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Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory
... Vital scholarship on Black cyberfeminism (Gray, 2015(Gray, , 2020McMillan Cottom, 2016), "Black women's digital resistance" (Bailey, 2021), and the oppressive nature of algorithms (Noble, 2018) are central to my understanding of the structural challenges involved in Black women's digital experiences, in addition to their creativity, collaboration, and innovation that are present too. Relatedly, although many institutions express an interest in protecting the privacy of people, including when using and storing their data online, very few institutions express an understanding of privacy that accounts for how it is shaped by inequalities and interlocking oppression such as the anti-Blackness, sexism, and misogyny (misogynoir) that Moya Bailey (2021) has extensively researched and written about. ...
... Despite the deficiencies of much of the media they encounter, the experiences of Black women are not exclusively defined by structural oppression that they face. Rather, such practices and experiences around media include forms of self-expression, creativity, pleasure, joy, and ingenuity (Benjamin, 2019;Clark, 2014;Gray, 2016;Lu and Steele, 2019;Steele, 2017), even as these are often treated as mere consumable commodities within mainstream media and cultural spheres in predominantly white societies. ...
How do Black women engulf themselves in the politics of being and becoming through everyday existence, aesthetics and media practices in creative, pleasurable, diasporic and resistant ways? How is the hegemony of North America, Eurocentrism, anti-Blackness and sexism implicated in this? We consider such questions in relation to Black women's media and aesthetic practices, and their related scholarship, by examining the Ghana-based web series An African City. Our work echoes calls for the decentering of media and communication studies rooted in white and Western perspectives but positioned as “universal.” We explore Black women's experiences (in Britain, the United States, Ghana, and Nigeria) as active producers in their communities; beyond the dominant epistemological hierarchy of whiteness in contrast with Blackness. Framing visual communication as a community-based source of self-expression, we emphasize the liberatory possibilities of aesthetics (fashion and screen depictions) for Black women, while tarrying with how capitalism constrains such radical potential.
This paper calls attention to critical race theory, critical disability studies, decolonial theory and their relevance to the study of robotic art and performances that utilise algorithms and other forms of computation. Our purpose is to uncover the veiled links between racial, gendered, and ableist practices that inform theory and practice in media art and performance, and to combat the governing codes that construct –and continue to normalize –practices of dehumanizing exclusions. While robots and cyborgs have the potential to figure posthuman forms of subjectivation, in practice they often reinforce human-machine, self-other, or abled-disabled binaries and gloss over the racist and dehumanizing exclusions that uphold neoliberal forms of power and Western conceptions of the human. Our aim is that this track, and the papers and discussions that follow, will highlight mechanisms for meaningful intervention and instigate critical reflection within media art theory to make visible how artworks and technologies continue to encode colonial hierarchies
This article focuses on Black women in and beyond Belgian mainstream media. It discusses media practices and interventions by Black women in Belgium and examines the discourses that Black women use when engaging with the topics of coloniality, racism, and blackness. Drawing from semi-structured interviews (N = 20) with Black women in Belgium, this article provides insight into who speaks, what is spoken about, and who is spoken to in Black women’s media discourses. In doing so, three frames of engagement are distinguished: opinion-making, dissidence, and marronage. Data shows that Black women are positioned and framed in public debate by media institutions to perform a proximity to radical Black activism. Additionally, Black women’s anti-racist discourses and strategies diverge in ways that creates tensions in the way they reflect on their (sense of) agency in regard to media institutions. Moreover, Belgium’s colonial legacy influences the media landscape and public engagement in the French- and Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium in different ways. Where Dutch-speaking Belgium positions itself as progressive by including Black “radical” voices, French-speaking Belgium averts critical Black voices in mainstream media and public debate which, in turn, leads to innovative, radical, grass-roots mobilizations among Black women in and beyond digital media.
Digital racism and the online experiences of Black people have been foregrounded in vital contemporary research, particularly Black scholarship and critical race and digital studies. As digital developments occur rapidly there is a need for work which theorizes recent expressions of digital anti-Blackness, including since increased marketing industry interest in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020. This paper explores digital racism related to online (re)presentations of Black people and associated racist marketplace logics, digital practices, and (re)mediations of Blackness in the service of brands. Focusing on computer-generated imagery (CGI) racialized online influencers, the spectacularization of Black pain and lives, digital marketing approaches, and digital Blackface, this work contextualizes anti-Black digital racism by reflecting on its connection to centuries of white supremacy and often under-investigated racial capitalism. Overall, this work examines the shape-shifting nature of anti-Black digital racism and commercial components of it which are impacted by intersecting oppressions.
This chapter highlights issues to do with Black digital diasporic content and communication. It discusses how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to deal with experiences of oppression that are specific to their lives and in communal ways. This chapter explores resistant credentials of some of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain, while reckoning with potentially conflicting aspects of counter-cultural practices which exist in the context of digital consumerism. This discussion features analysis of how Black American popular and digital culture contributes to some of the digital encounters and lives of Black women in Britain in impactful ways. Overall, this chapter focuses on Black women’s experiences of knowledge-sharing online, including via natural hair video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube.
This chapter is a closing consideration of why digital terrains continue to be a source of pleasure, creativity, and knowledge-sharing, as well as distress and danger for Black women in Britain. It reflects on the (un)definable nature of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain, similarities and differences between them, and the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) global pandemic in 2020.
This chapter focuses on Black women’s contemporary digital, creative, and cultural industry experiences. It reflects on the overlap between tacit issues concerning racial, gender, and cultural identity in online spaces, and tensions between the emancipatory, enterprising, enjoyable and extractive dimensions of the digital experiences of Black women in Britain—which are inevitably impacted by capitalist infrastructures. This chapter addresses how labour is (un)defined and understood in society, in ways influenced by social hierarchies and structural exploitation linked to anti-Black racism, sexism, classism and different interlocking oppressions. Traumatic aspects of Black women’s digital experiences are discussed, as well as the endeavours of self-serving and institutionally racist arts organisations that attempt to ‘diversify’ their brand image by spectacularising Black people.
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