Peg Yorkin stated, “If we had not prevented the U.S. from recognizing the Taliban, think of how much worse this all would be.”[ii] In an open letter to the magazine, RAWA accused it of being a “mere mouthpiece of hegemonic, US-centric, ego driven corporate feminism,” and emphasized RAWA’s role in providing education, relief, medical assistance, and political organization for over two decades in Afghanistan.[iii]

The RAWA activist’s statement serves to highlight the fact that feminist groups around the world are not equal — the terms of their exchange may be unequal, as may be their access to resources, and their political weight at the national and transnational levels. Likewise, demands for equality may be articulated along different axes (of class, for example, rather than gender), or equality may not serve the interests of feminist struggles at all. Feminist media activists frequently work parallel to one another, within distinctly different economic, political and social frameworks, and through media whose conditions of production, distribution and reception are incommensurable. Intersections or sites of cooperation occur through the difficult work of political alliance, the circulation of media objects in transnational circuits or through new media platforms, and through the very labor of feminist scholarship that attempts to understand the global dimensions of feminist media production, circulation and spectatorship.

As feminist scholars of global media, we are driven to identify the considerable gaps in our knowledge and practices at the scale of the global, the transnational or the cross-cultural. This very scale demands an imaginative leap across specific instances in the interest of a critical scholarship that understands and engages the effects of an expansive global capitalism, in the interest of forging sites of solidarity and resistance, and in the service of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty terms a “feminism without borders.” Such scales of analysis (in media, activism and academics) focus on questions of production and reception in cultures of exchange, attending specifically to the differential relationships in the global system and the uneven terms of cooperation, even as the aim of scholarship and cultural production remain to discover possibilities for alliances, alternative histories or new identity positions. Mohanty argues that feminist analyses that cross national, racial or ethnic boundaries produce and reproduce difference through the naturalization of analytic categories, categories that presumed cross-cultural validity, arguing instead that unity needs to be struggled towards by “uncovering alternative, non-identical histories that challenge and disrupt the spatial and temporal location of a hegemonic history.”[iv]

For the transnational feminist media scholar (and indeed for a filmmaker in political solidarity with RAWA), the connections, for example, between RAWA and SEWA are generative for a “feminism without borders,” just as the conflict between RAWA and Feminist Majority Foundation serves a critical warning, an example of an expansive and reductive transnational feminism searching not for instances in a cultural-historical conjuncture so much as family resemblances.[v] A rejection of familial, analogical, or (worse) presumptive associations between media activists and video works around the globe raises the very question of how scholars might find productive intersections in feminist activism within the global system. To focus merely on local cultural production obscures the manner in which, in Stuart Hall’s terms, “historical processes with different time-scales and trajectories […] may be convened in the same conjuncture.”[vi] The current context of globalization, neoliberal politics and late capitalism focuses our theoretical attention on both the very real and immediate effects of a globalizing political economy, as well as the relational geographies of power at the local, national and transnational scale. In theorizing the contemporary conjuncture, however, we must be attentive to discrepancy, to multiplicity of the contexts of globalization as, in Lawrence Grossberg’s terms, “overlapping and competing geographies of locations, places, and diagrams, with their different logics of boundaries (coding), connectivities (territorializing), and stratifications.”[vii] A “discrepant conjuncture” signals also the limits of a conjuncture to account for all historical processes, and specifically those (subaltern) processes that operate outside the logics of globalization, capitalism and liberal democratic forces.

The RAWA activist’s caution provides an important guideline for transnational feminist scholarship: the incommensurability of different feminist struggles, and thus the specificity of the aesthetic and representational strategies mobilized in media work, are themselves generative of feminist theorizing in the globalized present. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in our knowledge and practice, then, these gaps themselves might shed light on the differential positions of women in the global system, and the uneven character of cross-cultural exchange. Such an approach entails a complex understanding of the material, cultural, and political conditions of global contact and of the discrepancies that continue to make contact impossible. The work of feminist scholars of new media, therefore, might be to make manifest these discrepancies as theoretical, cultural and political objects.

The necessity of such a practice is evidenced by the compelling desire to examine RAWA and SEWA together, to work at elucidating in theory the discrepant conjuncture between these two associations. The drive behind such an endeavor is not a taken for granted universalism, but an articulation of what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “universal aspirations.”[viii] Rather than hastily dismiss universals in favor of culturally specific analyses, Tsing argues that universals allow scholars, activists, and cultural producers to conceptualize the global, even as a fiction, imaginative act or aspiration. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s compelling statement that ‘we cannot not want the universal, even as it so often excludes us,’ Tsing argues for a scholarship of global connection through “generalization” from small details, a generalization that involves, first, a unification of the field of inquiry through “spiritual, aesthetic, mathematical, logical or moral principles,” and second, collaboration among different knowledge seekers to turn disparate forms of knowledge into compatible ones.[ix] Such collaboration involves patient, provisional work of bridging and negotiating across incompatible differences. Tsing observes, however, that both features of generalization mask one another: “The specificity of collaborations is erased by pre-established unity; the a priori status of unity is denied by turning to its instantiation in collaborations.”[x] The interplay of these two forms of generalization, according to Tsing, define the global scale.

Rather than resolve the tension between universalization and negotiation, Tsing uses the term friction to describe the unstable, unequal and creative forms of interconnection across difference. She notes, “Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.”[xi] Her method: ground the work of universalizing in specific historical contexts, through the unstable and shifting arrangements of power/knowledge in the global system; likewise, frame the work of negotiation and collaboration in the aspirational and unfulfilled imaginary of a (perpetually unachieved) universalism. The work of encounters across difference in the world thus becomes a model for critical and cultural production, the careful theorization of discrepant conjunctions rather than a single-minded cultural explanation.

Tsing’s concept of friction becomes a powerful metaphor for transnational feminist media production, circulation and criticism, for the entangled technologies, politics, geographical locations, semiotic codes, and subjective processes involved in visualizing sites of struggle across local contexts. Friction challenges the models of proximity, instantaneity, speed and flow, networks and webs that govern the more utopic visions of communications technologies. These latter metaphors ally new media with the discourses of freedom, self-actualization and transparency that governed (capitalist) models of globalization from the 1990s onward. The term ‘friction’ is both material and metaphorical: it highlights the difficult work of transnational translation across media cultures, the specific encounters of cameras and web applications, technical training, technology transfer, censorship, incommensurable platforms and exhibition spaces in which media objects emerge. Metaphorically also, friction points to the generative and repressive aspects of global connection through new media channels. Tsing stresses that friction is not a metaphor for resistance: “Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction.”[xii] Friction is productive of global connection but also importantly impedes the smooth operation of global power.

The focus here on a “discrepant conjuncture” of media activists, cultural objects, and political processes functions as an invitation to conceptualize the gap in our knowledge and practices as precisely the space of friction in and across transnational spheres. On what grounds—through what generalizable categories—might RAWA and SEWA may be compared? Through the lens of video as a mediating voice in women’s political activism? Through their common social justice work? The search for a common lens provides a generalized model for approaching the two organizations, even as the concepts vital to this scholarship necessarily shift from one context to the next, are fleshed out in frictional, paradoxical or competing terms in different contexts. The critical ground of such a feminist media analysis lies not in exposing a common underlying structure in each case—and thus identifying a form of mimesis in aesthetic strategies or political actions—but in examining a generalized category across incommensurable social, cultural and political spaces. It also involves a careful parsing of the material connections and discrepancies to illuminate the historical and cultural differences between media activism, even as one might envision and enact common political and cultural projects across these differences. Questions emerge not only about the vastly different political reality of contemporary Afghanistan and India, but also about the position of women in public life, including within the international division of labor.

