Postdigital Feminisms: Platformed-Lives, Labour, Intimacies, and Activism

Category: Publication

Although the early twenty-first century fuelled feminist-hopes that the Internet would revolutionise women and girls’ lives, digital platforms have not necessarily helped society to cast-off the shackles of patriarchy. A cyberfeminist utopia has been replaced by digital labour practices, both paid and unpaid, that remain acutely gendered (Gregg and Andrijasevic 2019; Jarrett 2016). While networked intimacies, desires, and sexualities have proliferated, creating radical potential (e.g., Dobson et al. 2018), they have also generated big business for the technology companies that mediatize and profit from forms of gender-based violence and objectification. Simultaneously, digital platforms have not completely cancelled out creative approaches to challenging sexism and misogyny (Mendes et al. 2019). However, despite the proliferation of hashtag campaigns – for example, to end sexual exploitation and gender-based violence – social media has become a limited channel for feminist consciousness-raising, legal arbitration, or political participation, and at the very least is concurrent with forms of networked misogyny (Banet-Weiser 2018). Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exacerbating the production, exchange, and normalisation of deep fake and unsolicited pornography at viral scale (Chowdhury and Lakshmi 2023). To address the ambivalence, enduring gendered power dynamics, and inequalities of more-than-digital culture, this call for papers is titled: Postdigital Feminisms: Platformed-Lives, Labour, Intimacies and Activism. The special issue (SI) invites scholars to contribute to the theoretical development of postdigital feminisms and feminisms in the postdigital by exploring critical feminist topics, including gendered intersectional platformed lives, labour, intimacies, and activism. We are interested in creating a dialogue about postdigital theorising, in all its openness and eclecticism (Jandrić et al. 2022), and feminist analysis of postdigital contexts where feminisms come together with other theoretical frameworks within the ‘post’ to be applied to an increasingly blurred digital and non-digital world to understand its particular gendered consequences (Evans et al. forthcoming). We are also interested in challenging what a theory or concept of the postdigital can do in feminist scholarship, research, and activism (Bassett 2015). The SI is open to a range of feminist approaches, methodologies and case studies. This includes discussion of feminist philosophy; feminist histories; activism; language; new tech; AI; labour; class; culture; education; postcolonialism; decolonialism; and feminist futures. Contributions can consider threshold postdigital concepts, principles, and scholarship to develop feminist objects, methods, and concepts of research (Mikulan 2024; Hurley and Al-Ali 2021; MacKenzie 2023). Articles could explore postdigital feminisms’ scope for critical exploration and intersectional feminist analysis of the systemic injustices, internalised misogyny, everyday oppression and suppression of women and girls as well as men/masculinities from a feminist postdigital perspective. Informed by feminist theories of social justice, intersectionality, and technologies, contributions have the opportunity to consider the complexities, exploitation, and imaginaries of the acutely gendered postdigital condition (Evans and Riley 2023; Hurley 2021). Although the SI is not expected to pre-empt or solve all the challenges faced by feminists in the postdigital age, it will facilitate a reflexive space for engaging with the postdigital, both contextually and theoretically, and with a range of feminisms, while debating and developing postdigital feminisms’ parameters, borders, concepts, methods, and interlocutors. Papers can include but are not limited to the below areas and themes: Postdigital feminist theorising Postdigital feminist philosophies. The scope of feminist ontologies, epistemologies, onto-epistemologies, and critical methodologies for theorising the postdigital condition. Postdigital feminist histories. Discussions of the historical roots of feminist engagement with technology, from early women in computing to grassroots online activism; fourth-wave feminism; cyber feminism; cyborgs; manifestos; feminist hashtags; open-source projects; hackers; inclusive design; and diverse user experiences. Postdigital feminist reflexivity. The scope of critical feminist self-reflexivity for considering power dynamics, gendered processes and outcomes of postdigital research. Postcolonial feminisms. Articles considering how digital technologies are framing, representing and inhibiting postcolonial identities, while challenging stereotypes and promoting diverse narratives that reflect the complexities of gendered postdigital experiences. Decolonial feminisms. Challenges to western-centric frameworks of knowledge to highlight Indigenous women, including LGBTQ+’s experiences of technology, ensuring that their unique identities and contributions are recognised and valued while acknowledging that what counts as Indigenous is unstable. Postdigital feminist futures. Speculative articles for reimagining and creating alternative more-than-digital futures that prioritise equity, justice, and sustainability, resisting the commodification and exploitation often associated with mainstream digital practices. Postdigital feminisms. Discussion of postdigital feminism(s) as an open set of theorising as well as intersectional theorising of postdigital feminist contexts/conditions. Platform patriarchy, lives and labour Postdigital feminist languages. Examination of how language functions in the postdigital age, including examples of feminist advocacy for more equitable and inclusive communication practices. Postdigital cultures. Studies of platform architectures; creator economies; neoliberal and postfeminist content and culture analysis to explore the ambivalent gendered visibilities and subjectification by women, girls and non-binary social actors in the postdigital age. Postdigital feminist education. Studies ranging from early years through to primary, secondary, higher education, and de-schooling. Feminist new tech and AI. Analysis of bias encoded within emerging technologies, including large language models and data training sets. Postdigital labour. Evaluation of how participation in the gig economy, including freelance or contract work, occurs within an intersectional nexus of gender, class, race, religion, and sexualities, while being constituted by platform patriarchy and marginalisation of women working in Big Tech. Postdigital intimacies Critical intimacies. Research on and through the postdigital that draws on digital, data, platform, and mediated intimacies literatures to generate new accounts of postdigital intimacies through feminist, queer, anti-racist, and postcolonial theory. Contested intimacies. Exploring feminist accounts of the postdigital that recognise intimacy as violent, failed, incomplete; challenging preconceived ideas of intimacies as based on reciprocity. More-than-human intimacy: Relationships with technology; networked connections as intimate relations; feminist new materialist accounts of the postdigital. Feminist intersubjectivity: Developing more-than-digital accounts of intelligibility, recognition, and relationality, as well as illegibility, misrecognition, and disconnection, that both reproduce and challenge gender power relations. Postdigital activism Postdigital feminist activism: Studies of activism and social movements which challenge the ‘normalised’ culture of misogyny, molestation, and sexual harassment of schoolgirls and women. Global South feminist activism: Case studies discussing digital gender activism in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America, as well as by postdigital diaspora, beyond and within the Global North. Activist groups: Case studies of the LGBTQ+ movement; eco-feminisms; and/or indigenous feminist activists in a range of postdigital contexts.

Initiator(s):
Postdigital Science and Education

Deadline: 01.02.2025
Publication-Type: Article / Journal

https://link.springer.com/journal/42438/updates/27727678

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein