Understanding Feminist Infrastructures: An Exploratory Study of Online Feminist Content Creation Spaces in India
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The internet and digital media technologies have played an important role in contemporary feminist practice – in addition to social media activism, their growing prevalence in academia, advocacy, and creative expression illustrate how digital media contributes to efforts to question asymmetries of power and knowledge. In the last few years, the concept of a feminist internet and forms of feminist infrastructures have emerged as crucial entry points to understand the affordances of the digital and its many challenges, especially for women and other structurally disadvantaged communities.Feminist content creation has been integral to contemporary feminist work in India, and is an entry-point into discussions on what could be a feminist internet. The growth of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This study looks at the development of feminist infrastructures (including various interpretations of the term) through an exploration of online feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces, and their impact on the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India.
Through conversations with select online feminist publishing, content creation, and curation spaces, this study outlines motivations for choosing certain media, nature of content, languages and design, and how such choices inform practice and politics. In addition to the above, we also conducted two workshops on feminist infrastructure wishlists, and feminist principles of design and infrastructure. These conversations have offered several insights on the landscape of feminist content creation in India, and the affordances and challenges of digital technologies in facilitating contemporary feminist work. An overarching aim of the project is to unpack the term ‘feminist infrastructure’ and its interpretations in the context of the transition to digital content creation and publication. We aim to continue these conversations with a focus on the larger, often invisible role of digital infrastructures in the development of discourse on human rights, free speech and safety, to understand what are challenges to, and efforts being undertaken to create an inclusive, accessible and feminist internet.
