LEARNING ABOUT ONLINE FEMINISM HERE
In the pathway that follows, I will map how this publication, and the archive it enlivens, evidence core terms, methods, and strategies that might make a digital experience “feminist.” While engaging here, my findings about online feminist spaces have been affirmed, challenged and expanded. This archive has allowed me to think about our editors' guiding questions, interrogating “the possibilities and limitations of digital media for popular education, social and economic justice movement building, critical theory, and academic scholarship.” I will use three short pieces of writing culled from my feministolinespaces project to name, point to, and frame the radical feminist framework and work that I have found here:
1) In "Learning from the Online Feminists,” I list 13 statements that help define the core of my understanding of an “online feminist practice.” My statements were culled from insights of my students who looked closely at online spaces over three semesters by engaging in one site and practicing a close textual analysis and a media ethnography, and then creating their own hybrid online/offline feminist media spaces. For each of the principles, I link to one or more object within this archive to either use it as an exemplar of that principle or to build out the principle in exciting and perhaps unanticipated directions.
2) In "Context is Politics," I engage in a similar project by ruminating on my students’ work and our complicated experience as feminists at Occupy LA. The offline context of lived activism allowed us to name “our growing idea that a feminist action, idea, goal, or identity only becomes political in context: i.e. in a community, an embrasive or democratic structure, an oppositional space, a home, online.”
3) Finally, in "The Main Question," I list 16 terms that I use to frame answers to “What makes a, this, any space feminist?” This is another hermeneutic structure that might help to identify the kinds of radical, productive, transformative political practices that both emerge from and are archived in this site, as well as others we might build in the future.
4) In my conclusion to this Dialogue, I identify what I see here that was not named directly in my earlier feministolinespaces project, thereby linking into dialogue our many feminist strongholds on the Internet.