A theme running through the readings this week is how identities are forged, represented, negotiated, and contested through and with the digital technology we use. Despite the anonymity one might enjoy in certain spaces on the internet, as we know from reading Nakamura, Hayles and Haraway, our bodies matter. Technologies can be used to subvert power structures and inequality, though more often digital media is used to amplify and reproduce them.

Loza describes how the #FemFuture initiative and its defenders silenced the women of color who have used platforms such as Twitter to call attention to their exclusion and to the ways they experience patriarchy differently from the middle / upper middle class white women who have powerful positions as bloggers and pundits in online feminist movements. When Black scientist and writer DNLee wrote a blog post about her experience being demeaned for her gender and race in an email exchange, Scientific American removed her blog post — ostensibly to “verify” facts, but a Tweet from Sci Am’s editor said that the post was “not appropriate for this area.” That justification makes little sense, given, as Hess from Slate writes “Lee’s blog is specifically dedicated to diversity issues; the business of how science is made, disseminated, and funded is crucial to its very existence.”

Many are using the internet to unite, heal, and raise awareness (the women using  #NotYourAsianSidekick and #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, for example). But most of the examples in the readings demonstrate how digital media is used to entrench oppression.

Citing Nguyen, Loza writes: Feminists of the digital age must refuse the nostalgic discourse of authentic selves, of natural bodies, of fixed communities and instead attend to the “structures and relations that produce different kinds of subjects in position with different kinds of technologies” (Nguyen 2003, 302).

Haraway, in Cyborg Feminism (1991) asks a similar question: What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective, and ironically socialist-feminist?

Provocation: The readings this week have shown us many non-examples of the quotes above. What does the above look like in practice? What examples that you’ve come across demonstrate how digital interactions can build effective coalitions across identity groups that go beyond the “add-and-stir” model of diversity (Bailey, 2011)? How can we recognize, embrace, and attend to the role of intersectionality in our teaching and scholarship with digital media?