Book Review
Book Review | Digital Black Feminism, by Catherine Knight Steele (New York University Press, 2021)
Rutgers University
lv251@sociology.rutgers.edu
Digital Black Feminism is a valuable methodological and empirical addition to the digital humanities and communications fields. Catherine Knight Steele combines digital ethnography with archival content analysis to critically document Black women’s impact on the cultural infrastructure of the web. From hashtags to community message boards, Steele demonstrates that we should understand Digital Black Feminism as expanding upon the intellectual genealogy of pre-digital Black feminism. Digital Black Feminism also serves as a case study of online culture work as a process of spatially developing the internet through the creation and maintenance of community spaces. As a participant observer, Steele is able to demonstrate the multi-sited nature of digital Black feminism with important lessons for cultural scholarship in the new media ecosystem.
In Chapter 1 Steele situates her inquiry of Black feminist digital production within a history of Black women as “technological innovators, laborers, and creative manipulators of feminized communication” (23). Beginning with a historical analysis has the positive effect of pre-empting a techno-utopian interpretation of the emphasis on Black women’s agency in digitally mediated space. Rather than a model of the democratizing potential of digitally networked media tools, Digital Black Feminism reflects Black women’s use of new technological affordances to innovate on an existing repertoire of dissent and subversion. Steele applies Tonia Sutherland’s strategy of “archival amnesty” (24) to records of Black women’s labor under US chattel slavery to identify moments of agency and survival in the use and creation of technology. Steel argues that we can subvert narratives that affirm Black victimhood and foreclose possibilities of Black agency by reading Black women’s interactions with technology as artifacts of intentional resistance.
Steele uses Rayvon Fouché’s “survival technology” concept to locate creative intention and intellectual production in forced labor.
Alluding to Audre Lorde’s often-referenced thesis that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Steele asserts that the ability to examine, deconstruct, and subvert social systems is historically foundational to Black women’s resistance. Because identifying and subverting technological oppression is key to Black women’s survival, we can read those subversions as materially significant interventions in technological innovations. For example, Steele argues that Black women used the performance of “respectability politics” as “an avenue to hone argumentation skills and cement their position in Black cultural life” (37) in spite of the interpersonal and intrapersonal political marginalization of Black women.
Chapter 2 examines Black women’s digitally mediated knowledge production through the metaphor of the Black beauty shop. Historically, African American women innovated the Black woman-owned beauty shop to challenge their exclusion from participation in public life. As places where Black women could gather and exchange knowledge without surveillance, beauty shops constitute essential cultural infrastructure. Accordingly, we can understand the early beauty shop owners that subverted cultural proscriptions against Black female property ownership and entrepreneurship as technological innovators hacking social, economic, and legal systems. Steele writes, “The how of the shop also tells a story of exclusion from the traditional economy and entrepreneurship” (47).
This narrative of prohibition and pathbreaking allows Steele to connect digital Black feminism to the longer legacy of Black feminist culture work. As metaphorical beauty shops, curated digital Black feminist spaces provide spaces for Black women to debate social ideals; collect, access, and share educational resources; seek community support; and politically mobilize. At the same time, the “master’s tools” metaphor captures the liberatory limitations of capitalist wealth accumulation and property ownership in both cases. This continuity between earlier Black feminist expressions and new digital Black feminism illustrates again that digital Black feminists in a modern media ecology share with their predecessors the need to organize in opposition to systems of communication control. The inherent tension between creating intervening in existing systems to enable participation and dismantling such systems altogether creates the context for innovation. One such innovation is digital Black feminism.
The section “From Technophobia to Black Technophilia” offers important insight into one of the book’s central projects, resisting the erasure of Black digital creators. Steele challenges the continued predominance of a Black technophobia lens that positions Black technology users as always late adopters with low technical competencies. As a corrective, she offers Black technophilia, a focus on quotidian digitally mediated communication among networked Black users. Steele’s usage draws on André Brock’s study of Black digital libidinal, or pleasure-seeking communication via social media as well as Marisa Parham’s critical analysis of pre-digital DJing and remixing culture. The technophillia lens is a helpful connector between hip-hop feminism and digital Black feminism.
