-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: Postdigital Intimacies Event: Intimate Digital Feminist
Activism: 9th of June
Datum: Mon, 23 May 2022 08:40:41 +0000
Von: Cpc.icc <cpc....@coventry.ac.uk>
*Intimate Digital Feminist Activism*
Date: 9th June 2022
Time: 3:00-5:00pm (UK Time)
Venue: Online on Zoom
Language: English
Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/intimate-digital-feminist-activism-tickets-139452769989
Postdigital intimacies perform a folding public and private, shaping new
ways of collectivising. What are the activist potentials
ofpostdigitalintimacies?
In the fourth seminar in the Postdigital Intimacies network, we explore
the relationalities of digital feminist activism. Digital feminist
activism is central to the struggles over feminism: hashtag, popular,
and neoliberal, but also radical and creative, forming new lines of
feminist inquiry and reprising old ones. Central to these new lines of
feminist practice has been an intimate visibility of rape culture,
sexual and racial harassment, and everyday misogyny.
This seminar will explore the merging of public and private in acts of
feminist resistance. The speakers will reflect on how we can represent,
experience and act in the world differently, through queer, critical
race and feminist theory. Their work reflects the way creative practice
also locates the blurring of public and private as both present, future
and past, when the personal is (and always has been) political.
*“Digitized narratives of sexual violence”*
Kaitlynn Mendes, Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research
Chair in Inequality and Gender, University of Western Ontario, Canada
This talk reflects on how narratives and disclosures of sexual violence
are shaped both by rape culture and rape myths, but also by the digital
platforms and conventions, affordances and restrictions of the platforms
in which they appear. Drawing from theories such as affect and platform
vernacular, this talk draws from empirical data from nearly 1000
disclosures across social media platforms and websites to show how
digital platforms shape ‘digitized narratives’ of sexual violence not
only around what is known about sexual violence, but how it is felt and
experienced across digital networks. The talk also attends to important
considerations around who is able to disclose sexual violence via
digital technologies, and which disclosures are likely to gain
visibility amidst sexist, racist, and homophobic algorithmic biases.
*“The intimate territoriality of digital activism: mourning and loss in
the visual practices of Iranian #justice-seeking mothers” *
Sara Tafakori, Assistant Professor in Media and Communication,
University of Leeds, UK
In this paper, I focus on the digital activism of Iranian
#justice-seeking mothers, conceiving this women’s network as a digital
intimate public, in which the political is engaged through a language of
personal and familiar attachment (Berlant 1998, 2008). I trace the ways
in which these women sustain a solidaristic mode of intimacy through
collectively narrating the loss of their children at the hands of the
Iranian state. In doing so, I argue, the mothers’ network utilises the
affective resources of melancholia, staging their ‘absolute refusal to
relinquish the other’ (Eng and Han 2003) via the digital affordances of
Instagram and Twitter, in order to expand the space of political
appearance at both national and transnational levels (Azoulay 2008,
Arendt 1998). They do this, I argue, through hybrid visual practices of
public intimacy, disseminating and archiving in-person gatherings at
their children’s graves, as well as memorialising the dead in the
erstwhile private spaces of each others’ homes. In stressing the
simultaneously local and transnational dimensions of these women’s
activism, which innovatively reshapes cultural tropes around motherhood,
family and mourning, I take a critical distance, on the one hand, from
approaches that frame mourners’ digital activism in Western-centric
terms, that is, as a form of deterritorialization that ‘escapes’ the
restrictions of its global South context (Dobson et al 2018, Papailias
2019); and on the other hand, from those approaches that frame mourning
activism in non-Western contexts in territorially specific and
culturally exoticising terms (Hjorth 2018, Cumiskey and Hjorth 2017). I
conclude by reflecting on what light this research can shed on the
broader study of women’s intimate digital activism across local and
transnational contexts in the global South.
*“The unsolicited pussy pic: Public privates and the value of feminist
absurd humor in dark times”*
Jenny Sundén, Professor of Gender Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden
Research on digital feminist activism has often focused on the affective
dynamics of anger, and rightfully so.Anger mobilizes bodies and fuels
social change, but it also wears bodies down. Constant anger is simply
exhausting. In this talk, building on our bookWho’s laughing now?
Feminist tactics in social media(Sundén and Paasonen 2020, MIT Press), I
willinstead foreground humor, laughter and a sense of the absurd as a
means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate,
sexism and misogyny. More specifically, I willexplore the humorous
trajectory of the unsolicited pussy pick and other forms of creative
pussy pick making as feminist interventions in a culturally pervasive
dick pick culture. As an echo from 1960s and 1970s feminist “cunt art,”
vulvas seem to enjoy something of a revival in current feminist artistic
and activist practices and their intersections with social media
platforms, indicating how female genitalia continue to both shape the
anatomy of contemporary sexism and provide grounds for reappropriation
and resistance. One particularly vibrant example is the work of the
feminist artist Stephanie Sarley, in particular her sassy pictorial
treatment of vulvas on Instagram in absurdist registers. In discussions
of absurdist humor, distinctions are often made between light
playfulness on one hand and a much darker existential absurd on the
other. For us, absurd feminist humor rather combines the lighthearted
and the darkly existential. The utmost absurd or surreal qualities of
sexism provide a sounding board for seemingly lighter forms of humor
that traffics in the unreasonable, the illogical and the inappropriate.
This paradoxical compound of lightness and darkness forms a tactic for
dealing with a ludicrous reality.
*Speaker bios*
*Kaitlynn Mendes* is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada
Research Chair in Inequality and Gender at the University of Western
Ontario, Canada. Kaitlynn is a feminist scholar whose work sits at the
intersections of media, sociology, education, and cultural studies. She
has written widely around representations of feminism in the media, and
feminists’ use of social media to challenge rape culture. She has 50
publications around feminism, the media, and digital technologies
including the award winning SlutWalk: Feminism, activism and
media (2015), and Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back
Against Rape Culture (2019, with Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller).
*Sara Tafakori* is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the
University of Leeds. Before joining the School of Media and
Communication at the University of Leeds, she was a guest teacher and
visiting fellow at the Centre for Media and Communication at the London
School of Economics, holding a joint position as a 2020-21 Max Weber
Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow based in Lebanon (Beirut). She was
previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and
concurrently hold a Teaching Fellowship at the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS). Her PhD explored the affective mediation of
crisis through the lens of critical race and feminist theory, focusing
on the mediation of Iran’s economic sanctions on Persian Facebook. Her
research interests include feminist media and cultural studies,
postcolonial and critical race theory, and emotion/affect theory, with a
particular focus on mediation of (in)justice and human rights. Her
recent research has focused the problematics of constructing feminist
solidarity through engaging with critical race and postcolonial
critiques of popular feminism(s).
*Jenny Sundén* is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University.
Her work is situated at the intersection of digital media studies,
gender and sexuality studies and affect theory. She is currently working
on digital intimacy and questions of technological brokenness,
disruption and delay;feminist uses of humor in social media as forms of
resistance; and digital sexual cultures, nudity and kink. She is the
author ofWho’s laughing now? Feminist tactics in social media(with
Susanna Paasonen, 2020) and Gender and Sexuality in online game
cultures: Passionate play (with Malin Sveningsson, 2012).
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