Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue no. 8: Gender, Globalization and the Digital (November 2015)
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Issue edited by Roopika Risam
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Item Open Access [Issue no. 8 Cover](Fembot Collective, 2015-11) McCallum, DavidItem Open Access Digi-Blogging Gender Violence: Intersecting Ethnicity, Race, Migration and Globalization in South Asian Community Blogs Against IPV(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Mukherjee, IshaniItem Open Access CultureNotFoundException(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Zachary, Viet Pine; Kazuo, RodrigoItem Open Access Women's Ways of Structuring Data(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Masters, Christine LItem Open Access Feminist Rhetoric in the Digital Sphere: Digital Interventions & the Subversion of Gendered Cultural Scripts(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Lane, LizItem Open Access Rule-guided Expression: Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Allukian, Kristin; Carassai, MauroThis paper is concerned with the examination of rule-guided cultural and thematic battles enacted by women writers in two historical moments—the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first centuries—against the dominant cultural institutions of their time. Such battles, evaluated in the Anglophone world of letters at large, bring to light women’s often inconspicuous strategies for legislating new mechanisms of written expression within the established authoring and reading practices of their times. The recurring patterns we detect in these strategies offer a point of departure to explore continuities connecting the woman’s right to productive labor movement in the nineteenth-century with woman’s right to control their own digital labor in the twenty first century—two moments in time when varying feminist discourses were converging around the conceptualization of “new woman.” Both the mobility-limited late nineteenth century society and the apparently digitally-democratized twenty-first century seem to call for female writing subjects, who are often seen at the margins of the “social factory,” to intervene through specific literary acts of disturbance. Such acts of disturbance, when closely analyzed, can be seen as both exposing and altering the rule-based systems in which these authors are confrontationally embedded. In assessing how the tensions generated by an increasingly mechanized, industrialized, electronic, and software-automated trajectory over the last centuries are reflected in literary expression by select female writers, we discovered that the acts of literary subversions enacted by these women share many a commonality when it comes to their basic operative functioning. First, they usually unfold by means of a three-piece set of features that we illustrate in our close readings of the specific works we discuss. Second, they seem to occur in historical periods characterized by rapid modernizing changes marked by the appearance of technological networks. Third, these acts can be most clearly seen as similar once we look at them from, as it were, a typological perspective: what nineteenth-century print authors envisioned for the heroines and female characters of their novels seems to be eventually re-enacted and transposed into concrete authorial practices by female writers operating in born-digital environments. Without claiming such a tendency to work as a fundamental prerogative of all women’s writing or without contending that it constitutes an ongoing inclination reaching well beyond the epochs we are considering, the mere existence of the recurring structures we uncover in this paper proves both intriguingly meaningful and undoubtedly promising in terms of further scholarly interrogation on the issue of gender-based forms of expression in the literary field.Item Open Access Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Percieved Interconnectedness(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Abidin, CrystalAround 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 globallyItem Open Access Thrice Invisible in its Visibilty: Queerness and user generated 'Kand' videos(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Nishant, ShahItem Open Access Introduction:Gender, Globalization, and the Digital(Fembot Collective, 2015-11) Risam, Roopika