WE LAND HERE
In the pathway that follows, I will demonstrate how this site evidences the core terms, values, methods, practices, and strategies that my students, interlocutors, and I determined might make a digital experience “feminist” while, in so doing, necessarily also productively challenging, expanding, and/or duplicating my projects’ preliminary and speculative findings. To do so, I will use three short pieces of writing culled from my feministolinespaces project to name, point to, and frame the radical feminist work located everywhere here, in this project. I will use this archive to think about “the possibilities and limitations of digital media for popular education, social and economic justice movement building, critical theory, and academic scholarship.”
1) In "Learning from the Online Feminists,” I list 13 statements that help define what is core for my understanding of an “online feminist practice.” My statements were culled from the insights of my students who themselves looked closely at online spaces over a semester by engaging close textual analysis, a media ethnography, and 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 a prime example of the 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 my list of 16 terms that I use to frame answers to The Main Question, “What makes a, this, any space feminist?” I provide one last 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.
4) In my conclusion to this Dialogue, I name some of what I saw here that was not named directly in my feministolinespaces project, thereby building our strongholds on the Internet in dialogue.
