E-Racing difference in E-Space: Black female subjectivity and the Web-based portfolio

Abstract

This article seeks to complicate current theories of gender, technology, and composition by examining the self-representation of Black women at Spelman College (an historically Black, all-female private college) in their end-of-the-semester Web-based portfolios. Although feminist advocates of “cyborg writing” celebrate alternative self-fashioning in e-spaces, women of color frequently perform racially situated acts of resistance that celebrate re-embodiment and a networked diasporic intimacy rather than the loss of gender and racial markers. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the metaphors of parody and transgression that ground the feminist celebration of multiple subjectivities to elucidate their “white, middle-class” standpoint. I then examine—through a close analysis of student Web-based portfolios—how African-American women, who often must mask their “Blackness” within white workplace or school settings, hold onto sets of experience, memories, and cultural signs when they present themselves online, appropriating e-space as a site of resistant memory.