Call For Papers: Special Issue on (En)gendering the Digital World
Call for Papers: (En)gendering the Digital World
More than ever, our lives (and deaths) are entangled with the digitally-mediated world, and our virtual expressions are part of how we become recognisable subjects in the world. The hopes that groups like the cyber-feminists placed in the 1990s internet, as a gender-less space, appear massively compromised. Instead, many of the most powerful actors in the tech ecosystem appear to benefit from a kind of ‘digital patriarchy’ (Little and Winch 2021). Poor quality and exploitative forms of labour, required to support our platform economies, have blossomed, much of it being in the shadows (Murgia 2024), heavily gendered, and racialised (Van Doorn 2017). In this era that is marked by the birth of the iPhone in Jobs-ian legend, the Musk-y realms of X, and the Zucker-punch of the Meta-verse, rationality, quantification, and innovation appear to still be imagined as masculine qualities, while vulnerability, emotionality and qualitative knowledge remain associated with women and the private. Therefore, “(en)gendering” the digital world and including diverse gendered positions becomes crucial in understanding and interrogating the contemporary digital world.
As a result of platform cultures and the datification of society, bodies, lives and livelihoods are increasingly broken into data sets capable of being analysed, acted upon or optimised by ourselves and our institutions. Our capacities and futures are shaped by (predictive) algorithms which not only reinforce existing power relations but create new ones. Even with the sophistication of data classification systems, lived realities of gender, race and sexuality continue to be flattened, binarised and processed to be ‘tractable’ by powerful digital interests (D'Ignazio and Klein 2020). Modern algorithms are highly indebted to behavioural analytics, whose mechanisms were precisely tuned to predict the supposedly mysterious ‘behaviour of women, children, people of colour and the poor’ (Lepore 2020, p.325). How might these groups of people re-assert their influence on knowledge production, now that algorithms increasingly run the economic/”surveillance” model of the digital world (Zuboff 2015)? Can new technologies really produce forms of ‘non-gendered objectification’, beyond bodies and labels (McAdam and Marlow, 2010)?
Many digital systems derive their legitimacy from claims to strengthened relationships, community and interest-based connections, such as those built through fanhood (Morris 2014) and community arts (Minahan and Cox 2007), or supporting human processes such as memorialization (Reading and Notley, 2017). Yet, it is increasingly clear that the digital creates divisions and disparities in everyday life, as well as the Internet provides new avenues for silencing marginalised groups. As technologies and society move more quickly away from the more utopist 1990s ideas of the internet as a quasi-anarchistic and self-managed space, with everybody being equal, so too the politics of social groups online transforms. Internet communities become increasingly constrained spaces due to platform convergence and technological monopolies. We all may go through life using “echo chambers,” whether progressive echo chambers or reactionary ones. There are particular concerns around certain networked communities, such as e.g. the manosphere (Ging, 2019), Incel communities (Askanius et al. 2024), white supremacist spaces (Askanius, 2021), and anti-gender organising (Alm & Engebretsen, 2022). Yet, even progressive communities are not immune to the siloing of the modern internet community.
Equally, while the internet and platform culture in particular is hailed by some as “the world’s public square” and thus understood through important cosmopolitan values of public speech, both state intervention and corporate regulation are increasingly restricting the kinds of content one can access online. That is perhaps more evident in what scholars have termed the “deplatformisation of sex,” whereby sexually-explicit content (or content read as sexually-explicit) is increasingly forbidden by platforms and often automatically removed by algorithmic means. This, research shows, has severely impacted gender and sexual minorities online (Blunt et al. 2021).
Across these questions and beyond, digitalization is a profoundly ethical and political matter that requires critical engagement, particularly from gender-focused scholars. What kind of methodological and epistemological opportunities/limits are provided by the digital? How does the digital provide avenues for challenging hegemonic notions of gender, race, sexuality, class, age, etc.? How does the digital make us think through key feminist issues, such as power, knowledge, visibility etc.?
With this special issue, we want to invite feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, artists and activists to think with and through digital matters (in both senses of the word) from intersectional, feminist, queer/trans, decolonial, and posthuman perspectives. We encourage submissions from junior scholars as well as more experienced scholars. We welcome submissions that deploy radical and experimental methodologies. In addition to academic articles, we also welcome essays and book reviews.
Potential themes include but are not limited to, gendered perspectives on:
- Digital hate (racism, transphobia, the manosphere, etc)
- Algorithms, AI and posthuman performativity
- Digital labour and/or entrepreneurship
- Internet culture (gaming, memes etc.)
- Sex, sexuality, and the deplatforming of sex
- Feminist and queer perspective on data
- Digital activism and solidarities
- Technology-facilitated violence and abuse
- Body and embodiment
- Digital colonialism
- Digital Health and care
- Death, dying and mourning in digital times
- Digital temporalities
Please submit contributions via the usual electronic submission system of KKF. Remember to indicate that your text is meant for this special issue. Deadline for submissions of abstracts is the 15th of March 2025. All article contributions will be peer-reviewed. The submission deadline for full articles is 15th of July 2025.
Corresponding editors for this special issue:
Maja Brandt Andreasen
University of Stavanger, Norway
Kai Roland Green,
Aarhus University, Denmark
Tara Mehrabi
Karlstad University, Sweden
João Florêncio
Linköping University, Sweden
References
Alm, E., & Engebretsen, E. L. (2022). Anti-gender Politics and Queer Theory. Lambda Nordica, 27(3-4), 7-19. https://doi.org/10.34041/ln.v27.838
Askanius, T. (2021). On Frogs, Monkeys, and Execution Memes: Exploring the Humor-Hate Nexus at the Intersection of Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right Movements in Sweden. Television & New Media, 22(2), 147-165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982234
Askanius, T., Brock, M., Kaun, A., & Larsson, A. (2024).“Time to Abandon Swedish Women”: Discursive Connections Between Misogyny and White Supremacy in Sweden. International Journal Of Communication, 18, 19.
Blunt, Danielle, Stefanie Duguay, Tarleton Gillespie, Sinnamon Love, and Clarissa Smith. “Deplatforming Sex: A Roundtable Conversation.” Porn Studies 8 (4): 420–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.2005907.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Strong Ideas Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020.
Ging, D. (2019). Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 22(4), 638-657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17706401
Lepore, Jill. If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future, 2020.
Little, Ben, and Alison Winch. The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021.
McAdam, Maura, and Susan Marlow. “Chapter 4 Female Entrepreneurship in the Context of High Technology Business Incubation: Strategic Approaches to Managing Challenges and Celebrating Success.” In Innovating Women: Contributions to Technological Advancement, edited by Pooran Wynarczyk and Susan Marlow, 1:55–75. Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2040-7246(2010)0000001009.
Minahan, Stella, and Julie Wolfram Cox. “Stitch’nBitch: Cyberfeminism, a Third Place and the New Materiality.” Journal of Material Culture 12, no. 1 (March 2007): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183507074559.
Murgia, Madhumita. Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. Pan Macmillan UK, 2024.
Reading, Anna, and Tanya Notley. “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies.” In Digital Memory Studies. Routledge, 2017.
Van Doorn, Niels. “Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the ‘on-Demand’ Economy.” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 6 (2017): 898–914. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194.
Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (March 2015): 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5.
