DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2015
Volume 9 Number 02
Volume 9 Number 02
Introduction to Feminisms and DH special issue
Abstract
Introduction to the special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on Feminisms and DH, which offers both background on the origins of the special issue and an overview of the pieces therein.
Special issues often capture a moment in time, an efflorescence of critical engagement,
or an urgent and timely shift in a field. If most special issues are snapshots, “Feminisms and DH” is something more like a long-exposure
photograph, a surreal composite that is simultaneously fiction and fact.
Let me indulge in a bit of scene-setting to help elucidate what I mean about the
surrealism of this issue and as way of practicing the kind of self-disclosure that Chris
Bourg and Bess Sadler argue is an important design and accessibility feature in feminist
work [Bourg and Sadler 2015]. Katherine D. Harris and I first proposed this special
issue to the editorial board of DHQ in January of 2012. We
had been part of ongoing discussions about “silences” in archives and were
relatively fresh off of a challenging roundtable titled “Editing
Digital Feminisms” at the 2011 meeting of the Society of Textual Scholarship
(STS), which also included Marilee Lindeman and Martha Nell Smith. The roundtable was
great; what was challenging from my perspective was the clear gender profile of those in
attendance – ours was a room full of women. While it was (is) disheartening to imagine
that our male colleagues weren’t interested in feminist DH work, it struck us as
particularly strange given the history of the field. As Harris and I noted in our call
for this special issue, “several of the major
DH projects that are now at the forefront of the field had feminist imperatives at
the outset (for example: Women Writers Project, the Orlando Project, and the
Dickenson Archive), but it does not seem to us that there has been a sustained
inquiry into the evolving relationships between feminist theory and DH
work.”
In calling for a more sustained consideration of relationships between feminist theories
and digital humanities, we were calling for engagements that helped enrich our sense of
why feminisms mattered to DH, beyond simply getting more women in the rooms. In addition
to issues of equity and access, at stake in the conception of this special issue were
the ethics and commitments in digital humanities scholarship and teaching. Within a
12-month span leading up to the proposal, there were discussions at the Modern Language
Association meeting about who was in and who was out of DH,[1] Jamie
Skye Bianco’s “This Digital Humanities Which is Not One” and
Tara McPherson’s “Why is the Digital Humanities So White?”
came out in print, and the seeds of the three-site THATCamp Feminisms were sown by
debates about coding, gender, and the politics of DH. In response, the creative and
critical pieces in this special issue work to think not just about gender parity and
recovery, modes central to second wave feminisms, but also about intersectional
identities, labor, affect, and materiality in ways aligned with third-wave and
decolonizing feminisms. Several of the pieces also reach outside of the admittedly
porous boundaries of DH to include Library and Information Studies, Postcolonial
Studies, Ethnography, and Game Studies as explicitly feminist interventions in a field
that can feel dominated by literary and textual studies.
By invoking the surreality of long-exposure photography I mean to point to the ways the
interventions here are as necessary and fresh as they might have been in 2012 or 2013.
Given the production time, this should be a blurry photograph, but the lack of sustained
engagement with feminist theory within DH makes it still rather clear. Rather than being
superseded, the interventions of each piece, and of the collection as a whole, have only
become more urgent and it is striking that the field has not yet seen another special
issue on feminisms and digital humanities. As I write this introduction the annual ADHO
Digital Humanities conference is taking place in Sydney, Australia. In some ways it
seems as if nothing has changed. As Scott Weingart has observed is his series of blog
posts on the ADHO conference, while 46% of DH2015 attendees are women, they make up only
35% of authors with accepted papers.[2] What’s more, his analysis suggests
that part of what makes DH so white (to paraphrase McPherson) is that “there’s a very clear bias against submissions by people
with names non-standard to the US.”[3] Now, it is worth noting
that a single year does not a trend make (although he sees stable numbers over three
years with respect to gender) and that the ADHO conference is not necessarily
representative of the entirety of digital humanities scholarship. Nevertheless, the
questions we posed in the call for this issue about the presence of a masculinized
research/tools track and a feminized pedagogy track, the elided histories of feminist
intervention, and exclusionary cultures within DH are as urgent today as they were in
2012
“Feminisms and DH” confronts a number of methodological and
topical biases that continue to haunt the field according to Weingart’s analysis. Jamie
Skye Bianco’s “Man and His Tool, Again?: Queer and Feminist Notes on
Practices in the Digital Humanities and Object Orientations Everywhere” uses a
performative mode, previously theorized in her 2012 “This Digital
Humanities Which is Not One,” to critique heteropatriarchal biases in a
textual studies dominated digital humanities. Her piece exemplifies the “socially engaged critical creativity”
advocated by feminist scholars like Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylenska; a thinking with
and through the tools that we critique [Kember and Zylinska 2013]. Her piece and the
companion teaching reflection by Nicole Starosielski push the boundaries of traditional
academic argument by insisting that “creative critique” is central to how we
communicate amongst ourselves as scholars and with and to our students.
