Technofeminism

This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. TechnoFeminism fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology.

From podiums on international stages to mainstream media coverage, from crowds of youth marching in streets, to social media feeds, everywhere we look we can see girls rising in the climate justice movement. Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall examine these climate activists from the intersection of gender studies, new media studies, and environmental activism. Chapters include cases about iconic climate girls such as Greta Thunberg, Mari Copeny, and Autumn Peltier (Wiikwemkoong First Nation) and lesser-known climate girl activists who design technologies, global non-profit organizations, and lawsuits against governments. Cunningham and Crandall reveal that climate girls are intersectional activists aware of how systems of oppression—including racism, heterosexism, and capitalism—impact the climate crisis. Individuals interested in women’s and gender studies, environmental studies, and communications studies will find this book of particular interest.

The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.

Technofeminist Storiographies: Women, Information Technology, and Cultural Representation analyzes both historical and contemporary accounts of women’s lived experiences of technology, from Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr to women working across the tech industry today, and juxtaposes them with larger cultural representations of women and technology. The book explores both the relationship between gender and technology and the cultural contexts that enable and constrain that relationship, questions that call for opportunities for women to share their lived experiences and to have such experiences represented across media genres. Despite the rich, complex stories and histories women have with technology—as programmers, inventors, and workers—media throughout history, including film, television, games, toys, children’s books, and biographies, often inadequately and inaccurately represent them. Throughout the book, Kristine Blair chronicles the portrayal of the relationship between women and information technology across these media genres. Inevitably, the societal conditions that surround technology use—including portrayal through popular media—impact the extent to which women and girls gain and maintain access within those cultural contexts. This book calls for a more visible history of women’s technological achievements in which their stories are heard for generations to come, rather than be forgotten and unknown.

There are countless ways of thinking, feeling, and acting like an ecofeminist. Ecofeminism includes a plurality of perspectives, thriving in dialogue between diverse theories and practices involving ecological and feminist matters of concern. Deepening the dialogue, the contributors in this anthology explore critical and complementary interactions between ecofeminism and other areas of inquiry, including ecocriticism, postcolonialism, geography, environmental law, religion, geoengineering, systems thinking, family therapy, and more. This volume aims to further the cultural and literary theories of ecofeminism by situating them in conversation with other interpretations and analyses of intersections between environment, gender, and culture. This anthology is a unique combination of contemporary, interdisciplinary, and global perspectives in dialogue with ecofeminism, supporting academic and activist efforts to resist oppression and domination and cultivate care and justice.

The Beautiful Warriors: Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century brings together seven current technofeminist positions from the fields of art and activism. In very different ways, they expand the theories and practices of 1990's cyberfeminism and thus react to new forms of discrimination and exploitation. Gender politics are negotiated with reference to technology, and questions of technology are combined with questions of ecology and economy. The different positions around this new techno-eco-feminism understand their practice as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to join in, to continue, and never give up. Contributions from Christina Grammatikopoulou, Isabel de Sena, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Spideralex, Sophie Toupin, hvale vale, Yvonne Volkart.

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.

As a reaction to typically dead-end debates on future human and robot collaboration that tend to be either dismissive or overly welcoming towards »cobot« technologies, this book provides a technofeminist intervention. Pat Treusch not only shows how both the fields of technofeminism and robotics can engage in a practical exchange through knitting, but also contributes a tangible example of coboting dynamics. Robotic Knitting re-negotiates the boundaries between formalisation and embodiment, craft and high-tech as well as useful and dysfunctional machines. It re-crafts the nature of collaboration between human and robot. This finally entails an alternative mode of relating - a mode that enables an account of careful coboting.