Introduction: In Search of Digital Feminisms

It is my pleasure to turn the Theory Thread over to discussions of feminisms and the digital. Edited by Katherine Behar and Silvia Ruzanka, In Search of Digital Feminisms includes five essays and the editors’ introduction that suggests we play with the shift from surfing to searching to what is fast becoming the offer, if not the intrusion, of piles of unrequested information. But In Search of Digital Feminisms is not an exercise in melancholia, longing for better digital days now past or for lost feminist horizons. It is a search, having already arrived at a destination, a before and an after all at once, the lost origin that always points to the work of an originary mediation or modulation, if not digitization. In other words, these are not anti-technology works; these are works seeking rather to find ways to creativity and multiplicity in identity and practice that can be an intervention into the contemporary scenes of feminisms and the digital. Although primarily offered as texts, the works that follow point to the need to make theoretical interventions a matter of practices, a matter of interactive mediation, a doing, if not a doing with others.

[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue2/theory/index.html. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral2.]