Journal „Kvinder, Køn & Forskning|Women, Gender & Research“; Univ. of Copenhagen (Web)
Proposals by: 15.03.2025
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)? Read more … (Web)
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