Surfing Feminism's Online Wave: The Internet and the Future of Feminism

Abstract

Surfing Feminism's Online Wave: The Internet and the Future of Feminism Stephanie Richer Schulte Books Discussed in This Article Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization. By Manisha Desai. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action. Edited by Kris tine Blair, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. By Nicholas Carr. New York: Norton, 2010. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, journalist Deborah Soloman asked Jessica Valenti, the founder and editor of the blog Feministing.com, if she considered herself a "third wave feminist." In her answer, Valenti expressed her discomfort with the "wave" terminology before answering: "Maybe we're on to the fourth wave. Maybe the fourth wave is online."1 Defining and numbering waves of feminism was and remains a contro versial endeavor, and one not addressed directly here. Less controversial, FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 727 728 Stephanie Richer Schulte though, is the deeply interrelated nature of gender and technology and the somewhat paradoxical hope that the internet is the key to the future of feminism. This essay surveys recent books to take up notions of gender and technology, in particular those that investigate computer-network ing technologies and feminist activism. These works ask questions such as the following: Can the internet provide or become a feminist space? How do online environments enable or compromise offline activism? Are computer networking technologies always-already male and a sphere where male dominance is reinforced? These questions center on a problem shared by many new media scholars: Is the internet a vehicle for liberation through collective action or a distraction from the collective and from "real" problems?2 This review places recent books (rejdefining cyberfeminism in the larger trajectory of scholarship on the internet in order to illustrate the relationships between the two fields. For example, it illustrates how the internet itself and the scholars who studied it offered feminists a produc tive new framework through which to rethink their collective projects as diverse, horizontally organized, and global. In this sense, both the technology itself and early attempts to understand it participated in the important shift toward global and transnational feminisms. This essay also, however, illustrates how early internet scholarship was deeply marked by utopian-dystopian binary-driven research that characterized online spaces as either good or bad and that focused on "the virtual" and "the physical" as separate spheres. In some ways, this bias impinged upon many early studies of cyberfeminism, which tended to either demonize or celebrate the possibilities of online feminism. However, early cyberfemi nist works added to the body of internet scholarship by introducing estab lished feminist critical valences to studies of the internet. These scholars attended to the tacit value systems embedded in both networking tech nologies and their antecedent structures; they also focused on how people used the internet and redefined the technology through their use. The contemporary cyberfeminist scholarship detailed here offers complex and multifaceted gendered analyses of how the internet oper ates, the politics that shape its structure and its uses, and the potential it holds for social justice and feminist activism. In so doing, these books Stephanie Richer Schulte 729 complicate utopian-dystopian binaries and undermine unproductive assumptions entrenched elsewhere in internet scholarship, making femi nist scholarship one place in which the most interesting work about the internet—its shape, its potentials, its politics, its future—is happening. These works build on cyberfeminist predecessors in particular and bring feminist scholarship's critical focus, attention to gendered structures of power, and activist concentration to the study of internet technology. Thus, internet studies is not only a crucial site for feminist studies, but it is also an area that benefits from, but could use more, critical feminist schol arship to puncture unquestioned (male, white, and Western) assumptions about internet technologies. The books discussed here include chapters that employ a multi tude of methodologies and ideological perspectives, spanning qualitative interviews and quantitative data and analyses as well as political theoreti cal explorations. These works model critical research methods that inter weave daily online practices...