RAWA was founded in 1977 by a number of Afghan women intellectuals as a political and social organization fighting for human rights and social justice in Afghanistan. It aimed to involve Afghan women in social and political activities, and fought for the establishment of a democratic and secular government in Afghanistan.[xiii] After the coup and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, RAWA became involved in the resistance movement, and separated itself from the Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting against the Soviet occupation. They played an active role in providing basic services for women and children—many of whom were refugees in camps in Pakistan—under the repressive regime of the Taliban. Their work providing schools and hostels for Afghan children and a hospital for refugee women and children in Quetta was largely framed by the resistance to the brutal conditions of women brought upon by occupation and political repression.

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), by contrast, is a trade union, started in 1972 out of the Textile Labour Association, India’s oldest and largest union of textile workers founded in 1920 by a woman, Anasuya Sarabhai. The textile labor movement drew from Mahatma Gandhi’s successful strike of textile workers in 1917, and formed a Women’s Wing in 1954 to assist women in mill workers’ households. By 1968, the Association offered classes in sewing, knitting, embroidery, spinning, typing and stenography. Finding the exploitation of women workers still rampant, and the rights of self-employed women largely unprotected, the leaders of the TLA and the Women’s Wing, on an appeal from women who worked as used garment dealers, formed the Self-Employed Women’s Association in 1971.  Its initial aims were to represent poor and self-employed women workers. Their main goals are to mobilize women to demand work security, income security, food and social security, meeting basic needs such as health care, childcare, and shelter. They aim to organize women to be self-reliant, both economically and politically (in their decision-making ability).[xiv]

While both organizations emerge—led by women—in the 1970s, the extension of the labor movement in post-colonial India to the informal sector (a labor movement that had its roots in decolonization) meant that the video activism undertaken by SEWA served to build unity among self-employed women and voice explicit demands for social justice and economic rights. The members of Video SEWA included women working in the informal sector (head loaders, vegetable vendors, home-based workers), many of whom produced documentaries representing their living conditions and political struggles. They formed a cooperative in 2002 to produce educational and informational video programs to shed light on the social and economic conditions of self-employed women, to provide information about the services provided by SEWA (including healthcare and childcare), and to bring awareness to women in an effort to create solidarity and mobilize women workers. Their videos include documentary accounts of the conditions of self-employed women (as vendors and hawkers, home-based garment workers, or agricultural workers), alongside informational videos about the work of SEWA in organizing self-employed women into a worker’s movement. They include information about unions and cooperatives, about microfinancing, or housing projects. Ultimately, Video SEWA aims to provide a tool for communication between groups of self-employed women, and between them and policy planners and government officials.

RAWA’s use of video, by contrast, is constituted by the persistent and chronic state of emergency in Afghanistan, under Soviet occupation and through the multiple human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban regime. The use of video activism served to provide evidence of human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban, and resisted both the ban on image making and on women’s participation in public life. The graphic images of beatings, executions and stonings served largely to bring international pressure to bear against the Taliban regime, as well as to solicit material support for their social work. The video work is thus largely aimed at an external audience, international human rights organizations and the international media. The videos and reports are largely distributed through RAWA’s website, although they are also included in some of RAWA’s publications.

Yet, SEWA and RAWA both work with women largely cast out from the structures of democratic citizenship and wage labor. The work of visualizing their experiences, of mobilizing collective experience stems from their location in an impossible space, both within the structures of global capitalism (as the last instance in a chain of super-exploitation) and illegible and unrecognizable as political or economic subjects (either through the political ban on public life or through the economic exclusions in the informal economy). The generalizable category—the speculative universal described by Tsing above—turns out to be not the media activism that makes both groups appear to transnational audiences, but rather the gendered nature of economic exclusion at the heart of their social justice work.

Interestingly, this fact was laid bare in the very statement by the RAWA activist with which I began, and in its invocation of the work involved in transnational feminist media scholarship. Her emphasis on the impossibility of demanding income equality in Afghanistan (“the main issue is finding work!”) signals the importance of examining how women are differently situated in and by global processes. The media activism each group undertakes serves as an important site of generative friction, rather than as the generalizable lens through which the feminist media scholar might undertake cross-cultural comparison. For RAWA’s framing of human rights abuses conforms more readily to the documentary function of investigative journalism, while SEWA’s documentary projects are modeled more fully on participatory models of community video. The RAWA activist’s statement served to unseat the notion of the commonality of oppression as well as of the specificity of discourses of empowerment. Her warning to the interviewer serves to remind the scholar that the use of media in activist work engages the specificity of the political struggle undertaken. And further, that common strategies or aesthetics may obscure the differences between the same term across contexts. The frictions between media activists and media objects in the global sphere invite scholars to write (rather than paper over) the discrepancies between the social, political, aesthetic and cultural worlds in which media emerge in meaningful imaging processes. The important gaps—the incommensurable ways in which imaging practices function in specific contexts—rather than disabling transnational feminist media work, become rather the generative site of feminist critical engagement and an important predicament for thinking through the multiple contradictions and multiplicities of feminist politics in a globalized present.

As I start to write this brief contribution to the launch of Ada – an exciting initiative not only in feminist publishing but also in the wider questions it raises about the relation between politics and technology now – it is not clear to me whether, or to what extent, “we” need another feminist manifesto, let alone a futurist one![i] Futurism is inherently problematic, not so much in its tendency to make predictions that may or may not (usually not) prove accurate, but in its adherence to technology-driven visions that play out a limited dualism of utopias and dystopias, of secularized heavens and hells. Notwithstanding the rich and often wonderful visual, popular and literary culture these visions have produced, have we not learned enough about the complex relation between technology, politics and the social to be done with the future today?

Maybe not. I’m reminded of David Lyon’s intervention in the Information Society debate (1995). Neither a celebrant nor a skeptic, Lyon simply refuses to separate technology from ‘some view of the good society’ (7). For him, futurism is legitimate if it is neither ignorant of technology nor driven by it. When it comes to technology, we are still learning to think outside of the terms of all or nothing and to regard it, in short, less as an independent agent – that will either supersede us (in intelligence, in the evolutionary stakes) or act as a panacea on our behalf – and more as a co-constituent of what we call human –  a form of agency that we work and are simultaneously worked with (Haraway 1991; Hayles 1999; Stiegler 1998; McLuhan 2006). If technology is not our friend, it does not need to become our enemy. It is important to recall the master/slave history of human-machine relations at a time when we’re being told that our smart devices and environments are designed solely to meet our individual needs, wants and whims (Suchman 2007). That is because these technologies are serving us in a double sense. They are serving us – up. They are converting their servility into a praxis of TTL (Targeting, Tracking and Location), integrating systems of marketing and surveillance and, by degrees, turning human subjects into data objects destined for advertisers and app developers. Industry-led visions of the technological future have always been disingenuous, but never more than now. There is therefore the distinct possibility that we’ve never been more in need of alternatives. A feminist futurist manifesto – especially one with an eye on the past – might offer one such alternative.