Equally critical, argues Roopika Risam, is intersectionality as “a lens for scholarship in the digital humanities [that] resists binary
logic, encourages complex analysis, and foregrounds difference.” This is an
important corrective that we have seen recently emerge in projects like the Digital
Diversity Timeline, Amy Earhart’s Diverse Histories of DH, and Global Outlook DH to tell
more diverse histories of digital humanities work and thereby imagine alternative
futures. Risam draws on Sandra Harding’s work in feminist and postcolonial Science and
Technology Studies (STS), to foreground the relationships between difference and
technology. In addition to suggesting the value of alternative histories, Risam does the
difficult work of charting theoretical foundations for alternative digital humanities
“methods that advocate inclusion and critical
analysis but are situated in the materiality of technologies.” In ways that
blend the kind of theoretical and historiographic work of both Risam and Bianco,
Gabrielle Dean’s “The Shock of the Familiar: Three Timelines about
Gender and Technology in the Library” offers a set of provocations about not
only the history of librarianship and information technology, but also about its
possible futures. Like Bianco, Dean plays with argumentative form, drawing on the
timeline as both a critical and speculative genre. Both Dean and Tanya Clement draw on
Library and Information Science disciplines to push digital humanists to grapple with
both the physical and epistemological sites of DH work, which is very often housed in
libraries and archives either literary, metaphorically, or both.
Clement’s “The Information Science Question in DH Feminism”
brings the question of infrastructure and its situated relations to the fore
specifically through Information Science and architectures and systems of knowledge.
Like Bianco, Risam, and Losh, Clement is interested the ways that a feminist insistence
on situated knowledge and “technologies of
self-consciousness” draws attention to technocultures and their underlying
epistemic commitments. Drawing on her own work on the Baroness von Freytag, Clement
deftly demonstrates how tools and subject become entangled as she pursues the social
text/body/network. The social body/network is central as well to Moya Bailey’s “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography
of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Bailey further expands the
question of how we communicate amongst ourselves when undertaking research by blurring
the boundaries between the researcher and her “subjects.” Prioritizing
“collaborative connections” in order to enact a praxis of care that she sees at
work in Black trans women’s use of Twitter, Bailey’s autoethnography charts a different
mode of scholarly engagement than that envisioned by standard protocols in the social
sciences.
Elizabeth Losh looks to feminist Media and Game Studies and STS to suggest that it is
critical to move networks and power formations from ground to figure in feminist digital
humanities. Citing the example of the Ludica collective (Celia Pearce, Jacki Morie,
Tracy Fullerton and Janine Fron), she also imagines new ways for collaborative, communal
feminist work to unfold within DH. Collaboration and social networks might be keywords
for this special issue. Bailey and Losh both point us to scholarly practitioners who act
as and within communities. Similar modalities have histories within scholarly and
activist communities of women of color, trans, and queer folks. Work like that of the
Crunk Feminist Collective (http://crunkfeministcollective.tumblr.com/), Electronic Disturbance Theater
2.0/b.a.n.g lab (http://bang.transreal.org/about/), the LatiNegrxs Project (http://lati-negros.tumblr.com/) and
GO::DH (http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ demonstrate that interdisciplinary and
inclusive collaborative communities have long been present if not centered in digital
humanities work. They also illuminate how powerful community-driven mixed-media
scholarship can be — both as models of scholarly practice and as arguments that
illuminate technologies and practices of oppression.
Constance Crompton, Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, and the DMSEG team use “Enlisting 'Vertues Noble & Excelent' Across Scholarly Cultures:
Digital Collaboration and the Social Edition” to reflect on the affordances
and limitations of social editing for the Devonshire Manuscript, a text that is itself
deeply social and networked. The team sought to create an inclusive, visible editorial
process as a way of prioritizing the processes of editing and social networking over a
traditional model of consumption. In this they are perhaps the most conventional of all
of the projects discussed here, in so far as they are producing a digital edition of an
early modern text. But their efforts to expand beyond traditional scholarly platforms
and communities place their work firmly in line with the other feminist interventions in
this special issue. These efforts were repaid with insights on the ways that wiki
platforms might enact social support functions akin to early modern marginalia and, as
if responding to Losh and Clement, they foreground their own feminist epistemological
commitments through both their processes and their platform. But they also had to
grapple with the presence of trolls in their open edition, making it clear that digital
platforms are always “contact zones” of the kind discussed by Mary Louis Pratt [Pratt 1991]. Spaces where difference, dissensus, and even abuse can mingle
in the social text.
