Digital media and feminist futures: awkward cooptions in the impasse

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Notes

1. “Die systemische Internalisierung eines weißen Patriarchats ist wirkmächtiger als der Kampf gegen Sexismus. Mit anderen Worten: Da wo weiße Frauen bereit sind, selbst Vergewaltigung und Frauenverachtung hinzunehmen, wird Rassismus verhandelbar und dafür eingesetzt, den uneingeschränkten Zugang zu weißen Privilegien zu erhalten.” Translation our own.

2. We are thinking for example about the discussions about the assaults that took place on New Year’s Eve 2015/16 in Cologne, Germany. For a poignant discussion of these events, see Beverly Weber (2016); Vanessa D. Plumly (2016). Further, see Sara Farris’s work on Femonationalism (2017).

3. For example, the German campaign #ausnahmslos, which enhanced mainly the visibility of white German feminist voices in the public sphere and only partially managed to re-shape the public debate about gender, violence, and racialized fear.

4. Cooption, here, is a utilitarian strategy (to use something for your own purposes). Appropriation, in comparison, describes a (sometimes related) display of privilege to steal or make something that is not yours your own. For a video of the lecture, see https://vimeo.com/207840795.

5. For example, slogans such as “LGBTQ Lives Matter”, spotted at a recent Pride event in Edmonton, AB.

6. See https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/ or https://www.welcomeblanket.org for the patterns. Louise Gray (2010) describes a similar tactic used in Chicks on Speed’s art projects that merge digital code with woven carpets as pointing to “the equivalence between the loom and the computer: both are programmed to produce a result, and the slippage of ‘female’ craft and ‘male’ technology is achieved in a neatly radical move” (41).

7. This thought piece is part of a research project-in-progress on “Digital Feminisms and Feminist Futures” (https://www.ualberta.ca/research/research-initiatives/digital-feminisms-and-feminist-futures), which is part of a larger research partnership on “Just Futures,” with Beverly Weber, Peggy Piesche, Deepti Misri, Danika Medak-Saltzman, Fatima El-Tayeb, and Pinar Tuzcu, among others.