The Virtual Beauty Shop: Crafting a Digital Black Feminism in the Blogosphere
Catherine Knight Steele, Ph.D.
Colorado State University
@STeeleCat717
Presented at: Digital Blackness – Rutgers University 2016
Of Barbershops and Beauty Shops• From counterpublics to enclaves and
satellite communities• Toward a secondary orality• Resistance discourse online
Black Feminism and the affordances of technology• Use of technologies of the voice and
pen• Blogging as a feminist technology• Communal• Alternate forms of writing
Critical Techno-cultural Discourse Analysis
informed by both Critical Race Theory and Nakamura’s cyber-cultural research to examine systemic
instantiations of privilege and power in online spaces
structural analysis of an artifact with a discourse analysis of the cultural means through which users interpolate themselves within relations to the artifact” (Brock, 2011)
1. situating online discourse about cultural artifacts within a sociocultural matrix
2. analyzing interfaces to understand how the Internet’s form and function visually, symbolically, and interactively mediate discourse
3. communication technologies as a representation of shared beliefs that produce, maintain, and transform reality (Brock, 2009)
The popular and the political…
Digital Black Feminismprioritizes agency, reclaims the right to self-identify, centralizes non-gendered spaces of discourse, has complicated allegiances, and is informed by a dialectic of self and community interests
Negotiating black feminism through blogging• Crafting a loyal “clientele”• Facilitation of discourse and communal sharing• Revenue generation and capitalist enterprise
