Whose feminism is it anyway? Reinterpreting digital media and feminisms from the non-metropolitan global south

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement—the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars.