MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation of Leigh Gruwell

Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

______Jason Palmeri, Director

______Heidi McKee, Reader

______Kate Ronald, Reader

______Michele Simmons, Reader

______Gaile Pohlhaus, Graduate School Representative MULTIMODAL FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES: NETWORKED RHETORICAL AGENCY AND THE MATERIALITY OF DIGITAL COMPOSING

by Leigh Gruwell

Composition specialists have long recognized how online writing technologies call into question our notions of what it means to write, and how they might offer opportunities for resistance and empowerment, particularly when it comes to gendered identities and epistemologies. But there is no doubt that the internet—like any technology—is embedded in networks of power that govern the production of knowledge, identities, and agency. In this project, I employ a person-based, feminist materialist methodology to map these networks in three online spaces (Wikipedia, Ravelry, and Feminist Frequency) in order to develop a theory of multimodal feminist epistemologies. By foregrounding the materiality of composing, multimodal feminist epistemologies help rhetors reflect on their embodied positions within larger networks, in addition to highlighting the overlapping networks of power that produce identity and agency. Embracing this subversive multimodal textuality will enable researchers, students, internet users, and web designers to acknowledge the diverse locations of identity production and explore alternative epistemologies, ultimately facilitating more ethical and effective rhetorical action online. The value of a multimodal feminist epistemology, then, lies in its ability to articulate new ways of being and knowing— and that can ultimately equip us to make the internet, as well as the rest of the world, a more inclusive, empowering place. MULTIMODAL FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES: NETWORKED RHETORICAL AGENCY AND THE MATERIALITY OF DIGITAL COMPOSING

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Leigh Gruwell

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2015

Dissertation Director: Jason Palmeri

©

Leigh Gruwell

2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE Material Questions: Feminism, Multimodality, and Digital Spaces...... 1

CHAPTER TWO Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)Action...... 30

CHAPTER THREE Ravelry: Weaving a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology...... 62

CHAPTER FOUR Feminist Frequency and Networks of Identity, Circulation, and Resistance...... 94

CHAPTER FIVE Reading, Resisting, and Remaking: Multimodal Feminist Epistemologies at Work...... 128

REFERENCES...... 143

APPENDIX A...... 168

APPENDIX B...... 172

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LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1...... 31

FIGURE 2...... 39

FIGURE 3...... 42

FIGURE 4...... 67

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FIGURE 10...... 83

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FIGURE 16...... 117

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project has its roots in so many places: graduate seminars, conferences, back porches, and bars. I have been fortunate to work alongside many talented and inspiring people during my time at Miami and am especially grateful for the support of the English department and the fellowship that allowed me to complete this dissertation. My chair, Jason Palmeri, has encouraged me from the start and has shown me what kind of scholar I want to be. His guidance and friendship are invaluable. I am also indebted to my outstanding committee: Heidi McKee, Kate Ronald, Michele Simmons, and Gaile Pohlhaus. I thank them for their passion, wisdom, and wit —I am lucky to call them mentors. There are many, many other people who have helped me think my way through this dissertation. In particular, Morgan Leckie, Natalie Szymanski, Kevin Rutherford, Jonathan Bradshaw, and Rory Lee have all been generous with their time and insight. I am better for it. My colleagues at Miami and beyond have all contributed in significant ways to this project and I am thankful for such a vibrant community of scholars and teachers. I am also appreciative of my students at Miami, whose energy and intellect have challenged me to be the teacher they deserve. And, finally, I must acknowledge the unending love, support, and humor of my husband, Veikko. He is my partner in every way, and I thank him for making this possible.

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Chapter 1 Material Questions: Feminism, Multimodality, and Digital Spaces

In 1998, digital feminist scholars Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan declared that “feminists must harness the new technologies to serve their own political and social goals” (p. 195). More than fifteen years (and countless technological innovations) later, however, it is still not entirely clear how feminists might best utilize digital writing technologies. On Wikipedia, for instance, a female editor finds that the community does not recognize her expertise, and her edits are erased. Meanwhile, a knitter on the fibercraft website Ravelry posts a photo of her latest project, and in the process contributes to a multimodal community that values local and global knowledges alike. And with the web series Feminist Frequency, an activist utilizes subversive networks as well as her embodied experiences to challenge sexist representations and resist gendered harassment. These examples, all drawn from case studies in this project, illustrate how online spaces are embedded in networks of power that govern the production of knowledge, identities, and agency (A. J. Banks, 2006; Nakamura, 2008; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). Composition specialists have long recognized how online writing technologies call into question our notions of what it means to write (C. Selfe, 1999; Welch 1999; Wysocki 2001; Yancey, 2004) and can offer opportunities for resistance and empowerment, particularly when it comes to gendered identities and epistemologies (LeCourt & Barnes, 1999; Rhodes, 2005; L. Sullivan, 1997). But how do marginalized groups gain access to these spaces? How do they make their voices heard? And how can they take advantage of multimodal texts—and textual networks—to intervene in the discourses that render them “marginalized” in the first place? In this dissertation, I address these questions by tracing how three different spaces— Wikipedia, Ravelry, and Feminist Frequency—alternately enable and constrain feminist rhetorical action rooted in multimodal feminist epistemologies. To do so, I build on a long history of computers and composition scholarship that recognizes digital writing technologies as deserving of sustained scholarly attention (Bolter, 1991; C. Haas, 1996; C. Selfe, 1999; Yancey, 2004). These researchers have written about not just the materiality of digital writing (Baron, 1999; Bolter, 1991; C. Haas, 1996; Kress, 2003, 2005) but have investigated the discourse

1 communities and power relations that structure internet technologies (A. J. Banks, 2006; Nakamura, 2008; C. Selfe, 1999; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). The field’s recognition that technology is not neutral—that it is not only embedded in but can perpetuate exclusionary power relationships—is perhaps one of the reasons why feminist scholarship has played such a central role in the scholarship of computers and composition. This valuable work opened the conversation about the relationships between internet writing technologies and gendered identities (Hawisher & Sullivan 1998, 1999; LeCourt & Barnes, 1999; Romano, 1998; Sloane, 1999; L. Sullivan 1997; Takayoshi, 2000). While these feminist researchers were among the first to question how digital spaces shape gendered identities, this work often employed methodologies that ignored the local and global networks that construct localized, intersectional identities, thus perhaps implicitly constructing “woman” as universal category (Bowen, 2009; A. Haas, 2009; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998). Although this scholarship is no doubt valuable, these oversights illustrate the dangers of drawing on a theory of identity that does not consider the many locations from which identities are shaped, resisted, and transformed. Composition studies has also produced a good deal of research on multimodal texts, arguing that they offer new resources for meaning-making that should inform our theories of composing (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012; Yancey, 2004), pedagogies (Kress, 2003; C. Selfe, 1999, 2009; Wysocki, 2005) and scholarly practice (Almjeld & Blair, 2012; Ball, 2004; McKee & Porter, 2009). Yet, with few exceptions, feminists in computers and composition have also largely ignored the possibilities that multimodal texts offer for generating, sustaining, and circulating feminist epistemologies.1 Increased attention to materiality, I suggest, can help address both the networked nature of identity construction as well as the possibilities multimodality might hold for feminist rhetorics. This dissertation, then, seeks to craft a theory of networked multimodal feminist epistemologies through close study of women’s composing practices in and around three digital spaces: Wikipedia, Ravelry, and Feminist Frequency. These sites demonstrate not only the mechanisms by which women are

1 These exceptions include Jen Almjeld and Kristine Blair (2012), Kristie S. Fleckenstein (1996; 2010), and Hawisher and Sullivan (1999), who have all contributed important research and methodologies devoted to understanding the relationship between the body and multimodality. 2 excluded and silenced online, but more importantly, how women are making use of multimodal texts to create and circulate feminist epistemologies, challenging us to rethink agency as tactical, temporal, and networked. These multimodal epistemic networks demonstrate how valuing varied embodied, local experiences (and their relationship with digital technologies) can foster feminist rhetorical and political action. This chapter will offer an explanation of my theoretical frame and key terms as well as sketching out a materiality-focused methodology for studying feminist rhetorics online.

Key Terms and Theoretical Frames In this section, I define some of my argument’s central terms and theoretical frames. I begin by grounding my project squarely in a feminist epistemology of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1991), which argues that materiality—broadly defined as including bodies, locations, and technologies—simultaneously enables and constrains the kinds of knowledge claims we can make. Recognizing the role of material networks in the creation of knowledge thus complicates traditional understandings of identity. Identity formation, I suggest, is a complex, recursive process rooted in embodied experience and rhetorical interactions with technologies, communities, and spaces. This epistemological approach guides my discussion of multimodality, which is specifically attuned to the role of materiality in meaning making. I argue for a robust notion of multimodality, which considers not just the rhetorical affordances of a multimodal text itself, but also the material networks that enable its creation, delivery, and circulation. These material networks ultimately call us to acknowledge how rhetorical agency arises from many locations and therefore exceeds the individual rhetor. Together, these theoretical insights frame my investigation of feminist rhetorical action online. A theory of networked, multimodal feminist action may help address, in part, the tendency for women to be silenced and alienated online (Addison & Hilligoss, 1999; Herbst, 2009; Kirtley, 2009; Ratliff, 2009; L. Sullivan, 1997). Of course, there are no doubt innumerable online spaces that empower female rhetors (A. Haas, 2009; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998; Jack, 2009; Rhodes, 2005), and a 2014 report indicating that American men and women are online in nearly equal numbers suggests that gender divides in basic internet access are

3 waning.⁠2 Yet, as Claudia Herbst (2009) cautions, “women may be online by the droves but numbers have surprisingly little to do with authority. Authority comes via authorship and women tend not to be the authors of technology” (p. 145). In other words, by identifying ways that women might begin to intervene in and contest the technologies and discourses that silence them, they may begin to gain more authority in online interactions.

Epistemology Epistemology is the study of how we make knowledge. To examine an epistemology is to ask, “How do we know?” The field of rhetoric and composition—and English studies more broadly—has historically been invested in an epistemological viewpoint that grants language (and its social dimensions) primacy in the construction of knowledge and reality (Berlin, 1988; Bizzell, 1982). As Kenneth A. Bruffee (1984) succinctly puts it, “Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation” (p. 646-7). In rhetorical theories of “discourse communities” (Bizzell, 1982; Porter, 1986), “collaboration” (Lunsford & Ede, 2012; Trimbur, 1989), and “ecologies” (Cooper, 1986; Rivers & Weber, 2011), scholars in our field have long approached knowledge-making as not an isolated but communal process. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (2014) describe the epistemological implications of a theory of that posits knowledge as a social process, noting that our field tends to see the teaching of writing as tied profoundly and intimately to inviting students to understand how naming is an ideological act; how narrating experience can both reinforce and challenge the dominant order; how language use both buys into and potentially exceeds normative understanding; and how learning to write can both serve the existing order and help us reimagine it. (p. 483-4)

2 As of January 2014, the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project Survey indicates that 87% of American men and 86% of American women use the internet. While white Americans are online in slightly higher numbers (85%) than African Americans (81%) and Hispanic Americans (83%), the report does not further break down these racial categories by gender (“Internet User Demographics”). That is, they do not indicate if Hispanic women, for example, are online in the same number as Hispanic men. It may come as no surprise to learn that as household income rises, so too does internet use. Finally, it is also important to note that this data is limited to American internet use: they do not represent a global view of who is online and who is not. 4

The social turn, then, helps both us and our students understand how language is political. Yet, as Laura R. Micchiche (2014) suggests, the important contributions of the social turn in composition and rhetoric have perhaps occluded the role that materiality—locations, bodies, and technologies—play in the way we make knowledge. This project addresses this oversight by more deliberately attending to the materiality of women’s composing practices online, approaching composing and the production of knowledge as located within and supported by a tangle of material and discursive networks. To account for the materiality of knowledge-making, I make use of feminist standpoint theory, which foregrounds the role of bodies and experiences in the production of knowledge. Feminist standpoint theorists argue that because we experience the world (and the world experiences us) through our bodies, embodied experience shapes what and how we know (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1992; Hartsock, 1988; Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 2004). Nancy C. M. Hartsock was the first to articulate this perspective in her 1988 article “The Feminist Standpoint.” In it, she argues for the privileging of women’s knowledge based on their economic position within a gendered division of labor. Because women occupy different material locations, the thinking goes, their embodied knowledges “make available a particular and privileged critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy” (p. 159).3 Women’s embodiment thus affords them a different, privileged understanding of patriarchal systems. Hartsock’s argument is notable because it underscores how bodies shape epistemological processes, contesting the Cartesian mind/body dualism so central to most Western philosophy. However, critics of second-wave (and first-wave) feminism have rightfully pointed out the tendency to construct the identity “woman” as a universal category that ignores the intersectionality of race, sexuality, class, ability and a host of other markers of “difference” (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1984; Lorde, 1984). Bodies—and the knowledge they

3 Perhaps it’s more accurate to say a “sexed” division of labor, since Hartsock relies on the assumption that women’s sexual reproductive labor positions them differently within capitalist economies. Judith Butler (1999) would argue that this assumption (“sex” as natural and universal) is itself a discursive construct, and I too take issue with Hartsock basing her conception of “women” on reproductive labor alone. But the point, for me at least, is to note how embodied identities have material consequences for oppressed groups. 5 produce— are “necessarily interlocked with racial, cultural, and class particularities” (Grosz, 1994, p. 19). Lumping together a diverse group of individuals under the identity category “women” risks erasing the differences—particularly the material ones—that (dis)empower women. By calling attention to ways in which embodied “subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality” (Nash, 2008, p. 2), intersectional approaches to identity can greatly enrich feminist standpoint theory by accounting for the many differences that mark bodies and thus shape knowledge claims (Alcoff, 2006; Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991, Grosz, 1993; 1994). Embodied, intersectional approaches to knowledge production also indicate the relational, contextual, and highly specific nature of epistemology. As Linda Alcoff (2006) notes, identities “are constituted by social contextual conditions of interaction in specific cultures at particular historical periods, and thus their nature, effects, and the problems that need to be addressed in regard to them will be largely local” (p. 9). In other words, while standpoint theories highlight the role of the body in knowledge production, intersectionality demands that any claims about the body be considered against the specific cultural and historical contexts that produce embodied identity categories like gender and race. The physical body is a key location of knowledge production, but we must also acknowledge the role of cultures and technologies in that process. Donna Haraway (1991) is perhaps the most influential proponent of this approach to epistemology. She argues for an epistemology of “situated knowledges,” which, according to her, “are claims on people’s lives; the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity” (p. 195). Knowledge is not transcendent but rather a product of one’s location—and one’s location is a product of a complex interplay between bodies, technologies, and discourses. Knowledge, then, is relational and conditional. This approach— recognizing knowledge as partial, situated, and relational—asks us to “become answerable for what we learn how to see,” and may therefore be a more ethical approach to knowledge construction (Haraway, 1991, p. 190).

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Identity While identity is a particularly thorny issue, it is perhaps one of the central concerns for contemporary feminist theory. At the same time that discussions of intersectionality influenced feminist theories of identity, postmodernist thought called identity categories into question altogether, arguing that the stable, unified subject is a naive Modernist fiction. Postmodern theories of identity work to destablize the subject entirely, figuring it as a fluid and fragmented construct that is produced, policed, and contested through discourse. Butler, one of the most influential feminist theorists of identity, argues that gender is “performative,” a repetition of acts that form “an ongoing discursive practice” (1999; p. 43). For her, feminism’s focus on women’s identity is dangerous precisely because of the ways in which discourse constructs gender: “the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation” (p. 4). In other words, according to Butler, feminism’s insistence on the category “woman” only reproduces the exclusionary categories it hopes to contest in the first place. As I note above, however, we must not ignore the ways in which epistemologies are grounded in and shape material practices and experiences. Despite Butler’s argument that identity is a discursive construct, she acknowledges how these constructs shape real lives, writing, “to claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality” (1999, p. 43). Recognizing that identity is discursively constructed does not mitigate its material consequences. As contested a concept as it is, there’s value in claiming to study identity, because identity categories are still there, impacting daily interactions (Alcoff, 2006). Scholars who claim to study identity, then, must recognize how gendered identities are constantly being produced, and how this ongoing process of construction makes identity “open to intervention and resignification” (Butler, 1999, p. 43). The identity category of “woman,” as fraught as it is, still holds analytic and political promise because it allows us to understand and resist the power relations that are produced and sustained through discourse. Butler’s work is invaluable because it points out how identities are constructed through language. But her insistence on the primacy of discourse elides the material sites that work to construct identities. For her, the material is subsumed under the discursive; that is, there is no

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“material world” that exists beyond the discursive and ideological tools we use to construct it. Other feminists, however, question this hierarchy, arguing that the body cannot “be regarded as purely a social, cultural, and signifying effect lacking its own weighty materiality” (Grosz, 1994, p. 21; emphasis original). Krista Ratcliffe (2002) asserts that the discursive is in fact contained within the material, as “discourse is itself a material object and a material practice […] discourse possesses an agency of its own, an agency that always produces material effects” (p. 619). These disagreements about the relationship between “the material” and “the discursive” point to their complexity, and suggest that it is more productive to turn our attention to their interrelatedness. While I do believe that discourse and materiality construct one another, I will continue to refer to “the discursive” and “the material” throughout this dissertation because I want to emphasize how local, lived experiences shape knowledge production. Even if we recognize how materiality and discourse are products of one another, “materiality” is still a useful analytic tool because it calls attention to the diverse locations of identity production, from bodies, to physical spaces, to technologies, to economic relationships. My understanding of “women” as a category, then, is shaped by intersectional standpoint theories that call attention to the material relations that shape embodied experiences and knowledges. Feminist standpoint theory, as I outline above, helps navigate essentialist and postmodern approaches to identity because it offers a framework for understanding how embodied experiences shape our identities and epistemologies. Intersectionality enriches this framework by asking us to consider how power operates through the body, often in multiple and differing ways. Bodies—and the matrices of power that operate through those bodies—are thus critical to the production of knowledge. Although some scholars worry that feminist theory has “not yet developed a rigorous method of examining multiple subject positions” (Nash, 2008, p. 4-5; emphasis original), I suggest that retaining sight of materiality can enable us to understand the overlapping ideologies, discourses, and power relations that (re)produce gender without over-generalizing about “women’s identities.” If, as Butler claims, feminists should strive “to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity” (1999, p.188), then materiality offers a useful way to localize our claims about gender. Feminist researchers can retain identity as a political tool to call

8 attention to sexist inequality and assert collective power without universalizing women’s experience—as long as we contextualize any claims about identity within specific material locations. A localized, materialist approach to identity means recognizing that the tools we use to write the world also write us. Studying identity online, then, necessitates a consideration of the material networks that shape rhetorical action. Although early internet theorists like Sherry Turkle (1997) characterized the internet as a space where identities were mutable, online spaces, like any other technology, are mired in many of the same discourses, ideologies, and power relations that structure all other rhetorical interactions (Passonen, 2002; Shade, 2002; Wajcman, 2006, 2010). Interfaces, for instance, have attracted scholarly attention as locations where identity can be constructed online (Arola, 2010; McDonough, 1999; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). Interfaces are contested political spaces because they limit and enable what users can do—or even who they can be. Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. (1994) describe how interfaces function as “linguistic contact zones” (p. 482) where “the values of our culture—ideological, political, economic, educational—are mapped both implicitly and explicitly, constituting a complex set of material relations among culture, technology, and technology users” (p. 485). In other words, because interfaces are the point at which at users directly interact with technology, they are useful locations from which to map the relationships that sustain that interaction. Selfe and Selfe note that this interaction can be a fraught one, as computer interfaces often “value monocultralism, capitalism, and phallologic thinking […] to the exclusion of other perspectives” (p. 486). To illustrate how this dynamic plays out, Selfe and Selfe offer the example of the MacIntosh desktop interface: organized to resemble a desk (using “folders” to store files, and a trash can to delete data), this interface aligns with and reproduces middle-class professional values that might alienate working-class users. As a result, users from non- dominant groups may be excluded and silenced. Jerome P. McDonough (1999) explores this process in more detail, turning to the design of gaming software. His research suggests that “designers’ own identities and social location may influence users’ construction of identities within the systems those designers create” (p. 867). Like users, designers inhabit bodies that shape their interactions with the world and their

9 positionality. Because designers rely on their own identities and experiences to construct an imagined user of the interfaces they design, designers necessarily “inscribe these understandings within the virtual environment software, thus making the software itself a normative statement of who their users should be, and how they should behave” (p. 862). Interfaces, then, are integral to the construction of identity in any online space. As McDonough explains, “Software designers establish the technical limits of whom users can be and what they can do within the virtual space, and by doing so enable and constrain various forms of identity performance” (p. 864). Such a relationship can become especially problematic in a world where “white, masculine identity [is] normalized” (p. 867). If designers do not anticipate or imagine users with non-normative identities (women, working-class, non-white, for example), it becomes increasingly difficult for such users to enact those identities within the interface. For example, if an interface only allows users to select “male” or “female” to describe their gender identity, genderqueer individuals are excluded and dominated, forced to define themselves within the limiting gender binary offered by designers. Gendered bodies, then, both produce and are produced by the discourses and material structures that construct technologies. Of course, feminist standpoint theory already demands a recognition of the ways in which materially and discursively produced identities shape textual production and knowledge claims. But scholars like McDonough and Selfe and Selfe demonstrate how a focus on “the material” —understood as a part of, not separate from, discourse— offers specific locations from which to study the production of gendered identities. Despite the ways in which a more explicit focus on the material enriches conceptions of identity, few researchers within composition and rhetoric have fully embraced such an approach. I argue, therefore, for a more robust understanding of identity as both discursive and material but most importantly, localized.

Multimodality and Materiality Multimodal texts are, put simply, those that rely on multiple modes of communication, such as image, sound, or alphabetic text (Kress, 2003; Sheridan et al., 2012). A number of composition and rhetoric scholars have both studied and produced multimodal texts, particularly

10 within the last twenty years, as digital texts and technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous (Almjeld & Blair, 2012; Wysocki, 2005; Yancey, 2004). New media have made multimodality visible, and have challenged us to rethink what counts as rhetoric. But it’s important to distinguish between multimodal and digital texts. While digital texts—a website, for example— can be (and often are) multimodal, multimodality is not limited to digital technologies exclusively (Wysocki, 2004). Like Jody Shipka (2011), I am concerned that emphasis placed on ‘new’ (meaning digital) technologies has led to the tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multimedia, or still more broadly speaking, composition, with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitized, screen-mediated texts. (p. 7-8; emphasis original) Conflating multimodal and digital means, according to Shipka, “we risk missing or undervaluing the meaning-making and learning potentials associated with the uptake and transformation of still other representational systems and technologies” (p. 11). When multimodal means the same thing as digital, in other words, we miss the rhetorical possibilities—the affordances and constraints—that are unique to specific modalities. Gunther Kress (2005) emphasizes this point, writing that different modes offer “different positionings in the world and to the world, with different epistemological positions and commitments […and] bestow different powers on the makers and remakers of representation” (p. 295). Shipka and Kress both provide an approach to multimodal texts that is attuned to the rhetorical and epistemological effects of materiality—the bodies, the locations, and the tools that enable their production and use. Like feminist standpoint epistemology, multimodality alerts us to the ways in which discourse and materiality work together to create meaning. While this project does focus primarily on digital spaces, it does so with an eye toward the various textual and material networks that support and inform these digital spaces. I am therefore resistant to characterizing internet spaces and technologies as somehow separate from “real life” or “physical” ones. It is more productive, I suggest, to examine the ways in which digital spaces are intertwined with diverse discursive and material networks, both online and off. Examining the rhetorical and epistemological functions of these spaces thus demands we must examine the bodies, tools, and histories that have enabled their existence.

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This impulse is informed, in part, by arguments to historicize composing technologies (Baron, 1999; Bolter & Grusin, 2000, Palmeri, 2012; Wysocki, 2004). By looking at the ways in which “old” literacies shape (and are shaped by) “new” literacies, these scholars have productively complicated the stark division between digital and non-digital texts. Jason Palmeri in particular historicizes multimodality, “remixing” composition history to demonstrate that the field has engaged with multimodal texts and literacies since at least the 1960’s. The recognition that multimodality is not a new, or exclusively digital, phenomenon also arises in studies of feminist rhetorical histories, which acknowledge multiple modes of composing as sophisticated rhetorical practice (Goggin, 2002; Mattingly, 2002; Ritchie & Ronald, 2001). The rhetorical practices of women—a product of gendered social relations as well as material structures—have often been multimodal, emerging in diverse forms such as Amish quilts (Rumsey, 2009), cookbooks (Eves, 2005; Fleitz, 2010), scrapbooks (Rohan, 2004), and needlework (Goggin, 2002). Historically, “women’s literacy was devalued,” argues Elizabeth Fleitz, and therefore “women had to develop a new, useful literacy that would permit their communication practices to continue while fulfilling the duties of their gender role” (2010, n.p.). Examining these literacy practices has led feminist scholars to advocate the necessity of “an alternative way of theorizing and historicizing rhetorical praxis by exploring creative activities that may not typically come into view under current scholarly lenses and methods” (Goggin, 2002 p. 332). In other words, feminist multimodality has challenged what counts as rhetorical practice. While scholarship on the history of feminist rhetoric often examines multimodal texts, few scholars explicitly describe these artifacts as such and very rarely employ theories of multimodal rhetoric to unpack their significance. Because of the tendency to conflate “multimodal” with “digital” or “new media,” it’s likely not necessarily readily apparent to feminist rhetoricians how theories of multimodality can inform historical study. Likewise, scholars of multimodality seldom reference feminist rhetorical theories or histories.4 Yet, I

4 Fleckenstein is a notable exception. Specifically, her 2010 book Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom explores how ways of seeing foster rhetorical action. Fleckenstein draws from theories of visual rhetoric as well as from feminist theory to develop a visual epistemology. Additionally, Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki’s (2012) edited collection composing (media) = composing (embodiment) signals an increasing interest in the relationship between writing technologies and embodiment. 12 believe these two theoretical approaches to the study of composing can inform one another, particularly through their shared emphasis on materiality. I wish to advance, then, a feminist approach to multimodality that foregrounds networks of materiality.

