Digital Feminicity

2019

Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures is an angry feminist intervention disputing the masculinization of computational culture and cultural theory. It draws on feminist genealogies, traditions of writing and approaches to science and technology in order to provide an alternative to heavily material and object oriented turns and to the masculinism, scientism and anti-feminism that dominate both cultural and knowledge production. The book highlights the need to contest the regressively gendered and very often sexist politics of digital media forms, practices and study. It stresses the need to counter ideologies of scientism and anti-feminism and to reconnect feminist practices of thinking and writing with the contemporary problematic in order to re-conceptualize digital media and broader technological futures, pervasive mediation and increasing automation.

Atlantis Critical Studies in Gender Culture Social Justice, 2008

The “gender digital divide” constitutes a prolific research program that compares the differences between women and men in access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Nevertheless, those using feminist socio-constructivist perspectives argue for the need to pay attention, not only to “access,” but also to “design,” in addition to considering social relations as something that is coded within technological artifacts. From this perspective, gender constitutes an integral part of technological production. This paper explores the co-constitution of gender and technology, considering a specific action-research experience. It is argued that the re-signification of gendered and technological codes drifts through: a) the opening of gendered and technological codes; b) the production of new cultural imaginaries that question hegemonic representations of gender; and c) the production of new subjectivities through the reorganization of socio-technical practices to develop performative acts that transform patriarchal relations.

http://newmaterialistconference.wordpress.com/ The theory of new materialism is traversing many disciplines of knowledge: from quantum physics to art theory. This allows a search for a common ground for interdisciplinary studies. In addition, these theoretical approaches are proving themselves as a suitable “ethic-onto-epistemological” framework (Barad, 2007) that permits the examination of social phenomena from multidimensional perspectives, alongside offering new ways to theorize and challenge the divisions between matter and discourse, nature and culture, etc. However, the methodological parameters of these approaches remain underdeveloped and somewhat unclear especially when related to feminist theories and politics. New materialism has been coined as a “third wave feminist epistemology” (van der Tuin, 2009) in the present globalized information society, and it is because of this that a profound reassessment of some of the core research concepts is needed if these ways of theorizing want to configure themselves as an alternative to social constructivist approaches specifically in the context of digital cultures and political engagement. To these methodological concerns, we have included ‘gender’, ‘politics’ and ‘the digital’ because of their centrality in scholarly debates produced in feminist journals and scholarship. The terms also remain key for contemporary feminist practice. Can we still consider gender as a key concept for feminist politics? How is social change conceived of and produced within a new materialist framework? How is digital inter-connectedness affecting/affected by new materialisms, and most importantly different forms of life? To encourage theoretical and empirical queries along these lines, the V annual conference on the new materialisms at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona) invites scholars and postgraduate students to submit proposals for 20 minute presentations in reference to four concepts: gender, politics, methodologies, and the digital. Even though the conference focuses around four different concepts, the aim is not to offer prescriptive definitions of these terms. Rather, we hope that the concepts will be opened up and reconnected with each other in ways that enable the study of differing processes of reality’s unfolding.

Women Philosophers on Economics, Technology, Environment, and Gender History. Shaping the Future, Rethinking the Past, 2023

In this essay, I analyze some of the relationships that have been historically articulated between feminisms and technologies – specifically, the positions of cyberfeminism and technofeminism. I am interested in recognizing some of the instrumentalist and political assumptions about technology, where technology is understood in the sense of particular and discrete objects that have a specific political use, namely, to enslave or liberate. I articulate a critique of these assumptions from an ontological view of technology, which attends to the becoming of technical objects, recognizing in them their technological potencies and what this implies for a political, specifically feminist perspective.

2014

Information, Communication & Society, 2008

Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature: 24/7: Neoliberalism and the Undoing of Time, 2016

2018