I began this introduction by invoking the analogy of long-exposure photography, which
produces surreal images in part because it obscures differences across time. Streaky
starry night images preserve the traces of celestial bodies that appear at the beginning
of an evening, but are no longer visible by morning. We don’t have a good equivalent of
this in academic publishing. The contributors to this volume are doing the hard work of
bringing feminist theories and practice together, each in her/their own way and their
important work is preserved here in this issue. Process — the additions, deletions,
revisions evoked by the social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript project — is far
less visible. Perhaps this is a way in which the special issue is more surreal that the
long-exposure photograph; in advancing itself as a snapshot it erases the long arc,
privileging just the final product. Without this introduction, “Feminisms and DH” could well appear to be the labor of a single issue editor
when it was inaugurated by two and significantly supported by DHQ staff. It could look like a collection of eleven authors across eight
pieces, instead of an issue that contains within it the traces and published work of
seventeen authors across fourteen pieces.
As feminist theory has long known, our work is embodied and this embodiment manifests in
this issue as institutional and professional limits, geographic moves, pregnancies,
illnesses, and self-determining redirections. In some instances this has left gaps in
the final product – spaces where voices were to be heard, but aren’t for a variety of
reasons. These absent voices register for me as faded streaks in the long exposure
image. Harris and I invited more experimental pieces for an “assemblage” section in
our original call, which is realized in Bailey, Bianco, and Dean’s pieces but was
envisioned to be larger and more experimental still. A vibrant discussion of the
distance between the representation of women in the profession and feminist agendas is
absent and much needed. Engagement with queer theories and praxis are similarly limited
despite the great work being done in venues like ada: the journal of gender, new media, and technology (see for
example issue #5 on Queer Feminist Media Praxis).
The pieces herein are working to redefine DH and they all point to larger, often
marginalized fields of creative and critical work. Bailey and Rissam’s articles function
as entrée points to the work being done by women and feminists of color both in the U.S.
and internationally that has too often had to find home outside of DH as such but is
nevertheless transforming both how scholarship is done and on what terms. Crompton et
al.’s chapter similarly points to the rich vein of work being done and still to be done
on the various affordances and risks of social media and open platforms for feminist
digital production and scholarship. As suggested by Bianco, Dean, and Clement, a more
robust theorization of feminist digital humanities requires understanding the ways in
which academic structures subsume feminist innovation and critique, appropriating both
the insights and power of subversive work. Finally, as nearly every piece herein
demonstrates, if we are to have a more just feminist digital humanities, we must attend
to the ways that academic practices and digital spaces and tools are being leveraged by
those with power — very often to limit marginalized people and at the most extreme in
order to consume or promote violence against women, people of color, and trans people.
Gaps and silences aren’t unique to this special issue – there are always declined
invitations, rejected articles, pieces withdrawn or delayed or never written – but
having had the privilege of watching the process, they strike me as important traces.
Affect, another feminist keyword, was everywhere present in struggles over and in
reviews, anxieties about timelines, celebrations of new directions, and the mourning of
losses. Anger, frustration, sorrow, and joy are co-present on these pages and in the
margins of this issue, and yet are nearly absent from the reader’s perspective. From the
privileged position of editor, I am acutely aware of how disciplinary, technical, and
personal constraints have shaped this volume.
I draw attention to this as a way of testifying obliquely to the challenges that
continue to shape feminist engagements within digital humanities (probably within
academia more generally as well). I want to observe openly that this volume is shaped in
ways that may well be inarticulable but are at the heart of feminist commitments to
seeing knowledge production as material, embodied, affective, situated, and labor. bell
hooks writes about citing gaps in archives and histories as a way to “let the reader know that something has been
missed” and I want to mark that the pressures that come to bear on women’s
bodies, lives, and work mean that there are known gaps here [hooks 2004].
One of the great insights, I think, of the contributions to this volume is that there
are also many unknown gaps and that intersectional, interdisciplinary, and multimodal
work is essential to that process of seeing what we do not yet know is missing. Ellen
Rooney argues that “feminist address” is a performative, critical act
that creates constituencies and brings feminist positions into being – it is a
generative, poetic process through which alternative futures are created [Rooney 2006]. Herein are eight different modes of feminist address and they
are powerful but partial beginnings.
- Jacqueline Wernimont
Notes
[1] see Stephen Ramsay’s
write up of the MLA Roundtable http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out/
[3] ibid.
Works Cited
Bourg and Sadler 2015 Chris Bourg and Bess Sadler,
“Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery”
code{4}lib Issue 28 (April), 2015. Stable URL: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10425
Kember and Zylinska 2013 Sarah Kember and Joanna
Zylinska, Life After New Media (MIT, 2013), 177.
Pratt 1991 Mary Louise Pratt “Arts
of the Contact Zone,”
Profession (1991), pp. 33-40. Published by: Modern
Language Association. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469
Rooney 2006 Ellen Rooney, “Introduction,”
Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory
(Cambridge, 2006), 16.
hooks 2004 bell hooks, “Choosing
the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,”
The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and
Political Controversies, Sandra G. Harding (ed.), (Routledge, 2004),
154.