Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25990

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology is an open-access peer reviewed journal featuring scholarship on gender, new media and technology.

The journal publishes contributions that exemplify Ada’s commitments to politically engaged, intersectional approaches to feminist media scholarship.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 151

Open Access
About the Cover Illustration
(Fembot Collective, 2015) Hederson, Ameryah
Open Access
“América Latina Vai Ser Toda Feminista”: Visualizing & Realizing Transnational Feminisms in the Women’s Worlds March for Rights
(Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Synder, Cara K; Veiga, Ana Maria; Wolff, Cristina Scheibe
On August 2, 2017, ten thousand feminists from around the globe took to the streets of Florianopolis, Brazil to march for women’s rights. The Marcha Mundos de Mulheres por Direitos (Women’s Worlds March for Rights, or MMMD) was a central part of an academic conference jointly titled the 13th Women’s Worlds Congress / 11th Seminário Internacional Fazendo Gênero. Using this March – both its physical forms and its digital translations – as a case study, this essay explores how the visual rendering of dissent articulates and realizes transnational feminist politics and solidarities.
Open Access
Aurat Raj: Hacking Masculinity & Reimagining Gender in South Asian Cinema
(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Mokhtar, Shehram
This article interprets the 1979 Pakistani film Aurat Raj (Women’s Rule) as a work of feminist speculative fiction. The film presents a radically reimagined gendered world through its narrative of role reversal. Drawing on the concept of hacking as a practice of inspection and reconfiguration, I read women’s characters in Aurat Raj as entering and dissecting the leaky system of gender to salvage and reconstitute masculinity. The film highlights systemic problems of gender in electoral politics, social relations, and media representations through the phantasm of song, dance, and comedy. I argue that the fantastical scenarios, musical flights, and comedic twists in the film function as interventionist tools and techniques that help complicate and refashion the present by envisioning radical futures.
Open Access
Awkwardness and Assemblage: Digital Schemes for Feminist World-Making
(Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Smith-Prei, Carrie, 1975- author; Stehle, Maria
In this essay, we develop the concept of awkward assemblages to describe feminist digital activism that is multidirectional in its political effects and interpretive legibility, built of uneasy bedfellows and ill-suited coalitional partners. We exemplify the way in which activist practices, developing out of the tensions in which contemporary feminisms find themselves, complicate the genealogy of feminist protest. We focus on feminist responses triggered by the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015/16, particularly the work of Swiss-German performance artist Milo Moiré. This example allows us to highlight the complex ways in which local and contemporary feminist interventions intersect with the history of feminist protest art and how they link to transnational movements—among other examples, the #MeToo movement. We then turn to digital-feminist coalitional possibilities by thinking through assembling, along with coding and hacking, as performative labor that emphasizes the potential of inventing and visualizing political forms that (however awkwardly) materialize different worlds.
Open Access
Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Performative Politics And Queer Migrant Activisms
(Fembot Collective, 2018-11) Lynes, Krista
In June 2017, the refugee rights group LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece abducted a participatory artwork from the global contemporary art exhibit Documenta 14, held in Athens to highlight the city’s centrality to European imaginaries of crisis. They then released a ransom note and accompanying video in social media, in which they addressed the artist, Roger Bernat, condemning the fetishization of refugees by Documenta, and highlighting the precarious conditions queer migrants face on a daily basis. This paper takes up this action to examine the performative potential of such cultural interventions, their use of embodied actions which draw from the aesthetic languages of feminist and queer artistic practice, the forms of alliance their gesture enacted, and their careful negotiation of the tricky boundary of visibility/invisibility. It concludes that the strategic appropriation of urban space and digital platforms—a strategy it names “displacement”—served to interrupt Documenta’s more narrowly defined public sphere, forging a new space in which to appear publicly.
Open Access
Beyond Cyborg Collective Book Review
(Fembot Collective, 2013) Samer, Roxanne; Carlson, Laurie Ann
Open Access
Beyond the Blackbox: Repurposing ROM Hacking for Feminist Hacking/Making Practices
(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Kirtz, Jaime Lee
While much interest in feminist technology looks to future inventions, dead or obsolete communication media, such as older smartphones, offers spaces in which to hack into effaced gendered narratives, specifically through physical processes of deconstruction and circuit bending. Thus, this practice brings attention to the tasks and narratives of circuit inspection and soldering of female workers, such as dagongmei, i.e. Chinese female migrant workers. Through resoldering and reassembling a ROM chip in older telecommunication media, exposed is the ways in which women’s work in technology is blackboxed. Hacking the device in ways that make visible the work of women reconfigures this media as feminist technology. This hack draws from initiatives by scholars such as Lisa Parks and Lisa Nakamura, as well as DIY culture to trace, recover and discuss forms of female labor, inviting feminist technology to include affective, minority and domestic labor as critical production processes. This practice brings attention to the tasks and narratives of circuit inspection and soldering of female workers, such as dagongmei, i.e. Chinese female migrant workers (Pun and Chan 2013). Through resoldering and reassembling a ROM chip in older telecommunication media, exposed is the ways in which women’s work in technology is blackboxed. Bending the device in ways that make visible the work of women reconfigures this media as feminist technology. This hack draws from initiatives by scholars such as Lisa Parks and Lisa Nakamura, as well as DIY culture to trace, recover and discuss forms of female labor, inviting feminist technology to include affective, minority and domestic labor as critical production processes.
Open Access
Bina48: Gender, Race, and Queer Artificial Life