History is often deployed against the errant, beguiled, forward-looking lover of media and technology. I use the military metaphor advisedly. This is a long, drawn out and frankly tedious war between the technophobes and technophiles and their alignment, respectively, with what is properly academic and scholarly and what, on the other hand, is at best the sort of intellectualizing that serves as an indirect apology for capital and progress. Marshall McLuhan’s trajectory has been described and dismissed in this way. Yet his work says so much about the technological environment we inhabit and comprise — so troubles the paranoid dialectic of use = use or be used — that it is being reprieved, refashioned. I am one of a number of theorists who wants to think with McLuhan again, with provisos, but without (academic) prejudice (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Lister et. al. 2009). I’m certainly troubled by aspects of his work, not least its gender blindness. Still, I find its imaginative reach more fruitful than the grounded, but ultimately flattening approaches that oppose it and that use history as a/their weapon. Is the internet really no more than ‘an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory’ (Marvin 1988: 3)? The very premise is absurd. It proposes that history is linear and simply tracks back what the opposition has projected forward, creating, precisely, nothing but a counter-progressive, anti-teleological argument. Following Bolter and Grusin (following Foucault, following Nietzsche) I think of history as genealogy, not teleology – it simply does not move in straight lines.[ii] In this scenario, we’re faced with the remediation of the telegraph through the internet and that process is at once iterative and transformative.

Feminists have co-opted Foucault’s genealogies of hospitals, prisons, schools, workhouses, asylums and so on to tell hidden histories of our own.[iii] Our genealogies of feminism itself are also important precisely because they are not an investment in linearity – in going backwards to go forwards – but rather in ways of recognizing the complex, contested process of iteration and transformation. I appreciate Vikki Bell’s yoking of feminist histories and futures and most of all her observation that ‘the alternative vision of feminism is a display of an imaginative faculty’ (1999: 5). I am drawn to Clare Hemming’s account of what is at stake in feminist stories about feminism, and to her courage in suggesting that we might want to tell these differently – without recourse to narratives of progress, loss and return – if we are to sustain the ‘radical potential of feminist theory’ (2011: 2). Feminist genealogies, in addition to genealogies of feminism, rather than deploying history against the future, engage it through an investment that is necessarily imaginative, even speculative, in the possibility of political change. The premise, as Hemmings urges us to both see and tell, is that (our) politics are far from lost.

I want to highlight two aspects of a feminist genealogical approach to a technological future that isn’t (and never was) all about technology. The first consists of taking stock, of re-reading and of bringing forward, particularly those silenced, forgotten or marginalized areas of feminist debate so that we may avoid the tendency to repeat ourselves or indeed to make ‘turns’ that are predominantly or in part returns to concepts, categories and methodologies we have known.[iv] What, I wonder, would the now effectively silenced discourse of feminist psychoanalysis contribute to the current physics-inspired emphasis on agential relationality?[v] Is the need to extend our range of analysis from people to particles enough to justify the elision of an entire dimension of desire and other-than conscious drives? Do we presume that the subjects of contemporary technological culture lack an unconscious (that desire is a two-dimensional, mind-body affirmation of our becoming) or are we merely happy to leave that realm, that third dimension (or is it fourth?) to the writers and artists of science fiction who, presumably, have nothing to do with us? Do we no longer trade in desire when we write our feminist theories? My own re-reading of the once ‘new’ French feminists (who lie behind Haraway as solidly as Whitehead does), of Cixous in particular, was nothing short of stirring from the outset: ‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do’ (1985: 245). Did we stop speaking about this because of an essentialism that was never, at least unproblematically there, that was never not framed or contested from within, from the recognition by Cixous herself that there is ‘no general’, ‘no one typical’ woman? What Cixous highlights is richness, diversity, non-homogeneity. ‘Women’s imaginary’, she says, ‘is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing…’[vi]

Cixous’ injunction to write – ‘write, let no one hold you back’ – is, broadly speaking, the other aspect of a feminist genealogy that I seek to highlight here, in my proto-manifesto that is necessarily a manifesto of the ‘manifestoes’ that came before it, that also marked the launch of new journals and that sought, as I do too, to trouble the waters of feminist successes and failures and to persist in the project of transforming knowledge and/as life via the exposure of a certain masculinism that – surely – continues to reside there: ‘The frightful masculine fashion of speaking always surprises me. Speaking in order to be right – how ridiculous!’ (Gauthier 1985: 200).[vii]

Xaviére Gauthier lambasts an imitable and imitated (by “us”?) tendency to speak in order to be right or ‘in fact, to put someone else in the wrong’ (200). This is speech without reference to the vocal or the spoken, deaf to ‘the mutilation of meaning’ that must otherwise occur. It persists, she says, even ‘while a new voice is beginning to be heard’ through the gaps, speaking ‘on behalf of the unsaid’. This, perhaps never really new spoken – and written – voice continues to come through the gaps in ‘a socio-symbolic order’ that is not only, but still significantly masculine not least in its persistent claim to be right. If we call this claim representationalism,[viii] and the counter-claim is performativity[ix] then the question for me – following the logic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis – concerns the kind of critical languages (Franklin 2007), the modes of communication and critique (formed by and forming of a voice that speaks and writes on behalf of the unsaid) that are made possible or even necessary by the particular problems and challenges we now face.

The second part of my virtual[x] manifesto addresses this question of problems and, if not solutions then strategies to tackle them. The key to the latter will include, especially, a re-appraisal of ‘our’ — meaning not exclusively women’s, but post-cyborg, feminist — writing. Broadly, and from the standpoint of my own research in media, science and technology, those problems are threefold.

We are faced with exacerbated asymmetries in gendered forms of power and knowledge including or especially where those asymmetries appear to be addressed. This of course is characteristic of a neoliberal rationality[xi] which is embedded and naturalized in contemporary embedded and naturalized forms of so-called ubiquitous computing and in the partially present futurisms of supposedly human-centric, relational, affective, intelligent and intimate environments of the home and/or city. The re-orderings (of human subjects as data objects for integrated systems of surveillance and marketing) that structure these environments are rendered opaque by industry-driven investment in, even colonization of the quotidian, the ordinary everyday life of the individualized user/consumer. It is of note that the machinations of Facebook and Google are assimilated within specific, branded developments of ubiquitous computing known as Ambient Intelligence and Ambient Media. These emergent technosciences seek to reinforce a notion of everyday life even as they change it almost beyond recognition. We need to expose this sleight of hand – this Trojan Horse – especially in the light of reifications of everyday life in aspects of cultural studies (Hall 2008); notions of use and user-driven social media (Lovink 2011) and a tendency in current forms of theorizing to regard processes of affect and relationality as solutions to asymmetries of power rather than as questions we have begun to pose to them (Suchman 2007). Re-orderings at the level of subject and object privilege feminist ethical, political, epistemological and ontological interventions.

