[spectre] Fwd: Postdigital Intimacies Event: Intimate Digital Feminist Activism: 9th of June

[Andreas Broeckmann]

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: 	Postdigital Intimacies Event: Intimate Digital Feminist 
Activism: 9th of June
Datum: 	Mon, 23 May 2022 08:40:41 +0000
Von: 	Cpc.icc <cpc.icc at coventry.ac.uk>

*Intimate Digital Feminist Activism*

Date: 9th June 2022
Time: 3:00-5:00pm (UK Time)
Venue: Online on Zoom
Language: English

Register here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/intimate-digital-feminist-activism-tickets-139452769989

Postdigital intimacies perform a folding public and private, shaping new 
ways of collectivising. What are the activist potentials 
ofpostdigitalintimacies?

In the fourth seminar in the Postdigital Intimacies network, we explore 
the relationalities of digital feminist activism. Digital feminist 
activism is central to the struggles over feminism: hashtag, popular, 
and neoliberal, but also radical and creative, forming new lines of 
feminist inquiry and reprising old ones. Central to these new lines of 
feminist practice has been an intimate visibility of rape culture, 
sexual and racial harassment, and everyday misogyny.

This seminar will explore the merging of public and private in acts of 
feminist resistance. The speakers will reflect on how we can represent, 
experience and act in the world differently, through queer, critical 
race and feminist theory. Their work reflects the way creative practice 
also locates the blurring of public and private as both present, future 
and past, when the personal is (and always has been) political.

*“Digitized narratives of sexual violence”*

Kaitlynn Mendes, Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research 
Chair in Inequality and Gender, University of Western Ontario, Canada

This talk reflects on how narratives and disclosures of sexual violence 
are shaped both by rape culture and rape myths, but also by the digital 
platforms and conventions, affordances and restrictions of the platforms 
in which they appear. Drawing from theories such as affect and platform 
vernacular, this talk draws from empirical data from nearly 1000 
disclosures across social media platforms and websites to show how 
digital platforms shape ‘digitized narratives’ of sexual violence not 
only around what is known about sexual violence, but how it is felt and 
experienced across digital networks. The talk also attends to important 
considerations around who is able to disclose sexual violence via 
digital technologies, and which disclosures are likely to gain 
visibility amidst sexist, racist, and homophobic algorithmic biases.

*“The intimate territoriality of digital activism: mourning and loss in 
the visual practices of Iranian #justice-seeking mothers” *

Sara Tafakori, Assistant Professor in Media and Communication, 
University of Leeds, UK

In this paper, I focus on the digital activism of Iranian 
#justice-seeking mothers, conceiving this women’s network as a digital 
intimate public, in which the political is engaged through a language of 
personal and familiar attachment (Berlant 1998, 2008). I trace the ways 
in which these women sustain a solidaristic mode of intimacy through 
collectively narrating the loss of their children at the hands of the 
Iranian state. In doing so, I argue, the mothers’ network utilises the 
affective resources of melancholia, staging their ‘absolute refusal to 
relinquish the other’ (Eng and Han 2003) via the digital affordances of 
Instagram and Twitter, in order to expand the space of political 
appearance at both national and transnational levels (Azoulay 2008, 
Arendt 1998). They do this, I argue, through hybrid visual practices of 
public intimacy, disseminating and archiving in-person gatherings at 
their children’s graves, as well as memorialising the dead in the 
erstwhile private spaces of each others’ homes. In stressing the 
simultaneously local and transnational dimensions of these women’s 
activism, which innovatively reshapes cultural tropes around motherhood, 
family and mourning, I take a critical distance, on the one hand, from 
approaches that frame mourners’ digital activism  in Western-centric 
terms, that is, as a form of deterritorialization that ‘escapes’ the 
restrictions of its global South context (Dobson et al 2018, Papailias 
2019); and on the other hand, from those approaches that frame mourning 
activism in non-Western contexts  in territorially specific and 
culturally exoticising terms (Hjorth 2018, Cumiskey and Hjorth 2017). I 
conclude by reflecting on what light this research can shed on the 
broader study of women’s intimate digital activism across local and 
transnational contexts in the global South.

