“Online feminism has been the greatest innovation for the movement of feminism in the last 50 years,” said Jessie Daniels, a professor at the City University of New York, during a guest lecture at the 16th Street building on Tuesday November 4th. This information is according to the Femme Future Report, Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Wine and cheese lavishly awaited guests as the lecture room quickly accumulated more and more people by the minute. The small stage sat before many; women, men, young, old, all anxiously waiting in awe for the guest speakers to commence their prepared speeches. There was an ambience in the air like no other, you just knew it was going to be a lecture worth listening to.
If you are a living human being on this planet, there is no way you don’t know about feminism. It’s everywhere.
But what is “online feminism”, or its more current term, cyberfeminism? Coined in the early 1990s, the term can be described as the work of feminists interested in the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies.
Radhika Gajjala, Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University, says, “Women’s labor history is still being written.” Instead of doing busywork at home without protest, as they did in earlier times, women are now having a say in what their work is worth.
In various pre-industrial, post industrial and agricultural periods, the work of women was singled down to child-rearing practices or housework. Both of these duties were extremely laborious in their own sense, which many people overlooked. Even though women were doing work inside of the home rather than outside, compensation was still rightly deserved.
Thus leading to the creation of the Wages for Housework Movement in the 1970s. “[This movement] made it clear that what we do in the domestic space is work, is labor; and actually contributes to the value of the pay that the man gets, the wage earner gets, because of what’s done,” Gajjala states. “So the movement from the feminist was, there needs to be wage value for the work they are doing.”
She also adds, “The claim of the new domesticity is that they want to move away from the model of the 1970s feminists who rejected housework. I’m going to say that there was no rejection of housework, but rather there was an assertion that maybe there needs to be value for the housework for various reasons.”
“Cyberfeminism 2.0,” Radhika Gajjala’s book, has been offered as a framework for women’s empowerment through technology since the 1980s.
However, with almost everything on the Internet, cyberfeminism is not without its critics.
In August 2013, Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer of color, tweeted #solidarityisforwhitewomen in response to cyberfeminism activism directed at white feminist bloggers who failed to acknowledge racist and sexist behavior of one of their frequent contributors to blogs like Jezebel and Feministe. Whomever sent inappropriate material to these blogs is unknown. This is only one specific event, but quarrels such as this happen all the time between feminist bloggers.
In October, Hollaback, an organization with a website devoted to ending street harassment against women, released a two-minute video displaying 10 hours of a woman walking in NYC. But the editing of the video has been criticized.
“It had problems in terms of the way the neighborhoods were sampled, they oversampled for neighborhoods in Harlem and they also had some problems with editing,” Daniels says. “When there were white men who were catcalling this woman or street harassing this woman, they edited those women out.” The director’s explanation was that there were sound problems with those parts.
Daniels also looks at the link between feminism among white women and the supremacy of whites. “White feminism is easily grafted onto white supremacy and it’s useful for arguing for equality for white women and possibly for white gays and lesbians in a white supremacist context,” she says. “So we have to be careful about white feminism because it can so easily do the work of white supremacy.”
Based on her own personal research and through the findings of others, Daniels finds that the trouble with white feminism can be looked at the particular need to examine the positionality of white women. “It’s really the work of women of color, feminist scholars, Jackie Johnson, Patricia Hill Collins, and others, who really push us to say that this white feminism is not good enough, it doesn’t do the work we need feminism to do. It’s really based on their call that we need to do better.”
Feminist blogs may have used to seem like a whole bunch of nattering on the net, but now women are generating huge changes in today’s society via cyberspace.
Radhika Gajjala can be reached through her Twitter handle, @cyberdivalivesl, or on her website radhikagajjala.org. Jessie Daniels can be contacted through @jessienyc on Twitter.