Another key problem concerns the extension of reductionism or the alignment of women with particular forms of re/productivity including, now, precarious labour plus a move away from the reduction of bodies to code (courtesy of internal as well as external critiques of genetic determinism) towards a more diffuse alignment between computationalism and (everyday) life itself. I’m thinking here not just of the segue from Artificial Life to Synthetic Biology but of Artificial Intelligence to Ambient Intelligence. The apparent downsizing of contemporary science and technology from claims to artifice (machines that can think and live) to those of ambience and augmentation are deeply disingenuous and, in as far as they extend the reach of biopower through i.e. gendered visions of the smart home,[xii]servile agents and avatars embodying female stereotypes etc, they require a gendered form of biopolitics.[xiii] Even within the short life span of Ambient Intelligence, the iconic agent of servility has shifted from that of the butler to that of the nurse. Ambient intelligent nurses, designed to manage and regulate an ageing population @home rather than in the care of the state, would know when they were needed, come when they were called and cost next to nothing compared with the flesh and blood variety who are already ever more precariously employed.

I would also want to highlight the ongoing mechanization and commercialization of the entire life process through developments in genetic engineering, Synthetic Biology and their alignment with apparently less hubristic projects like Ambient Intelligence and Augmented Reality that are actually anything but. If we were to look back at our concerns in the 80s and 90s with a rationality of total control particularly in the context of imaging and reproductive technologies (Stabile 1992; Treichler 1990) we might ask what happens to that argument about control and totality now that it is, perhaps, more visibly about what markets do than science and technology per se.[xiv] What and where are the limits to control when there is no recourse to nature/body/life outside of their instrumentalisation?

Feminist methodologies are forms of intervention, of making a difference and my own trace a course (not necessarily a progressive one) from dissent to dialogue back to what Derrida calls dissension – the internal revolutions or overturnings that might afford us non-entrepreneurial opportunities or spaces for some serious play. Dissensions occur through the non-homogeneity of all fields of praxis, including our own. They occur through technological limitations, hubristic absurdities and for me, especially through the entanglements of science and storytelling. My recent re-reading of the cyborg manifesto, rightly distanced by Haraway due to its cold war connotations, reinforced my determination to pursue and advocate storytelling as theory for post-cyborgs and writing as a pre-eminent technology of intervention (1991). Bearing in mind that anthropologists as well as novelists, feminists as well as scientists are storytellers and that writing long exceeded the word to include cells, sounds and media-making – I don’t think we have reached the full potential or implications of this approach. If the potential is there for us to do knowledge differently, for example through cell-making that is not for profit and through generating forms of media that are always already critiques of media (Juhasz 2011) then the implications are that we can no longer retreat into our own forms of story-free scientism, disown our own failed writing experiments or talk of the limitations of off-the peg categories and concepts – subject/object, nature/culture, human/machine – in theory as if theory weren’t already a form of practice, experimentation, speculation.

Of course, not all forms of storytelling are treated equally so we need, I think, a re-appraisal of writing strategies such as parody alongside our pursuit of innovations in publishing, trans/mediality and disciplinarity and a shift, perhaps in how we see ourselves in relation to the academy, industry and publics.[xv] [15] In one possible vision of a feminist future steeped in post-cyborgian storytelling, we take more responsibility for our becomings within, and without the academy.

On May 15, 2012 popular science fiction writer John Scalzi published a post to his blog Whatever entitled “StraightWhiteMale: TheLowestDifficultySettingThatThereIs.”

I learned about Scalzi as did many non-fans, through John Schwartz’s admiring NewYorkTimes piece published July 6, 2012, which cited two influential and eloquent blog posts he had written that had gone viral: “BeingPoor” and “Straight White Male.” (Read “Being Poor.” It will break your heart, as will the hundreds of comments from readers who share their personal narratives of the unique humiliations of poverty. Here’s one: “Being poor is fighting with someone you love because they misplaced a $15 dollar check.”)

As Schwartz writes, Scalzi posts to Whatever almost every day, and the blog gets over 50,000 hits a day. Scalzi covers a huge variety of topics, but these two posts on poverty, race, class, and gender have reached the widest audience and generated the most commentary and controversy because he writes from a position of absolutely unassailable white geek masculinity as a popular science fiction writer. Media fandom has taken on a newfound social currency as an indicator of masculinity in the post-internet age, and producers of sci-fi “canons” such as Scalzi have correspondingly become bigger dogs in the popular culture sphere. Scalzi skillfully deploys the cultural capital he enjoys as a much-admired and widely read science fiction writer as a means to assert a new form of patriarchal power — geek masculinity — and he employs the rhetoric of gaming to solidify his authority with male readers, for whom digital games have become a form of social capital

Scalzi exercises a great deal of thoughtful and expert control over reader participation; he has an elaborate commenting policy, in which he reserves the right to delete or “mallet” posts that he finds offensive, and he has been known to shut down comment threads when they get too long or feel unproductive to him. However, even he expressed surprise at how controversial the “Straight White Male” piece proved to be. He published two follow-ups to the piece responding to the thousands of mostly-angry responses he received specifically from white male readers. In the second of these he wrote that it has “been fun and interesting watching the Intarweebs basically explode over it, especially the subclass of Straight White Males who cannot abide the idea that their lives play out on a fundamentally lower difficulty setting than everyone else’s, and have spun themselves up in tight, angry circles because I dared to suggest that they do.”

The “Straight White Male” piece is short, sweet, and eloquent. It’s easy to see why it went viral. It employs the discourse of video gaming, one assumed to come naturally to “dudes,” Scalzi’s stated intended audience, as a metaphor for explaining how race and gender confer automatic, unasked-for, mechanical advantages on players who are lucky enough to be born white and male. Just like the difficulty level one chooses while playing a game, these advantages gradually become invisible as the player becomes immersed in the game. What does become noticeable are deviations from this norm–when a quest is “too hard” the player may become aware of the difficulty setting that they chose, but otherwise that decision as a decision fades into the background. This is, indeed, how privilege works in “real life.”

The term “game mechanic” doesn’t appear in the piece but it underlies the argument throughout, explaining how points that a player can spend on advantages like “talent,” “wealth,” “charisma,” and “intelligence” are distributed by “the computer,” and that players must “deal with them,” just like they must in real life. This argument makes racism and sexism seem socially neutral, mechanical, structural, and not a personal act of aggression or oppression perpetrated upon one person by another. In short, they are institutional, invisible, “mechanical,” always business, never personal. Indeed, as Scalzi states at the beginning of the piece, his purpose in using gaming as a metaphor for life was to avoid the use of the term “privilege” altogether, since straight white men react badly to it. As he writes, “So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?”

Indeed, Scalzi’s argument is successful because it allows his privileged readers to abstract themselves from the equation and see understand racial and gender privilege not as something that they are “doing,” but rather as a structural benefit that they receive without trying. All gamers understand that the ludic world is above all constructed, in the most literal sense. If a boss or a monster kills you, you cannot take it personally — likewise, if you pick up a rare epic weapon, you cannot really claim credit for having “earned” it since it’s a programmed part of the environment. Scalzi understands above all that his readers cannot tolerate the feeling of being blamed for their privilege. Explaining race and gender as a structural advantage, an aspect of a made environment that was designed to reward some types and punish others, lets white male readers hold themselves blameless for their own advantages.

