Critical Feminist Materialisms stand in-between bodies, technologies, and subjects in the context of individual and collective practices, societal structures, and symbolic norms, whereas the seemingly immaterial technology is embedded in wide material networks, infrastructures designed to be visible only to the ones who maintain them.
Yet, technical media is also defined by non-object based materialities, and practically associating new materialism thinking to existing computer science framework requires developing understanding from a long history of practices; examining strategies that have permitted over time to differentiate from existing infrastructure and formulate what could serve critical thinking networks.
Although no infrastructure can claim independence certain practices have contributed to build a space of differentiation, from critical historical cyberfeminist approach (Faith Wilding – subRosa) to more contemporary queer hackers who work from gender to infrastructure building feminists servers.
The lineage of feminists undertakes have consolidated independent discourse and dedicated tools. My understanding of this research stands in this perspective.
Furthermore a number of issues are directly bringing necropolitics (Rosi Braidotti) to the forefront of our questions. As the rise of Artificial Intelligence inhabit our interaction to the world, it is of importance to understand on which basis digital and technological symbols are historically grounded. In response to the question To what critical theory debates can feminist materialist perspectives connect? It seems that the normalization of networked interactions via algorithmic governmentality is an intersectional approach as it denies most and every specific cultural aspect to sacrifice to the absolutism of the chart.
While Cyberfeminist have long been tackling the issues of excessive measurement both in preventive health (SmartMom project) and as an intersectional problematic, indeed measurement directly issued from a white supremacist perspective does not only refer to an existing precise norm but also refuse to take in account existing racial and economic differences.This process is not only emblematic of the cyborg goddess described by Donna Haraway, digital information is rather attached to very specific categorization of the body, precariat, migrant, racialised, gendered, criminalized.)
In response to the question To what critical theory debates can feminist materialist perspectives connect? It seems that the normalisation of networked interactions via algorithmic governmentality is an intersectional approach as it denies most and every specific culture, to sacrifice to the absolutism of the chart. Hack the binary gender system for the purpose of rewiring, reassembling, and re-imagining it.