Chapter 3, “Principles for Black Digital Feminism,” offers a roadmap for understanding how blog work laid the foundation for later digitally mediated community-building during the focus period of 2014 to 2020. Steele identifies three principles that undergird Black feminist blog writing and community management: agency, complicated allegiances, and self-care. The third chapter answers the fundamental question of what constitutes participation in Digital Black Feminism and Black Feminism more broadly by identifying ideological continuities in the work of self-identified Black feminists with popular digital platforms. The chapter could have included an examination of political tensions between self-defined Black feminists, since, at times, it gives the impression of movement consensus where political contention is more typical. Although Black feminism has been leveraged in online spaces by trans women and queer cis women to talk about anti-woman violence, other women who identify with the Black feminist tradition have invoked the same intellectual genealogy to exclude trans women.
In Chapter 4 Steele leverages unique insight as a participant observer in Digital Black Feminist spaces to curate and analyze artifacts from Black feminist blogs. This is the book’s most empirically rich chapter and also the chapter that leans most heavily on Steele’s operationalization of Black feminism. As an “older Millennial” herself, Steele is able to narrate a convincing account of how Black feminists of her generation were able to develop and leverage the technical and intellectual skills to carve out rhetorical space online. Insofar as Black women digital creators use new technological affordances in service of the Black feminist praxis of capturing and publishing Black women’s experience and knowledge, they transform the generative capacity of that technology. Using her own biography as a starting point, Steele describes how the Black model who served as the face of the famous typing training program Mavis Beacon became a symbol of Black women as computing experts and leaders for Black girls learning new tech tools. Armed with this and other imaginaries of professional leadership, Black girls were able to imagine themselves as agents of technological creation and cultural authorities within technocultural spaces.
Steele demonstrates that viewing oneself as an agent of technology use and creation has historically required that Black women take a stance in opposition to a default deficit model of their participation. For her historic analysis, Steele turns to white prohibitions against Black literacy and their attendant methods of surveillance and control: “Writing was a way to resist illiteracy as a tool of confinement” (97). In other words, writing and publishing were (and are) simultaneously tools of entrapment and tools of liberation. More broadly, “Black women’s relationship to labor and technology is a story of using tools and technologies crafted to oppress as mechanisms of resistance” (39).
Digital Black Feminism’s final chapter reflects on Digital Black Feminism as frame for branding, curating, or accessing targeted monetizable digital content. Chapter 5 is an excellent case study of new media dynamics, such as the rapid diffusion and reconfiguration of collective mobilization language across multiple digital platforms. Steele addresses Digital Black Feminist labor in terms of not just cultural production but workforce participation and the economic constraints of public knowledge production. In this context, the multi-sitedness of Digital Black Feminist is a branding and content distribution mechanism made necessary by new models of publication and compensation. From the modernization of patronage through online crowdfunding via companies like c and Kickstarter to the cultivation of loyal followers on Facebook, being compensated for digital culture work means navigating conditions created by big tech companies. The strategies Digital Black Feminists use for doing so hold critical insights about the technical affordances and limitations of these content monetization systems.
Digital Black Feminism demonstrates the importance of the cultural infrastructure that shapes users’ material experiences with the web and social media. Steele’s analysis demonstrates the multi-sitedness of Black Digital Feminism, and with it the continued importance of spatiality to understanding digital culture. Since Black feminists’ public-facing personal life becomes part of the same textual record as their scholarship, their daily participation in social media becomes an act of curatorial labor that necessitates both technical knowledge and complex culture work. Digital Black Feminist praxis addresses the legacy of literacy as both a technology of social control and one of resistance through an analysis of social media literacies deployed by Digital Black Feminists to take up public discursive space. Thus, studying Black women’s technoculture serves as a vehicle for identifying novel, distinct, and empirically generative uses of emergent technological affordances.
Author Bio
Leslie Kay Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, specializing in social movements. She draws extensively on the fields of race and gender, critical race theory, and online social media in her study of collective mobilization. She teaches qualitative and computer-assisted research methods, particularly digital ethnography and content analysis.