Many of Scalzi’s critics object that his metaphor isn’t perfect, since some games do let players choose many aspects of their identities, and game mechanics and difficulty settings work differently in different games. Nonetheless, the basic premise — that difficulty settings create a pervasive experience of ease or hardship and affects every aspect of a gamer’s experience, just as do race and gender — certainly help us understand how privilege works in “real life.”

However, the way that this argument works perpetuates the notion that men are automatic members of geek and gamer culture (which many men are not) and that women aren’t. As a man, Scalzi employs the discourse of gaming–leveling, “points,” dump stats–as a technique to appeal, specifically, to straight white men like himself, who “like women.” (And presumably don’t want to see them oppressed; cranky women just aren’t as fun for men to be around!). Heteronormative white masculinity is equated with expert, fan knowledge of gaming mechanics, structures, discourses–what Mia Consalvo has dubbed “gaming capital” in her excellentstudyofgamesandcheating. Scalzi employs this language’s value as a system of signification marked as inherently masculine. Gaming discourse becomes a male backchannel.

This technique is very effective because gaming capital is in fact aspirational for many young male players, as much a goal as it is a reality. Masculinity is performed by the display of technical knowledge, and gaming is the most recent iteration of this form of social display. Gaming itself becomes a mark of privilege within symbolic discourse. Even men who have no idea what “dump stats” are hailed by this argument because gaming capital is assumed to be intrinsically masculine. As George Lipsitz, another white male critic of white male privilege, puts it in his writing on the possessive investment in whiteness, the “dump stat” of gaming discourse is difference itself.

In an example of publishing on the lowest difficulty setting, Scalzi’s essay got much more play on the Interwebz than postings on this topic by any female games or science fiction blogger. While digital media and publishing have definitely changed the way that feminist scholars work by giving us more and faster outlets to publish for a public audience, there is no doubt that we are working at the highest difficulty setting. Most of us don’t have 50,000 readers, and are not popular science fiction authors with ties to the television industry: not that most men are either, but some men are, and no women are. Scalzi would be the first person to acknowledge this.

As Scalzi puts it, “the player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.”  Women of color gamers who publicly identify with the culture of gaming find themselves shunned, mocked, and generally treated in ways that are far worse than one could find in almost any other social context. Aisha Tyler, an African American actress who has appeared on television programs like 24, found out what it meant to be perceived as an intruder to “gamer culture.” After she emceed the Ubisoft demo at the Electronic Entertainment Expo more commonly known as E3, the largest and most important gaming industry conference, the backlash against her presence on social media like NeoGAF, YouTube and Twitter started with the terms “annoying fucking bitch” and went on in a similar vein. As Kotaku noted in “Aisha Tyler Rants ‘I’veBeenaGamerSinceBeforeYouCouldRead,’” The trollery directed at her exemplifies a troubling problem at the core of nerd culture. A hardcore base wants respect and recognition for the merits of whatever they love, be it comics, games or something else. But when someone they perceive as an outsider professes to share this love, the pitchforks come out.

Tyler responded with a beautifullywrittenessay (not a rant!) on her Facebook page. She writes

“I go to E3 each year because I love video games.
Because new titles still get me high.
Because I still love getting swag.
Love wearing my gamer pride on my sleeve.
People ask me what console I play.
Motherfucker, ALL of them.”

Aisha Tyler’s presence at E3 presenting for Ubisoft constitutes a black, female claim to gaming capital. It is hardcore, to use Scalzi’s term, and immensely threatening. It is abundantly apparent that the more gaming capital becomes identified with white masculinity, the more bitter the battle over its distribution, possession, and circulation will become. As gaming culture becomes more heavily capitalized both economically and symbolically, it becomes both more important for women to gain positions of power as critics, makers, and players, and more likely that it will be denied.

Gaming space is part and parcel of what George Lipsitz calls the “white spatial imaginary,” and the stakes for keeping women and people of color out are the same as they were during redlining, blockbusting, and other techniques to police movement and claims to space in America. As George Lipsitz writes in HowRacismTakesPlace, “because whiteness rarely speaks its names or admits to its advantages, it requires the construction of devalued and even demonized Blackness to be credible and legitimate. Although the white spatial imaginary originates mainly in appeals to the financial interests of whites rather than to simple fears of otherness, over times it produces a fearful relationship to the specter of Blackness.” (37). Google Books categorizes this book under “Business and Economics.” Word.

Feminist scholars have been at the forefront of giving scholarly legitimation to the existence of virtual community through their ethnographic and theoretical academic writing. T.L. Taylor, Sherry Turkle, Sandy Stone, Lori Kendall, Tom Boellstorff, and Bonnie Nardi have wonderful monographs to this end. Most traditional anthropologists and sociologists were hostile to this idea when these works were published, yet today there is wide agreement that online communities create real affective environments with real economic value. The battle to legitimate online community as an area of study has been won; today we know that online community is real by the sound of keystrokes and game controller buttons as players enter their credit card numbers into their computers or consoles to purchase time in World of Warcraft or Xbox Live. However, though most agree that racism and sexism absolutely permeate game culture and the online and offline communities and narratives that constitute it, few seem to care, and even straight white males like Scalzi who write about it publicly are castigated. (For an antidote to this, Mary Flanagan’s book CriticalPlay. Seriously).

Though some of his thousands of readers may have violently disagreed with him, Scalzi was read and taken seriously. When a woman of color gamer like Aisha Tyler appears in public to talk about games, she is not taken seriously.Shehastodefendhercredibilityasagamer, something that Scalzi is not asked to do. While commenters argued with his interpretation of how game mechanics worked, nobody claimed that he had never played them, a charge with which Tyler, despite her very public profile as a gamer, had to contend.

It’s one thing to say that women and non-whites are playing “the game of life” in hardcore mode — woman of color feminism has been telling us this for years. (See Grace Hong’s work on the Combahee River Collective in her powerful and rigorous monograph RupturesofCapital). And even the popular press has taken note of the egregious state of gaming for women and minorities: this August the New York Times published an article entitled “InVirtualPlay, SexHarassmentIsAllTooReal.” I wish that there were both more outrage and more analysis as to the causes, practices, and effects of games in the white spatial imaginary, but I don’t fault the Times. Journalists are good at describing problems more quickly than academics are (though in this case the Times is many years late: even NPRbeat them to this story by two years, which is saying something), but they don’t have the luxury of time to devote to deeper and more detailed writing. Journalists are good at bringing public awareness to problems like gaming’s pervasive racism, sexism, and homophobia, but awareness isn’t enough. It’s our job as feminist scholars, teachers, writers, and gamers to document, analyze, and theorize the white patriarchy that is so vigorously resurgent in games while never forgetting who profits here.

—-CITATION—-
Nakamura, L. (2012) Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital. Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. doi:10.7264/N37P8W9V

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In the following, Alex Juhasz and Anne Balsamo discuss FemTechNet, the network they have activated to produce the first distributed online collaborative course (DOCC) that demonstrates not only innovative thinking about emergent technologies, but also addresses — as its central topic — the long histories of feminist engagements with technology and cultural innovation. Together, they discuss the motivations and processes whereby feminist teachers, artists and scholars are joining each other to creatively redesign massively open online courses (MOOCs) according to feminist principles. This essay takes the shape of a conversation about the ideas, activities and processes that led to the creation of FemTechNet, as well as the project’s innovative thinking about feminism, learning and technology.