Networked Rhetorical Agency Standpoint feminism’s insistence on embodiment and positionality indicates just how interrelated identity and agency are. Yet, it also points to the many locations that work to construct identity. If we recognize how social, discursive, and material matrices of power work together to shape identity, then it follows that agency must be just as widely dispersed. In other words, rhetorical agency is not confined to the individual (and her embodied experiences) alone: like identity itself, agency is networked, partial, and provisional (Rhodes, 2005; Sheridan et al., 2012; Wysocki, 2004). Online communities make this networked model of rhetorical agency especially visible, as both on- and offline power structures enable and constrain rhetorical action. Composition and rhetoric scholars are just beginning to grapple with the implications of a networked approach to rhetorical agency. In her 2005 book Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem, Rhodes compares the textual practices of 1960s radical feminists to modern-day feminists online, arguing that their use of both print and digital texts poses a shifting, temporary subjectivity that can be appropriated for collective political action. She argues that rhetors ought to understand themselves “in context, as part of a vast network of possible selves and texts” (p. 86). Rhetorical agency demands writing “oneself into the network, to momentarily identify as or with some discourse of some other text. This necessity [...] makes itself manifest through a fictionalized stability” (p. 87). Rhetors, then, acquire agency by navigating discursive and material networks. This understanding of rhetorical agency necessitates a methodology that more seriously considers the ways in which networks of circulation shape texts and rhetorical action, as Rebecca Dingo argues in Networking Arguments (2012). Dingo suggests that feminist rhetoricians should pay closer attention to how arguments about women are networked; that is, how they emerge from and relate to macro and micro contexts. This approach, according to Dingo, is a useful transnational feminist rhetorical

13 methodology because it compels scholars to consider the material effects of rhetoric on both individual women as well as larger communities. David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel extend the argument that agency is located not within any one individual but within larger networks in The Available Means of Persuasion (2012). They recognize that rhetorical agency “needs to be reconfigured, understood in relation to a web of contingencies that are largely beyond the control of the rhetor” (p. xvii). For them, the rhetor is not so much an agent but rather a “point of articulation” (p. 99) whose ability to act lies within “complex and multifaceted contexts that are simultaneously material, discursive, social, cultural, and historical” (p. 11). Actor-network theory,5 which asserts that agency is distributed among assemblages of human and non-human objects, explicitly informs this approach to agency. Such a claim may seem far-fetched—particularly to humanists—but in fact it aligns with the arguments computers and composition specialists have been making for decades: the tools we use to compose always shape, to some extent, our rhetorical activities (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014; Baron, 1999; C. Haas, 1996; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). These scholars have long interrogated the role digital writing technologies play in rhetorical practice. With this attention to these technologies—particularly the internet—also came an attendant recognition of the networks that enabled their use. Although Sheridan et al.’s theory of networked agency productively complicates the idea of the unified, singular agent, it does not consider the power relationships that structure any rhetorical act. Feminist thought, I believe, can productively inform theories that acknowledge agency as distributed across discursive and material networks by accounting for how power shapes those networks. In many ways, feminist standpoint epistemology—which insists on the relational, partial, fluid nature of knowledge production—aligns with a theory of networked rhetorical agency. Scholarship on feminist rhetorical agency has in fact acknowledged the ways in which an agent’s ability to act is located within specific cultural and discursive networks (Ratcliffe, 2005; Rhodes, 2005; Royster & Kirsch, 2012; Wallace, 2011), but considerations of the material are typically limited to embodiment and don’t address how power inequities may affect local contexts, tools, and histories as well. Laurie E. Gries (2013) and Sarah Hallenbeck

5 Actor-network theory has its origins in the work of Bruno Latour, whom Sheridan et al. credit in their book. 14

(2012) are notable exceptions in that their scholarship does consider how power relationships intersect with the many discursive and material locations from which rhetorical agency arises. Their work, however, is more concerned with how such insights affect research methodologies. In this dissertation, I seek to further enrich our field’s understandings of networked rhetorical agency by exploring the ways in which gendered power relations permeate material and discursive networks, enabling or constraining multimodal rhetorical action in online spaces, interfaces, and communities.

Feminist Rhetorical Action Online The theoretical framework I sketch above grounds my investigation of feminist rhetorical action in digital spaces. This phrase, as I use it, is based in a recognition of the very real, very material, dimension of rhetorical performance and provides space for rhetorical performances that are not based (wholly or partially) on traditional alphabetic literacy. The word action in particular underscores agency—albeit the complex, distributed agency I discuss above. Feminist rhetorical action is necessarily political, although, importantly, its practitioners may not necessarily understand their actions as political or even as rhetorical. Yet, any rhetorical act that, in practice, calls attention to the gendered power relations that govern the production of identities and epistemology, I argue, can be termed feminist. This project explores the relationship between feminist rhetorical action and online multimodal texts. Although, as I noted above, multimodality is not exclusive to internet or digital texts, I choose to focus on the internet in particular because its very nature—its material affordances—so clearly illuminates the complex networks that sustain rhetorical action. I am particularly intrigued by the possibilities online multimodal texts hold for feminist rhetorical action. I’m certainly not claiming that multimodal texts are inherently feminist. It’s quite easy, in fact, to call to mind any number of sexist (or racist, or classist, or anti-gay, or ableist) multimodal texts. But what I am arguing is that the logic of multimodal texts—a logic that foregrounds location, embodiment, as well as material and discursive communicative networks—is consistent with feminist epistemologies and ultimately, feminist rhetorical and political action.

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Tracing a Methodology for Unpacking (Online) Feminist Epistemologies Because this study is so invested in foregrounding the role of materiality in feminist rhetorical action, I employ a methodology that arises from a close attention to materiality. Specifically, I argue for a methodology particularly attuned to the varied locations, histories, bodies, and tools that constitute any rhetorical act. If we accept that knowledge itself arises from the interaction of a complex network of material and discursive locations, then we must similarly develop methodologies that attempt to account for these relationships. Like Shipka (2011), I believe that by “tracing the processes by which texts are produced, circulated, received, responded to, used, misused, and transformed, we are able to examine the complex interplay of the digital and analog, of the human and nonhuman, and of technologies, both new and not so new” (p. 30). Researchers must therefore employ methods attuned to not just processes of composing and delivery, but to what Gries (2013) calls “futurity—the strands of time beyond the initial moment of production when consequences unfold as things circulate, enter into diverse kinds of relations, and transform across form, genre, and media” (p. 338). Tracing such diverse threads necessitates highly contextual methods. Thus, in each chapter that follows, I will detail the methods specific to each site of study. These methods, however, are guided by the methodology I outline in this section. Here, I offer a methodology for studying feminist multimodality online, and identify three methodological implications for a theory of networked identity and agency that underscores materiality: self-reflexivity on behalf of the researcher (McKee & Porter, 2010; Royster & Kirsch, 2012), a broadening of methods beyond discourse analysis alone (Almjeld & Blair, 2012; DePew, 2007), and closer attention to (global) circulations of texts (Dingo, 2012; Gries, 2013; Queen, 2008; Schell, 2010; Warner, 2002). These three considerations, I argue, are all consistent with feminist research methodologies, and will account for a broad number of material factors that work to construct identity and agency in digital spaces.

Feminist Research Methodologies Online and Off While feminist research methods (in our field and beyond) are as diverse as feminism itself, many feminist methodologies draw upon the same feminist epistemologies I outlined

16 above. Recognizing knowledge as situated and embodied means that researchers must acknowledge the material and discursive structures that shape their own epistemological commitments. This insight has informed composition studies through changing pedagogies, theories, and methodologies, as scholars begin to acknowledge how our positioning limits what and how we can know (Almjeld & Blair, 2012; Lu, 1998; Royster & Kirsch, 2012; Sullivan & Porter, 1997). Ethical research, in this view, is a product of a reflective researcher (who has carefully interrogated and accounted for her own positionality) co-constructing (ideally with participants) knowledge that will potentially improve the lives of women and other oppressed groups. Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter (1997), for example, see research as a rhetorical act that is shaped by the researcher as much as the object of study itself. They advocate a critical methodology that recognizes its own construction, and “remains alert to the frame[s of reference], to its strengths and as well as limitations, and to the presence of alternate frames” (p. 79). Theory should inform methodological decisions, but that theory, according to Patti Lather (1991), “must be open-ended, nondogmatic, speaking to and grounded in the circumstances of everyday life” (p. 55). Sullivan and Porter call this relationship praxis, and argue that researchers should see research as a process of placing theory and practice “both in dialectical tension, which can then allow either to change” (p. 27). Researchers should constantly move between theoretical and “practical” understandings of this term, revising their “frames” as they go. If research is to do political work and improve the lives of participants—as feminist researchers say it should—then methodologies that neglect to consider how or if their theoretical assumptions line up with the everyday practices of participants undermine the political, emancipatory potential of research. These epistemological foundations are what lead Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter (2010) to characterize feminist research methodologies as primarily concerned with social justice, care and respect for participants and their communities, flexibility, transparency, and researcher self-reflexivity (p. 155-6). Feminist research practices aim to redefine processes of knowledge-making while simultaneously working toward equality, and are therefore often understood as an explicitly political move. It is this political motivation to make research on

17 women work for women that has led many feminist researchers to rethink their relationships with participants. Because a feminist perspective is particularly attuned to power dynamics, and because it recognizes knowledge as relational, feminist researchers often approach participants as co-creators of knowledge rather than objects to be studied. In other words, as Gesa Kirsch (1999) writes, feminist research seeks “to eliminate inequalities between researchers and participants” (p. 5). Feminist researchers like Ellen Cushman (1996), Hawisher and Sullivan (1998, 1999), Gesa Kirsch (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000) (among many others) have shown us how reflecting on “the quality of the relationships we build with research participants” can produce ethically sound research that benefits all those involved (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003, p. 395). For example, in her 1996 article “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change,” Ellen Cushman works closely with residents neighboring her university, using her rhetorical expertise to help them define and achieve relatively modest but incredibly important literacy goals such as securing housing.6 Cushman establishes a “mutually empowering relationship” (p. 20) with the community members she works with through reciprocity, “an open and conscious negotiation of the power structures reproduced during the give-and-take interactions of the people involved on both side of the relationship” (p. 16). Cushman demonstrates how feminist researchers can resist the assumption that a researcher is somehow distanced or separate from participants by instead working with participants to enact meaningful social change. Understanding my relationship with participants as reciprocal encouraged me to work more closely with participants and their communities. I made sure to provide drafts to all participants and encouraged their feedback, for instance, in order to make the process of knowledge creation more collaborative. Feminist researchers who study digital spaces demonstrate the same commitment to respect “the autonomy and agency of the participants and communities being studied” (McKee & Porter, 2010, p. 169), even as new media technologies introduce a host of new ethical

6 Although Cushman does not specifically identify her methodology as feminist, her carefully constructed reciprocal relationships with participants, her attention to power dynamics, and her liberatory, activist goals all align quite clearly with feminist methodologies. 18 considerations. Yet, because feminist researchers are particularly attuned to issues of power, they are perhaps uniquely positioned to begin to offer solutions to the many difficult methodological questions faced by online researchers. While there is little disagreement among feminist researchers regarding the responsibility to establish transparent and equitable relationships between participants and researchers, it’s important to recognize the ways in which internet technologies may disempower feminist researchers and methodologies. The internet is comprised of incredibly diverse spaces, but it is dangerous to view it—or any digital technology—as a neutral tool. Technologies are products of their culture, designed by people with their own biases, assumptions, and motivations, and therefore “all technologies come packaged with a set of politics” (A. J. Banks, 2006, p. 23). Technology, in other words, is embedded in—and can perpetuate—exclusionary power relationships. Any researcher studying internet technology, then, must account for the ways in which online spaces are embedded in networks of power that govern the production of knowledge, identities, and agency (A. J. Banks, 2006; Nakamura, 2008; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). “Technology,” Rebecca Rickly (2007) reminds us, “does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do the methods we choose to study it,” so “as researchers, we must be perpetually aware that we are constructing a reality as we articulate our understanding of technological contexts, as well as select and apply methods, analyze data, and represent results (p. 385). In other words, research is a rhetorical act, as researchers interact with participants, institutional review committees (e.g. IRBs), and fellow scholars, in addition to the power structures that permeate the technologies we study (Barton, 2008; McKee & Porter, 2009; Rickly, 1997; Sapeienza, 2008; Sullivan & Porter, 1997). Understanding research as rhetorical helps us recognize the ways our research both exercises and is bound by power, and calls us to reflect on our own ethical responsibilities, as I do throughout the following chapters.

Self-Reflexivity and Researcher Responsibilities If we recognize that embodied positions shape what an individual can know, then researchers must account for their own identities through self-critical reflection. McKee and Porter argue that “self reflexivity and critical consciousness about one’s own position, gender,

19 and status are key features of feminist thinking” (2010, p. 155). For researchers investigating identities in online spaces, this means understanding how technologies—as material sites where discourses converge—work to construct our own identities, for “researchers are not exempt from this identity construction process” (Almjeld & Blair, 2012, p. 103). Researchers, then, must not only interrogate their own epistemological positionings but also consider their relationship to the site(s) and individual(s) that they choose to study. My recognition that knowledge is situated thus motivates my decision to include personal reflections on my relationships with the communities I study through the following chapters. Because online research so thoroughly challenges our traditional understandings of public and private, researchers are faced with a whole host of new ethical considerations in regards to their participants. Sullivan and Porter (1997) argue that ethics (along with politics) are essential concerns of critical research designs, particularly those focused on digital writing. For them, ethics “is the practical art not of avoiding the exercise of power (which is unavoidable), but of making careful decisions about how power relations are to be exercised in order to avoid domination of the other” (p. 119). In a 2012 article with, Blair, Almjeld describes some of the difficult ethical decisions facing digital feminist researchers. While researching MySpace, a community to which she already belonged, Almjeld had to negotiate her dual insider/outsider status not just with other MySpace members but within her final write-up. Almjeld and Blair conclude that “applying feminist research methodologies to new media spaces thus requires us to be explicit about our own positions as researchers writing through the new media spaces we study” (p. 102). Researchers who intend to enact feminist methodologies online must therefore carefully consider their relationship to the sites, communities, and individuals that they choose to study, acknowledging the “multiple roles of researcher, participant, and observer” they may inhabit (McKee & Porter, 2010, p. 166). Feminist methodologies demand that any researcher navigating these roles be as explicit as possible in order to ensure ethical interactions with participants and their communities. As a researcher and often a member of the communities I study here, it was critical that I reflect on my own position(s) and work carefully to negotiate my relationship with participants, as I discuss in more detail in the following chapters.

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In their study of feminist research in online spaces, McKee and Porter found that researchers recognized their ethical responsibilities to participants: they “generally favored treating online postings as person-based rather than text-based research” (2010, p. 158).7 Such a methodological approach ensures researchers exercise their power carefully, as they seek to craft reciprocal relationships that remain attentive to participants’ needs. As Sullivan and Porter argue, “the [ethical] research process clearly demonstrates commitment to those in an oppressed (marginalized) situation. It does not leave the participants stranded” (1997, p. 139). Of course, not all feminist scholars have approached online research in this way. Feminist researchers like Deborah Silverman Bowen (2009), Angela Haas (2009), Lisa Nakamura (2008), and Clancy Ratliff (2009) have studied online texts as text-based as opposed to person-based. While no doubt insightful, such work tends to eschew the role of materiality in online composing and rhetorical agency. Thinking about materiality, I argue, allows researchers (digital or not) to focus on their own localized positions in addition to the location of participants, thus accounting for the ethical and political implications of research. In this study, accounting for the materiality of my participants’ knowledge claims, as well as my own, better equipped me to identify power relations and subsequently adjust relationships with participants to ensure responsible, effective research.

Beyond Discourse Analysis: Using “Multimodal Methods” A methodology focused on material relationships calls us to reflect on not just the ethical implications of our research, but the methods we employ as well. The specificity of material locations—particularly multimodal online spaces and the bodies that inhabit them—demands more than discourse analysis alone. Employing person-based methods online offers more complex—and therefore more accurate—narratives of women’s technology use, responding to the feminist imperative to speak with, not for, women (Takayoshi, 2000). However, many early studies of gendered rhetorical interactions online made use of discourse analysis methods. One initial focus for these researchers was hypertext (LeCourt & Barnes, 1999; L. Sullivan, 1999).

7 In their book The Ethics of Internet Research (2009), McKee and Porter offer a helpful visual heuristic to help internet researchers determine when they might seek informed consent (p. 88). 21

Other early studies also centered on text-heavy online spaces, such as email, message boards, and chat rooms (Addison & Hilligoss, 1999; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998). This reliance on discourse analysis is not all that surprising given our field’s history of analyzing written and spoken language within English departments. It makes sense that researchers would import their methods from print culture to digital spaces, especially considering the text-heavy nature of the early internet. These scholars, trained in analyzing artifacts of print culture, and who understood that gendered identities were produced through the repetition of discursive performances, naturally turned to discourse analysis methods in the early days of internet research. Yet, the internet is no longer the text-heavy medium of the 90s. Technological advances mean today’s internet is multimodal, characterized by images, sound, videos, and interactivity (Yancey, 2004). Almjeld and Blair argue that the multimodal spaces that populate Web 2.0 are distinctive enough to warrant new methods of study (2012, p. 99). Continued reliance on textual analysis alone may limit the kinds of online spaces feminist researchers in composition and rhetoric study, or may obscure the multimodal elements that construct rhetorical action. Multimodal, digital spaces call us to use more diverse methods to study the production of gendered identities and rhetorical agency. Researchers studying women’s rhetorical action in online spaces, however, still tend to invoke alphabetic discourse analysis as their main (or even only) method of studying the production of identity. For example, Jordynn Jack’s (2009) study of a feminist blogging community argues that members are empowered to challenge negative portrayals of women, yet she limits her analysis to alphabetic elements alone, ignoring entirely the multimodal design choices bloggers make. Jack’s choice to analyze alphabetic artifacts isolated from their material environment limits her research scene in significant ways. Attention to the multimodal nature of blogging, for example, might have drawn Jack to investigate the design affordances of the blogging software the women in her study used. As Arola argues, this software often limits rhetors’ agency, as “the design template is chosen for them” (2010, p. 6). Studying multimodal spaces such as a feminist blogging community calls for methods that acknowledge how materiality and discourse intersect to construct identity and agency. Kevin Eric DePew (2007) agrees that researchers studying digital spaces should move beyond discourse analysis in order to account for the materiality of internet spaces and users.

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He argues that because “it is impossible to separate the ‘meat’ (the users and their lived experiences) from the ‘machine’ (the software programs and digitally written texts)” (p. 55), researchers should “insert communicative participants into the process, which gives researchers the opportunity to see both the complex nature of the research site and apertures in the field’s tropes” (p. 52). Bodies don’t disappear online, so researchers who study digital spaces might begin to adopt more person-based research methods (interviews, surveys, ethnographies) in order to account for the lived experience of internet users. Many have already begun such work: scholars like Blair (2012), Jack (2009), Susan Kirtley (2009), and McKee (2004) have demonstrated how researchers might use person-based research to situate technology use within embodied experiences. This work demonstrates how person-based research can provide richer, more nuanced accounts of women’s online composing. Such work is only beginning, however. Compositionists have yet to use person-based methods to study the gendered relationships in the online spaces my dissertation examines. While our field has studied wikis (Hood, 2009; Purdy, 2009; Vie & deWinter, 2008), social networks (Gerben, 2009; Maranto & Barton, 2010; Swartz, 2011; Vie, 2008; Williams, 2008), and internet feminist activism (Queen, 2008; Ratliff, 2009; Rhodes, 2005), little of this scholarship has used person-based methods to account for how such spaces shape gendered identities and rhetorical agency. This dissertation is but one attempt to address this oversight.

Networks of Circulation: Situating the Local in the Global Research methodologies that ignore the material locations of discourse also tend to ignore questions of circulation and reproduction. Online spaces force attention to circulation, writes Rhodes (2005), since “the internet itself exists as a writing technology, one that constructs its texts and their means of dissemination simultaneously” (p. 53). The internet thus demands that researchers consider networks of circulation as an integral part of any rhetorical situation. Sheridan et al. (2012) argue that online, “the work of rhetors is not done when the composition is done, but continues in the labor rhetors invest in processes of circulation,” thus challenging typical conceptions of the composing process (p. xxi). What’s more, they claim, because digital texts can be (and often are) so easily remixed or reused, rhetors often “strategize about the

23 potential recomposition and redistribution of a text” (p. 79). Researchers who study internet spaces should consider the networks—both discursive and material—that facilitate or constrain processes of circulation and remix rather than analyzing texts as fixed, finite artifacts. Viewing online spaces in this way pushes us to consider processes of identity construction as more widely distributed and networked than previously acknowledged. Paying attention to the ways in which material networks, artifacts, and locations shape rhetorical action is an important move, particularly for feminist scholars interested in promoting social justice and equity through their research. Rhodes’ 2005 study of activist women’s websites is a good example of such work. She situates these websites in the networks of collective agency and textuality that supported the work of radical feminists in the 1960s, arguing that “radical feminist texts emphasize temporary positionality and the use of available technologies” (p. 66). Rhodes’ study focuses on the ways in which these websites create “the idea of a networked community composed of writerly activists, who work individually and collectively through their texts” (p. 66). Her focus on the hyperlinked networks that sustain this radical textuality underscores the ways in which the circulation of texts shapes radical feminist identities online—and reveals localized strategies that feminists might use to resist or disrupt those constructions. While Rhodes’ study is certainly a promising model for researchers hoping to understand the material networks that sustain feminist rhetorical action, it remains securely situated in the lives of Western women. Composition and rhetoric scholars like Dingo (2012), Mary Queen (2008), and Eileen Schell (2012b) have argued that researchers should adopt transnational feminist rhetorical analysis in order to consider “how rhetorics travel” (Dingo, 2012, p. 2). A transnational approach, says Dingo, illuminates the specific contexts in which gendered identities are produced: a transnational feminist network model emphasizes that the identity category of ‘woman’ is entangled within a variety of connections [...and] to understand women’s oppression, feminists must consider not only a woman’s local circumstances but how her circumstances relate to and are informed by supranational policies, colonial history,

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global economic structures, and even our practices here in the West. (p. 11; emphasis original) That is, a transnational model recognizes the specificity of embodied experience but also places it within larger, global networks. For example, in Rhodes’ 2005 study, she briefly mentions “the now-defunct ‘Third World Women’s Web-Ring’” in her analysis of an Asian-American feminist’s website (p. 71). A transnational feminist rhetorical perspective might have pushed Rhodes to consider this web-ring in more detail. Why did it shut down? Who were its members? What kind of (global and local) networks shape the identity category “third world women”? And how might it differ from Western feminists’ understandings of “third world women”? Other researchers, however, have started to approach digital spaces from a transnational feminist lens. Queen (2008) describes the internet as “the very embodiment of globalization,” and argues that investigating networks of circulation can help uncover power relations, because “digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority” (p. 472). Her research on the digital circulations of representations of an Afghan women’s rights group is an excellent example of how researchers might examine the circulation and remix of texts within differing global and local contexts. Scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics reminds all researchers to consider how local conditions interact with larger networks of power. This is a particularly salient reminder for digital researchers, who may not consider the global economic relations that sustain the production of internet technologies. The online world does not exist apart from “the real world,” and researchers might consider how the digital spaces they study are embedded in the same political structures that foster global inequality. For instance, a transnational feminist perspective might prompt a researcher studying how Apple’s iPad interface impacts online composing to learn about the Chinese women whose labor is exploited to produce the iPad cheaply. The researcher might also note that only the world’s most privileged citizens will possess the financial means and technological literacy to access and use the iPad. Although there is no doubt that my research is largely situated in the West, I nevertheless attempt to account for both the local and global networks that enable or constrain rhetorical action. Recruiting participants from diverse cultural and national backgrounds for my

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Wikipedia study, for example, helped me recognize that Wikipedia’s editorial policies can exclude non-Western content.8 Thus, the concept of circulation—especially figured in the way that transnational feminist rhetorical scholarship models—pushes researchers to situate the local construction of identity within multiple, global networks of discourse and materiality.

