Call for Papers: Feminist Archaeologies of Desktop Media

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.

"Imago. Studi di cinema e media", n. 22, 2020

This article aims to consider certain narrative elements in the experience of media users within contemporary screen interfaces. We will begin with the assumption that the research, visualization, and appropriation of media content of various types (textual, photographic, audiovisual, etc.) necessarily involve the exploration of different environments, in relation to which interfaces define the degree and mode of interaction. Secondly, we will inquire whether these forms of interaction allow for the emergence of an ongoing narrative based on "topological choices" – not structured a priori but determined moment by moment by the actions performed by the media user. This is a form of narrative that is embodied and situated. In conclusion, we will analyze how this form of spatialized ongoing narrative is presented in the desktop film "Searching" by Aneesh Chaganty.

Mobile touchscreen media have become integral to everyday life, producing new modes of human interaction and engagement. In The Fabric of Interface, Stephen Monteiro argues that these draw heavily on gendered forms and practices often derived from textile and needlecraft culture. Indeed, ties between computing technologies, textile industries, and domestic labor have long shaped conceptual and material approaches to digital and electronic media. Emphasizing the design and function of mobile devices, interfaces, and platforms, Monteiro demonstrates how contemporary media adopt specific aesthetics, strategies, and practices of textile construction and needle-based assembly in encouraging or requiring users to generate, manipulate, and join together networked data. Common perceptions of personal media use as conflating leisure and immaterial collective labor—particularly in the case of social media—are similarly reinforced by affinities to informal collective and individual domestic craft practices, such as sewing and quilting, that have often been dismissed as pastimes requiring little skill and attention. These circumstances raise important questions about the powerful role that gender—as well as race, ethnicity, and other markers of social difference and inequality—can play in our approach to, and expectations of, media and their underlying technological and economic configurations. Exploring device design, app construction, casual game genres, social networking strategies, and the performativity of public media practices, The Fabric of Interface establishes the widespread and profound influence of textile-based cultural production and gendered social norms in shaping contemporary communication and its place in our lives.

2007

The following is a philosophical consideration of the computer, particularly the graphical user interface (GUI), as a cultural artifact. Basing the examination on the premise that the computer is not a neutral tool but, rather, is an extension of the society creating it, I review potential pitfalls associated with the GUI. Particularly, the GUI can act to relegate computer literacy to a status of usability, rather than conceptual knowledge, and it can also function to further marginalize individuals outside the membership of the dominant culture. Our current notions of “computer literacy” must be revisited under the scrutiny of the computer, particularly the GUI, as a cultural artifact that acts to re-perpetuate the dominant culture’s standards and mores. As instructors, we need to be aware of these inherent detrimental aspects so that we can empower our students to control the tool we call the computer, rather than vice versa. This paper seeks to raise questions and awareness of po...

2025

Call for Papers – GAMER Conference digital technologies and Gender in Arts and MEdia: creation, representations, Reception (GAMER) March 12–13, 2026 | Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France The Institute of Communication and Media at Sorbonne Nouvelle, in collaboration with the Departments of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies and Cultural Mediation at Sorbonne Nouvelle, the IRMÉCCEN research laboratory, Research Committees 14 (Sociology of Communication, Knowledge, and Culture) and 37 (Sociology of the Arts) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), as well as Research Committee 38 (Political Socio-Anthropology: Media and Cultures) of the International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists (AISLF), are pleased to jointly host an international bilingual conference (French and English) entitled “digital technologies and Gender in Arts and MEdia: creation, representation, Reception” (GAMER).

1999

Recent feminist cultural studies of technology analyze how discourses and practices that circulate in high-tech culture reproduce and enact the same unequal power rela-tions embedded in our institutions and day-to-day activities. Feminist interventions are communicative acts that bring attention to the shifting power relations within a specific discursive context. An analysis of the assumptions about audience that oper-ate in electronic artifacts demonstrates how power relations play out within particular communities. The author argues that enacting feminist interventions in online envi-ronments changes the online community’s identity and sense of audience, and that creating feminist multimedia can help ensure a more human, diverse and gender balanced human presence in all forms of technology and new media. community electronic conferences feminist critiques of technology intervention multimedia The publication of “Women and Computers: An Introduction ” in the 1990 special issue of ...

Atlantis Critical Studies in Gender Culture Social Justice, 2008

Women's History Review, 2016

“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” (as an alternative formulation to standpoints) that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices (practical and conceptual) need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In the digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman (1991; 2004); Haraway (1993; Nakamura, 2003), Hayles (1993; 2012), VNSMatrix (1991), Adam (1998), Plant (1998). Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field (using Gottlob Frege’s (1964) sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology (cf. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Van Der Tuin, 2014), and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects (Malabou, 2011; Fraser, 2013). Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change (Olkowski, 1999; Van Der Tuin 2014). This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register – “feminicity”– can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activity points of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, ie, forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices (inclusive of intuition, compulsion, capitalist-driven practices of utility, theory and art).

Information, Communication & Society, 2008