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Chapter 5: Digital Divas Strike Back: Digital Cultures and Feminist Futures
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Chapter 5 Digital Divas Strike Back Digital Cultures and Feminist Futures At the dawn of our information age, circa 2000, filmmaker Julie Dash embarked on The Digital Diva, an interactive CD‑Rom and film project.1 In this work, the titular Digital Diva, Anna Achebe, immerses herself in a digital lifestyle but is eventually targeted for police surveillance—and for death—when she hacks into a corporate scheme to change our privacy laws. While highlighting the technological hostility against black minds that engage with the digital revolution, Dash offers a heroine who outsmarts the guardians of technology as she bridges the divides between “reality” and the virtual. Anna, who inherits her decryption gift from her Nigerian grandfather, who had cracked the Enigma code used by Hitler during World War II, is situated within an African diasporic legacy of black intelligence, scientific engagement, and political resistance: unafraid of technology but “real enough” to utilize it for social justice. While Dash’s imaginative engagement with and critique of digital technology has not reached a wide audience, she nonetheless showcases how technology can shift its focus toward black women’s concerns and aesthetics. In the wake of her creative efforts, other female artists have expanded digital technology in radical and provocative ways. How might we imagine new roles and interactions for women who engage technology? Moreover, how might these engagements reflect a politics of feminism, a politics of liberation? These questions become urgent in this age of the computer revolution, especially when we realize that “Digital Divas” are still marginalized in Big Media narratives. Consider David Fincher’s critically acclaimed 2010 film The Social Network, which debuted ten years after The Digital Diva and is based on the 115 116 Body as Evidence life of Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the massive social network site Facebook, and the youngest billionaire in the world. The film imagines a world of Ivy League computer geeks that excludes women, except as the “muse” for inventive computer programs. Indeed, The Social Network depicts Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) coming up with Facebook by first lashing out at an ex‑girlfriend on his live journal blog. In a fit of chauvinistic rage and embitterment, Zuckerberg creates in the spur of the moment an objectifying Web site called “Facemash,” which allows men to rate the attractiveness of Harvard’s female undergraduate students based on their online photos, which he has accessed by using his computer hacking skills. While Zuckerberg himself said he created Facebook because he just liked “building stuff,” the film narrative relied instead on an old Internet archived blog feed, in which the young billionaire refers to a co‑ed as a “bitch,” and the infamous short‑lived existence of Facemash, to constitute the “origin narrative” of one of the most populous social network sites on the Internet.2 It is not surprising that The Social Network mobilized routine techno‑cultural practices of linguistic and visual subjugation of women’s bodies to frame men’s innovative engagements with technology. In this chapter, I examine the extent to which our digital revolution has relied on women’s bodies to fuel and shape its technologies. This is evident in the assemblage of computers by various third world women assembly line workers here and abroad and in mass rapes in the Congo region, where the war over raw materials used in computer chips continues. This is also evident in the proliferation of Internet porn sites that simulate the violence underlying the femicide on the U.S./Mexico border, where some of our digital technologies are assembled, and in the increasing numbers of women who now have unlimited access to computer technology. In response to these contradictions and possibilities, I further explore women’s creative appropriations of digital technology to assess the complex interplay of gender with race, class, nationality, and other markers of difference. As I have already asked in chapter 4, Can a social revolution be digitized? And can we finally make meaning of “more and more information”? How, indeed, can information be transformed into knowledge and action? RETOOLING RESISTANCE The struggle to gain access to and proficiency with the latest tools of technology is not a new one for women, particularly for women of color. If the written word represents one of our earliest tools of technology, then we need only reflect on Virginia Woolf’s thesis and the responses by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, who assert that only a certain class of women could [18.118.205...