Chapter Overviews In the chapters that follow, I apply the theoretical and methodological frame outlined above to three specific online communities: Wikipedia, Ravelry, and Feminist Frequency. Each space fosters a significant amount of rhetorical interaction, but, as I explore in each chapter, some offer more promise for feminist rhetorical action than others. Together, these sites demonstrate not just how gendered power manifests online, but how scholars, students, and users might utilize the internet to contest those power relations altogether. Chapter 2, “Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)Action” is devoted to the first site in my study, Wikipedia. This community is one of the internet’s most successful examples of collaborative writing and knowledge-making. While compositionists have been generally quick to praise Wikipedia as a composing space that emphasizes revision and challenges traditional models of textual authority and authorship (Hood, 2009; Purdy, 2009; Vie & deWinter, 2008), the field has yet to explore why just 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are women (Glott, Schmidt, & Ghosh, 2010). There are likely other major demographic imbalances on Wikipedia as well, encompassing age, class, race, education, and more. These statistics indicate that Wikipedia’s knowledge-making community is not quite as egalitarian as it may appear, as women are more often consuming knowledge on Wikipedia than producing it. If compositionists are to take Wikipedia seriously as a writing resource (and I believe we should), we must turn our attention to the question of gender. Why aren’t more women contributing to Wikipedia? What gets left out when so many voices are silent? What

8 It’s equally important to note the transnational limitations of my study. I chose to focus on online spaces that are, for the most part, created and used by Western users. While I made efforts to reach out to users from a wide variety of global locations, I was ultimately limited to English speakers. I suspect many other researchers face the same constraints, but it doubtless affected my analysis of each online space studied here. In the following chapters, I discuss the implications of this and other methodological shortcomings in more detail. 26 happens when men overwhelmingly control what counts as knowledge in one of the world’s most visible knowledge resources? Through interviews with current self-identified female Wikipedia editors, I seek to understand not just the experiences of the women who do contribute to Wikipedia, but begin to explain the absence of so many others. My research suggests that far from being an open, democratic writing space, Wikipedia has an exclusionary “men’s locker-room” atmosphere that values a model of literacy and collaboration that silences differences and perpetuates positivist epistemologies. In order to address these concerns, I conclude with conversations with feminist Wikipedia activists (groups such as #tooFew—Feminists Engage Wikipedia) and fellow feminist scholars, in hopes of developing tactics for resistance. Even though Wikipedia demonstrates that women may face exclusion in online spaces, Chapter 3, “Ravelry: Weaving a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology,” complicates the common narrative that positions women as passive users, not creators, of digital spaces. This chapter extends my view of digital, collaborative communities to Ravelry, a site for knitters and crocheters. With over four million members—the vast majority of whom are women—Ravelry is both a social network and database, where users write, share, and edit patterns (“4 Million!,” 2014). Not only do users generate nearly all its content, Ravelry also inspires, even encourages, users to hack existing content as they share alterations to patterns. Ravelry is also notable for its highly visible multimodality: in addition to the text, images, and videos within the site itself, it also demonstrates how digital spaces reflect and are reflected in “real life”: in this case, users’ physical knitting or crochet work. Unlike Wikipedia, then, Ravelry relies on an epistemology that values the local, the personal, and the experiential. Drawing on surveys and interviews with users as well as an analysis of the site itself, I argue that Ravelry users exhibit a sophisticated awareness of multimodal circulation, seeing each other “not merely as recipients of rhetorical compositions, but as potential recomposers and redistributors of texts” (Sheridan et al., 2012, p. 78). Invoking a methodology that positions Ravelry within a feminist tradition of resistant material, rhetorical practices (Gere, 1997; Goggin, 2002; Rhodes, 2005), Chapter 3 examines how Ravelry facilitates complex multimodal exchanges that are both a product of and a precursor to a feminist community. While Ravelry is

27 by no means a feminist utopia (users are overwhelmingly white, for example), it still offers a much-needed challenge to the notion of a male-authored web and illustrates one way in which some women exercise networked agency online. Studying women’s successful online rhetorical interactions could very well inform the work of designers and rhetors who hope to create more equitable digital communities. While Wikipedia and Ravelry both present an epistemology that has serious political implications for women, neither site is explicitly activist. Chapter 4, “Feminist Frequency and Networks of Identity, Circulation, and Resistance,” thus turns to digital activism: Feminist Frequency, a video web series and blog created by Anita Sarkeesian. Feminist Frequency maintains a wide internet presence, including a highly popular YouTube channel, a website, a Tumblr, and Facebook and Twitter accounts. Although Sarkeesian has faced brutal sexist harassment, she has still managed to ensure the success of Feminist Frequency by embracing a multimodal, networked approach to rhetorical action. In this chapter, I explore Feminist Frequency, and Sarkeesian’s rhetorical tactics, to demonstrate how feminist counterpublics online can use textual circulation as a tactic to resist the normative discourses of the wider internet and pop culture publics (Fraser, 1992; Warner, 2002). I base my investigation of Feminist Frequency on close study of the rhetorical actions of not just Sarkeesian but also other writers/users who have responded to and shared her texts online. In this way, I attribute Feminist Frequency’s rhetorical functionality to not a single rhetor but as the work of a feminist activist community hoping to intervene in sexist discourses through the circulation of multimodal texts that foreground situated knowledges. I first concentrate on Sarkeesian, who has stated that her decision to present her “real” identity and body in her work has led to harassment (Angyal, 2011). I examine this harassment in more detail in order to understand why and how material power structures may limit rhetorical agency online. However, the broader community of Feminist Frequency supporters has enabled the site’s success through circulation, thus illustrating the kind of resilient, networked agency made possible by internet technologies. This model of agency is important for feminist scholars and teachers, as it demonstrates how digital, multimodal activism is as dependent on discursive and material networks as is it on any one rhetor.

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I close my dissertation with Chapter 5, “Reading, Resisting, and Remaking: Multimodal Feminist Epistemologies at Work,” which defines a multimodal feminist epistemology through three key features: its attention to materiality and embodiment, its recognition of rhetorical agency as networked, and its fundamentally subversive nature. Considering the materiality of composing helps rhetors reflect on their embodied positions within larger networks. It also highlights how identity and agency are embedded in overlapping networks of power. Asking ourselves and our students how these networks of power inform rhetorical agency will enable all of us to engage in more ethical and effective rhetorical action online. By making use of subversive multimodal textuality, researchers, students, internet users, and web designers can begin acknowledge the diverse locations of identity production and explore alternative epistemologies. The value of a multimodal feminist epistemology, then, lies in its ability to articulate new ways of being and knowing— and that can ultimately empower us to make the internet, as well as the rest of the world, a more inclusive, empowering place.

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Chapter 2 Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)Action

According to a 2011 Pew study, 53% of American internet users—both men and women—look for information on Wikipedia (Zickuhr & Rainie, 2011).9 Wikipedia’s influence extends into the classroom as well, as teachers of writing are no doubt aware: 52% of college students in a 2010 study say they “always” or “frequently” use Wikipedia during school-related research (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). This, one might argue, is potentially good news: while many are skeptical of Wikipedia, our field has been generally quick to praise Wikipedia as a collaborative site of writing and knowledge production that emphasizes revision and challenges traditional models of textual authority and authorship (Brown, 2009; Cummings, 2008; Hood, 2009; Purdy, 2009). Yet, while compositionists may be optimistic about its potential to democratize the production of knowledge, the fact remains that a scant 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are women (Glott et al., 2010). Wikipedia’s “gender gap” is significant enough that the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced an initiative that aimed at raise the share of female contributors to a modest 25 percent by 2015 (Cohen, 2011).10 These statistics suggest a rather large inequity in terms of who is producing and sustaining Wikipedia’s epistemological community—instead of being active producers of knowledge on Wikipedia, women are more often than not positioned as passive consumers.11 It seems that men are the ones overwhelmingly writing—and determining what counts as “good writing”—on

9 This number is nearly evenly divided between men and women: Pew’s 2011 study found that 56% of American men and 50% of American women who use the internet have gone to Wikipedia to locate information (Zickuhr & Rainie). 10 As of May 2015, Wikimedia has not announced if it has met its goal. 11 It is important to recognize that there are likely other demographic imbalances on Wikipedia, ranging across age, class, race, education, and more. Ruediger Glott, Philipp Schmidt, and Rishab Ghosh noted that Wikipedians tend to skew younger (the average age of editors is 25.22) and typically have at least a high school or undergraduate education (2010, p. 7). However, this survey—the most comprehensive study to date of Wikipedia editors—did not ask participants about their racial or economic backgrounds. Another study found that 43% of black American internet users and 40% of Hispanic American internet users look for information on Wikipedia (compared to 55% of white American internet users), but this study only measures readership, not authorship (Zickuhr & Rainie, 2011). That is, the study does not delineate how many of these readers actually contribute to Wikipedia. 30

Wikipedia. Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry for “Feminist Movement” (Figure 1). This article has been flagged as needing “cleanup” because “it is written like a personal reflection or essay.” Wikipedia then asks that users “improve it” by “rewriting it in an encyclopedic style.” In the editorial guidelines that inform comments such as these, Wikipedia explicitly values an “objective,” detached, “encyclopedic” way of writing, and thus, only certain types of knowledge are deemed acceptable in this collaborative digital space. In contrast, feminist scholars have long contested the common distinction between “objective” knowledge and subjective knowledge derived from the embodied positions of women and feminists (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1992). Ironically, then, this entry suggests that Wikipedia will let users write about feminism, but not from the embodied position of a feminist.

Figure 1: “Feminist movement” article, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movement

While many compositionists have been eager to accept wikis (and Wikipedia more specifically) as a valuable writing technology and pedagogical tool (Hood, 2009; McClure 2011; Purdy 2010), I argue that Wikipedia may in fact carry some problematic implications for feminist teachers of writing. Although Wikipedia endorses an “encyclopedic style” that presupposes objectivity and claims to be open to everyone (part of its appeal is the supposed “democratization of knowledge”), I claim that it in fact privileges patriarchal methodologies and epistemologies. In this chapter, I consider how and why Wikipedia endorses exclusionary epistemologies, and how we as researchers and teachers of writing might work with our students to challenge it. After I explore how Wikipedia functions as a rhetorical discourse community, I offer a close textual analysis of Wikipedia’s English-language community and editorial policies. The community’s large “gender gap,” I claim, has profound implications in terms of what kind of writing and knowledge is valued (or even present) in one of the world’s

31 largest and most visible encyclopedic resources. I then turn to interviews and surveys of female Wikipedia editors to consider how they navigate a space that excludes particular (feminist) ways of knowing and writing. Although Wikipedia operates on the premise that a writer’s embodied subjectivity is unrelated to the production of knowledge, the women who participated in my study indicated that local and experiential knowledge is instead central to their writing processes. In particular, these interviews demonstrate how women have developed sophisticated rhetorical strategies to write into a space where their knowledges may otherwise be devalued. I conclude by offering strategies that researchers, teachers and students can employ to challenge the epistemological normativity of Wikipedia, arguing that digital feminist activists must occupy and resist the sites that we wish to subvert.

Situating Wikipedia’s Exclusionary Epistemology Wikipedia is perhaps the most visible instance of the wiki, a technology that has been around since the early days of the internet but gained popularity around 2003 (Kohl, Liebert, & Metten, 2009, p. 167). Wikis allow multiple users to collaboratively write and edit hypertexts. In Wikipedia’s case, the goal is to collaboratively create an openly accessible online encyclopedia. Eschewing the expert-authored model of traditional print encyclopedias, Wikipedia instead operates on the belief that its users are a remarkable source of knowledge. Wikipedia’s main page, for example, proudly proclaims Wikipedia as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (“Wikipedia Main Page,” 2013). While it’s difficult to say for sure how many people have contributed to Wikipedia since its creation in 2001, “more than 100,000 registered users have made at least 10 edits each” (“Wikipedia Publishes,” 2007). Voluntarily, these users have made Wikipedia the ninth most visited website in the world, with nearly four million articles in English alone (it boasts millions more articles in 281 other languages as well) (Glott et al., 2010). Wikipedia has faced its share of criticisms, mostly focused on the question of reliability (Cummings, 2008; Read, 2007). Compositionists, however, have generally been more welcoming of this technology. Many composition scholars see wikis as valuable precisely because they challenge traditional notions of authorial expertise and textual stability. Wiki

32 technology presents the potential to create a constantly evolving space that privileges collaborative writing (and meaning-making), undermining the notion that a single, unified identity is the preferred authorial position. Scholars praise Wikipedia specifically for its ability to provide students with a public audience for their writing (Hood, 2009; Purdy, 2009), and argue that it frames writing as a socially constructed, recursive process (Brown, 2009; Cummings, 2008). In addition to the main article entry, each article features a “discussion” page, where users can discuss particular editing and writing decisions. Users can also view an article’s “history” page, which records individual edits and earlier versions, thus making the writing process visible. These features indicate that on Wikipedia neither text nor knowledge are finished, fixed entities: they are always up for revision, and they are always public. Wikipedia, then, favors collaborative, public writing as the mechanism of meaning-making rather than deeming it as the province of credentialed experts. Indeed, “knowledge [on Wikipedia] is framed as up for debate by any interested party,” says James P. Purdy (2009, p. 356). Given all this praise, it’s tempting to see Wikipedia a potentially valuable tool for building and exploring a feminist epistemology online. After all, feminist epistemologies refuse to see knowledge as stable but rather as fluid and relational. Wikipedia’s social nature, as well as its technical affordances, appear to perfectly suit feminist action online. Yet, while Wikipedia may potentially be a democratizing force in some ways, Wikipedia (like any writing technology) is a product of its culture, and approaching any technology as transparent can be dangerous. Our field’s long tradition of feminist critiques of technology (Blair & Takayoshi, 1999; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1999; Ratliff, 2007; L. Sullivan, 1997; Takayoshi, 1994) reminds us that we must approach any writing technology carefully and critically. Wikipedia is no different. The software that supports any wiki will most certainly reflect certain biases and assumptions (Arola, 2010; Selfe & Selfe 1994; Wysocki & Jasken, 2004), and the community policies of each individual wiki—either explicitly articulated or not— also work to regulate what kind of discourse is appropriate (Bossewitch, Frankfurt, Sherman, & Kelly, 2008). In the case of Wikipedia, it appears that the community itself—and the rhetorical practices it endorses—may not be open to feminist ways of knowing and writing. Specifically, I argue that the values of the

33 male-dominated discourse community discount feminist ways of knowing, thus alienating and silencing (potential) female editors and even feminist researchers.

Discourse Communities: Online and Off How can such a large and sometimes chaotic space like Wikipedia systemically exclude feminist epistemologies? The answer lies in considering how Wikipedia functions as discourse community. Since composition’s “social turn” in the 1980’s, it’s become widely accepted in the field to recognize knowledge—and the texts that codify that knowledge—as a social process. Importantly, however, this social process of knowledge production does not result from one large conversation. Rather, knowledge is generated through the negotiation of multiple, overlapping smaller groups called discourse communities. Discourse communities, as Porter defines them, are, at base, “a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated” (1986, p. 38-9). These communities share specific norms and assumptions that, on the one hand, work to make community discourse legible to its members, but, on the other hand, can also make it difficult for non-members to decipher or access (Bartholomae, 1985). Discourse communities, both in theory and in practice, help explain how rhetorical situations differ across various social contexts and groups of rhetors. What is important is not necessarily the values of individual members of a community, but, as Patricia Bizzell explains, “the expectations they share by virtue of belonging to that particular community” (1982, p. 218). Knowledge-making, then, is the result of collaborations of individuals belonging to specific discourse communities. These communities, however, are not insulated, independent entities. Rather, says Joesph Harris, “one is always simultaneously a part of several discourses, several communities, is always already committed to a number of conflicting beliefs and practices” (1989, p. 19; emphasis original). That is, discourse communities are comprised of members that occupy different positions within multiple discourse communities. Marilyn M. Cooper explores this idea more fully in her 1986 article “The Ecology of Writing.” She likens discourse communities to an ecological web, arguing that “writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (p. 367). This

34 ecological model is useful in understanding how discourse communities work in digital spaces. While the texts of specific discourse communities may be located wholly online, the members of these communities constitute other communities, both online and off. In other words, digital discourse communities like Wikipedia are not isolated entities: rather, they exist within a larger network of overlapping discourse communities rooted in material and digital locations (Edbauer, 2005; Rivers & Weber, 2011). This means that the norms and assumptions that govern users’ overlapping discourse communities will inevitably shape their work on Wikipedia, and that their work on Wikipedia will no doubt shape the other discourse communities to which they belong. Writing and the production of knowledge take place within and are enabled by a tangled network of material and digital discourse communities. Yet, Wikipedia’s design does not acknowledge this relationship between social locations and epistemology. Wikipedia does not require editors to register, and only records “anonymous” edits as IP addresses. Many active users do choose to register, creating user names and even user pages, where they can include biographical information, links to Wikipedia projects they’re involved in, and “user boxes” that indicate a user’s interests and sometimes even their editing philosophy. However, registered users do not have to create user pages (many don’t), and often these pages have very little information at all. In other words, it is difficult to discern who these users are, not in the sense of unveiling their “real world” identities (although some users certainly do), but their allegiances, their politics, their social positioning—their standpoint. Wikipedia does not make it a priority to understand how a user’s social relationships may shape the knowledge they generate. This practice builds and sustains Wikipedia’s problematic assumption that “Truth,” or knowledge, is separate from, or at least only tangentially related to, one’s standpoint.

When Collaborative Writing Becomes Exclusionary Writing: Wikipedia’s Style Problem Approaching Wikipedia as a discourse community helps explain why this specific wiki— which could, theoretically, accommodate feminist ways of knowing and writing—fails to do so. Wikipedia enables many voices to speak at once: most articles are written by several different authors over time, apparently privileging multiplicity and resisting the notion of a singular,

35 hegemonic Truth. This kind of multivocality is in fact a key tenet of feminist research and writing. Candace Spigelman notes how an epistemological position that favors totality and objectivity can reinforce hegemonic structures of knowledge and power: “what counts as evidential is determined by those positioned to credentialize and validate particular objects or discourses” (2001, p. 66). Many feminists thus advocate narrative as an especially powerful way of knowing, because it can potentially call attention to our embodied subject positions and to the contingency of knowledge (W. P. Banks, 2003; Fleckenstein, 2010; Helmers, 2006; Ratcliffe, 2002). Spigelman explains how personal narratives can work against universalized, “objective” notions of truth: “experiential evidence necessarily destabilizes certainty [...] stories encourage contradiction and inconsistency and offer narrative layerings, all open to interpretation” (2001, p. 75). Although wikis can potentially enable the kind of multiplicitous, multi-positioned writing that feminists value, Wikipedia explicitly enforces a “neutral point of view” policy, which it explains means “representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources” (“Wikipedia:Neutral point of view,” 2013). As Haraway and other feminists have rightly noted, neutrality is an illusion, “the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity” (1991, p. 195). Wikipedia anticipates this objection and explains its stance by writing, “The NPOV policy says nothing about objectivity. In particular, the policy does not say that there is such a thing as objectivity in a philosophical sense [...] to be neutral is to describe debates rather than engage in them” (“Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/FAQ,” 2013). This policy, then, understands language and Truth to be two separate entities. That is, according to Wikipedia, an editor may describe a debate without taking a position in that debate. Yet, language is inherently political, and Wikipedia’s style policy—the language used to “describe debates”—actively enforces exclusionary practices. Wikipedia’s Manual of Style explains that the purpose of its house style is to help “editors write articles with consistent, clear, and precise language, layout, and formatting. The goal is to make Wikipedia easier and more intuitive to use” (“Wikipedia:Manual of Style,” 2013). This understanding of language presupposes that clarity and precision are the best ways to make (or represent, as Wikipedia

36 might suggest) knowledge. Wikipedia editors should employ a style that gives articles an appearance of objectivity: “articles should generally not be written from a first or second person perspective [...] the writer should be invisible to the reader […] The use of subjective qualifiers should be avoided” (“Wikipedia:Writing Better Articles,” 2013). Even though Wikipedia claims that neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing, its style policy actively discourages any show of embodied positionality, reminding contributors to avoid using the site to write “personal essays that state your particular feelings about a topic (rather than the opinion of experts). [... Wikipedia] is not a vehicle to make personal opinions become part of such knowledge” (“Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is Not,” 2012). This is why Wikipedia has determined that the “Feminist Movement” article is not “encyclopedic” enough—because it utilizes a subjective way of knowing that relies on interpretation and analysis, it is presumed to be of poor quality. The political and ideological stakes are indeed high, as a recent debate over language use on Wikipedia demonstrates. In February 2012, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (a group of administrators that resolves community disputes) asked for users’ opinions on how to title articles describing the abortion debate. The current titles, “Support for the legalization of abortion” and “Opposition to the legalization of abortion,” were unsatisfactory to the community for a number of reasons, including their limited scope, framing of the issue, and sheer wordiness. Over the course of two months, users discussed and debated the virtues of a number of alternatives and, after a vote, ranked “Pro-life” and “Pro-choice” as their communal first choice (“Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Abortion article titles,” 2012). This debate is notable because not only does it offer an example of how the Wikipedia community responds to a contentious issue such as abortion, but it also illustrates the political power of language. “Pro- Life” and “Pro-Choice,” while perhaps less cumbersome and more familiar to readers, are not exactly “neutral,” nor are they particularly accurate.12 They reduce an exceedingly complex debate to two sides and, at the very least, misrepresent the issue (Crawley et al., 2009; Koerber,

12 Sara Crawley, Rebecca K. Willman, Leisa Clark, and Clare Walsh (2009) argue that such a binary approach to abortion “has created a false dualism from the complex histories and experiences surrounding abortion” (229) and ultimately removes women from “the center of the abortion debate” (228). 37

Booher, & Rickly, 2012). While a dispute over article titles may seem like a petty issue, the low number of female Wikipedia contributors suggests that this naming debate threatens to speak for women and perpetuate discourse that removes agency from women—particularly salient in light of recent reproductive healthcare legislation aimed at governing women’s bodies and rights. The arbitration committee was careful to note that “This discussion is not a vote, and as per all discussions, comments will be weighed based on strength of argument” (“Wikipedia: Requests for comment/Abortion article titles,” 2012; emphasis original). Such a policy begs the question: what counts as a strong argument? Whose epistemological standards are used? Presumably, the Arbitration Committee will judge any arguments in the same way that all information on Wikipedia is judged: Is it verifiable? Is it neutral? Is it “accepted knowledge”? (“Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not,” 2012). However, when it comes to an issue like abortion—where women’s voices and experiences have often been silenced—traditional epistemologies that value objectivity may not be appropriate, and may in fact only reinforce hegemonic structures. Wikipedia works from an epistemological stance that normalizes language, and thus knowledge, ultimately silencing alternate subjectivities or viewpoints. Wikipedia’s style polices are no doubt rooted in print-based encyclopedias. The visual similarities between the layout of a Wikipedia article and a traditional print text are indeed striking (Figure 2). Black text, laid in between margins and divided by larger headings and sub- headings, appears on a white screen, accompanied by the occasional image or sound clip. Like a traditional print text, footnotes and citations appear at the end of article. These design choices— codified by Wikipedia’s Manual of Style—hark back to the familiar encyclopedic genre, especially as it operates in print. J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin (2000) describe the relationship between old and new media as “remediation,” or “the particular ways in which [new media] refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (p. 15). In this case, Wikipedia, the new medium, remediate[s] by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the

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older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. (p. 47)

Figure 2: Typical Wikipedia article layout, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

The visual and discursive style of Wikipedia explicitly draws on the familiar logic of the print encyclopedia—perhaps to make it more recognizable to readers and editors, or to lend itself some credibility by mimicking the design of a more obviously “authoritative” source— and thus imports many of the same rhetorical and epistemological assumptions of the print encyclopedia. Although the earliest ideas of an encyclopedia can be traced back to ancient Greece, it wasn’t until the early-to-mid eighteenth century that encyclopedias began to take the recognizable print-based form we see today.13 It is no coincidence that encyclopedias began to take their modern form alongside the beginnings of the Enlightenment. Encyclopedias made the Enlightenment values of “transportable knowledge, the communication of ideas across national and confessional boundaries; the ability of individuals, whatever their social status, to participate in a universal conversation” manifest (Yeo, 2001, p. 57). Importantly, however, much Enlightenment thought is concerned with language and its shortcomings, preferring instead to describe reality through inductive scientific reasoning. John Locke’s “An Essay

13 Early uses of the word encyclopedia denoted “the course of learning appropriate to the educated person” (Yeo, 2001, p. 7). Thus, while it was meant to suggest comprehensive knowledge, it did not locate that knowledge in a specific volume of books, as today’s usage of “encyclopedia” might indicate. 39

Concerning Human Understanding” demonstrates this distrust toward language: “it is easy to perceive what imperfection there is in language, and how the very nature of words makes it almost unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations” (2001; p. 817). Language, according to this view, does not generate reality but instead can only fall short of describing its true nature. Encyclopedias, then, have confronted “the anxieties […] about whether effective communication of knowledge could be achieved, given the perceived inadequacies of language— the gap between words and things” from the Enlightenment onward (Yeo, 2001, p. 157). The only way to address the perceived gap between words and things is to strive for a universal, objective use of language. A handful of scholars have already considered how Wikipedia may function as a contemporary example of the Enlightenment project of democracy and emancipation (Haider & Sundin, 2001; Kennedy, 2009; Yeo, 2007). However, this scholarship has neglected to consider what epistemologies—and resulting rhetorical actions—are excluded by Wikipedia’s positivist inheritance. A number of studies have found that Wikipedia’s quality— that is, its tone, accuracy, and scope— is just as good or even better than traditional print encyclopedias (Emigh & Herring, 2005; Giles, 2005; Reavley et al., 2012). William Emigh and Susan C. Herring argue that this is largely a result of “Wikipedia users appropriate[ing] norms and expectations about what an 'encyclopedia' should be, including norms of formality, neutrality, and consistency, from the larger culture” (2005, p. 9). It is just as likely, however, that these users are also importing their “norms and expectations” about what counts as knowledge (and what doesn’t count) from the encyclopedic tradition that dictates knowledge is universal, stable, and, above all, objective.