Anne Balsamo:  Cultural amnesia or ongoing historical ignorance — how else to describe the lack of understanding about the intimate relationship between feminism and technology? How can it be that, in 2012, smart people still wonder what feminism – and feminists, women, and girls — have to contribute to our thinking about technology?

When I present my ongoing research on the relationship between culture and technological innovation, I often begin by noting that some of the most useful insights into the project have come from the work of feminist philosophers (Harding, Haraway, Barad, Braidotti). Feminist readers of my work will not find this surprising. But for readers who do not know this tradition, my reference is apparently quite puzzling. Discussions afterwards routinely include someone who asks — with a discernible note of skepticism in his or her voice — what does feminism have to do with technological innovation?

I’ve learned how to answer this question more succinctly now, having realized over time that the question-asker wasn’t really interested in an exquisite recounting of the history of women’s engagement with the practices of invention, patent laws, or high-tech industries, nor in my zealous citation of important feminist work in science and technology studies, visual culture, or media studies more broadly. How I answer is beside the point for this piece, suffice to say that this question has continued to vex me, so much so that I now see it as a symptom of a widespread case of cultural amnesia. How can people in the audiences I typically address (academically trained and highly credentialed technologists) NOT know these histories?

Alex Juhasz: Forty or more years into Women’s and Ethnic (and later Queer) Studies’ incursions into academia as disciplines of their own, and into established disciplines, we find, to our delight, that feminists have taken on significant positions of power — as thinkers, teachers, administrators — in institutions around the world. Yet we also see that this hard-won authority and agency is itself as silo-ed as are our fields of expertise and practice. How can new technologies allow us to meet, share, and learn across the boundaries of place, field, training, and objects that inhibit feminist connection and movement? How can we mobilize, network, archive and grow our actual institutional power, as well as our discrete intellectual traditions and politicized processes?

FemTechNet has been created to address and redress these questions. The time is now for those of us who are senior scholars in feminist science technology studies, in media arts, in communication, across the disciplines, to join with cutting edge researchers and artists new to these fields.

Alex and Anne:  We launched FemTechNet in April 2012 during a series of private conversations about our shared sense of longing for feminist scholarly and artistic community that deeply understood the histories of feminist work as they also focused on pushing the horizon of contemporary efforts. Quite surprisingly, at about this time, we both individually received an email from Carol Stabile announcing the launch of Fembot and a new journal called Ada. The creators of Fembot could not have known about our conversations and our longing for an online space.

Clearly, something was in the air. We learned that the team from Fembot was asking similar questions to our own. Talking with them broadened our thinking about the digital support needed for feminist work. From the beginning, we knew we were working on complementary efforts: Fembot and Ada focus on publication and public engagement, while FemTechNet focuses on pedagogy and archiving feminist histories. In the best spirit of collaboration, we joined forces, and began sharing resources and networks. We then attended and held meetings with feminist colleagues around the world who were working on similar topics. Meet-ups at conferences during 2012 enabled FemTechNet to grow quickly. FemTechNet now includes more than 300 people. The first major project of FemTechNet is “Feminist Dialogues in Technology,” our DOCC, which will take form as a global course to be taught from September through November 2013 in fifteen classrooms around the world.

FemTechNet is both an exploration of topics pertaining to feminism and technology, and a demonstration of feminist technocultural innovation. We see our mission and process as feminist in that size is not of importance, whereas collaboration, experimentation, power sharing and a DIY ethic take center stage. Our project uses technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversations while privileging situated diversity and networked agency.

How did we get there?

Alex: I did not know Anne Balsamo — my dearly valued collaborator in FemTechNet — until quite recently. Of course, I knew of her long before our first brainstorming session over vente lattes at the Starbucks near the University of Southern California (USC) in February 2012, as I knew the work and reputations of so many of the women I have since met over the explosive but brief history of this project. Yet the known and felt presence of our amazing, numerous, and undisputedly influential peers around the globe — enabled and sustained by decades of feminist scholarship, art, institutions and organizing that have since been broadcast via the internet — is not the same thing as knowing them. Certainly my recent thinking about feminist possibilities online are driven by the certain knowledge that IRL relationships are the glue, inspiration, and solidification most of us need to stay committed to each other digitally.

I decided I wanted to meet Anne in 2011 when I learned online that she had received an NEH Digital Start Up Grant for her project that digitally navigates the AIDS quilt. My work has long focused upon the pandemic and I was planning to write an essay on contemporary AIDS documentaries. I knew Anne was nearby at USC, so I wrote an email and asked if we could talk.

We had lunch. We had so much in common: intellectual interests, academic lineage and rank, middle age, an abiding commitment to feminist theory and politics within and outside academia, a shared sense of the contradictions of feminism’s clear losses pressing against its seeming abundance and our own growing authority as mid-career feminists. The loss of a visible and perhaps viable cultural and political presence in the name of feminism has come at the same time that many self-identified feminists, schooled and practiced within decades of academic and activist traditions, find ourselves and our peers in charge of things like departments, programs, universities, and agencies. It was delightful to sit across the table from someone who saw the world in the same confused and yet inspiring way. You must know those rare lunches and their superb conversations: scintillating, sustaining. We don’t seem to do this enough! Here, the problem of isolation, or institutional silo-ing (we all work so hard for and at our discrete institutions, or departments or fields), and oddly, its association to feminist power, enters our consideration. (Note to those younger than myself: I wish I had known earlier that notes to women you admire, and with whom you share interests, are always appropriate, perennially appreciated, and often lead to the best sort of professional and political opportunities.)

Six months passed. I wrote the essay on AIDS documentaries. I made a website about online feminism.[i] I had concerns about its design and audience. I remembered my previous lunch with Anne and this time asked her to coffee. I said, “I can’t figure out how to find, build, and share feminist community online, even though I feel a hunger and curiosity.” Anne replied, “We don’t need to invent new structures — we know how to build communities. A class is a great arrangement for building and maintaining a productive group of smart individuals with shared purposes.”

Anne:  I unburdened my worries about this cultural amnesia to Alex when I met her for lunch that first time. Not only did she immediately understand why I was worried, she also reported that she often encountered a similar phenomenon when talking about early work in feminist media and digital art.   I remember thinking: “we should do something about this someday.”

When next we met — six months later — we moved on to talk about other topics. Alex was interested in brainstorming ways to build an online feminist community. I was interested in thinking about alternative online learning infrastructures, having participated in a Mozilla open-learning forum at Drumbeat 2011 in Barcelona. What was also influencing our discussions no doubt was the frenzied interest in the notion of MOOCs fueled in part by the media-headlines about the wild success of the Stanford course on Artificial Intelligence offered by two computer science instructors that eventually attracted more than 10,000 online students.

