I’ve been looking around a bit for other projects around feminist & queer politics and digital networks. Meanwhile I’m preparing a digital storytelling workshop for women (cis or trans) – a hands on digital media technologies in everyday feminist (and perhaps queer) politics – I’ll say more about this when practicalities are sorted out.
So I came across the US-based Digital Sisterhood project which seems interesting – and features various feminist voices on a web site, online radio show, Twitter page, and Tweetchats – and even organised events like an online yoga session. I also came across the article Class, the Digital and (Immaterial) Feminism by Jennifer Cotter in THE RED CRITIQUE 13 (Fall/Winter 2008) – which basically builds its entire critique around a reading of Judy Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism, and argues that within digital capitalist conditions
“women are not freed from deepening exploitation and the deterioration of their economic conditions of life in transnational capitalism, even when some become techno-managers”.
and brutally that
“Immaterial feminism is liberal feminism, and liberal feminism is an ally of transnational capitalism, not of exploited women”.
A bit abrasive, but never mind. Then I also found this Queer & Feminist New Media Spaces post in the HASTAC site (which I admittedly visit too often lately for postdoc announcements on the other side of the Atlantic), which gives a review and lists some interesting questions in the end. I run across this older Montreal based Feminist interventions – Locative media project by Andrea Zeffiro (a doctoral candidate in Communication at Concordia University in 2008 when the post was written) which, in a reflection, concludes that
“A critical pedagogical approach – in which social, political and economic factors are made apparent prior to production – will sharpen the necessary tools, enabling feminist curiosities to excavate locative media”.
Luckily, I also found something which is forthcoming (17th of November) – the DIGITAL SITES/QUEER CIRCULATIONS: TRACING ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS AND GLBTQ COMMUNITIES organised by Mary L Gray (Indiana University) – and I’ll check back for the abstracts.
Aristea Fotopoulou 