The response to a proposed panel for the technology area of the International Communication Association conference suggests the precarious position of intersectional feminist considerations of the internet. A reviewer noted that “using feminist cultural theory to critique” touchscreens “is interesting enough,” but the individual was “not convinced this will speak to a broad subset” of the “membership.” Feminist studies have had a significant influence on film and television studies, in many cases becoming canonical texts and shifting critical questions and areas of research. However, feminist studies of internet technologies and cultural practices are still too often identified as peripheral, not especially interesting, and as unpleasant interventions. Feminist examinations of the internet and related technologies are seen as not enough, including not scholarly enough, and as excessively too much. This is especially the case when such analyses interrogate claims about the agentive aspects of the internet, question the behaviors of male...
Internet Studies
Michele White is a professor of internet and new media studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Her monographs include Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Duke University Press, 2012) and Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (Routledge, 2015). She has also published such online beauty research as “How ‘your hands look’ and ‘what they can do’: #ManicureMonday, Twitter, and Useful Media,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 2 (2015): 4–36; and “Women's Nail Polish Blogging and Femininity: ‘The Girliest You Will Ever See Me,’” in Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
Michele White; Internet Studies. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 95–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.95
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University of California Press