*“The unsolicited pussy pic: Public privates and the value of feminist 
absurd humor in dark times”*

Jenny Sundén, Professor of Gender Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden

Research on digital feminist activism has often focused on the affective 
dynamics of anger, and rightfully so.Anger mobilizes bodies and fuels 
social change, but it also wears bodies down. Constant anger is simply 
exhausting. In this talk, building on our bookWho’s laughing now? 
Feminist tactics in social media(Sundén and Paasonen 2020, MIT Press), I 
willinstead foreground humor, laughter and a sense of the absurd as a 
means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, 
sexism and misogyny. More specifically, I willexplore the humorous 
trajectory of the unsolicited pussy pick and other forms of creative 
pussy pick making as feminist interventions in a culturally pervasive 
dick pick culture. As an echo from 1960s and 1970s feminist “cunt art,” 
vulvas seem to enjoy something of a revival in current feminist artistic 
and activist practices and their intersections with social media 
platforms, indicating how female genitalia continue to both shape the 
anatomy of contemporary sexism and provide grounds for reappropriation 
and resistance. One particularly vibrant example is the work of the 
feminist artist Stephanie Sarley, in particular her sassy pictorial 
treatment of vulvas on Instagram in absurdist registers. In discussions 
of absurdist humor, distinctions are often made between light 
playfulness on one hand and a much darker existential absurd on the 
other. For us, absurd feminist humor rather combines the lighthearted 
and the darkly existential. The utmost absurd or surreal qualities of 
sexism provide a sounding board for seemingly lighter forms of humor 
that traffics in the unreasonable, the illogical and the inappropriate. 
This paradoxical compound of lightness and darkness forms a tactic for 
dealing with a ludicrous reality.

*Speaker bios*

*Kaitlynn Mendes* is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada 
Research Chair in Inequality and Gender at the University of Western 
Ontario, Canada. Kaitlynn is a feminist scholar whose work sits at the 
intersections of media, sociology, education, and cultural studies. She 
has written widely around representations of feminism in the media, and 
feminists’ use of social media to challenge rape culture. She has 50 
publications around feminism, the media, and digital technologies 
including the award winning SlutWalk: Feminism, activism and 
media (2015), and Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back 
Against Rape Culture (2019, with Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller).

*Sara Tafakori* is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the 
University of Leeds.  Before joining the School of Media and 
Communication at the University of Leeds, she was a guest teacher and 
visiting fellow at the Centre for Media and Communication at the London 
School of Economics, holding a joint position as a 2020-21 Max Weber 
Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow based in Lebanon (Beirut). She was 
previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and 
concurrently hold a Teaching Fellowship at the School of Oriental and 
African Studies (SOAS). Her PhD explored the affective mediation of 
crisis through the lens of critical race and feminist theory, focusing 
on the mediation of Iran’s economic sanctions on Persian Facebook. Her 
research interests include feminist media and cultural studies, 
postcolonial and critical race theory, and emotion/affect theory, with a 
particular focus on mediation of (in)justice and human rights. Her 
recent research has focused the problematics of constructing feminist 
solidarity through engaging with critical race and postcolonial 
critiques of popular feminism(s).

*Jenny Sundén* is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University. 
Her work is situated at the intersection of digital media studies, 
gender and sexuality studies and affect theory. She is currently working 
on digital intimacy and questions of technological brokenness, 
disruption and delay;feminist uses of humor in social media as forms of 
resistance; and digital sexual cultures, nudity and kink. She is the 
author ofWho’s laughing now? Feminist tactics in social media(with 
Susanna Paasonen, 2020) and Gender and Sexuality in online game 
cultures: Passionate play (with Malin Sveningsson, 2012).