Methods: Studying Wikipedia’s Web of Power Although a close study of the gendered epistemologies of Wikipedia’s community guidelines and historical origins can be revealing, it is important to remember that Wikipedia is not just a collection of articles—it is a large group of embodied individuals joining together to write those articles. Through rhetorical interactions, these individuals generate community standards that govern the production of texts and knowledge. Wikipedia offers an endless

40 supply of textual artifacts for researchers, and the compositionists who have researched Wikipedia have accordingly relied primarily on these textual artifacts (Brown, 2009; Hood, 2009; Purdy, 2009). While researchers can make valuable claims based on their analysis of such textual data, Wikipedia entries are a product of users’ individual standpoints, Wikipedia’s interface, and its community guidelines. Thus, if we are to take seriously the claim that what one can know is closely tied to one’s social position and relationships, it is just as important to study the users themselves if we are to learn about Wikipedia’s epistemological values (DePew, 2007; Takayoshi, 2000). Grounding my study in person-based interview and survey research thus grants me insight into the local practices and experiences of digital writers, which complicates the existing, mostly-positive portraits of Wikipedia. It also aligns with my own feminist perspective, which is grounded in a respect for and responsibility to participants, as well as an acknowledgement and self-reflexive examination of my own position as researcher (Almjeld & Blair, 2012; Fine, 1998; Romberger, 2007). I’ll admit that my own experiences with Wikipedia, in part, spurred my interest in this research. Before I ever edited or created an article, I was a faithful and regular reader. Wikipedia was (and still is) one of my go-to references when I want a quick run-down of a particular topic, which is why I began teaching my first-year writing students how they might use Wikipedia as a research tool. My experience as a user has been a generally positive one, and this speaks to Wikipedia’s strengths: it’s easy to navigate, easy to read, and extraordinarily comprehensive. My limited experiences as a Wikipedia editor, however, have been far less positive. I found the interface clunky and hard to use (Wikipedia articles are written in an idiosyncratic markup that resembles but is different from HTML; see Figure 3), and the few edits I made were either flagged for review or immediately undone. I didn’t feel like I was offering anything to the community, and after a few initial experiments in editing, I gave up altogether. I returned to my passive position as reader. But when I came across the troubling statistic that only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors were women, I immediately thought of my own experience as a Wikipedia contributor. Why were women so hesitant to write on Wikipedia? How many became frustrated with the technical aspects, or its editorial practices? And how were the experiences of the women who did contribute different?

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Figure 3: Wikpedia markup, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Welsh_Corgi&action=edit

My identity as a feminist rhetorician also motivated me to create this study. The strikingly low number of female Wikipedians bothered me, not only because I recalled my own failed attempts to edit Wikipedia, but because I believe in the internet’s potential to enrich and circulate feminist rhetorics. The main goal of my research, then, was to help make women’s voices more visible on Wikipedia, thus supporting the interests of current and potential female Wikipedia editors—and perhaps even women online more generally. But in order to learn more about Wikipedia’s gender politics (and what it was, exactly, that women wanted from the community), I needed to talk to the women who were already there. Through their experiences, I might begin to identify ways to make Wikipedia a more welcoming space for women. While I hoped to eventually understand these women as individuals—with different social positions and motivations—I also knew that I needed to understand the community to which they belonged. In order to craft the kind of respectful, collaborative relationship I wanted with individual participants, in short, I first had to craft my researcher identity with the community at large. Luckily, I quickly discovered that the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia) operates its own Research Committee. This committee is comprised of expert community members and Wikipedia employees who can review (and grant or deny) any requests for research on or in the community. The support of the Research Committee can be

42 valuable indeed to a researcher: not only does it invite a more reciprocal relationship with participants and their community, it can also give researchers access to Wikimedia data or assistance in participant recruitment. In many ways, then, the Research Committee—and subsequent review process—appears to be a researcher’s dream. Through a process of review and revision, the researcher can negotiate the terms of her relationship with the community. In practice, the Research Committee functions very much like an Institutional Review Board (IRB): first, a researcher creates a page (using the same interface that Wikipedia editors encounter) describing her project, methodologies, and requests for support. Then, committee members review the project and either ask for revision or offer support. For good or ill, the Research Committee—like IRBs—determines what counts as good, ethical, rigorous research. While securing IRB support is a crucial step in any person-based research project (IRBs, after all, are meant to ensure the protection of human subjects), some researchers have criticized the IRB process specifically for being skewed toward a bioethical, or positivist, epistemological perspective that doesn’t necessarily value the same practices as feminist methodologies (Barton, 2008; McKee, 2003; Milne, 2005). Because of these biases, writes McKee, “it is important that we argue for the legitimacy of our research, particularly when confronted with institutional oversight committees that may operate with different research paradigms in mind” (2003, p. 491). On first glance, however, the Wikimedia Research Committee seems to value many of the same ethical principles that feminist researchers do. In their list of “Good Practices on Wikipedia Research,” they tell researchers that they support “community engagement,” which they describe as “talk[ing] to Wikimedians before taking action,” as well as “transparency.” “Wikimedians,” they write, “should know who you are and have a general idea of your research goals.” Importantly, the Research Committee also insists on “(Re)Contribution,” so that “Wikimedia and/or the community [benefits] in some way from participating in your work.” Finally, the list warns against “disruption,” noting that “Wikimedia and its editors should not be negatively affected by your work.” (“Notes on good practices on Wikipedia Research,” 2013). A researcher reviewing this page might then be encouraged by the community’s potential to support feminist research.

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This list, however, is one of the only available explanations of the Research Committee’s values and expectations—and it appears to be under construction, with notes for revision written in the article. In fact, the article has not been revised since September 2011. Since I couldn’t find much more to help me craft my request for support—beyond reading other, successful, requests—I dutifully got to work creating my project page using much of the same language as I had in my IRB proposal.14 I explained that I had designed my study as a two-phase project: first, participants would take a relatively short survey (seeking both straightforward quantitative data as well as qualitative data that would most directly speak to participants‘ experiences). This survey also offered participants a chance to take part in a longer interview with me.15 I tried to emphasize my desire to work with Wikipedians to help make the community more inclusive, and made it clear that I would happily share any conclusions or recommendations that resulted from my research with the community. Weeks, then months, passed before I started to receive feedback from committee members and other Wikipedians. Some of these comments were helpful, such as one user’s suggestion that I make a explicit effort to recruit female contributors from all over the world in order to reflect the geographic diversity of Wikipedia editors (I ended up taking this advice, and was grateful that I did).16 But it was clear from their comments that other users were not as familiar with feminist research practices. For example, one user asked me to clarify my hypothesis, and urged me to study something more precise than “women’s experience.” Evidently, this user was operating from a very different epistemological framework than I was. I did my best to revise my proposal in response to the concerns Wikimedians had expressed, but the fact was that I received very little feedback at all—only four users responded to my request over a year and a half. Most distressing, however, was the lack of any official response from the Research Committee. I wanted to respect the community I planned to research, but I worried that waiting

14 My institution’s IRB determined my project was exempt from review. Although I understood my research as person-based, as McKee and Porter (2009) argue, many IRBs tend to see internet research as text-based rather than person-based. 15 See Appendix A for a more detailed description of survey and interviews questions. 16 I have chosen to paraphrase, rather than directly quote, these comments because I do not wish to draw attention to these specific users. Direct quotes can be easily traced back to their authors, and these users did not agree to participate in my research study. My paraphrasing is meant to indicate community, not individual, attitudes toward my research. 44 for the Research Committee would delay my study to the point that it would no longer be timely enough to positively impact the community. I’m not the only feminist researcher who has faced challenges working with Wikimedia’s Research Committee. Kate, a scholar in a field dominated by quantitative methods, contacted me after reading my research project page on Wikimedia.17 She too was planning a qualitative study of female Wikipedia editors, and, like me, claimed a specifically feminist methodology. Kate wanted to hear about my experience working with the Research Committee, as she had already faced many of the same problems that I encountered. She found the process of creating a page and requesting support difficult (“nothing is obvious, nothing is user-friendly at all,” she told me), and the Research Committee members that reviewed her project page were unfamiliar with feminist methods. When I said that I was gonna be using feminist interview techniques, one of the members of the Research Committee came back and said, ‘what does that mean?’ [...] I was laughing, because if you Google ‘feminist interview techniques,’ there's an entry on Wikipedia. [...] It’s like, really? You couldn't have Googled this? Kate also found that the Research Committee’s expectations for “transparency” conflicted with her own feminist perspective: the Research Committee asked me to post my interview protocol, and I pushed back on that and I said that I didn't want to. […] I didn't want to publicly post my interview protocol, because I wanted it to be a conversation with my participants. And it was a semi-structured interview. I may not use all of the questions. I may change the language of some of the questions depending upon the interactions with my participant. And I got a lot of pushback about that. Although Kate eventually compromised and posted sample questions, she was uncertain about the motivations of the Research Committee: “I felt like it was more about power than protecting the community.” Kate explained that, in her mind, enacting a feminist methodology

17 I have given all participants (including Kate) psudeonyms. To further protect Kate’s identity (and her continuing relationship with Wikipedia), I am being purposely vague regarding Kate’s field of study. 45

comes down to epistemology […] I really value stories and [...] especially in my field, where a lot of the work is quantitative, it's kind of a push back on that, to say that that isn't the whole truth. That there's this larger narrative, this story, and the context is really important. And that the individual voices are really important. Kate worried, as I did, that the epistemology valued by the Wikipedia community did not support the epistemology she valued as a feminist researcher. Happily, however, Kate was able to work with the Research Committee and revise her project page to receive their support in participant recruitment. She especially credits the women she’s interacted with at Wikimedia for their support: [They] have been incredibly supportive […] even with the Research Committee, it got to the point where the straw poll was called to say ‘approve’ or ‘not approve’ [my request for support], and some of the women from the Wikimedia Foundation jumped on, and spoke up, and approved it and said why. Kate also admitted that she had an “inside track” to the Wikimedia Foundation (friends and colleagues who had either worked for or with Wikimedia), and was able to learn more about the Research Committee and the process for requesting their support. Her contacts “were able to share some of the covert, latent information with me that otherwise I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have even known where to get started […] it’s almost like being admitted into a secret society.” Because Kate was able to access some of the internal networks within the Wikimedia Foundation, she suggests, she was able to better understand the community’s expectations for research. Kate was able to make the best of a challenging research situation, but both of our experiences suggest that researchers using methodologies unfamiliar or unacceptable to the community are disadvantaged in terms of negotiating community support and access to data and/or participants. Indeed, none of the current members of the Research Committee indicated any familiarity with feminist methodologies in their biographic profiles. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that, as a non-profit organization that relies, in part, on volunteer

46 support, Wikimedia’s Research Committee is likely understaffed.18 Of the projects proposed in 2013, for example, the Research Committee was able to offer support to just under half of the researchers who asked. Wikipedia is and had always been a volunteer effort, and I couldn’t expect users to want to help my research. Respecting participants means respecting their interests as well as their non-interest, and I certainly didn’t want to force anyone to help me design my study or recruit participants. However, this experience prompted me to consider how feminist researchers might gain access to communities that don’t share their methodological or political commitments. Luckily, however, I discovered that Wikimedia ran a Gender Gap listserv for Wikipedians who were concerned about the community’s lack of women. Although I had still not received any official endorsement from the Research Committee, I decided to introduce myself and my research to the listserv, hoping that these insiders might offer some advice on how I should proceed. To my surprise, several women agreed to participate in my study right away. My desperate Googling also introduced me to #tooFEW (Feminist Engage Wikipedia), an organized edit-a-thon that encouraged feminists to either supplement existing Wikipedia content or begin new articles. I was happy to see that there were other feminists who wanted to do something about the way women were represented on Wikipedia, and I immediately contacted the event’s organizer to explain my research. She graciously introduced me to other feminists working on/with Wikipedia, some of whom agreed to share their experiences with me. In the end, members of these communities became my sole source of participants. The women who participated in this study are thus interested in and knowledgeable about the hotly debated “gender gap” on Wikipedia, and several have participated in events (online and off) to recruit and educate female editors. Recruiting my subjects from these groups, then, allowed me to speak to women who contribute actively to Wikipedia even while remaining critical of—or at least interested in—the community’s gender politics. While participants shared their experiences with me through surveys and interviews, here I focus mostly on the interviews I conducted because I believe they offer a richer, more detailed

18 A Wikipedia insider (a well-respected editor and sometimes employee) who wished to remain anonymous confirmed that the Research Committee is quite understaffed and thus is often overwhelmed by research requests. 47 portrait of women’s experiences on Wikipedia. However, at times I will supplement my analysis with survey responses in order to illustrate broader trends or to represent different viewpoints. Survey questions offered a mixture of multiple-choice and open response questions, and interviews were semi-structured in order to create a more reciprocal, open dialogue. This meant participants often brought up experiences and insights I had not originally planned to ask about, but were valuable nonetheless. After transcribing interviews and collecting all survey responses, I developed a coding scheme based on participants’ responses as well as my own focus on feminist epistemologies. Thus, my coding focused on topical areas such as expertise, citation, writing processes, and experiences with/in the Wikipedia community. All participants had the opportunity to review and respond to a draft of this chapter, and those who responded only asked for minor changes and clarifications, such as removal of certain identifying information. Because most participants are so active within Wikipedia, I took particular care to safeguard their identities in order to avoid any potential resistance from the community. In the next section, I share their experiences in more detail.

A Glimpse of a Body: The Women of Wikipedia Speak In the course of my person-based research, the stories of three specific interview participants emerged as especially compelling. While the experiences of these women are not necessarily representative, I chose to concentrate on them here because they provide insight into how some women employ embodied writing practices on Wikipedia. Sylvia is a white woman from the United States who lives and works in Australia. At the time of our interview, she had nearly completed her PhD in Communication and was about to begin a post-doctoral position. Lekha is a South Indian woman who is enrolled in an undergraduate degree program in medicine and surgery, with plans to complete medical school to become a doctor. She writes in both English language Wikipedia as well as in Malayalam Wikipedia, a much smaller Wikipedia written in a language spoken primarily in Southern India. Janet, the oldest of the three (she is in her mid-fifties), is a white Australian woman who is a senior academic at a local university. They all identified as middle-class, do not have children, and only Janet is married. Survey participants also represented a range of backgrounds: while the demographic questions I

48 posed were optional, most of the 13 participants chose to answer them. Ages varied from between 18 and 55, as did physical locations, with Brazilian, Indian, Australian, and American women all responding. Of those that indicated their race, all but one said they were some variation of caucasian, and 80% had completed some form of graduate education. 62.5 % of participants have an average annual household income of at least $50,000. Together, these participants depict a relatively privileged group of well-educated, economically advantaged women. While not representative, this sample suggests that the most active female Wikipedians have both the social and material capital necessary to devote time to Wikipedia work— something many women around the world lack. Their social and economic positions may also afford them the rhetorical skills they need to successfully conform to Wikipedia’s epistemological and discursive conventions—even if, as their interviews and survey responses suggest, they sometimes struggle to balance their political and embodied positions in a space that discounts any show of subjectivity.

Personal/Political Investments in a “Neutral” Space These women are, in many senses, Wikipedia success stories. All interview participants describe themselves as active contributors (and have been for several years), writing on a variety of topics including Australian history, women’s sports, and medicine. Their participation in the Wikipedia community extends beyond just writing and editing articles, though: all three are involved, in one way or another, in larger Wikipedia projects such as administration (Janet serves on the board of Wikimedia Australia), education (Lekha leads workshops), and outreach (Sylvia got Wikimedia Australia to sponsor a trip to London so that she could cover the paralympic games for Wikipedia). It is clear that these three women are all deeply invested in their work with Wikipedia. But why do they invest so much time, energy, and money to help build a community that they admit can exclude and intimidate women? Janet identified strongly with Wikipedia’s ideological mission to make knowledge freely and widely available. She recalls:

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a few years ago, around December, when they were doing the annual donation campaign, there was a banner ad with [Wikipedia founder] Jimmy Wales saying something like […] ‘we want to give free knowledge to everyone, everywhere.’ Words to that effect. And I just looked at that and I thought ‘by God, that is powerful statement.’ […] You know, a world where everyone has access to knowledge regardless of the impediments. And I think that's when I really kind of emotionally bought into it. Janet explains that although she had contributed before, it was at this point when her activity on Wikipedia accelerated. A full 80% of survey participants agreed, saying that they like contributing because it allows them to share their knowledge with others. Many remarked on the ideological aspirations of the project: one participant wrote, “I like the idea of building such a resource,” and another said, “It’s an amazing phenomenon and a great way of sharing knowledge. I believe in the principles it adheres to.” Lekha also describes a personal, emotional connection to Wikipedia. She says that while Wikipedia’s ideological goals initially attracted her, her involvement with the community kept her editing. She noted that at first she tried to keep her work on Wikipedia separate from her personal life. But once she began making friends—both online and off at face-to-face Wikipedia events—she felt strongly connected to the community, and describes these interactions as positive ones. Lekha’s investment in Wikipedia, it seems, is at least partially spurred by its social aspects. Sylvia, on the other hand, offered a more explicitly political purpose for her work on Wikipedia. She admits, “Sometimes I write because I do have an agenda.” She went on to explain that she writes articles to highlight issues that she is personally and politically invested in: “I write for Wikipedia's rules in order to accomplish goals. I want to see people with disabilities highlighted on the front page of Wikipedia, so I write that sort of stuff. I want to see women, Australian women, on the front page of Wikipedia so I write to make that happen.” Others explained that they derive personal enjoyment from contributing: one survey participant described contributing as “meditative,” while another said she contributes simply “because I can.” These women, then, see the potential of Wikipedia as not only a knowledge-building and - sharing platform, but as a way to relax and even assert agency.

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When I asked interview participants about the kind of topics they tend to write about most, it was clear that all three were writing about topics that mattered to them as individuals and professionals. Lekha, for example, spends most of her time working on articles related to medicine—she notes that this is easy given that she is currently studying medicine in school— and explains that she often tries to highlight the “Indian perspective” in her writing. Sylvia writes about sports-related topics, specifically women’s sports, Australian sports, and paralympic games and athletes (her PhD research examined sports fans). Janet had perhaps the most variation in terms of what kind of articles she edited most frequently. But she said that she often worked on articles about local history (“I come from a very old local family,” she explained) and routinely found herself editing articles on specific places where she had recently or was currently traveling. In other words, all three women wrote almost exclusively about topics to which they were personally—oftentimes even physically—connected. In the cases of these participants, their experiences and expertise participating in other discourse communities, communities that directly shaped their individual positionalities, helped them feel authorized to contribute to Wikipedia.

The Exception to the Norm: Where Are the Rest of the Women? When I asked interview participants why there aren’t more women writing on Wikipedia, they offered three main explanations: women’s lack of time, Wikipedia’s interface, and, perhaps most significantly, the norms and standards of its discourse community. Even though they are all active contributors to Wikipedia, their education, outreach, and administrative work with Wikipedia puts them all in contact with women who are either less active or not at all active on Wikipedia, and they spoke at length about these experiences. They also grounded their explanations in their own stories of learning about the community and its rules. Thus, while it may seem counter-intuitive to ask current female editors to explain the lack of women writing on Wikipedia, I believe their answers provide valuable insight on the “gender gap” question. Their answers demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of Wikipedia’s rhetorical discourse community, technical knowledge of its interface, and how material conditions intersect with and influence online composing practices.

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Lekha and Janet both insisted that women’s “real life” material conditions account for the lack of women on Wikipedia. Janet, speaking specifically in terms of Western women, explained that women are strapped for time. She suggested that while more and more women enter professional careers, they are still expected to do most of the work at home. Lekha also shared this perspective, even though she clarified that she was speaking about Indian women in particular. Her outreach work has led her to talk with many women who say “that they do not have the time.” She continued, noting that, in her experience, Indian “women are traditionally to stay at home.” Notably, both Lekha and Janet link women’s material conditions—a lack of time due to domestic and work responsibilities—to a lack of confidence online. “Everything has to do with the way people are raised here,” said Lekha, “so they lack confidence.” Janet agreed, claiming that “women are still a little bit less confident.” She provided an example to illustrate her point: she said that her mother-in-law, who is in her early eighties, reads Wikipedia regularly but does not contribute—even when she notices errors or a lack of content in specific articles. When Janet encourages her to edit articles, her mother-in-law (who left school around age 15) “deprecates her [own] knowledge.” Sylvia also recognizes that Wikipedia’s contributor base reflects “real world” biases. “There's obviously a gender imbalance,” she told me. “Yes, because there's a gender imbalance in real life!”19 While she does acknowledge that online communities are situated in larger, “real life” social contexts, she suggests that the gender gap issue is not primarily due to women’s material circumstances. Rather, it is that “women don’t think Wikipedia is a priority.” Sylvia believes that Wikipedia needs to do a better job of articulating why women should contribute. As one survey participant asked, “Why should women contribute? Women can make more money and get more attention and recognition being involved elsewhere. Wikipedia renders women as contributors invisible.” While all three interview participants attributed, to some extent, the low number of female editors on Wikipedia to the social and cultural contexts surrounding Wikipedia, they also were quick to point out that Wikipedia’s interface, its community, and its writing guidelines were all to blame for the persistent gender gap problem. Janet and Lekha both identified the interface as

19 Sylvia also spoke at length about other biases on Wikipedia, particularly its U.S.- and Western-heavy content imbalance. “It’s not a gender gap,” she said. “It’s a people gap.” 52 one of the most visible hurdles for female editors. Lekha, who described herself as coming from “a non-technology background” admitted that the interface was “very tough” when she first began editing. She learned by trial and error, looking at articles and copying the code that other editors had written. Janet, on the other hand, identifies as an “IT person,” and said that the Wiki markup users must learn to write on Wikipedia didn’t “frighten her.” She noted that “IT people and people in that kind of space are disproportionately male […] so therefore confidence level with markup I think is probably higher with men than women.” In other words, because women are underrepresented in fields that might afford them familiarity with markup, they are likely less familiar with or perhaps even intimidated by Wikipedia’s complex code.

