NWSA Approved! Women’s Technolabor: Acts of Advocacy Online, in Media, and On Stage

This panel examines the technolabor of women in the US across multiple mediums.  By technolabor we mean, women’s work with digital and material technologies such as the electric guitar,  web-based platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, and online health forums and websites like WebMD and Our Bodies, Our Blog.  These three papers emerge at the crossroads of technology, identity, agency,  and representation.  They analyze real-time transgressive tools, actions, and effects that are generating new, incisive and inclusive capacities for producing knowledge. At the core of our research are issues of identity, self-definition and just representation.  This panel uses interdisciplinary and intersectional frameworks as seen in the work of Jayna Brown and the late Jose Munoz, to contextualize these diverse groups within the category women.  Presenters also engage feminist scholars of epistemology and the politics and labor of knowledge-production such as Patricia Hill-Collins. Each paper considers how women actively work to transform the social barriers that contribute to distorted views of themselves within popular culture and public discourse. The women we highlight in our work challenge hegemonic representations through alternative knowledge production as a form of self advocacy. Our work is a reflection of ongoing debates around the limits and possibilities of gendered knowledge, particularly women’s knowledge in the service of building a more equitable world.

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