Alex:  And then and there at Starbucks, just like that, we had our concept for technologically facilitated, global feminist conversation and pedagogy: a massively distributed feminist learning experiment that would remember and store what had been done within feminism and technology and propel us to new actions and projects. And because we are mid-career professionals, we had just enough private pull at our own institutions, not to mention a shit-load of connections to women similarly (and even more powerfully) positioned. We used the computer and face-to-face meetings at international conferences in a range of fields to spread word of our plan. Thus, we quickly fabricated a working meeting with about ten amazing, mostly full, feminist professors from Canada and the U.S for a day in Los Angeles. To do so, I secured a small research grant ($7000) from my home liberal arts college, and we used it for transport and hospitality: to get strong players in our growing global network together in one town and room. In return, we got an invaluable day of thinking and conversation and the unmappable explosive might of collaborative and committed conversation.

And here’s where desire comes in, mixed as it must ever be with history and process. Most of us have been in feminist “collaborative” meetings that go sour fast, that were never really about sharing, that get hijacked by needs that are thought to be bigger than any group’s immediate goals. We desire community but can get hurt in the process. But this first FemTechNet meeting, and every other one I have attended since, in person and online, was not derailed by feminist-process gone amok. Why? We have been surprised to see how humble and hungry are our quite commanding peers (and those who lead and follow us in the profession) for fair, elevated, and purposeful conversation and institutions. It’s as if they don’t usually get this at home (or on the internet) even though we live in an era supposedly defined by abundant conversation and growing feminist influence, at least at the institutional level. And we’ve seen that an almost unimaginable generosity grows from this need, one defined as much by a sharing of isolated, even stockpiled and hard-won resources, as by an open-hearted allocation of discriminating and lovely spirit. You see, Anne and I had only a few principles to begin our fields-wide conversations: we would work with all the scholars and artists who we admire, share our interests, and who feel they belong. No divas were allowed; we would not expend our precious resource of face-time managing personalities over ideas.

Anne: After this meeting, the dots were simple to connect. We had begun the process of activating our networks of colleagues who do research and teach on feminism, science, technology and media. The meeting proved to be an invitation to plan and participate in a DEMONSTRATION of the practice of feminist innovation. I had the notion that one facet of the innovation would focus on rethinking the very idea of the massively open online course THROUGH a feminist logic. The course would cover topics central to feminist studies of science, technology, and media.

If all goes as planned, the first FemTechNet courses — “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” — will be taught between September and November 2013. Unlike a MOOC, where the instructors and course experts are centralized at a single institution (i.e., Stanford, Harvard, MIT), in this DOCC, students from across the globe enroll “at large” to learn (access the knowledge) from the center. The “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” DOCC is built on the notion that not only the students but also the teachers/instructors/experts, as well as the institutional infrastructures for granting “credit” or supporting a learning community, are all distributed across the globe. Even though Alex and Anne serve as the coordinators of the “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” DOCC, they are neither the instructors nor the main learning designers. The teachers are those who arrange to offer a nodal class for students enrolled in their educational institutions. The teachers are those who agree to offer “independent studies,” “directed reading experiences,” or extra credit for those students who seek credit for participating in the DOCC. The teachers are those who sign on as “at-large” learners, who want to engage in the material offered as part of the course. The teachers are those who “drop in” as informal learners because they are interested in a particular topic on the course schedule. The teachers are also the students. Everyone is a participant in a massively distributed work of feminist innovation.

The last piece of the initial vision, the last dot to connect, so to speak, was to address the issue of feminist histories and the digital archive. The purpose here is not simply to demonstrate a contemporary example of feminist technocultural innovation, but to structure the remembering of feminist contributions to the history of technology. In short we need not only to produce new innovation, but also to reproduce the insights from the long history of the engagement among women and technologies. In hindsight it was probably the obvious next step. We would ask all participants in the network — and not just those participating in the DOCC — to take part in a collaborative learning activity that focuses on “writing” women and feminists into the global digital archive. We call this project “Storming Wikipedia.” We are also inviting them to both submit and/or evaluate the course materials: videos, readings, keywords, games, web resources that have been contributed and evaluated for their pedagogic value by the network.

Drawing on contemporary learning theory, we define the course materials as “learning objects,” and seek to develop learning objects that learn through use. A “learning object” is a piece or collection of pedagogical materials (including things that we might identify as content items (articles, images, videos), activities, and assessment methods) that serve a specific learning objective. The most sophisticated approach to the design of digital learning objects suggests that we need to create them so that they can be easily annotated or modified by users to include information about the conditions of their use and the effectiveness of learning that is enabled. Ideally, digital learning objects should over time evolve to archive the meaningfulness of their use in particular situations.[ii]

Drawing on contemporary work in feminist science and technology research, we are working with an expanded notion of a “learning object” to incorporate insights about “boundary objects.” This theoretical reframing asserts that the “object” participates in the creation of meanings: of identity, or usefulness, of function, of possibilities. The concept of a “boundary object” was promoted by the late Susan Leigh Starr (a prominent feminist scholar in science/technology studies) to assert that objects (material, digital, discursive, conceptual) participate in the co-production of reality. At base, the notion asserts that objects perform important communication “work” among people: they are defined enough to enable people to form common understandings, but weakly determined so that participants can modify them to express emergent thinking.[iii]

In FemTechNet we refer to the educational materials to be used in the DOCC as “boundary objects that learn” (BOTLs). The pedagogical objects or collections of objects that will be submitted by members of the network will be considered through these theoretical perspectives. While we are still developing the fuller theoretical explication of this approach, in summary we assert that:

• objects are ontologically multi-faceted;
• objects participate in the human process of meaning-making;
• objects serve as means of communication over differences, over place, over time;
• objects mediate the identities of human participants as members of groups or as individuals;
• and, more specifically for this project, digital technologies enable learning objects to be modified by those who use the object in specific learning situations.

Following this, the BOTLs that will be used in the “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology” DOCC will not only be submitted by participants in the DOCC, but also evaluated, assessed, and redesigned by those members. The creation of BOTLs is one of the experiments at the heart of the FemTechNet DOCC. The notion of “boundary objects that learn” to be contributed and evaluated for pedagogic use by members of the network manifests the distributed nature of expertise within the networks.

Alex: Since the lunch that led to coffee that led to the vision that led to the meeting, we’ve grown our network, begun to secure funds and institutional affiliations, started to architect and build our technological needs, designed the structure for our DOCC, and shared authorial agency with any one who steps up and contributes. While we started something by naming a need and exemplifying some processes, it is our hope that FemTechNet will evolve into an ongoing global course that goes through many iterations based on the objectives that emerge from its participating members. FemTechNet makes use of the openings and opportunities afforded by technology that are laced with individual desire, networked power, and particular place. We use digital and other devices to activate our network of likeminded people (working in feminism and technology across a wide range of disciplines) so as to archive past practices and initiate contemporary conversation and pedagogy. Anyone can join the network and help build the class and its learning materials; anyone can teach the class within their home institution; anyone can take the class for credit (by registering through the home institution and making arrangements with a supportive faculty member), anyone can audit or drop-in on the course as “self-directed learners.”

Despite the ambitious objective to offer at least one nodal course on every continent, our aims for this work of feminist innovation are quite straightforward:  for eight weeks in 2013 we want people around the globe to be talking, learning, and writing about feminism and technology. And after those eight weeks, we want the global archive of digital culture to be better informed than it was before we started.

