Table of Contents for In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure
Introduction: Feminist Technopolitics and Development
The introductory chapter explores how international development builds on tropes aligned with femininity such as nurturing and self-sacrifice in a race to include women in the "digital revolution." At the same time, feminist digital activists in the global South who are involved in development work mobilize a politics of care rooted in solidarity and pleasure in negotiating and defying technocapitalist paradigms of digital inclusion. The Introduction explores how a politics of care is used in numerous ways, from making profit and furthering exploitation to building collaborative worlds. Care can be both liberatory and urgent, as well as uncomfortable and entangled in histories of violence.
1.The Politics of Discourse
Chapter 1 focuses on the textual analysis of international development—particularly the UN—and corporate policies and discourses on the intersection of gender and digital technologies from the mid 1990s to the present. These institutions construct an ideal Third World Technological Woman that combines technological dexterity and entrepreneurial instinct with care and selflessness. Thus, digital technologies provide yet another field for tactics of discipline that explicitly target women. These technosolutionist and neoliberal discourses focus on a politics of inclusion that does not address the histories that have erected the very barriers that these women are supposed to miraculously overcome. The chapter includes a comparison between global and Latin America discourses produced by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
2.Solidarity
Chapter 2 examines the work of the grassroots feminist cooperative Sulá Batsú, in Costa Rica. Sulá Batsú is a leader in the area of gender and technology organizing in Latin America. The chapter discusses how Sulá Batsú's solidarity-based organizational practices enable a Technological Woman that challenges colonizing and market-centered entrepreneurial strategies by forging collectivized ways of living and working, and the ways that technology is localized, collectivized, and felt. The cooperative's administrative structure, its inclusivity and reflexivity, its principles of sharing knowledge, participatory action research, and public art projects are all important pieces of its feminist technopolitics. At the same time, there are conflicts and contradictions emerging from the co-op's feminist praxes around the members' relationships, as well as their work on entrepreneurship and market-based solutions to inequality. Chapter 2 also analyzes Costa Rica's state policies on gender and technology.
3.Pleasure
Chapter 3 examines the Women's Rights Programme of the transnational network Association for Progressive Communications (APC WRP), a trailblazing transnational organization in the area of internet rights. APC WRP problematizes online violence through two main strategies: (1) by anchoring online violence in a Southern epistemology that makes explicit the connections between online violence and broader structural contexts; and (2) by advocating for novel forms of online pleasure. Feminist activists foster a pleasure-based technopolitics that reinvents tropes on "Third World" women's victimization and "natural" heroism. The chapter explores how activism on pleasure is entangled with harm, trauma, and pain, and how advocating for laws that criminalize perpetrators often contradict feminist principles of intersectional justice. This chapter also examines the surge of development documents on the dangers of online violence against women and other marginalized communities.
4.Uneasy Alliances
Chapter 4 examines how feminist digital activists of Sulá Batsú and APC WRP negotiate their relationships with international development and corporate funders to be able to advance their projects. These "uneasy alliances" require compromises, yet also provide a productive ground for subversion. The chapter explores the subtleties of organizational everyday processes and forms of implementation to understand the complexities between feminist politics and funding. Chapter 4 also frames these difficult negotiations within the broader context of the increasing corporatization of development and its implications for achieving a more just world.
Conclusion: A Feminist Technological Otherwise
The Conclusion examines current revelations on the coupling of technology, capitalism, and violence, and how feminist digital activists in the global South are contesting and negotiating numerous forms of inclusion in digital politics. Feminist activists work within, against, and beyond corporate and development paradigms of digital inclusion through strategies based on solidarity, pleasure, and joy. The chapter problematizes the politics of digital inclusion in a world in which digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous and powerful. The Conclusion suggests ways forward amid increasing socioeconomic violence and ecological collapse and highlights contemporary activism that is generative and hopeful.
Appendix: On Methods
The Appendix includes a description and analysis of the author's research methods in studying Sulá Batsú, APC WRP, and UN and ECLAC documents. It covers details about the process of data collection through fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis. In addition, the Appendix includes reflections about positionality, building relationships with participants and collaborators, the asymmetrical power relationships between researchers and "the researched," and the complexities of employing feminist methods. The Appendix concludes with a reflection on the importance of breaking with modern-colonial constructs of scholarly research and the importance of honesty and accountability.