Traversing bodies and territories: feminist activism against digital violence

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how feminist collectives approach the internet as a feminist territory to defend it from violence. Feminist media studies have recently focused on bodies as sites of oppression and resistance in our digital society. In this article, however, I contend that violence is not limited to bodies; it extends to the territories that these bodies occupy. I demonstrate the importance of territory as a political place of feminist enunciation,1 from which new strategies against digital violence emerge. I argue that it is possible to conceptualize the internet as a territory through communitarian feminism, a theoretical and political contribution to feminism from Indigenous women in Latin America. I further claim that the body-territory category proposed by communitarian feminism can help feminist media studies broaden its analysis of how power relations around violence, data extractivism, and inequalities manifest. The article is based on a digital ethnography of four social collectives enunciating a feminist internet in Mexico. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it contributes to the theorization of the internet as a territory. Second, it presents evidence of current feminist strategies for defending digital territory.