Working Within and Against Wikipedia’s Discourse Community Although participants offered numerous reasons for the low number of female contributors on Wikipedia, they have all managed to be successful Wikipedia contributors themselves. So how do they approach writing in a space that they acknowledge can be difficult for women to enter? Unsurprisingly, they all demonstrated a sophisticated sense of rhetorical awareness. More specifically, participants indicated that they have a strong working knowledge of the norms and rules that constitute Wikipedia’s discourse community, and this, I suggest, is why they have managed to prosper on Wikipedia. This complex knowledge also points to what I believe is a major reason why Wikipedia has difficulty attracting more female editors: the conventions of the discourse community are difficult to learn and master because they are, in many ways, unique to Wikipedia alone. Additionally, these conventions also often run counter to feminist ways of knowing and writing, and can exclude rhetorical acts that are embodied and experiential. Lekha’s awareness of Wikipedia’s discourse community focused most centrally on audience. Wikipedia itself reminds contributors to imagine “a general audience,” and notes that articles “should be understandable to the widest possible audience” (“Wikipedia: Make technical articles understandable,” 2013). Lekha does her best to enact this community norm when she works on medical articles. As a medical student, Lekha has a good deal of expertise, but her rhetorical decision-making is guided by an imagined audience of non-experts: “I make

53 sure that I do not […] put in a lot of medical terms to make it very complicated for [readers…]. We have to expect […that] people from a non-medical background also read it.” However vague the idea of a “general audience” might be, it’s important to recognize that Lekha’s audience extends beyond passive Wikipedia readers: it also includes other writers who inhabit the Wikipedia discourse community. If other contributors find her language to be too specialized or technical, they can rewrite or even delete it. Lekha’s sense of audience, then, is tied up in what the community imagines as appropriate for its audience. In this way, Wikipedia’s discourse community works to create a fairly homogenous set of rhetorical possibilities for individual writers. Perhaps this is why all three interview participants noted relying on some kind of template when they compose. While templates can help novices become familiar with the conventions of particular genres and discourse communities, they can also disempower users by artificially separating form and content (Arola, 2010). Lekha told me that when she first began learning to write on Wikipedia, and found herself struggling to learn how to correctly format articles, she would “look up pages which had been well-developed, like the page on Barack Obama […] and learn the format of everything.” Since Wikipedia relies on Wiki Markup, Wikipedia’s idiosyncratic code, to compose articles, Lekha could literally copy and paste code from one article to another, editing and adjusting as needed. Janet and Sylvia also noted that they rely on a standard template to help create articles that are in line with Wikipedia’s community standards. Janet said that she “developed a bit of a template” when she writes biographical articles: you know, the first paragraph will sort of have this information in it, then I'll have one section that deals with their personal life, one section that deals with them in terms of their business or professional life, and one section that will deal with their public life […] And I guess I have a fairly standard set of sources that I use to gather that information. So I've got a kind of a pattern to these things. Sylvia was even more transparent about how she uses templates to prosper in the Wikipedia discourse community. She explained that she has “to view [writing on] Wikipedia as a game.” Sylvia is very aware that she must cite “a whole bunch of sources” so that her articles won’t get deleted. This means that, in her view, the quality of her writing suffers: “My prose

54 comes off as choppy because […] I write source first. I find the source and then I put the information in […] And the prose is awful. My writing on Wikipedia is awful because I write kinda with that game stuff in mind.” Sylvia believes Wikipedia’s emphasis on “verifiability” (one of Wikipedia’s key tenets) is perhaps one of the biggest barriers for participation. “Once people learn about sourcing, it really takes away the barriers,” she explained. Given that all three interview participants are active in academia, it may then be no surprise that they were easily able to transfer their knowledge of research and citation to Wikipedia’s discourse community. While providing citations may be essential to writing on Wikipedia, Sylvia remains critical of the practice, explaining that Wikipedia’s citation policies work to support an “American-centric” copyright stance. She believes that Wikipedia invokes such rigid citation policies “as a kind of shorthand for ‘this would be a copyright violation in the United States of America.’” Potential editors who are unfamiliar with academic citation or U.S. Copyright law, then, may have difficulty participating on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s emphasis on “reliable sources” works alongside its NPOV policy to exclude knowledge that the community does not deem appropriate. Although these policies may in fact be the best way to ensure the encyclopedia remains uniform at the hands of so many editors, the emphasis on verifiable sources can exclude local, embodied knowledges. Janet shared one such instance with me. As she was editing an article on local schools, she wanted to add in that her suburb had no high schools, only primary schools. “Sometimes you can't [find citations], sometimes particularly for stuff you know,” she said. “Where do you find a source that tells you there isn't a school in a suburb? I mean, I know that, I've lived here for twenty-something years […] But where do you find a source that says there isn't a high school in a particular suburb?” In this case, Janet’s local knowledge was excluded by Wikipedia’s policies, even though readers might very well value such knowledge. What’s more, these policies do not recognize how “reliability” is not stable or unchanging, but rather generated through the discourse of a community of experts. In other words, Wikipedia’s policies do not account for how the embodied experiences of its community might shape what counts as “relevant,” “neutral,” or even “true.”

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Sylvia’s experience editing articles on women’s and paralympic sports provide another example. She noted that editors will “organize sports […] they’ll create the category, you know, ‘women 100 meter runners’ or something like that, [but] they won't create the comparable ‘male 100 meter runners’ even though sports is gender segregated.” When she created an article on the sport netball (popular in Oceanic nations and predominantly played by women), she says she ran across an American male editor who questioned its relevance since it was a women’s sport played in a handful of small countries. In Sylvia’s eyes, Wikipedia suffers from “not just a bias against women, [but] a bias against regions.” Sylvia feels that this bias negatively affects the kind of content included on Wikipedia. When she spoke about her work on articles about paralympic athletes, she said, “people with disability, even if they've competed at the highest level, they're not necessarily notable […] You go to Wimbledon, you win the women's wheelchair double, you're not necessarily notable […] because you're an athlete with a disability.” What Wikipedia’s policies overlook is that notability itself is a situated knowledge. What’s “notable” to a white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied American man will likely be different than someone who does not occupy these privileged identity categories. Sylvia is very aware of the default subject position that the Wikipedia community assumes of its writers, and while she does not hide the fact that she is a woman when she writes on Wikipedia, she does keep her sexuality to herself. “I don't advertise that I'm a lesbian because I know there is discrimination there,” she said. Sylvia then told me that she had heard about homophobic remarks and harassment from other out gay and lesbian Wikipedia editors, and simply doesn’t want to “deal with it.” She fears that because she is a “female writing about women,” other editors will dismiss her writing as simply the work of someone “writing about women because they’re hot.” In other words, Sylvia worries that the community will not recognize her expertise because of her embodied identity position. Her choice to keep her sexuality private on Wikipedia suggests not only overt homophobia among the community, but also illustrates how users work to enforce and police a “neutral” subject position from other editors—thus shutting out local, embodied knowledges. Sylvia, Janet, and Lekha all demonstrated complex rhetorical knowledge of Wikipedia’s discourse community. However, their writing practices suggest that Wikipedia doesn’t support

56 the egalitarian, accessible writing space that compositionists have celebrated. Indeed, the women that I surveyed noted again and again that the community itself was not “very collegial.” Reading through their responses, it was clear that the women felt disappointed in the community’s version of collaboration, which, to them, felt more like win-lose aggression than give-take negotiation. Their remarks suggest that on Wikipedia, contributing is more of a competition than a collaboration. One woman wrote, “Often, during a content dispute, it’s the loudest and most aggressive that comes out ‘winner.’” Another invoked the metaphor of a “men’s locker room” to describe Wikipedia’s competitive atmosphere: “Someone once described Wikipedia as ‘reeking like a men’s locker room.’ I’d say that’s pretty accurate.” These responses indicate that Wikipedia fosters an approach to collaboration that is much like what Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede (1990) term “hierarchical collaboration.” This model of collaboration values “productivity and efficiency,” and, as a result, “the realities of multiple voices and shifting authority are seen as problems to be overcome or resolved. Knowledge in this mode is most often viewed as information to be found or a problem to be solved” (p. 235). I suggest that although Wikipedia has the potential to model a very different kind of collaboration, in practice, it functions as a hierarchical collaboration—“a predominantly masculine mode of discourse” (p. 235). Differences are not seen as productive tensions to be explored, but as conflicts to smooth out. Eliding conflict in this way can simply reinforce hegemonic structures, turning collaboration into homogenization. On Wikipedia, a community that suffers from unequal power structures, non-dominant viewpoints can thus be silenced.

Fostering Political, Ethical Engagements with Wikipedia These interviews, read alongside Wikipedia’s policies, indicate that Wikipedia’s discourse community is organized around an epistemology that presumes a stable, knowable truth—a truth which can be transparently shared through “good writing.” The women who participated in my study have mastered the rules of this community—often in order to achieve their own political goals—but the fact remains that nearly 90% of Wikipedia’s contributors are men. How, then, might we address this disparity? And how should we approach Wikipedia as teachers and scholars of writing?

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Fortunately, Wikipedia as well as other external groups are taking steps to address the severe gender imbalance. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia foundation, leads the official effort to raise the number of female editors. In a 2010 blog post, she outlines several strategies to recruit more women to Wikipedia, including “deliberately focus efforts on recruiting women,” “stage and support women-only activities,” “work to create and protect a female-friendly environment,” and “emphasize social impact” (“Unlocking the clubhouse,” n.p.). Wikipedia is now in fact organizing more outreach efforts targeted at women, and is actively working on creating and improving women-focused articles. Wikipedia’s Gender Gap task force has also suggested that Wikipedia revise community policies to better address issues like harassment, dispute resolution, and sexist language in Wikipedia articles. However, while these efforts may in fact draw more women to Wikipedia, they do not address the larger epistemological problems of relying on “neutral” language to convey the “objective” truth. One of the groups I relied on when recruiting participants, #tooFEW, is taking a more explicitly political approach to Wikipedia’s gender gap. The group, sponsored by HASTAC (a collective of scholars and artists dedicated to exploring creative, critical interdisciplinary uses of technology) organizes Wikipedia edit-a-thons, where participants are encouraged to “improve Wikipedia for all” by creating or editing “entries by (and on) feminists and people of color” (Barnett, 2013). Significantly, the goal is not only to improve the number of women contributing to Wikipedia, but to call attention to the relationship between the gender gap and Wikipedia’s epistemological biases. “Wikipedia is not a magical machine that pulls information from various sources and aggregates the data,” their blog announces. “It’s edited. By people” (Barnett, 2013, n.p.). Efforts like #tooFEW go beyond simply encouraging women to write on Wikipedia—they instead cultivate a critical engagement with the technology that recognizes the relationship between embodied subjectivity and the production of knowledge. This work is important because, as Wikipedia gains legitimacy, it is becoming more and more ubiquitous: search any topic in Google, and, more often than not, the Wikipedia entry for that topic will be the first hit. Wikipedia articles are becoming the primary, most visible representation of knowledge on a subject, and as Jaron Lanier suggests, this pervasiveness could “promote the false idea that there is only one universal truth in some arenas where that isn’t so”

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(2011 p. 79). While many Wikipedia articles are certainly quite good as encyclopedic entries, we should push ourselves and our students to consider the value, ethics, and politics of using such sources—and to consider what kind of knowledge might exist in other kinds of sources. Of course, drawing from a number of different sources is simply good research practice. But what I’m calling for is a more careful examination of the role of embodied, subjective experience, both in the scholarship that we consume and in the scholarship that we produce. Enacting a techno-feminist research ethic means reflecting on our own positions, our bodies, and our relationships to others (Almjeld & Blair, 2012). Wikipedia’s explicit endorsement of “objective,” detached writing as a means of establishing legitimacy is, after all, borrowed from scholarly discourse conventions, and only indicates that we still have a long way to go to overturn the belief that good, valid knowledge is delivered from “the view from above, from nowhere” (Haraway, 1991, p.195). An over-reliance on this kind of positivist epistemology thus limits the kind of knowledge researchers are able to make, as my (and Kate’s) experiences researching Wikipedia demonstrate. Because Wikipedia’s Research Committee did not recognize my feminist methodology as a legitimate one, the possibility of my rhetorical act— my planned research project—was dismissed. Faced with this lack of power, I instead turned to the peripheral communities that surround Wikipedia to help me enact the activist feminist methodology I had struggled to legitimate through more official channels. While I was careful to identify myself and my priorities—a scholar engaged in a research project—I also clearly explained my political commitments to feminist activism. Working with these communities allowed me to forge valuable professional and personal relationships, as I began to craft an identity for myself as a public scholar whose work is not just visible but relevant to non- academics. Connecting with communities who shared my goal, I believe, made it easier for me to enact a feminist ethic of reciprocity. Creating such alliances requires the same self-reflective work that any feminist research does. We must consciously consider how to forge ethical, reciprocal relationships, and respect the work that our allies do. One of the most vexing questions I faced as I wrote up this study, for example, was my responsibility to Kate. I didn’t want to do anything to endanger her ongoing research alliance with Wikipedia, and I strongly believe that I ought to do all I can to support

59 her work. I chose to contact Kate before I started writing to ensure she was comfortable with me writing about her experience, and I also gave her the opportunity to review and comment on this chapter. I chose, very carefully, what details to reveal about her (and her research) so that I might minimize the risk of exposing her identity and jeopardizing her relationship with Wikipedia. This approach, of course, is specific to me, my research, and my participants, and may not be appropriate for all situations. The point, however, remains: enacting a feminist methodology (online or off) means that we are obligated to respect and protect those who help us interrupt the discourses that silence feminist research. Internet technologies in particular offer feminist researchers promising avenues for pursuing this work. Digital journals and academic presses such as Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Harlot, and Computers and Composition Digital Press are just some of the venues that value and support the kind of embodied, reflective, relational epistemologies that feminist researchers advocate. But we must also be attentive to the public, digital spaces where knowledge is made. Techno-feminists have both the technical and rhetorical expertise to contest Wikipedia’s epistemological orientations. While Wikipedia’s strategy to address the gender gap puts the onus on women to join the community and align with its values, I believe it is more productive to question this program altogether and point out how the community might change to accommodate women. Public, digital spaces are the ideal venue for this change: instead of talking only to one another, my research points to the value of forming reciprocal relationships with organizations like #tooFEW to resist exclusionary practices online. We can carry out this work in our classrooms as well. While asking students to read or contribute to Wikipedia might very well provide an opportunity for students to learn about collaboration, research, and public writing (Hood, 2009; McClure, 2011; Purdy 2009, 2010), we should invoke this technology critically. Instead of eschewing Wikipedia entirely, we might use it as a way to open up conversations with our students about how knowledge is generated, and how discourse communities work to generate and sustain communicative norms that can be used to both empower and silence writers. Such conversations would highlight the necessity of critically examining source material (Who’s writing this? What stake do they have in this argument?) as well as how discourse communities work to create and normalize knowledge

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(What are the values of this community? Who belongs to this community? Who is missing?). We can ask our students to perform rhetorical analyses of Wikipedia articles in an attempt to illustrate its epistemological values. We can also encourage our students to write in Wikipedia itself, not just to learn the conventions of the discourse community, but to perhaps try to subvert those conventions altogether. What, for example, is the difference between an article on sexual assault written like a typical Wikipedia article and one written from experience? How do their rhetorical effects differ, and which is more appropriate for different purposes? Asking students to engage with Wikipedia in this way will not only potentially open up the rhetorical possibilities of Wikipedia, but will push them to consider how to work in and against other digital discourse communities to achieve their own political goals. While Wikipedia remains an incredibly powerful resource, we must remember that it is not perfect. More research needs to be done to understand, for example, what other subjectivities are underrepresented or missing entirely from Wikipedia: race, class, sexuality, ability, geographical location. While my conversations with female Wikipedia editors offer some explanations for why such individuals may feel alienated from the community, research directly engaging those who don’t contribute to Wikipedia will only enrich our ability to make a more inclusive space. But in the meantime, we must approach Wikipedia—or any other writing technology, for that matter—with a critical eye. Although Wikipedia may not fully live up to its democratizing hype, it remains a powerful place for teachers and students alike to contest the gendered production of knowledge online.

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Chapter 3 Ravelry: Weaving a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology

Over 4 million users from more than 100 countries. 65,000 forum posts per day. 10 million photos added in 2013 alone (“4 million!,” 2014). All this on Ravelry, the biggest social network you may have never heard of. Ravelry, a site for knitters, crocheters, and other fiber artists, connects users to each other and to an impressive database of patterns, yarns, designers, and retailers. Like Wikipedia (and many other online communities), the vast majority of the site’s content is user-generated. Unlike Wikipedia, however, Ravelry’s user base is overwhelmingly comprised of women, with estimates indicating women make up at least 75% of users.20 What’s more, the content they’re producing is much more multimodal: while users certainly compose plenty of alphabetic text, they’re also creating and sharing photos, illustrations, videos, audio tracks, and, of course, knitted objects—1000 tons worth, to be exact (“4 Million!,” 2014). Together, these users and the diverse content they create constitute a robust community that offers a potentially subversive feminist epistemology that values the local, the experiential, and the personal. Ravelry’s interface and its users’ rhetorical interactions work together to facilitate complex multimodal exchanges that are both a product of and a precursor to a feminist community. Like Wikipedia, Ravelry asks its users to create and share knowledge, collaboratively. And both rely on a model of composing that sees process and product as inextricable. Yet, as a user (and researcher) of both sites, I recognize how differently these two communities function. While both sites offer easy access to an immense amount of information, Ravelers (the preferred nickname for Ravelry users) seem to value difference in collaboration. Wikipedians, on the other hand, hope to erase difference and reach a definite consensus. Ravelers are producing sophisticated multimodal texts— both on- and offline—while Wikipedia appears to value alphabetic texts as the preferred tool of knowledge-making. And, on a basic level,

20 Ravelry does not offer specific user demographics (see pages 71-2 for a more detailed explanation). However, web tracking site Alexa.com notes “Relative to the general internet population, females are greatly over- represented at this site” (“Ravelry.com,” 2014), and Forbes.com describes Ravelry as one of the “girliest” social networks, estimating its user base as 75% female (Sheft-Ason, 2011) 62

Ravelers are downright friendly, making me feel welcome as a new knitter, community member, and researcher, happily sharing their extensive knitting expertise. So why are these two communities—so similar at first glance—so different? Ravelry not only demonstrates how women use technology for their own ends (Blair, Gajjala, & Tulley, 2009; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998; Stabile 1994), but also, through its focus on the material practice of knitting, makes “women’s technological history” visible (Shade, 2002, p. 49). In this chapter, then, I analyze how Ravelry—as a community and as an interface—supports a multimodal feminist epistemology that acknowledges rhetorical agency as networked across a number of human and nonhuman actors (Rhodes, 2005; Sheridan et al., 2012). I again rely on both visual/discursive analysis as well as person-based research to support this investigation. I begin by historicizing Ravelry, arguing that it participates in a long tradition of women’s literacy practices. Then, I turn to a person-based study of Ravelry and its users, arguing that the site’s interface, its community, and its texts all work together to support a relational, embodied feminist epistemology. Ravelry’s robust multimodal interface and texts help facilitate this epistemology, offering a far different model of collaboration and knowledge- making than sites like Wikipedia. Ravelry, I argue, serves as a subversive model for feminist rhetorical process and practice online.

A Stitch in Time: Ravelry and Knitting Culture To understand how Ravelry functions as a digital technology, it is first necessary to examine the literacies and traditions it builds upon. Like Wikipedia, Ravelry builds on and reshapes older technologies. This process, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, is called remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). Ravelry, for example, depends on older media such as pattern books, knitting journals, knitting supplies, and even the classic knitting circle. However, as I argue in Chapter 1, it is also important to recognize the ways in which these older technologies are themselves multimodal. Even though knitting pattern books are print artifacts, they often invoke alphabetic modes (written instructions), visual modes (photos and illustrations), as well as an implicit reliance on the embodied tradition and practice of knitting

63 itself. It is no surprise, then, that Ravelry is such a richly multimodal space—it draws from historical practices and texts that were also multimodal. Ravelry emerges first and foremost from the practice of knitting, which has had multiple, often conflicting functions in women’s history. Although knitting was not originally gendered (the first knitters were in fact men), in the 19th and 20th centuries it became a symbol of feminine domesticity, particularly in the West (MacDonald, 1988).21 Joanne Turney (2009) suggests that knitting was taught to young women “as a means of instilling discipline and obedience” (p. 13). However, knitting has also provided women an outlet for creative expression and community-making. Anne MacDonald claims that for women, knitting together transformed a tedious task into an enjoyable one, and knitting eventually became an integral part of many women’s social lives: “With cloth manufacture such an indispensable home function, sharing the more arduous tasks with neighbors substituted conviviality for solitary spinning, sewing, carding, dyeing, knitting, and turned the cooperative social activity, or ‘bee,’ into a highly anticipated affair” (1988, p. 13-4). These knitting bees served not just a social function, but sometimes a political one. With few outlets for political action, knitting bees offered women agency. Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush argue that the “hidden zones” of the knitting circle “provided a different kind of subject formation. These spaces would function to allow women to swap stories, skills, knowledge, and strategies and generally speak about the more oppressive aspects of the social home” (2011; p. 240). Colonial American women used their knitting to protest taxation of British imports (MacDonald, 1988, p. 26-28), and women on both sides of the American Civil War gathered to knit supplies for soldiers (MacDonald, 1988, p. 98). Some women even used their skills to make money for themselves or for charities (MacDonald, 1988, p. 149). For Turney, the knitting circle “recognizes the power of group work, discussion and activism. Indeed, from a Marxist perspective, engagement in practical and creative activity, such as knitting, acts as a tool for changing society” (2009, p. 203). The

21 Most sources on knitting, its history, and its cultural meanings focus on the West, and most of Ravelry’s users are also located in the West. For the purposes of this chapter, then, my analysis is limited to Western knitters and practices, although it is important to acknowledge that knitting is not strictly a Western phenomenon. 64 material process and products of knitting, therefore, have a history of facilitating not just social ties but rhetorical action. Although knitting’s social dimensions did, at times, result in political action—often in the form of donating or selling knitted goods for a cause—knitting as a social activity still has deep ties to the domestic sphere. Turney (2009) describes knitting as “both familial and familiar” (p. 5), arguing that the act of knitting not only teaches useful household skills, but “[creates] bonds and relationships between female relatives” (p. 12). Passing down knitting patterns and tools as well as the embodied practice of knitting itself over time allows knitting to act “as a communicative tool, expressing histories that had hitherto been hidden, marginalized or ignored” (Turney, 2009, p. 203). Knitting patterns, for example, may appear “timeless and objective,” according to Kristina M. Medford, but in fact “they are always subject to the particular knitter, always a product of their context and maker” (2006, p. 104). Because individual bodies knit differently (knitters know if they tend to knit “tightly” or “loosely,” for example), each hand-knit good is different from another. Knitting techniques can also vary from one knitting culture to another. A knitter can choose to use a Dutch heel, a French heel, or a German strap heel (among others) when making a sock. While all knitters make use of established techniques like the cable cast-on or the kitchener stitch, each time they use one of these techniques its history is rewritten and passed on anew. Suzanne Kesler Rumsey (2009) names this process of handing down communicative, literate practices over time “heritage literacy,” which “describes how literacies and technology uses are accumulated across generations through a decision-making process” (p. 576). Rumsey makes the important distinction that heritage literacies can be multimodal, “[accounting] for the passage of all sorts of literate practices, not necessarily or exclusively print or alphabetic literacies” (p. 576). While her study of heritage literacy is grounded in the literacy practices of Amish quilters, this term can also productively describe the ways in which knitting—its practices, its products, its cultural associations—have evolved over time. Like Rumsey’s Amish quilters, the work of knitting “shows interdependence between generations as the new generation depends on the old for their intellectual inheritances, and the old depends on the new for innovations and adaptations, as well as adoptions of literacy traditions” (p. 490). There is, in

65 fact, a long tradition of viewing women’s craft practices as literate, rhetorical artifacts that “[highlight] subjects, objects, and relationships” (Prins, 2012, p.152). Ravelry remediates not just the multimodal texts and technologies of knitting, but the heritage literacies surrounding knitting as well. One way in which contemporary knitters are invoking knitting’s heritage literacy—and redefining rhetoric itself—is through “craftivism,” a movement centered on the creation of crafts for activist purposes. Alla Myzelev argues that contemporary knitters often draw on an idealized sense of community and the past, which is often “transformed and reworked into the creative powers at establishing a public, active community of like-minded people” (2013, p. 153). Craftivists utilize this sentimentality for a number of purposes: to protest consumption practices, capitalist economies, and gendered labor (Minahan & Cox, 2007; Pentney 2008). The AIDS memorial quilt is perhaps one of the best-known examples of craftivism. Using a collaboratively crafted object reminiscent of domesticity and comfort, the AIDS memorial quilt makes visible the lives lost to AIDS. Some contemporary knitters have recognized knitting’s craftivist potential as well. Los Angeles group KnitRiot recently knit a “portable Corn Field” (Figure 4) meant to garner support for California’s Proposition 37, which proposed to label all genetically modified foods (“Our ‘Yes on Prop 37,’” 2012). Another group of knitters based in Tel Aviv, Savta Connection, regularly participates in “Urban Knitting” or “yarn bombing” (Figure 5) in order to “add beauty and softness to the city” (“Why,” 2010). These projects, they write, are “a great way to create unique, one of a kind pieces of art which present an appealing and heart-warming alternative to our consumerism washed society and city” (“Why,” 2010). Beth Ann Pentney (2008) argues that knitting is an ideal location for articulating and enacting a specifically feminist activism because “it is grounded in a gendered cultural practice that can readily be politicized for different purposes by different groups and individuals” (n.p.) In other words, craftivist knitters recognize knitting’s gendered history and use it as a powerful rhetorical tool. Of course, not all knitters work for expressly political purposes: many knit for fun or out of necessity. But whatever a knitter’s goals may be, knitting has a long history of calling attention to its social nature. Whether joining with other women to knit and catch up on

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neighborhood gossip, organizing the collection of knitted squares for a peace scarf, or relying on the pattern written and re-written over time to create the perfect pair of socks, knitters have always seen their work as fundamentally social and communicative. The internet offers contemporary knitters an ideal place to enact and build upon this ethic. Not only do online technologies allow knitters to find and talk to one another, digital tools provide an accessible archive of knitting-related information. Perhaps most importantly, though, the internet allows knitters the ability to simultaneously reinforce, contest, or subvert the meaning of knitting itself.

