Digital Feminicity: Predication and Measurement, Materialist Informatics and Images
Article Sidebar
Google Scholar citations
Main Article Content
“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” (as an alternative formulation to standpoints) that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices (practical and conceptual) need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In the digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman (1991; 2004); Haraway (1993; Nakamura, 2003), Hayles (1993; 2012), VNSMatrix (1991), Adam (1998), Plant (1998). Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field (using Gottlob Frege’s (1964) sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology (cf. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Van Der Tuin, 2014), and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects (Malabou, 2011; Fraser, 2013). Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change (Olkowski, 1999; Van Der Tuin 2014). This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register — “feminicity”— can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activity-points of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, i.e., forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices (inclusive of intuition, compulsion, capitalist-driven practices of utility, theory and art).
Keywords:
Article Details
Copyright
For all articles published in Artnodes that are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, copyright is retained by the author(s). The complete text the license can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship, journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s).
Authors are responsible for obtaining the necessary licences for the images that are subject to copyright.
Assignment of intellectual property rights
The author non exclusively transfers the rights to use (reproduce, distribute, publicly broadcast or transform) and market the work, in full or part, to the journal’s editors in all present and future formats and modalities, in all languages, for the lifetime of the work and worldwide.
I hereby declare that I am the original author of the work. The editors shall thus not be held responsible for any obligation or legal action that may derive from the work submitted in terms of violation of third parties’ rights, whether intellectual property, trade secret or any other right.
Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr. Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media and a Principle Lecturer in Research at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Dr. Colman is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (2014), Deleuze and Cinema (2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007).
Similar Articles
- Jan Distelmeyer, From object to process. Interface politics of networked computerization , Artnodes: No. 24: (July 2019). NODE 24. After post-truth (Editor.: Jorge Luis Marzo)
- Esther Pizarro Juanas, Ecologies of saturation. Artistic research: Space Debris :: Waste Constellations , Artnodes: No. 31: (January 2023). NODE 31. Possibles II (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.