(Fembot Collective, 2016-05) Greene, Shelleen
Bina48, an artificial intelligence modeled after an African American woman, achieves radical political potential not by way of the trope of bodily transcendence and networked disembodiment, but rather, through her convergence of cybernetics, queer, and racial emancipatory politics toward possible hybrid, future constructions of self.
Open Access
Black Beauty and Digital Spaces: The New Visibility Politics
(Fembot Collective, 2016-11) Hobson, Janell
Less than a year after the creation of the viral hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, an equally catchy and politically charged slogan surfaced: #BlackGirlMagic. This latest hashtag insists on making black women’s bodies both visible and legible in contexts of beauty, desirability, and dignity. However, more needs to be said about how digital spaces have reified the raced and gendered meanings of black women’s bodies, in which representative and performative sites of beauty and defiance contribute to the shaping of black political subjects. At times, this becomes a space for subversion and protest, at other times a way of narrowing definitions and essentialist understandings of ‘black womanhood’ and ‘black girlhood.’ A black beauty project must grapple with a more complex examination of the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability that can reframe black embodiment beyond commercialized spectacles and toward more diverse representations of liberated bodies.
Open Access
Black Deaths Matter? Sousveillance and the Invisibility of Black Life
(Fembot Collective, 2016-11) Fischer, Mia; Mohrman, K
This article examines the shooting of Philando Castile, and his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds’, decision to film his death at the hands of the police, in order to explore the potential of live-streaming applications as a form of “sousveillance” that can expose white supremacy from below. In highlighting the political economy constraints that limit the dissemination of such images, we argue that the geographic and historical context of these videos as well as their integration into social justice movements, are critical for deploying them as effective tools that challenge racial inequality and make black life matter, not just black death.
Open Access
the Blind Shall See! the Question of Anonyminity in Journal Peer Review
(Fembot Collective, 2014) Pontille, David; Didier, Torny
Open Access
"C'mon! Make me a man!": Persona 4, Digital Bodies, and Queer Potentiality
(Fembot Collective, 2013-06) Youngblood, Jordan
Open Access
Casual Games, Time Management, and the Work of Affect
(Fembot Collective, 2013) Anable, Audrey
Open Access
Casual Threats: The Feminization of Casual Video Games
(Fembot Collective, 2013) Vanderhoef, John
Open Access
Collective Organizing, Individual Resistance, or Asshole Griefers: An Ethnographic Analysis of Women of Color in Xbox Live
(Fembot Collective, 2013) Gray, Kirshonna
Open Access
Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Percieved Interconnectedness
(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Abidin, Crystal
Around the world, many young people have taken to social media to monetise their personal lives as “influencers.” Although international news reports have variously described these commercial social media users as “bloggers,” “YouTubers,” and “Instagrammers,” I conceptualise these high-profile Internet microcelebrities (Senft 2008) as influencers regardless of their digital platform. Influencers are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in digital and physical spaces, and monetise their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalised, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Although influencers are now a worldwide phenomenon, this paper investigates a subset of them, namely women influencers of the “lifestyle” genre in Singapore. Based on my fieldwork and drawing from Horton & Wohl’s work on parasocial relations (1956), I observe how influencers appropriate and mobilise intimacies in different ways (commercial, interactive, reciprocal, disclosive), and describe a model of communication between influencers and followers I term “perceived interconnectedness”, in which influencers interact with followers to give the impression of intimacy. The practices investigated and analyses developed in this paper are not unique to Singapore and may be mapped onto larger Influencer ecologies. However, as a small nation of just over five million (YourSingapore 2013) with a high IT penetration rate (iDA 2015) and relatively developed Influencer industry[1], it is hoped that this study of influencers in Singapore can serve as a microcosm for future comparative studies of influencers globally
Open Access
Communizing Care in The Left Hand Of Darkness
(Fembot Collective, 2017-11) Aizura, Aren Z.
In this essay I combine a reading of The Left Hand of Darkness with autobiographical accounts of queer/trans reproduction and childrearing. Contrasting my own experiments in “50/50” parenting with the vision of care elaborated in the novel, I draw attention to the importance of caring labor to radical queer and trans politics more generally.
Open Access
Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems
(Fembot Collective, 2016-11) Hicks, Mar
Although online dating has only recently become culturally acceptable and widespread, using computers to make romantic matches has a long history. But rather than revolutionizing how people met and married, this article shows how early computerized dating systems re-inscribed conservative social norms about gender, race, class, and sexuality. It explores the mid-twentieth century origins of computer dating and matchmaking in order to argue for the importance of using sexuality as a lens of analysis in the history of computing. Doing so makes more visible the heteronormativity that silently structures much of our technological infrastructure and helps bring other questions about gender, race, and class into the foreground. The article connects this history to other examples in the history of technology that show how technological systems touted as “revolutionary” often help entrenched structural biases proliferate rather than breaking them down. The article also upsets the notion that computer dating systems can simply be understood as a version of the “boys and their toys” narrative that has dominated much of computing history. It shows that, contrary to what was previously believed, the first computerized dating system in either the US or the UK was run by a woman.
Open Access
Conclusion: It's Our Collective, Principled Making that Matters Most: Queer Feminist Media Praxis @Ada
(Fembot Collective, 2014-07) Juhasz, Alexandra
Open Access
Confronting toxic gamer culture: A challenge for feminist game studies scholars
(Fembot Collective, 2012-11) Consalvo, Mia