Figures 4 (L) and 5 (R): Contemporary examples of knitting craftivism (Figure 4 from http://knitriot.blogspot.com/2012/10/our-yes-on-prop-37-corn-field-hits-road.html; Figure 5 from http://www.savtaconnection.com/pages/why.html

Studying Digital Knitters Although Ravelry was certainly not the first site to address knitters’ desire to communicate and create together, it is, according to most Ravelers, the most successful. Casey and Jessica Forbes founded Ravelry in 2007 as a place for knitters and crocheters to come together and share patterns and expertise. As its “About Us” page explains, “the content here is all user- driven; we as a community make the site what it is.” A reliance on user-created content perhaps explains why a staff of just five can manage a site with over four million members.

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Raverly—unlike most Web 2.0 sites—is notable in that it was developed, in part, by a woman. Although Casey handled all the coding labor, his wife Jessica had a heavy hand in the site’s conceptualization (so much so that, Jessica has taken the nickname “Mama Rav,” while Casey is simply “Code Monkey”) (Wade, 2011; Reagan, 2009; Ravelry “About Us”).22 Ravelry’s design encourages the creation of user-created content: its interface emphasizes both the creation of knitted or crocheted goods as well as the creation of social connections. Together, Ravelry’s users have helped build site content like forums, yarn and pattern search, a help wiki, and a database of millions of completed projects. These features are exactly why, when I learned to knit at age 25, I was so delighted to discover Ravelry. Because I was a beginner, I found myself making frequent use of the “techniques” forum, and I appreciated being able to sort patterns by difficultly rating. Both the depth of technical, knitting-related resources and the community’s welcoming, supportive spirit immediately impressed me, and it didn’t take long for me to become a regular user of the site. While I only belong to a few groups and rarely participate in the forums, I use the yarn and pattern search databases often and occasionally post my finished projects. I am certainly not the most active Ravelry user, but my use of the site afforded me a familiarity with its community and interface. Ravelry facilitated my initiation into the rich tradition and community of knitting, but what caught my attention as a feminist scholar of digital rhetoric was that users were overwhelmingly female, creating site content that was both collaborative and heavily multimodal. Thus, throughout this study, I inhabited a dual role of user and scholar. While perhaps more complex, such a position is, as Almjeld and Blair (2012) argue, a feminist one that “may help to blur divisions between researcher and researched and between personal and scholarly knowledges” (p. 105). In other words, my location allowed me to resist the strict researcher/subject division that feminist epistemologies work to complicate. Ravelry’s unique interactive features—as well as the methodology I detail in Chapter 1— guided my investigation of the community, which relies on a variety of data: rhetorical analysis of the site’s interface, design, and language, secondary research on and about Ravelry, and

22 While these nicknames may serve to reinforce problematic gender roles (women as nurturing mothers, men as goofy techies), they also signal a mixed-gender collaboration that places high value on feminized labor. 68 person-based research. For this part of the study, I again chose to utilize both survey and interview methods. After obtaining IRB approval, I contacted Ravelry site administrators to ask how I might go about recruiting participants. The site administrator I contacted (using Ravelry’s private messaging feature) informed me that the site did not permit research recruitment through the general forums. I was, however, welcome to contact individual groups and seek permission to recruit through their group forums. I sought and received permission to recruit in one of Ravlery’s most popular groups, Miscellaneous (with 857 members) as well as two smaller groups to which I already belonged, The Knitting Rhetoricians and MU Knit and Crochet. I eventually collected 61 survey responses from Ravelers, with more than 25 volunteers for interviews. I asked participants about their experiences as knitters and as Ravelers, focusing on the Ravelry community as well as its interface.23 For this study, I rely on all the survey responses I collected, as well as three interviews with Ravelry users Audrey, Lynn, and Helen.24 I developed a coding scheme organically from participants’ answers and from the key elements of feminist epistemologies I was most interested in identifying: relationality, partiality, embodiment, and experiential knowledge. My coding scheme was also attuned to issues of materiality and writing technologies, focusing on how and why users saw their work on Ravelry as embedded within and shaped by tools, locations, and bodies. After researching Wikipedia, I was surprised by how many Ravelers were willing to participate in my study. Perhaps this is due to the community ethic of helpfulness, but in all likelihood my location as a fellow knitter and Ravelry user helped establish my ethos as a community insider. Because I posted all recruitment requests through my personal Ravelry account, potential participants could click through to view my profile and site activity, confirming my position as someone who knew and participated in the community. While I can only speculate as to how my insider location may have positively affected the recruitment process, I know for sure that my prior positive experiences with Ravelry shaped my initial

23 See Appendix B for survey and interview questions. 24 I chose to focus on just three interviews in this chapter because I wanted to offer a more in-depth portrait of specific users alongside the more generalized responses from my survey. I have also changed the names of all interview participants, who have had a chance to review and respond to a draft of this chapter. Any suggestions for revision were minor and mostly focused on clarification. 69 research interests and expectations, as I already recognized and appreciated the site’s collaborative, multimodal textuality. Ravelry’s unique affordances may have appealed to me as a researcher, but it also meant that I had to address some particularly difficult legal and ethical questions. Throughout this chapter, I have included screenshots which, at times, include specific users’ projects, photographs, and comments. I consider the inclusion of these artifacts essential to fully illustrate Ravelry’s functionality. However, incorporating these images in my own work raises questions of both informed consent and fair use. To guide my decision-making process about what I should include, I turned to McKee and Porter’s excellent book, The Ethics of Internet Research (2009). To help researchers decide if and when informed consent is necessary, McKee and Porter ask researchers to consider how public or private an online text may be, how sensitive the information is, how vulnerable authors are, and how much researcher-participant interaction is necessary (p. 88). Using these heuristic questions, I determined that I would only show texts in detail from participants who had explicitly granted me permission to do so (Figure 11, for example, on page 86).25 However, because so much of Ravelry’s content is generated by its users, it would be nearly impossible to document the site’s functions without showing some content from users who had not granted me permission. McKee and Porter’s questions led me to conclude that because Ravelry is essentially a public space26 where users freely share (mostly) non-sensitive information, I would not be risking users’ safety or security—or my commitment to maintaining ethical relationships with participants—by sharing carefully selected content.27 I have, however, tried to obscure these users’ identities by blurring usernames and any recognizable faces in photographs. The question of intellectual property, however, is slightly thornier. Ravelers constantly share photographs of projects they’ve completed; it’s arguably one of the most central aspects of Ravelry membership. These photographs are taken by individual users and are thus their

25 On their consent forms, all interview participants explicitly granted me permission to screenshot their site activity. 26 Although users need to sign in to access Ravelry content, anyone can create a Ravelry account, and with more than four million users, it is safe to assume that Ravelry operates as a fairly public space. 27 To be clear, there is certainly sensitive information shared on Ravelry—users discuss all manner of topics—but I have chosen to avoid sharing screenshots of any potentially sensitive information. 70 intellectual property. But what of the completed knitted projects? Or the patterns these projects arose from? While knitters and knitting companies can and do copyright their patterns, it’s less certain who owns the products of those patterns—the knitted object itself, which may well differ from the pattern that inspired it. This quandary illustrates why crafting communities have struggled to define what, exactly, counts as intellectual property. Kristy Robertson explains that these debates move from notions of a common shared history that should be open and welcoming to all, [pass] through the idea that as a gendered pastime crafting is regularly devalued— something its practitioners should work against—and [conclude] with more recent arguments that there are lucrative opportunities for professional crafters and designers that need to be protected through the copyrighting, patenting and trademark of designs and processes. (2013, p. 88-9) While it is important to balance all these concerns, I also needed to determine if I could include the material I wanted to share in this study without violating copyright law. To help me untangle the complex issue of fair use, I again turned to McKee and Porter. They note that researchers ought to consider the material to be copied itself (its ownership, licensing, and implicit expectations), the intended (re)use of the material (dissemination and resulting commercial implications), and potential harms of using the material (ethical harm, copyright infringement, researcher liability) (2009, p. 69-70). I determined that I was within my legal and ethical rights to share users’ copyrighted material (photographs of knitted projects) in this chapter: not only is my use of these images limited to the purpose of academic research, generally, users who post photos do so to document their work and share it with the community, not to collect monetary compensation. While there are indeed some users who do post photos in order to seek monetary compensation—through (copyrighted) pattern or yarn sales, for example—I do not include these images in this chapter. Ravelry’s ethic of collaboration, remix, and remediation already challenges traditional conceptions of intellectual property, and demonstrates the continued need for researchers to carefully consider these issues. It’s also difficult to offer an overall sense of just who is using Ravelry, in part because Ravelry itself doesn’t track such information. During an episode of the FiberBeat podcast, co-

71 founder Jessica Forbes explains that the company “[tries] not to ask too much information, because we’re definitely not of a Facebook model of like, mining for information” (Wade, 2011). However, it’s safe to say that most Ravelers identify as women—and they are, by and large, a relatively privileged group of women. My survey data, while by no means a representative sample, indicated that most Ravelers have social, racial, and economic advantages not typical of women around the globe. Most (75%) respondents indicated that they lived in North America, most (73%) are married, most (78%) have obtained an undergraduate or graduate degree, and, perhaps most notably, an overwhelming majority (92%) noted their race as some variant of “white” or “caucasian.” Although I do not claim that this data represents all Ravelry users, it does suggest that Ravelers—specifically, those whose experiences I analyze below—are well-educated, financially secure, and racially privileged. At least one of my interview participants seemed to share this sentiment. Audrey told me that her experiences in the community suggested that Ravelers were “privileged” and “hugely white.” There are likely many reasons why Ravelers represent a generally privileged group of women. One may be the practice of knitting itself. Although there are certainly women who knit out of financial necessity, contemporary knitting is often figured as a frivolous, domestic leisure activity that requires both time and money. Because knitting is often thought of in these gendered, raced, and classed ways, it follows that those who do not fit within the image of the idealized knitter (white, female, and middle-class) may not knit or may not seek to join a community of knitters. Issues of internet access also inevitably intersect with Ravelry’s demographics: knitters who cannot reliably or regularly access the internet obviously have a much lower likelihood of joining the site.28 Whatever the reason, it’s important to recognize that Ravelry may in fact be an exclusionary community in some ways. However, the vast majority of Ravelers I surveyed or interviewed described the community as “friendly,” “kind,” and “welcoming.” In fact, many

28 As late as 2013, a Pew Internet and American Life study found that 15% of American adults do not use the internet at all. These non-internet users cited lack of interest, lack of technical knowledge, and the expense of owning internet technologies. Importantly, 77% of these non-internet users also expressed a lack of physical availability or access to the internet (“Who’s Not Online and Why”). Additionally, it is probable that the number of non-internet users is much higher worldwide. 72 participants explained that value Ravelry most for its social interactions: 86% of those surveyed said that they use the site to talk to other knitters. These users said that Ravelry offers them “some sense of belonging to a community,” and opportunities “to connect with others.” Overall, participants offered a great deal of praise for Ravelry, calling it a “wonderful site,” a “very effective and efficient space,” and “a well-designed, intuitive site [that is] easy and enjoyable to use.” Indeed, when I asked survey participants about their least favorite part of Ravelry, 15 of the 49 participants who responded said that there was either nothing difficult about the site at all, or that Ravelry is “so exciting you forget to knit.” Even mainstream media outlets like Slate and the New York Observer have noted Ravelry’s remarkable ability to attract near-obsessive devotion from its users. Farhad Manjoo at Slate suggests that what makes Ravelry work so well is that, in addition to being a place to catch up with friends, it is also a boon to its users' favorite hobby—it helps people catalog their yarn, their favorite patterns, and the stuff they've made or plan on making. In other words, there is something to do there. (2011, n.p.) Communication scholar Maria Hellstrom agrees, writing that although “Ravelry’s social network requires a lot of labour, […] this is to a great extent work knitters themselves have determined to be important and meaningful” (2013, p. 7). Users are, in fact, doing a lot on Ravelry: together, they’ve knit up over five billion kilometers of yarn, adding 7,000 new projects every day (“4 million!,” 2014). Almost 90% of users who responded to my survey say they visit the site daily—even though just 69% said they knit daily. Clearly, Ravelry is doing more than just helping users knit. How, then, does Ravelry enable such robustly multimodal and collaborative composing? Like any online community, Ravelry is made of users, their rhetorical interactions, and of course, the materiality of the site itself. On Ravelry, though, all these features are highly visible and highly valued by both users and site founders Casey and Jessica Forbes. Thus, my analysis focuses on three main locations: Ravelry’s interface, its community, and its texts.

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An Invitation to Compose: Ravelry’s Interface Ravelry draws together its enthusiastic user base through the shared history and practices of knitting at the same time that it reimagines and reworks these traditions. As a website, Ravelry inevitably is bound by the unique constraints and affordances of internet technologies. Most user interaction, for example, is located within the virtual space of Ravelry’s interface. Customers cannot touch yarn for sale. Instead, they have to rely on the details provided and mediated by Ravelry’s interface. As I discuss in Chapter 1, interfaces—designed by people and constrained by technological capabilities—can exercise power because they necessarily delimit the ways in which users interact with the site (Arola, 2010; McDonough 1999; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). In order to understand how Ravelry functions as a digital community, then, it necessary to analyze its interface as a political construct. What possibilities does Ravelry’s interface offer users, and what possibilities does it preclude? Ravelry is a highly interactive site that expects its users to contribute. While it is certainly possible for Ravelers to use the site only to locate and access information, Ravelry does not permit anonymity. To access any of the site’s features, a user must first register, providing an email address and a username. Ravelry, then, demands that users create some sort of identity for themselves before they even get access to the site. Once a user has registered, they are then encouraged to create and share their own work right away. For example, the “Welcome to Ravelry! Video Tour”—presumably for new users— begins by showing users how to create on Ravelry. Before showing users how to browse data on patterns and yarns, it first explains how to create a profile and how to update the project notebook (the space for each user to upload and share their knitted projects). This video, meant to introduce users to Ravelry and its features, privileges production (of projects) over consumption (of information on patterns, yarns, and stores) in Ravelers’ use of the site. This dynamic is only reinforced by the design of the site itself. The first tab at the top of the page is “my notebook,” which contains all of a users’ work on Ravelry, including the project notebook, a queue (of projects to knit), a list of favorites (designers, yarns, patterns), blog posts, and more (Figure 6). In other words, Ravelry’s interface

74 encourages users to see themselves first and foremost as active contributors to the community, not passive consumers.

Figures 6 (L) and 7 (R): Ravelry user notebook (L) and project page (R). Both from ravelry.com These contributions, like any activity on Ravelry, are still mediated by the site’s interface. Ravelry relies heavily on fill-in-the-blank style templates for user productions within the site (Figure 7). Although these templates can problematically constrain user activity (Arola, 2010), the Ravelry users that participated in my study spoke highly of Ravelry’s interface. All three of the women I interviewed praised it. Audrey called the site “very accessible,” and Helen described the interface as “extremely well thought-out and extremely well designed.” Lynn, who says she’s “not the most techno-savvy,” believes Ravelry was intentionally designed to be easy to use: “I think whatever [Ravelry co-founder] Casey has done, he's done an amazing job. [...] I mean, he's really set it up for non-technical people. And I think we go on there not because we're techno but because we're trying to find patterns.” In a podcast interview, Ravelry co- founder Jessica Forbes confirmed Lynn’s suspicion that the site was designed for “non-technical people,” explaining that she and her husband always make design decisions with special concern for ease and intuitiveness: “We want it to be really accessible for people to come on and know what it is, like ‘oh, okay this is where you add your projects, or this is where you can talk to people about this subject.’ So we do want to make it as simple and concise as possible” (Wade, 2011).

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While Ravelry’s templates are easy to use and create uniformity among entries (project pages are relatively consistent, for example), making them easily searchable, there are significant limitations to this kind of interface. Kristin Arola has critiqued Web 2.0’s over- reliance on templates, which, she argues, “render[s] form standardized and invisible” (2010, p. 4). Such an interface does not offer users much control over design, producing a false division between content and form. Users are also left with “little control over a large part of [their] representation,” obscuring “the ways in which design functions to make meaning and produce selves” (Arola, 2010, p. 7). Ravelry, in some respects, falls victim to this content-form split. User profiles (Figure 8) are quite limited, including only basic information such as first name, location, and profile pictures (alongside more irreverent questions like “fave curse word”). However, Ravelry users have many other locations in which they can craft their identities, all of which are linked out from the profile page. These locations emphasize users’ relationships and positions within the community. Site activity like group affiliations, forum posts, and friendships with other users can all work to craft (relational) identities on Ravelry.

Figur e 8: Ravelry user profile; from ravelry.com

Perhaps the location that is most significant for the composing of Ravelers’ identities is the project page, where users display their knitted work, both completed and in-progress (Figure 9). In many ways, the project page digitizes and publicizes the traditional genre of a knitting journal. Ravelers can include notes on the project, which can vary from tracking progress, reasons for knitting the projects, and any modifications made to the pattern, as well as photos of 76 the project (either finished or in-progress). While Lynn said in her interview with me that she often keeps notes on projects to remind herself of “the reason why I made it at the time,” calling her notes “more of an internal dialogue,” Audrey saw the project page as one of the primary locations from which she crafts her identity on Ravelry. “When it comes to who I am on Ravelry,” she told me, “I can make this mythical cohesive identity [through my projects…] And I think it also kind of like shows my evolution in knitting.” In other words, Audrey’s knitting— and her online representation of this offline work—contributes to her status in the community. What’s more, the project page allows users to link their projects through Ravelry’s database to specify what pattern and yarn they used, and even link to the store at which the yarn was purchased. Although the interfaces that govern user-created content like the project page are fairly limited—thus perhaps falling victim to Arola’s critique of Web 2.0 templates—it does emphasize Ravelry’s self-consciously collaborative approach to knowledge-making and, on a practical level, makes organizing the vast quantities of information on Ravlery much easier.

Figure 9: Ravelry user project page; from ravelry.com Indeed, participants cited Ravelry’s cross-listed databases of yarns, patterns, tools, vendors, and projects as one of the most useful functions of the site. 98% of Ravelers who took my survey said that they use the site to locate patterns and/or yarn, and many spoke enthusiastically about this feature. When I asked survey participants to identify the most

77 valuable aspects of Ravelry, 34 out of 54 open responses specifically praised these databases. “Ravelry has some really great search features that also make it easier to find and compare specific kinds of patterns,” wrote one survey participant. Audrey, whom I interviewed, explained how Ravelry’s easily searchable databases changed how she finds patterns. “All this stuff [yarn, patterns, needles] is cross listed. So it's just like, ok I have this stuff, what can I make with it? Which before Ravelry, you could Google around for that, it's just so efficient and now you don't have to do that anymore.” Ravelry’s fill-in-the-blank style templates are what enable the cross-listed search functions that users value. A handful (9 of 49) of respondents did indicate that using Ravelry’s interface was one of the most difficult parts of the site, citing a “steep learning curve” for new users. Ravelry’s administrators and designers, however, seem to have anticipated these difficulties and have worked to create a culture of technical support and education. Ravelry’s home page has a “Help help! Where am I?” box featured on the right side of the page, with links to video tutorials, a community-edited wiki, the “help!” forum (whose motto is “there are NO stupid questions here!”), help chat, and direct messages to site administrators. What’s more, the staff-authored blog that appears on Ravelry’s front page publishes a post every Thursday dedicated to explaining specific Ravelry features. Most help resources make a clear effort to use non- specialized, accessible language, and although this choice may potentially reinforce the narrative that women are less skilled at using technology, I suggest it only further positions Ravelry as a welcoming and supportive community.29 Ravelry’s choice to foreground technical support in this way not only familiarizes new and seasoned users with the site’s interface, it also works to normalize the process of seeking out and receiving help. The language that frames Ravelry’s help resources minimizes any embarrassment any “non-technical” users might feel, and establishes an ethic of reciprocity and education that permeates other aspects of the community.

29 Those users who do want to know more about the technical details behind Ravelry’s development and operation can read “Code Monkey” Casey Forbes’ blog, which details the more technical aspects of Ravelry. Additionally, the 27 groups listed under the “technology” category also indicate that Ravelry complicates simple narratives of gendered technology use. 78

Friends and Experts Alike: Ravelry’s Community While Ravelry’s interface certainly works to govern its rhetorical and epistemological capacities, its users—and their interactions, both online and off—are essential to Ravelry’s functionality. Because users generate so much of the site’s content, it is safe to say that without Ravelers, there would be no Ravelry. Participants confirmed this, making it clear that they value Ravelry’s community so much because they see each other as knowledgeable experts. “I love the fact that if I have a question about a pattern, tool, technique, or yarn, I can ask. Someone will have an answer,” wrote one survey respondent. Another described the site as a “crowd- sourced education.” This is perhaps unsurprising, given knitting’s history as a heritage literacy (Rumsey, 2009), a skilled practice handed down over time, often in domestic settings or in gendered communities rather than through formal instruction. Many of the users I surveyed are in fact experienced knitters: 50% said that they had been knitting for twenty years or more, and more than 90% of participants have been knitting for more than five years. As Bratich writes, the social networking of digital online media thus has a predecessor in the tactile media of craftwork. The familiar claim about the radical potential of the digital web— interconnection, collaboration, producing and reproducing relationships— has a long history in other kinds of networking. (2010, p. 307 n. 4) No doubt, then, that many users brought their offline experiences with knitting communities to Ravelry. Ravelers thus enact the heritage literacy of knitting within their digital community, sharing advice, expertise, and techniques. One survey participant explained how this dynamic improved her own knitting: hearing other knitter's feedback on different patterns and yarn makes it easier to make choices what I'm planning a project. Other knitters on Ravelry have turned me on to different techniques that have been hugely helpful and seeing how other knitters have altered patterns has inspired me to become a more confident and independent knitter. Audrey, one the Ravelers that I interviewed, noted how this model of information sharing works to equalize power relationships within the community: “the other thing that's really cool is just to have these designers that are considered experts, [and] you can see their process too […] the

79 power differential is gone because whatever anyone's put up there, everyone else can see.” Other participants said that they appreciated access to “real” knitters and their products, “seeing what stuff looks like after [being] finished by real people rather than the experts.” This appreciation of “non-expert” knowledge is in fact characteristic of crafting communities, explains David Gauntlett. “A significant part of the joy of craft, and online creativity, is of course that it does not rely on hierarchies of experts and elites to be validated, and does not depend on editors and gatekeepers for its circulation” (2011, p. 218; emphasis original). Ravelry extends this tradition, enabling users to access “expert” and “non-expert” knowledge alike, blurring the distinction between the two altogether. This mixture of expert and non-expert knowledge is indeed highly valued by the Ravelers I spoke to. Ravelers who responded to my survey indicated that they see the site as an important educational resource: 74% indicated that they use Ravelry to learn more about knitting. “I am most likely a much better knitter because of Ravelry--it's a valuable resource for improving my skills,” wrote one survey participant. Other participants echoed this, writing that Ravelry helps them to “[learn] new knitting techniques,” and offers “immediate help with any pattern or technique problems.” They value Ravelry’s ability to keep them up-to-date on the most recent trends: “I use Ravelry as this resource to kind of see what's hip and new and watch what other people are doing,” said Audrey. The other women I interviewed indicated that Ravelry’s vast amount of information helps them expand their knitting practices. “I tend to collect more patterns and maybe get exposed to more,” Helen explained. Group challenges, often called knit- a-longs, also help educate and encourage knitters of all skill levels. One Raveler explained, “I love KALs [knit-a-longs] because it helps me complete projects. If I wasn't following along, I would not finish many things.” Another user said that these kind of groups “give me a set start and end for a project, to challenge myself.” Lynn, one of the Ravelers I interviewed, even cited Ravelry’s global user base as one of the reasons why she “experiment[s] a lot more with stuff.” She told me that seeing patterns and techniques from all over the world has made her a more “international knitter.” On Ravelry, then, the community’s expertise helps push users to learn, and knit, more.

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Many participants also noted that they get more than just knitting-related support on Ravelry. Some even find emotional support in the community, describing Ravelers as “empathetic.” One interview participant, Helen, joined a cancer support group on Ravelry while both her parents were battling cancer. Lynn, another interview participant, told me how often she turns to Ravelry for emotional support: if it hadn't been for Ravelry […] it’s helped me through a divorce, you know, just having support. It helped me through the death of my mom [and] moving [...] It's like a female support group. I see it a lot of times like an old-fashioned quilting bee, where you go out and you know you all get together and chatter and talk. [...] And I find that very supportive that way. Notably, five separate survey participants described Ravelry as a “safe” space in an open response. One of these participants attributed this sense of safety to the lack of men on Ravelry. She wrote that she “feel[s] more free to speak there [Ravelry] than many other places […] The lack of ‘mansplaining’ is wonderful for a change!” For at least two participants, then, the perceived (and actual) lack of men in the community creates a sense of safety and support. It is perhaps because Ravelers find so much support (knitting-related or otherwise) in the community that many participants also spoke of a strong emphasis on reciprocity. Although participants appreciate having access to others’ expertise, they also like that Ravelry values their own knowledge, knitting-related or otherwise. Audrey explains that when she decided to start sharing her projects on Ravelry, it “was a way for me to kind of give back to the people who I was asking questions of or looking at their projects.” At least ten different survey participants wrote that one of the most valuable aspects of the site was the ability to learn from others and to share their own knowledge. Participants cited “the opportunity to get (or give help),” the ability “to learn and to share my own expertise,” and the chance “to share technical advice (knitting), patterns, ideas and to also gain some knowledge” as some of their favorite things about Ravelry. According to these users, then, Ravelry’s community fosters an ethic of reciprocity, and participants enjoy taking part in the creation and sharing of knowledge within the community. The kind of collaboration that participants described is very much like what Lunsford and Ede (1990) describe as “dialogic.” In contrast to the more authoritative, masculine form of

81 collaboration they term “hierarchical” (the kind of collaboration that I argued in Chapter 2 is taking place on Wikipedia), dialogic collaboration “is loosely structured, and the roles enacted within it are fluid; one ‘person’ may occupy multiple and shifting roles […] Those who participate in dialogic collaboration generally value the creative tension inherent in multivoiced and multivalent ventures” (p. 275). While hierarchical collaboration views differences as “problems to be solved” (p. 275), dialogic collaboration values difference as “a strength to be capitalized on and emphasized” (p. 276). Lunsford and Ede argue that dialogic collaboration is not only “predominantly feminine,” it is also “potentially, at least, deeply subversive” (p. 276). Dialogic collaboration, as modeled by Ravelry, functions on an epistemology that values multiplicity and difference. To see how this dynamic plays out in more detail, I now turn my attention to the ways in which this epistemology of heterogeneity influences how users compose on Ravelry.