Alex and Anne: To build FemTechNet, we are guided by long-standing feminist principles and processes. These include:

• a commitment to sharing power, tempered by an understanding that hierarchies can be useful at times;
• a commitment to interactions and structures that respect and enable diversity of opinion, experience, and position;
• an understanding that technology can enable interaction, and that all interaction is located, embodied, and material;
• a commitment to creating safe spaces for collaboration;

the creative rethinking of inherited structures, technologies, and infrastructures to be responsive to what Beth Coleman calls an “x-reality”[iv] that includes online and offline spaces and experiences.

These are the abiding and structuring feminist principles that bring us together and that allow us to know when we’re in good company and doing good work.  These are the principles that underlie the invitation to others to join this networking project. This account of the creation of FemTechNet foregrounds process over product; the personal over the institutional. Watching how quickly the idea of FemTechNet was propagated through various networks, we understand now that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come, especially when the world’s best feminist thinkers are engaged in making it happen.

I spent five days without electricity this fall. It wasn’t totally unexpected either. Hurricane Isaac was lumbering into the Gulf at the pace of a drunken tourist. I dutifully prepared as I always do when it looks like we’re in for a tropical visitor. I bought the batteries and candles, canned goods, water and ice. I filled the tub with water too. I had a flashlight in every room, a shortwave radio in the den, and then I charged two smart phones, leaving one off as the back up. When Isaac showed up at 5 a.m., the lights went off. At the time, I could still cheerily joke about The Love Boat’s insistent but innocuous bartender, now personified as a category one, coming to announce last call.

By day four, I was incredibly anxious. It was really hot in the house. During those first days, we opened all the windows to try to create a cross-breeze and sat in the shade in an attempt to save our energies. That didn’t work very well. My two-year-old kept pointing up at the television set, asking for Oswald and Maisy to no avail. The Wi-Fi wasn’t working either so she couldn’t search for YouTube solace. Reduced to waves of tearful tantrums, my boyfriend played a DVD for her in half hour segments over the course of the day, trying to ration the battery and preserve our sanity. Nights we drove around the worst flooded areas of the state to get to a friend’s house who had power and thus air conditioning. But during the days, we kept moving around in the city, looking to eat a hot meal, to buy more ice, and to recharge the Androids that never matched the capacities of our old Nokias. We still couldn’t call anyone as the lines were jammed or down. I responded to text messages and posted a couple of Facebook updates just to say, “We’re ok.” When the power came back on, I went to my office and started the process of recovery in the form of dozens of emails to tell people what had happened and when I might get back on track.

To understand the irony of this experience, let me position myself. I am editor of a journal in which half our title refers to “new media.” So every day I traffic in the digital transfer of manuscripts touting the enabling capacities of the internet, mobile phones, tablets, and supposedly smart technologies. It’s not like I can’t understand the feelings of freedom these objects inspire. I facilitate the transfer, involving both transport and communication, through a range of objects: the desktop, laptop, my phone, and my shiny, new iPad. I recognize that the process of being a journal editor, at least in terms of distribution and circulation, has become easier because of these devices. But I also understand how these devices can blind us to the state of the environments we live in. Here I present three lessons living in New Orleans and Hurricane Isaac taught me about new media and technology. I offer them to my fellow writers and researchers, if for no other reason than to temper some of the claims in the manuscripts that come across my desktop.

1. Pay attention to the political economy of communications infrastructures that enable new media and technologies.

I walk around campus watching people literally trip over the crumbling curbs and sidewalk tiles pushed up and around by the grand oak tree roots in my southern city. They are too busy texting or reading email on their devices to pay attention to their ramshackle surroundings. In a similar way, so many academic discourses about the uses and abuses of new media simply overlook questions of infrastructure, the material landscape that encompasses these uses. New Orleans has not had any major upgrade in electrical service or its maintenance since the mid-1970s. Unless you live in one of those incredibly privileged spaces where Parisian intellectuals and Microsoft researchers roam, chances are your local infrastructures for communications and transportation are falling apart too. Who cares about HD and 4G, much less net-locality, when you don’t have power to begin with? In short, we cannot overlook the impacts of neoliberal governance, specifically the disinvestment in public goods and the privatization of basic utilities, on a supposedly techno-centric society.

2. New media technologies can extend beyond electronic infrastructures, and resist them.

The other blind spot in new media research also relates to the metaphor of students gazing raptly into their electronic screens. After this hurricane and other human-inflected disasters, New Orleanians have had to get creative if they simply want to communicate with the outside world. Even today, street signs not replaced by some official entity post- Katrina have colorful placards announcing names and directing our attentions. When the power went out after Isaac, some good Samaritan-cum-artist sent out a decorative reminder to neighbors and the electric company alike to advise them where the power lines were down. If I followed the signs around town, I could find services, avoid hazards, and connect with a community so often and otherwise segmented by social class. The signs mediated both public messages with the private flair of the artists who made them. In sum, if you’re looking only at electronic screens as new media, you’ll miss these beautiful new media and the creative people making them. In the eye of a communications disaster, these are the primary – indeed, sometimes the only – communication technologies left to survivors. Given the likelihood of future failures and ongoing crises, it would make sense for researchers to pay more attention to the ways low-tech, no-tech solutions enable a “networked society.”

3. New media and technologies are not essential to young people’s identities.

Finally, after three days of hearing my daughter wail, her face red from crying in the stifling heat, we two adults in the house decided on the only solution. While she napped, we unplugged the set and put it in the closet. She woke up, pointed at the empty mantel place and announced, “TV broke.” Then she went off and played with her toys as if nothing had happened. This act of heresy for the television and new media scholar was actually pretty instructive for me. As I weigh the seeming importance media scholars continue to place on the new technological object with the other things that surround us, it feels like there’s always a lack of insight into the real lived experiences we have with media. The theoretical calls to decenter the object in media studies have still largely gone unheeded in the procession of studies of consumption, uses, and ecologies. So much has been made of young people’s dependencies on their mobile phones that we seem to forget that needs for connection, attention, and passing time existed long before telecommunications companies targeted the teen market. New media researchers do not have to be luddites or embrace the pseudo-medicalized discourses around media addiction, but they also don’t need to echo the marketing messages that kids are smarter, happier, or better off with a gadget. For every cell phone as manna study, just imagine another technology taking the phone’s place, such as a diary, a camera, or maybe even a book. In the wake of the storm, my daughter found a paper dollhouse a ready substitute.

It may seem strange to inaugurate a journal devoted to feminism and new media with a discussion of new media breakdowns, candles, signs, and paper dollhouses; but, for me, the feminist message in this is that we need to envision all people as new media users, even when the technology has been around for centuries. And feminist scholars of new media must look up from their own screens and deal with larger questions of access, context, and political economy if it we are to ever deal with real questions of access and relevance beyond a privileged few. Because if it’s only the gals in the networked cities, the babes with the hot new gadgets, and the desirable demographics in the digital enclosures that we are talking about and to in new media studies, then I’d rather stay in the dark.

Respectin’ old technologies. Credit: Photo by Vicki Mayer

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Respectin’ old technologies. Credit: Photo by Vicki Mayer

—-CITATION—-
Mayer, V. (2012) Through the Darkness: Musings on New Media. Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. doi:10.7264/N3CC0XMD

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