Feminist Activism and Digital Networks ― Between Empowerment and Vulnerability

This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in relation to identity and to activist practice. Aristea Fotopoulou examines how activists make claims about rights online, and how they negotiate access, connectivity, openness and visibility in digital networks. Through a triple focus on embodied media practices, labour and imaginaries, and across the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer social life, she advocates a move away from understandings of digital media technologies as intrinsically exploitative or empowering. By reinstating the media as constant material agents in the process of politicization, Fotopoulou creates a powerful text that appeals to students and scholars of digital media, gender and sexuality, and readers interested in the role of media technologies in activism.

Aristea Fotopoulou is Lecturer in Media, Sociology in Lancaster University. Her work is at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written about feminism and digital networks, information politics and knowledge production, and currently writes about big data analytics for communities, and about the Quantified Self and new practices of personal data sharing. She has recently completed work as research Co-Investigator for the network Susnet- Sustaining Networked Knowledge: Feminist Media, Art and Activism (University of Sussex); researcher on a technological assessment of emerging technologies, with focus on media, communications and digital culture (smart grids, wearable sensors and in-vitro meat) – (EU FP7 EPINET); and 2014 Visiting Scholar at the Research Center Science and Justice (UCSC). She blogs at LoopingThreads.com and can be found @aristeaf. Her journalistic/academic pieces are planned to appear in the forthcoming Participation Now! Section of OpenDemocracy.net and in Converstations (http://theconversation.com/uk).