Week 6: Black Cyberfeminism
When I was a youth, I remember excitedly telling my mother that I loved the internet so much because I had so many friends online. My friends and I played online games, we chatted everyday about our various fandoms, and our perceptions of the world from our individual standpoints. As the internet did not have the best reputation as a space for connection and community at that time, my mother was quite skeptical and cautioned me against getting too involved in these online friendships. Oh how times have changed, but also how they still stay the same.
This week’s lectures focused on the concept of Cyberfeminism, intersectional identity, and what it means to perform an embodied sense of self online. Throughout this course I have worked to decenter my plans for the week in order to be more responsive to the discussions that the students have been having in class and online. In response to these discussions we have explored a lot of heavy topics, from slavery to Jim Crow and lynching to police brutality. With that history in mind, I was cognizant in the class discussions of how dystopian the energy was getting. There was a lot of focus on the perils of technology and concern that there wasn’t much that we could do to change it.
Therefore, I presented this week’s topic as a transition into calmer waters. The required reading for this week was Anna Everett’s “On Cyberfeminism and Cyberwomanism” which references Rosi Braidotti’s essay “Cyberfeminism with a difference”. We began lecture with the following quote:
“Cyber-feminism needs to cultivate a culture of joy and affirmation. Feminist women have a long history of dancing through a variety of potentially lethal minefields in their pursuit of socio-symbolic justice. Nowadays, women have to undertake the dance through cyberspace” (Braidotti 11)
This quote began our exploration of early internet research and the question of embodiment online. After a discussion and analysis of Feminism through the types, we began to explore why feminist internet research is offered as a response to writers who would imply that “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog”. Through an exploration of Kimberle Crenshaw’s work and definition of intersectionality, I offered the questions: “How do we perform identity within virtual space?” and “Is there a difference between how people treat you online vs. how they treat you offline?”
The responses, as always, were fascinating and generative. Despite the classroom being composed of what some would call digital natives, the same concerns and beliefs about building friendships online that my mother expressed two decades ago were reproduced in our in-class discussion. Many of the students only saw online friendships as “real” in that they were a way of cultivating a friendship that had been previously constructed offline or eventually leveling up to a long term offline relationship. There was quite a bit of skepticism about the possibility that you could know people that you met online in the same way that you know people offline.
I found this discourse to be quite surprising and it made me think, both within and outside of the classroom, about the nature of reality and perception. One of the critiques levied against the reality of the virtual was that we only have mediated versions of ourselves presented online i.e. images, video, etc. In my own solipsistic thoughts I wondered if there was a significant difference between the photos/videos that we upload to represent us online and the living avatar that is the physical body we show up as in the offline world. What is it that we believe we are getting in the offline experience that we are somehow not getting online? What is this perception of reality as really real that we have constructed for ourselves and is it keeping us from believing in the many possibilities of the virtual world?
This is of course a looming question today, as many universities contend with migrating an offline experience of college to an online realm. The question of whether we can ever replicate the classroom experience in an online reality has plagued many a professor at this time. However, in the first week of classes, my students expressed knowing laughter as I noted that my research has in many ways primed me for living mostly in a virtual world. It is more difficult for me to believe that education somehow only exists within the confines of the classroom and that it cannot be remediated online. Or, if it is remediated, that it is somehow an inferior experience. In the same way that pre-teen Faithe would have told you about all of her friends online, educator Faithe is just as excited about all of the things her students do and say on our various learning platforms as she is about all of the things that they do and say in the physical classroom.
As an educator with a poststructuralist bent I like to frame questions as binary, in this case setting up a binary between online/offline, in order to disrupt the binary itself. My long term goal with this exercise is that I believe eventually the students will call me out for constructing these questions in such a way. That they will see through the binary (or The Matrix as I like to think of it) and know that their responses do not have to conform to my sentence construction. It is then and only then that I will know my lessons have been learned, the students becoming the masters, as they say.
In the weekly workshop on imagining an internet and technology which is responsive to the intersections of identity, I instructed the students on how to construct (and deconstruct) their own Intersectional Matrix. They then used this matrix of identity to reimagine their own experiences online and the role that identity plays in the spaces and communities that they have chosen to take part in. The workshop concluded with an imagining of what tools and technology might look like if there was more investment in the matrices of identity that co-create our lived experiences both online and offline.
Now that we have made it to the midpoint of the term, the readings for this time period offer frameworks for doing research in Black digital studies as well as setting us up for workshops over the coming weeks that walk the class through different digital research methods, topics, and writing styles. I hope that by creating more joy and affirmation in the classroom through the shift in content and topics, we can all begin to breathe a bit easier and imagine the potential for a brighter tomorrow.
Required Readings
Additional Readings
Daniels, Jessie. "Rethinking cyberfeminism (s): Race, gender, and embodiment." Women's Studies Quarterly 37.1/2 (2009): 101-124.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. "Black cyberfeminism: Ways forward for intersectionality and digital sociology." Digital sociologies (2016).
Richard, Gabriela T., and Kishonna L. Gray. "Gendered play, racialized reality: Black cyberfeminism, inclusive communities of practice, and the intersections of learning, socialization, and resilience in online gaming." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 39.1 (2018): 112-148.