Making a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology: Ravelry’s Textuality Ravelry’s community and its interface work together to create a space that invites and encourages users to participate in the creation of texts. The composing process displayed on Ravelry is a self-consciously social and collaborative one, resulting in texts (produced both online and off) that privilege a relational epistemology of local communities, embodied knowledge, and multimodality. Many Ravelers reported using the site to connect with local groups and experiences, either by strengthening existing local ties or fostering new ones. In part, this is because Ravelry’s features make it easy: clicking on the groups tab, for example, will bring up “browse groups by location” as the first search parameter. Group forums are in fact one of the primary means by which users connect to local communities. Audrey called the forums “very place-based besides being online,” explaining that “when [she] moved […she] tried to join all the local groups [she] could find.” Others use forums for “sharing local information,” or to organize local meet-ups. Lynn even told me that she uses group forums to locate other Ravelers when she travels. “I've contacted groups that I'm going to be in the area [...] I did that when we went to England, that was really cool. [...] I went to a group there, it was wonderful.” Together, Ravelry’s interface

82 and community emphasize the importance of establishing local relationships both online and off. Another way Ravelry connects users to local communities is by offering brick-and-mortar local yarn stores the ability to create a page on Ravelry. These pages show information about the store, its staff, its yarn, and its patrons. Ravelry co-founder Jessica Forbes says that she and her staff try to make these local yarn stores visible on Ravelry because they are key to sustaining any knitting community. “We do try to think about our local stores as much as we can. It’s so important that they’re around, and healthy and happy,” she explained on the FiberBeat podcast (Wade, 2011). Ravelry even enables users to link back to the local yarn store from which they bought the materials used for a specific project (Figure 10). Audrey told me that she uses this feature often because “part of my Ravelry persona is showing that I support local yarn shops, and when we travel I try to buy yarn for specific projects and then tag the store when I make it.” Audrey, then, is making a rhetorical choice—one enabled by Ravelry’s interface—to demonstrate support for local communities and economies. Rather than existing in a separate, isolated online space, Ravelry is uniquely enmeshed in users’ local, lived experiences.

Figure 10: Ravelry user project page indicating the origins of materials; from ravelry.com 83

On Ravelry, online activity and “real life” experiences are not mutually exclusive: they complement and enrich one another. Whether in local group forums, local yarn shop pages, on through the users’ offline work knitting, “reminders of the offline, material world are always present on Ravelry” (Hellstrom, 2013, p. 19). This is apparent especially on the project page, where users can post photos and write about their completed and in-progress knitting projects. Hellstrom argues that a Raveler’s offline work (or, more precisely, the digital representation of that offline work) helps to strengthen digital ties: “Ravelers have found a way of translating manual labour offline into an affective reality within their online social space, and through this translation they reap positive benefits in the form of community-building and social capital” (2013, p. 55). In other words, while Ravelry’s interface enables users to represent or even create local, material relationships and texts, the community itself helps to reinforce the sense that online and offline worlds are intertwined. Representations of physical knitted labor also work to foreground the body: after all, a hand-knit sweater requires a pair of hands. Because, as Gauntlett argues, hand-crafted objects remind us “that we make our own experiences, as well as [shape] our material surroundings” (2011, p. 59), hand-knit goods—and their imperfections—always call back to the body that made them. Photographs of knitted goods abound on Ravelry: on the front page blog, when searching for patterns, or in the forums. Even though the body is implicitly present in all these images, photographs of actual bodies are also visible all over Ravelry, from users’ avatars, to project photos where users model their finished products. Photos of bodies wearing completed projects are especially valued by the community, because it helps users imagine a how a pattern might fit on their own bodies. Audrey explained that she likes to look at people's different versions of [a project] to see what actual knitters who aren't the designers who style like the photos, like what their actual projects actually look like, what it looks like on a body. Like my dream is to find a knitter who's better than me and has the same measurements as me and I can just knit everything they do after them. Helen also appreciates when users model the projects they have completed because it helps her judge sizing:

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For example, with mittens, I have very small hands. If somebody says that they knit the size small and I see that it looks kind of gigantic on theirs I'll know it's not a pattern for me. My husband, on the other hand, has pretty large hands so if somebody knits a large size glove, and they look tight, then I know I'll either have to find another pattern or do the math and size it up. Ravelry’s community privileges digital texts that foreground, not obscure, bodies. Photographs are therefore highly valued by Ravelers: they provide an indication of what a finished knit objects looks like, and how it functions in actual use, on actual bodies. All three interview participants agreed that photographs play a crucial role in their Ravelry usage. Photographs are “really important” for Audrey, and Lynn insisted that she “will not knit a pattern that doesn't have a picture on it.” Helen said that she’s searching for patterns, she “go[es] a lot by the visuals. The pictures are probably the most important thing, and if [she] like[s] the way a finished object looks, then [she’ll] consider it.” Importantly, both Ravelry’s community and its interface work together to encourage a rich visual representation of any particular pattern. Because users can link an individual project to its pattern (as archived in Ravelry’s pattern database), users can see multiple versions of the same pattern knit by different users. Some patterns have hundreds of versions, knit by different individuals using different yarns, colors, techniques, and sizing. These photographs, and their important role on Ravelry, illustrate how the site works to create a robust understanding of multimodality that includes both digital texts (images, alphabetic texts, videos, etc.) as well as tangible material objects like knitting tools and products (needles, yarn, a completed hat, etc.). While the digital and material are always intertwined, Ravelry is notable because it makes this relationship so visible. Obviously, this affordance likely has much to do with the materiality of the knitted object itself: regardless of its source, knitters often value an object’s visual appearance (and all that it connotes such as personal style or functionality) when choosing a new project. Ravelry’s multimodality also likely has its roots in the older knitting media (pattern books, knitting journals) that preceded it. Building from and remediating these genres so directly ensures Ravelry’s multimodality values both the digital and

85 the material. This robust approach to multimodality allows Ravelers to knit their way into a larger textual and social network, one individual object at a time. Because Ravelry’s multimodal interface recognizes how online and offline life constitute one another, users make and share texts that foreground personal, experiential knowledge. For example, of the twenty most recent topics in the group Knitting Through Grad School (a group to which I belong), only two deal, in some way, with knitting. Instead, most posts seek advice and support for navigating academia. Personal knowledge permeates even those spaces meant to focus on knitting skills, techniques, and products. Users’ projects routinely describe not just technical details (such as yarn or any modifications) but the experience of making or using the product. One of Lynn’s projects, “Tiger hat for Josh” (Figure 11) lists all the details of its construction: the yarn, the needles, a link to the original pattern. But the project notes tell the story of Josh receiving the hat as a birthday gift, and Lynn chooses to include not just photos of the finished hat and its construction, but of Josh as well. Notably, Josh is not even wearing his hat in these photos—they are seemingly included as a reminder of Josh himself. In this way, Lynn’s project privileges her personal experience and relationship to Josh as much as the technical knowledge of knitting construction.

Figure 11: Lynn’s “Tiger hat for Josh” project page; from ravelry.com

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Figure 12: User projects for “Tiger hat,” from ravelry.com Lynn’s approach to this project is not at all unusual: clicking through others’ “Tiger Hat” projects reveals the same mixture of technical and personal knowledge (Figure 12). Users wrote about the intended recipient, included photos of the hat in progress and in use, and told their stories of knitting the hat. Ravelers thus understand experiential knowledge and technical knowledge—generated and shared multimodally—as equally valuable, if not inseparable. But the affordances of the project page, namely the ability to link to and reference others’ projects, also reveal an epistemology grounded in relationality and intertextuality. Several survey participants spoke of how important it was to see others’ projects before starting their own. “I spend a lot of time looking at other knitter/crocheter's FOs [finished objects],” wrote one user. Another Raveler explained that she appreciates “seeing how other knitters complete a pattern to help me plan my own project.” In other words, users look back and build upon others’ projects so that that may complete their own. Ravelers also indicated that they anticipate this kind of

87 exchange when they compose project pages. Helen explained that she posts finished projects “especially if it's a piece that I've made a lot of modifications on or if I've found errors that I can correct, I know that other people's projects have helped me so I wanna help [other people].” In fact, 76% of the Ravelers I surveyed said that they “always” or “usually” share their projects on Ravelry, and many of them do so explicitly anticipating how their work can help other users. 57% of those whose said they post their projects do so in order to “to share any pattern alterations or changes with the Ravelry community,” while 46% said that they share their work “to show other users what a pattern looks like in a different yarn.” Ravelry thus encourages not just the consumption but the creation of multimodal texts, both digital and material. These texts recognize their own histories and futures, acknowledging their role in a larger network. In this way, Ravelry’s unique multimodality encourages and expects the future (re)composings of different rhetors. Sheridan et al. (2012) call this approach to textuality rhetorical velocity, in which the rhetor “see[s] audience not merely as recipients of rhetorical compositions, but as potential recomposers and redistributors of texts” (p. 78). Composing with rhetorical velocity means being aware of the discursive and material networks that undergird any rhetorical act, enabling potential circulation and reuse. By imagining how their work will be read and reused, Ravelers demonstrate a sophisticated sense of audience— one that figures them as rhetors in their own right—when sharing their work. By rooting itself in a crafting tradition that is attentive to “the object in use, in circulation” (Prins, 2012, p. 154), Ravelry’s interface and its community work together to enable this kind of exchange. Multimodal texts, particularly those that are online, necessitate a rhetorical theory that acknowledges the importance of circulation (Sheridan et al., 2012). Considering the life of a text after its completion impacts rhetorical choices throughout the composing process, as “processes of circulation inform both the material and symbolic considerations of composing. The moment of circulation inhabits the moment of composition” (Sheridan et al., 2012, p. 63-4; emphasis original). But, as I argue in Chapters 1 and 4, accounting for circulation means acknowledging the complicated and varied material and discursive networks that sustain rhetorical action. Rhetorical agency, therefore, “is not contained within a single unified human subject, but is the function of our relational position within a multifactorial matrix” (Sheridan et

88 al., 2012, p. 103). Such an argument may appear to undermine the ability of any one rhetor to act, but Rhodes (2005) suggests that rhetors in fact find (provisional and partial) agency in the process of navigating these networks: “it is through using the network that one finds the temporary stability necessary for textual action” (p. 90). In other words, rhetorical agency is located in the process of recognizing and negotiating the various networks that enable rhetorical action. This appears to be the kind of rhetorical agency at work on Ravelry. On Ravelry, knitters find a space to enter and create textual networks located both in “real life” and online. Although the internet is embedded in (and often constitutes) networks of power that can exclude and silence women, Ravelry provides a stable location from which rhetors can act. Ravelry is especially notable because the networked rhetorical agency it offers is grounded in a feminist epistemology that values personal experience, local communities, and multiplicity.

Weaving a Multimodal Web: Ravelry and Feminist Epistemologies Online Through its interface design as well as through its collaborative, knowledgeable community, Ravelry allows users to create and share multimodal texts that value local experiences and embodied practices, privileging a feminist epistemology. This epistemology recognizes that knowledge is made not just through the body but through social and textual relationships. Ravelry’s understanding of the processes of knowledge-making thus asks us to reconsider rhetorical agency as multifaceted, located in networks of discursive and material affinities rather than within an isolated rhetor. It also suggests the ways in which a multimodal feminist community can work to support feminist activism. While Ravelry was not created for the express purpose of enabling feminist rhetorical action, there are indeed a good number of activist groups—groups organized around explicit political motives—active on Ravelry. For example, there are more than 100 groups that categorize themselves as “charity crafting” groups. These activist groups, as I see them, fall into one of two categories: the first relies on a shared tradition of knitting as a means of activist organization, while the second employs hand- knit goods for political action. The fact that so many of these groups have grown and prospered on Ravelry suggests that the community’s epistemology is one that fosters feminist activism.

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The first kind of activist group on Ravelry relies on knitting’s history of physically bringing knitters together via the knitting circle. For these groups, knitting is used as a point of commonality to come together and discuss personal/political affiliations and ideologies. These groups rarely have a concrete activist goal in mind; rather, they serve as a meeting place for politically-minded knitters to connect and forge alliances. One example is the group This is What a Feminist Knits Like, a group of 4201 members (including myself). This group describes itself as a “place to stitch and bitch about women’s rights,” and discussions here range from general knitting chat and lighthearted gifs to more intensive debate about feminist issues like women in STEM fields, disability, and sexuality (“Ravelry: This is What a Feminist Knits Like,” 2014). In this space, users feel safe to talk with other feminist knitters, creating productive coalitions in the process. Another group that falls into this category is Queer Revelry, a group of more than 4600 members for “everyone who supports the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and those who are questioning” (“Ravelry: Queer Reverly,” 2014). The discussion boards do have threads on knitting-related issues, like “fav rainbow yarn?” and “butch/not-femme designs,” but most threads don’t discuss knitting at all. Instead, this group favors a mixture of political/personal discussions, such as recent court decisions on gay marriage, dating and family issues, and local queer communities. While groups like This is What a Feminist Knits Like and Queer Revelry may not be organized around one specific political goal, their presence on Ravelry allows like-minded users to connect their political commitments with their knitting, and to organize for potential future action (on Ravelry or elsewhere) Another kind of activist group on Ravelry are those that knit projects for a clear activist goal. In this case, both the process of knitting as well as finished knit items become political action meant to achieve a concrete result. For example, the group 600 Monsters Strong was started in response to the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Its 1773 members aim to knit “monster-friends for children affected by gun violence and other traumatic situations” (“Ravely: 600 Monsters Strong,” 2014). This group’s discussion board is populated by threads that discuss the technical aspects of creating such “monsters,” focusing on pattern selections and fashioning child-safe eyes. In many threads, users also share their finished

90 monsters, sometimes even describing the varied situations of the children that will receive these gifts. Other threads focus on the organization itself, asking how many monsters have been made total, and for any news about distribution. While the group is no longer soliciting donations (due to an overwhelming number of contributions), its existence demonstrates how skilled organizers took advantage of Ravelry’s interface to respond to a kairotic moment. The 44-member Wool Against Weapons also falls into this knitting-as-political-action category. The group explains its purpose is to complete “a 7 mile long pink peace scarf” to protest the UK’s nuclear weapon program (“Ravelry: Wool Against Weapons,” 2014). Like 600 Monsters Strong, the Wool Against Weapons discussion board focuses on both technical questions concerning the construction of the scarf, as well as conversations about organizing the project and recruiting new members. In these cases, knitting is no longer trivial or kitschy: the act and the products of knitting serve as a material tool meant to protest gun violence and war technology. These knitters (largely women) choose to use their expertise to engage in political action, changing the connotations of knitting in the process. While these groups certainly do not represent the vast majority of rhetorical interactions on Ravelry, they do illustrate how a multimodal internet space that foregrounds users’ bodies, their relationships, and their (on- and offline) rhetorical practices can facilitate feminist action. Indeed, Ravelry may offer some valuable insights that technofeminist reachers, researchers, and activists might apply to other spaces. First, Ravelry’s interface suggests that designers might consider how to make the networked nature of textuality and knowledge-making more apparent. Although there are no doubt downsides to Ravelry’s fill-in-the-blank style templates (Arola, 2010), allowing users to connect not just to other digital texts but to material locations (other users, yarn stores, knitting groups, knitting tools) helps support an epistemology of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1991). Through this interface, Ravelry users are able to articulate their standpoints, sustain existing local relationships, and forge new meanings altogether. Additionally, Ravelry calls attention to the importance of dialogic—rather than hierarchical—collaboration online. Whereas a community like Wikipedia values consensus, Ravelry demonstrates the value of multivocality and difference. Patterns, for example, are not accompanied by one “official” finished product; instead, users can share their own individual

91 versions side-by-side. In this way, Ravelry privileges competing, overlapping, and sometimes incomplete knowledge claims. Online spaces that attempt to erase difference in favor of consensus inevitably end up silencing at least some users. Ravelry’s approach to collaboration offers a model that supports and perhaps even generates feminist epistemologies. Finally, Ravelry’s multimodality asks us to consider the ways in which multimodal texts may help create and circulate feminist epistemologies, redefining rhetorical practice itself. Feminist standpoint theory asks us to recognize that all knowledge is embodied, and multimodal texts like those on Ravelry can call attention to the subjective, situated nature of knowledge. Because Ravelry members are organized around the production of tactile objects, the texts they produce almost always call back to the bodies that made, wear, or use completed knitted objects. Through emphasizing the craft of composing—online and off—Ravelry thus illustrates “the complex of relationships between a maker’s identity, her interactions with others, and the things she makes” (Prins, 2012, p. 145). Multimodal texts that draw attention to the body, then, may be particularly valuable to feminists who wish to highlight the subjective, experiential nature of knowledge production. Ravelry’s textuality calls to mind the double meaning of digital, both in the sense of computerization but also the fingers and hands that engage in knitting, and therefore demonstrates how writing technologies are not stand-alone tools but rather exist in larger webs of literate traditions and material contexts. By making these relationships visible, Ravelry challenges researchers and teachers alike to reconsider what exactly counts as “writing technology.” The multimodal texts produced on and around Ravelry help illuminate the ways in which rhetorical praxis relies on, as Shipka (2011) argues, “complex and highly distributed processes” (p.13). If, as Fleckenstein (2004) argues, meaning “consists of a web, an ecology of symbol systems feeding into and evolving out of one another” (p. 616), then online spaces that don’t acknowledge or support the interaction between alphabetic texts, images, sound, and bodies fail to acknowledge all rhetorical—and political—possibilities. Ravelry’s multimodality is significant for its ability to facilitate a feminist epistemology of collaboration, relationality, and embodiment. Ravelry’s direct link to women’s historical and contemporary material practices likely makes this epistemology more apparent: as a

92 community, Ravelry not only values “women’s work,” but creates a multimodal network (on- and offline) that emphasizes relationships, bodies, and experiences. While it is no feminist utopia—what is lost, for example, when spaces such as these are overwhelmingly populated by privileged, Western white women?—feminist scholars, activists, and designers might still look to Ravelry as an example of an internet space that supports the kind of rhetorical work they hope to do. By creating robust, multimodal online communities that value, not erase, difference and embodiment, we can build a more inclusive web.

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Chapter 4 Feminist Frequency and Networks of Identity, Circulation, and Resistance

In late January 2015, Anita Sarkeesian, founder and host of the web series Feminist Frequency, published a blog post containing every hostile, hateful, and violent Twitter message she received in one week’s time (Sarkessian, 2015). A sampling of those messages demonstrates just what kind of antagonism Sarkeesian faces every day online (warning: these messages are unedited and contain very strong and offensive gendered language):30

@Femfreq Shut the fuck up you fucking cunt and make me a sandwich

@Femfreq Eyo fucking slut. If you ever come to Europe I will rape you into oblivion

@Femfreq uh boohoo stop crying you selfish faking bitch and get over it who would rape you your fucking ugly you Arab bitch

@Femfreq You Stupid Ass Bitch I Will Fuck You In The Ass So Hard I Would Break The 9.5 Earthquake Record And Leave That Ass Jiggling ForDays

@Femfreq I WANT TO FUCKING STAB YOUR STUPID FUCKING UGLY SHAPED FACE YOU FEMINIST CUNT, KILL YOURSELF, NO ONE WILL CARE BITCH.

@Femfreq I wish I knew you should I could have sex with you and then run you over with my car

30 I will continue to quote such explicit tweets throughout this chapter. Like Emma A. Jane (2015), I believe that it is necessary to cite such “explicit vitriol” in order to avoid “positioning flaming as a mild and/or mostly benign practice” (p. 73). I have therefore quoted all data from Twitter and YouTube verbatim. 94

Over the week Sarkeesian documented, she eventually received more than 150 such messages. What could have triggered such an avalanche of gendered rage and violence? How does such vitriol affect the ability of women online to engage in feminist rhetorical action? And how might multimodal feminist epistemologies work to resist and subvert such pernicious attempts at silencing, excluding, and intimidating women? In the previous chapter, I worked to identify features of a multimodal feminist epistemology through the relatively self-contained and homogeneous community of Ravelry. In this chapter, I build on this work by identifying another example of a multimodal feminist epistemology in action: Feminist Frequency. However, Feminist Frequency is not centered around a single platform as Ravelry is. Sarkeesian relies on multiple spaces (YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter, for example) to host and circulate her videos, often bumping up against more dominant and sometimes antagonistic publics. As the Tweets above demonstrate, these spaces can invite as much resistance and hostility as productive dialogue surrounding contemporary feminism. Feminist Frequency is an excellent example of how rhetors must enact a networked rhetorical agency, making use of material and discursive networks to circulate and deliver their work to audiences. Yet, while Sarkeesian’s videos illustrate why theories of composing must account for circulation, they also point to a shortcoming in the burgeoning composition studies scholarship on circulation: the lack of attention to gendered power relations that permeate and sustain the material and discursive networks that enable circulation.31 While there has been a growing amount of excellent scholarship advocating for the importance of circulation in understanding composing (Gries, 2013; Porter, 2009; Sheridan et al., 2012), this work has largely neglected to consider what happens when rhetors face gendered resistance. This chapter then, will argue that Feminist Frequency enacts and extends the same kind of multimodal feminist epistemology exhibited on Ravelry. Sarkeesian grounds her arguments in her embodied experiences, making use of the multimodal affordances offered by online video technology. This approach is made successful by Sarkeesian’s reliance on a model of networked

31 Notable exceptions are Dingo (2012) and Queen (2008), who explicitly draw on transnational feminism to inform their readings of practices/theories of circulation. Despite this valuable scholarship, compositionists have also largely neglected to consider the ways in which race, nationality, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers intersect with circulation studies. 95 rhetorical agency, acknowledging and anticipating the many locations from which rhetorical actions emerge. The visibility of Feminist Frequency is due, in large part, to Sarkeesian’s skillful navigation of productive and circulatory networks, but the circulation, reception, and repurposing of these videos also demonstrates the gendered power structures that interlace all rhetorical action, online and off. Sarkeessian, as an individual rhetor, has faced not just resistance but outright hostility and even threats, but because she acknowledges and relies on a model of networked rhetorical agency, she is able to navigate the gendered structures that might otherwise silence or restrict a single rhetor. I begin by outlining a theoretical model of networked rhetorical agency, drawing both from the growing body of scholarship within composition studies as well as feminist theory to argue that rhetorical agency is not located within a single rhetor but generated through the interaction of diverse material and discursive networks, all of which are products and often producers of gendered power relationships. Then, I present the case of Anita Sarkeesian and her web video series, Feminist Frequency, which serves as a powerful example of how a networked rhetorical agency can support multimodal feminist epistemologies. However, the staggering amount of harassment Sarkeesian has received speaks to the difficulties feminists still face online. To study this dynamic in more detail, I turn to the platforms that have had the most visible role in delivering and circulating Feminist Frequency videos: Twitter and YouTube. Through close study of tweets, YouTube comments, and response videos, I argue that Sarkeesian’s multimodal feminist epistemology, which relies on a networked model of rhetorical agency, stands at odds with the epistemological assumptions of the gaming public, which has in turn responded with silencing and threatening tactics. I conclude this chapter by examining the implications of Feminist Frequency for composition teachers and scholars, underscoring the importance of a networked model of rhetorical agency to resist gendered harassment and make room for multimodal feminist epistemologies online.

Rhetorical Agency in the Network As I argued in Chapters 1 and 3, composition studies has devoted considerable attention to an expanded notion of agency, acknowledging that rhetorical agency exceeds the singular

96 human subject. Variously termed writing ecologies (Cooper, 1986; Edbauer, 2005; Rivers & Weber, 2011), object-oriented rhetorics (Reid, 2012), or new materialism (Gries, 2013; Micciche, 2014), such approaches “reshape materialist critiques in order to acknowledge and reckon with a much-expanded notion of agency, one that includes humans, nonhumans, and the environmental surround” (Micciche, 2014, p. 489). It is no coincidence, I suggest, that this reconfiguration of agency has erupted in the wake of compositionists’ increased attention to the role of writing technologies and materiality more generally. As scholars increasingly begin to examine how rhetorical and literate practices construct ways of knowing and being, writing studies must account for how materiality, not just discourse, generates knowledges and experiences. Acknowledging the role of materiality in epistemological processes may refute the idea that agency resides entirely within the unified human subject, but, importantly, it does not forfeit human agency altogether. Instead, as Sheridan et al. write, agency is “distributed across a fragile and complex dance among multiple and ontologically disparate actors” (2012, p. 107). Agency, in these conceptions, is distributed rather than localized, and it is therefore increasingly important to turn our attention to the many locations from which rhetorical agency springs. In a networked theory of rhetorical agency, then, rhetorical success is located in the rhetor’s ability to navigate the network. Sheridan et al. (2012) describe the work of the rhetor as “choreographer” (p. 107), and argue that rather than master, the human agent is instead “rhetor- as-point-of-articulation [who] experiences the radical simultaneity of myriad material, cultural, and semiotic factors that enable and constrain rhetorical action” (p. 99-100). Rejecting the idea that agency is wholly located within an individual human actor has significant implications for our methodologies, as we must begin to account for the vast, shifting networks that comprise rhetorical action. Feminist rhetoricians in particular have focused their methodological attentions on rhetorical agency as networked. Dingo (2012) argues that feminist rhetoricians should play closer attention to how arguments about women exist within larger and ever- changing networks in order to ensure that feminist research is attuned to the material circumstances of women’s lives. Hallenbeck (2012) makes a similar argument in her discussion of feminist historiographic methods. She wants to resist the field’s tendency to focus on narratives of a single courageous female rhetor, which tend “to place the woman rhetor against

97 her world rather than within it” (p. 12). Rather, she suggests feminist historiographers look to actor-network theory in order to locate studies of women rhetors within “the entire network in which [they] acted” (p. 21). One useful mechanism for untangling the complex nodes that form any rhetorical network is the concepts of publics. Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) is most often credited with introducing a theorized notion of “the public sphere,” which, for Habermas, is characterized by the free, open, and rational public discussion which is essential to civil societies (p. 27). While Habermas’ work is foundational to public sphere theory, it has been criticized for overlooking the material—often embodied—differences that may prevent equal participation in the public sphere. In particular, Nancy Fraser (1992) argues that Habermas’ model of the public sphere is ultimately exclusionary because it fails to account for the very real differences (marked or unmarked) of potential participants (p. 116). She writes: the bourgeious conception of the public sphere requires bracketing inequalities of status. The public sphere was to be an arena in which interlocutors would set aside such characteristics as differences in birth and fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers […] In fact, the social inequalities among the interlocutors were not eliminated but only bracketed (p. 118). In other words, according to Fraser, a public sphere that does not acknowledge the very real power differentials that exist among its members only serves to perpetuate inequalities. Michael Warner echoes this criticism in his 2002 book Publics and Counterpublics, arguing that Habermas’ public sphere only offers the illusion of parity. Warner instead draws on Fraser to put forward the notion of multiple publics and counterpublics. These are generative spaces created by “the concatentation of texts through time” (p. 90), and counterpublics in particular are identified by their “awareness of [their] subordinate status” in contrast to larger publics (p. 56). While publics and counterpublics are both produced and sustained through texts, according to Warner, counterpublics are notable because they rely on texts to construct new ways of being. “Dominant publics,” he writes, are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality

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or normalcy. Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely. (p. 122) Counterpublics, then, rely on the production and, more importantly, circulation of texts to articulate new epistemological and ontological possibilities. The oppositional and generative nature of counterpublics has lead many feminist scholars to consider both the history of and the possibilities for feminist counterpublics. Because counterpublics, like publics, originate through the circulation of texts, much of this work has centered on understanding how feminists have made use of various media in the past. Studies of feminist presses (Murray, 1998), grrrl ‘zines (Zobl, 2004), women’s community radio (Mitchell, 1998), and the manifestos of 1960’s radical feminists (Rhodes, 2005) have all catalogued the many ways in which feminist counterpublics are created and sustained through texts. The recognition of the role of texts—and the material structures of their production and circulation—has also called the singular rhetorical agent into question. In particular, Rhodes argues that the unique textuality of feminist counterpublics offers an alternative model for rhetorical agency, as radical feminist textuality “emphasizes the idea of a networked community” (p. 56) and calls attention to the “the shifting, temporary situation of the text” (p. 87). Agency is therefore reconfigured as “a literacy of networks, a rhetoric of collective identification” (p. 90). The feminist mandate for collective action and identification, in other words, reimagines the role of an individual rhetor into something resembling Sheridan et al.’s “choreographer.” For counterpublics that already operate from a less powerful subaltern position, agency arises as a particularly pressing concern as access to rhetorical and material resources may be limited. Although it may appear that a model of networked rhetorical agency further robs already-marginalized individuals of their ability to act, I argue that recognizing rhetorical agency as distributed instead offers more rhetorical resources for rhetors. For feminist counterpublics seeking to contest and correct power differentials, knowing the ways texts circulate through discursive and material networks is an effective way to legitimize feminist epistemologies and rhetorical practices. As Lisa McLaughlin (1995) argues, feminist counterpublics must be attuned to the ways in which textual circulation affords agency.

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Importantly, however, for the political promise of feminism to be realized, those texts must find a way to push up against more dominant publics: “counterpublics cannot afford to be enclaved against or outside of production public spheres, but instead, must challenge them” (p. 47). The task of the feminist rhetorician, therefore, is to navigate the networks that sustain feminist counterpublics and simultaneously challenge dominant publics. Although feminist counterpublics have successfully engaged with other media in order to achieve this task, the internet has ushered in an explosion of feminist texts. After all, the internet collapses the boundaries between textual production and circulation (Rhodes, 2005). The internet is networking made visible, and therefore serves as a valuable tool for feminist counterpublics to exercise networked rhetorical agency. But, as the tweets that opened this chapter demonstrate, individual feminist rhetors experience unprecedented (in number, if not in content) threats of physical and sexual violence, hostility, and overt attempts at silencing. Feminist Frequency serves as an example of how the internet can support a networked rhetorical agency that in turn can support a multimodal feminist epistemology. Unfortunately, however, it also demonstrates the very real barriers to the creation of feminist knowledge in public, digital spaces.

Love it or Hate it: Feminist Frequency and Gaming Criticism Founded in 2009, Feminist Frequency is a video webseries created and hosted by Anita Sarkeesian. While the videos themselves are hosted on YouTube, Feminist Frequency has also developed a wide web presence, with a Twitter account, Facebook page, Tumblr blog, and website. The series’ initial episodes explored sexist representations of women in a wide variety of popular media, tackling such topics as toy ads, the Twilight films, and the HBO series True Blood. As Feminist Frequency started to gain more visibility, Sarkeesian, with support from Bitch magazine, introduced her Tropes vs. Women series in 2011. These six videos, each averaging around seven minutes in length, explored specific gendered pop culture tropes such as “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and “The Straw Feminist,” offering examples of their manifestation in contemporary television, films, and video games. With this series, Sarkeesian began to attract even more attention from supporters and detractors alike.

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It wasn’t until Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter initiative in May 2012 to raise $6,000 for a new series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games that the full-scale influx of hateful invective—which continues to this day—began. In two weeks’ time, Sarkeesian eventually exceeded her fundraising goal, receiving more than $150,000 from 6,967 backers (Feminist Frequency, 2012). At the same time, however, Sarkeesian found herself the target of a massive online attack. “All of my social media sites were flooded with threats of rape, violence, sexual assault, death,” she explained in a 2012 TEDx talk. Sarkeesian also recognized these messages as specifically grounded in misogyny: “these threats and comments were all specially targeting my gender” (TEDx Talks, 2012, 2:39). Almost immediately, Sarkeesian began to share examples of the harassment she’d received, writing that she decided it was “ultimately important to shed light on this type of abuse because online harassment and bullying are at epidemic levels across the internet” (Sarkeesian, 2012). In addition to the barrage of hateful emails, tweets, and Facebook messages, Sarkeesian’s Wikipedia page was vandalized with pornography, her website was attacked and shut down, manipulated images of Sarkeesian circulated (Figure 13), and one man even created a game where users could virtually punch Sarkeesian, bloodying and bruising her face.

Figure 13: A sample of the harassing images sent to Sarkeesian; from http://feministfrequency.com/2012/07/01/image-based-harassment-and-visual-misogyny/

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The campaign against Sarkeesian grew even more ferocious when the “Gamergate” movement erupted in the late summer and early fall of 2014. Gamergate began with an allegation of unethical video game reporting: a female game designer was (falsely) accused by an ex of sleeping with a gaming journalist in exchange for publicity for her new game. These charges quickly morphed into an all-out attack on prominent female game developers and critics. Indie game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu both left their homes after their addresses were made public online (Dewey, 2014; McDonald, 2014). Another game designer, Mattie Brice, decided to leave the industry altogether in the wake of Gamergate (McDonald, 2014), and gaming journalist Jenn Frank also left her job as a result of the violent and hateful comments she received (Dewey, 2014). Sarkeesian too found herself a target of this onslaught. Like Quinn and Wu, she fled her home after her attackers shared her address online (Dewey, 2014), and, in October 2014, she was forced to cancel a scheduled lecture at Utah State University after receiving bomb and mass shooting threats (McDonald, 2014). Sexism in the gaming industry is, sadly, nothing new. Scholars have documented many specific and systemic instances of women being silenced, excluded, and threatened in physical and digital gaming communities (Consalvo, 2012; Fox & Tang, 2014; Heron, Belford, & Goker, 2014; Salter & Blodgett, 2012). While the reasons for the outright misogyny and more subtle sexism that plague the gaming world are numerous, I suggest that the backlash directed at Sarkeesian indicates a major epistemological struggle over the gendered identity of “gamer.” That is, as women and feminist gamers grow both in numbers and visibility within the larger gaming public, gamers are forced to grapple with the seemingly simple question: who is a gamer, and who has the authority to say so? Analyzing gamers as a public constituted both by the games they play as well as the large amount of gaming journalism, commentary, and criticism they consume, can help shed light on the backlash faced by Gamergate targets and specifically Anita Sarkeesian. Next, I turn to a discussion of how best to study the diverse and sprawling textual locations that comprise any public, including the gaming one.

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Methods: Making Sense of the Network Because I am working from a model that affords agency to a network of human and non- human actors, my analysis of Feminist Frequency will not focus exclusively or even primarily on the content of the videos themselves. Additionally, I will not incorporate person-based research into this study. While I whole-heartedly endorse such methods as means to localize claims about the production of gendered epistemologies in digital spaces, I intend this chapter to trace the larger networks that enable and constrain the creation and circulation of localized feminist knowledge and texts, including the publics and counterpublics in which they participate. Scholars are only just beginning to grapple with the difficulty of developing methods and methodologies to study texts in this way. Gries (2013) is among the first to undertake such work by identifying a method she calls “iconographic tracking.” While this method is intended to trace the movement and transformations of digital images online—rather than the more dynamic video texts that Feminist Frequency produces—Gries’ work is still helpful for those of us interested in “how rhetoric unfolds with time in a constellation of dynamic networks, where rhetorical situations are blurred, initial intensions are often left behind, and agency is distributed amongst humans, technologies, and our material worlds” (p. 346). Although Gries presents this method as a way to track images specifically—not multimodal texts more generally—I invoke this method because of its attention to the materiality of texts and their circulation. For this chapter, then, I will rely on a modified version of Gries’ iconographic tracking, which involves “data hoarding” and “data mining” (p. 339) but is more specifically attuned to the media I am studying and the contexts in which they exist. This study thus necessitated that I first identify what platforms host most of the arguments about Feminist Frequency before tracing the means by which they circulate. Studying the many overlapping networks that support or refuse multimodal feminist epistemologies is a daunting task indeed, even with the benefits of internet technologies archiving and linking many of the nodes of this network. Googling “Anita Sarkeesian,” for example, returns almost 600,000 results. For that reason, I have isolated most of my data from two particular internet platforms: YouTube and Twitter. This is where much of Sarkeesian’s work lives, so to speak: YouTube hosts her Feminist Frequency videos (her channel has 44

103 videos with more than 188,000 subscribers), and she regularly uses Twitter to promote her work with Feminist Frequency (as of March 2015, she’s sent out almost 5,000 tweets and has 269,000 followers). YouTube and Twitter are also home to much of the pushback Sarkeesian has faced, as many YouTubers have made videos in response to her work, and Twitter hosted the barrage of hateful messages that opened this chapter. The interfaces of both YouTube and Twitter invite users to see themselves as producers; the purpose of both spaces is in fact to support the delivery and circulation of user-created content. This emphasis on production perhaps indicates why so many people have felt compelled to respond to Sarkeesian in both positive and negative ways. What’s more, both Twitter and YouTube are inherently multimodal interfaces. Although much of Twitter’s content and linkages (hashtags) are text-based, the interface does allow users to post images and videos, and every tweet is accompanied by a user’s Twitter handle and profile image. YouTube, the internet’s biggest video hosting and sharing site, is also steeped in multimodality, due to the very essence of online videos, which often draw from a variety of semiotic resources including alphabetic texts, moving and/or still images, voiceover, music, and sound effects. Many videos are also accompanied by textual comments from other viewers. Using and studying YouTube and Twitter, then, demands an attention to multimodality. As a user of both YouTube and Twitter, I do possess a certain literacy in understanding the functionality of these spaces. Of course, my status as a user and a researcher also calls me to reflect on my own position and how I arrived at the decision to study Feminist Frequency. I have enjoyed watching Feminist Frequency videos for many years, and personally appreciate Sarkeesian’s efforts to make feminist thought accessible and relevant. I’ve even shared some of her shorter videos in my classes, as an example of close, critical reading of popular texts. I also “follow” Feminist Frequency on Twitter, and have occasionally retweeted Feminist Frequency messages and tweeted at her account with messages of support. Being able to keep up with Sarkeesian’s actions through Twitter has been a helpful research tool, as my Twitter feed alerts me each time she posts something new. I make no secret of the fact that I am a fan of Sarkeesian’s, and the appalling harassment she’s received, in part, led me to study Feminist Frequency. But I was also intrigued by the explosion of interest in Feminist Frequency over the

104 years, particularly in terms of how viewers —not just Sarkeesian— use particular spaces (YouTube and Twitter) to drive that interest.

Figure 14: YouTube-suggested “response videos”; from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjImnqH_KwM

The affordances of both these spaces also makes tracking the circulation and repurposing of Sarkeesian’s multimodal feminist epistemology possible. YouTube automatically lists suggested videos to the right of whichever video a user is watching, and often promotes “response videos” posted by other YouTubers (see Figure 14). While it’s difficult to say for sure who is watching Feminist Frequency videos and how particular audience members found their way there, Feminist Frequency’s 2014 annual report32 notes that its YouTube channel has been viewed over 5.7 million times (p. 4), with most views coming from audiences between the ages of 25 and 34 (41.5%) and 18 to 24 (36.3%) (p. 12).33 YouTube also allows viewers to comment

32 In May 2014, Feminist Frequency gained legal nonprofit status (Feminist Frequency, 2015a, p. 10). 33 YouTube does collect demographic data on viewers through Google Analytics, but this information is only accessible to YouTube content providers. The data cited here is as reported by Feminist Frequency, which either does not have or chose not to share a gender breakdown of its viewers. 105 on videos, a feature Sarkeesian initially embraced but eventually had to shut down due to the barrage of hateful and misogynist comments she received after launching her Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Because of Sarkeesian’s decision to close comments on her videos, the best way to track the circulation and reception of her videos within YouTube is by focusing on the many response videos that directly engage with and often remix Feminist Frequency texts. In this chapter, I will, at times, quote the content of these videos, as well as their comment sections, in order to characterize the strategies most often invoked in an attempt to silence Sarkeesian. Twitter’s interface also enabled me to easily search and gather responses to Sarkeesian and her work with Feminist Frequency. Its hashtags, for example, make searching and tracing conversations as simple as a literal click of a button. Additionally, the platform hosts an advanced search feature that allows users to narrow searches to a particular topic, user, hashtag, language, or range of dates. It was this advanced search feature that enabled me to narrow down the immense amount of data on Twitter and track how users circulated and responded to Feminist Frequency videos. Throughout this chapter, I will analyze sets of Twitter data from specific date ranges, all mentioning Feminist Frequency’s Twitter handle, @femfreq.34 I relied on a fairly simple coding scheme to organize this data: I sorted all tweets into three main categories: 1. Tweets simply promoting Feminist Frequency videos, sharing links without offering any opinion on their content (what Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas [2013] call “second-hand circulation”); 2. Tweets offering direct support and positive feedback on Feminist Frequency videos; and 3. Tweets engaging in non-generative criticism meant to silence or dismiss, such as name-calling, sexist commentary, or violent threats. Because Twitter is a multimodal interface that encourages the sharing of links, images, video, and other media, for those tweets linking to other sources, I took into account the content of any linked media to determine in which category a tweet belonged. It is also important to note that there are likely more tweets than the third category would reflect; Sarkeesian has spoken at length about the blatantly offensive and violent messages she receives every day and the constant and on-going

34 Although Twitter users hail from all over the world and speak a number of languages, I narrowed my search to tweets in English alone in order to code the data. 106 process of reporting these messages so that they will be removed (Ideas at the House, 2015a; Sarkeesian, 2015; TEDx Talks, 2012; XOXO Festival, 2014). In other words, many of the most malicious tweets have likely been removed before they were available to include in my data sets.

Networking Feminist Frequency’s Multimodal Epistemology Although Sarkeesian’s detractors might say otherwise, the goals of Feminist Frequency are fairly straightforward. Sarkeesian explains: I actually started Feminist Frequency in grad school because I was really frustrated with how alienating feminist theory was in academia. This idea of feminism is a liberating idea and should be available to all people […] And so I actually started Feminist Frequency heavily influenced by bell hooks, who talked about how pop culture is where the pedagogy is happening. And I was like I’m going to marry these two ideas and create an accessible free show […] that was able to talk to people about feminist theory with the texts that are in their lives, with the work that is influencing their values and their attitudes every single day. (Ideas at the House, 2015b, 41:55) With each episode of Feminist Frequency, Sarkeesian hopes to make feminist thought not just more accessible to a wide audience but more relevant. Although her tone has evolved from slightly snarky and sarcastic to more detached and formal, it’s clear that Sarkeesian hopes her videos will demonstrate the importance of feminism to viewers who may not have access to the privileged spaces of academia. Feminist Frequency videos accomplish this goal through a polished aesthetic and fairly straightforward language devoid of unexamined jargon. Each Feminist Frequency video has a fairly consistent visual scene (although the production value has certainly increased over time): Sarkeesian sits in front of a solid-color screen, accompanied by an image slide in the top left corner that changes as she address different topics (Figure 15). At times, the videos will cut away from Sarkeesian to feature a full- screen excerpt of whichever text she is currently analyzing. Aside from any actors in specific media clips, Sarkeesian is the only person seen or heard in each video. In many ways, the visual style of facing the viewer, framed from the chest up and accompanied by a dynamic image

107 insert echoes news reports and may be an attempt by Sarkeesian to lend herself some credibility and refute common perceptions of feminists as angry, emotional, and unreasonable. Certainly, however, her decision to physically center herself in each video works to foreground her embodied experience as a woman.

Figure 15: Visual scene of a typical Feminist Frequency video; from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q

Sarkeesian performs “conventional” femininity in her videos through wearing long (sometimes vibrantly-colored) hair, makeup, jewelry, and even, at times, pink clothing. She thus uses her feminized embodiment to challenge common assumptions about who inhabits the identity of “gamer” or “feminist” before she even begins to speak. While her body is not necessarily emphasized, its presence alone is still a visible reminder that her feminist criticisms grow from her embodied experience as a woman and, in addition to her criticism itself, helps to perpetuate a feminist epistemology attentive to the materiality and situatedness of bodies. Unfortunately, however, this decision has led to many of the hateful gendered attacks Sarkeesian has faced since launching Feminist Frequency. Notably, a small but conspicuous 108 number of these comments are racialized, usually resting on anti-semitic or anti-arab sentiments. While Sarkeesian has only rarely—and passingly— discussed her Armenian heritage,35 her apparent racial ambiguity makes her vulnerable to such attacks. This racist abuse certainly does not predominate most of the harassment that Sarkeesian has received, but it is significant in that it demonstrates the complex intersectionality that results in the frequent coupling of sexism and racism. Here, I will analyze two Feminist Frequency videos, “Damsel in Distress: Part 1” and “The Scythian- Positive Female Characters in Video Games,” as well the responses to these videos as generated on YouTube and Twitter. In doing so, I discuss how Sarkeesian enacts a multimodal feminist epistemology that is responsive to the vast networks of circulation that generate publics. The response to Feminist Frequency, however, also illustrates how those networks can attempt to silence feminist rhetorical action and therefore speaks to the challenges facing feminists online.

Damsel in Distress: Part 1 “Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” is by far the most- watched Feminist Frequency video, with YouTube recording over 2.3 million views since its release in March 2013. This video was the first to result from her crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign, and immediately garnered attention from supporters and critics alike. The 23-minute long video is the first of three parts devoted to examining how video games often present women as passive objects meant to be rescued rather than active, independent characters. Sarkeesian calls this the “Damsel in Distress” trope, and in this video, she outlines its origins and traces the gaming industry’s use of it in early games of the 1980s and 90s. “Damsel in Distress: Part 1” exemplifies a multimodal epistemology through its deft use of multiple semiotic elements and acknowledgement that knowledge is relational and experiential. The video opens with slick graphics featuring Feminist Frequency’s turquoise-and-pink logo and clips of various female video game characters enacting the “Damsel in Distress” trope accompanied by poppy, electronic music. Such polished, professional editing, along with

35 Sarkeesian grew up in Canada, as the first-generation child of Armenian immigrant parents (Greenhouse, 2013). 109 dynamic music and graphics, lends the video immediate credibility, at least in terms of its ability to make effective use of the affordances of internet video. After this opening sequence, Sarkeesian appears on screen; first, in a close up of her alone seated before a dark blue background and then a slightly more distant shot of her accompanied by a still frame of an image. Her hair is back is a casual bun, she wears minimal makeup, large hoop earrings, and a pink and blue plaid collared shirt. Sarkeesian appears friendly but confident, and her delivery is marked by direct eye contact with the camera and a strong, even voice. Sarkeesian defines the Damsel in Distress trope for her audience, explaining that it is “a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and must be rescued by a male character, usually providing the core incentive or motivation for the protagonist’s quest” (Feminist Frequency, 2013, 3:26). She acknowledges that video games have inherited the trope, and traces its origins in Greek mythology. Sarkeesian examines the way the trope has manifested and transformed through various forms of media over time, thus positioning video games as cultural products situated in specific gendered narratives. The analysis then turns to how video games began to incorporate this trope in the industry’s earliest and most significant games, such as Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Sarkeesian’s explanation centers on not just the narrative function of female characters within games that rely on the Damsel in Distress trope, but on their visual representations (often clothed in skimpy, sexualized outfits) and even audio cues (such as “cheesy saxophone music” [2:43]) that signal the character’s status as an object of desire. Sarkeesian’s analytical methods thus rely on close attention to the ways in which multimodality constructs meaning, specifically gendered identities, within video games. In this way, Feminist Frequency videos advocate the critical consumption of multimodal texts while simultaneously producing knowledge through multimodality. The analysis is occasionally punctuated by brief introductions of feminist theory, such as the “subject/object dichotomy” (10:04) and the idea of gendered access to power. Here, Sarkeesian will pause to explain the concept and its usefulness in fairly simple terms (avoiding academic jargon) with accompanying examples. These moments are critical to Sarkeesian’s feminist goals because they demonstrate how the “Damsel in Distress” trope limits the kinds of

110 identities women can inhabit, and thus shapes and reflects larger assumptions about gender and identity. Toward the end of the video, Sarkeesian explicitly addresses the importance of this kind of analysis, arguing that we have to remember that these games don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re an increasingly important and influential part of our larger social and cultural ecosystem. […] The belief that somehow women are a naturally weaker gender is a deeply ingrained, socially constructed myth which is of course is completely false. But the notion is reinforced and perpetuated when women are continuously portrayed as frail, fragile, and vulnerable creatures. (21:12) Sarkeesian’s analysis of the Damsel trope, therefore, rests on the assumption that multimodal texts—such as video games— do real rhetorical and epistemological work in terms of constructing gendered identities. It is no surprise, then, that she has chosen to create her own multimodal texts to dismantle gender stereotypes. Sarkeesian closes the video by recalling her own experiences as a female gamer, explaining that she “grew up on Ninetendo,” and displaying a picture of herself as a child sitting on the floor, intently staring off toward a screen, Nintendo controller in hand. Although Sarkeesian states she’ll “always have a special place in her heart” for early Nintendo games, she also asserts how important it is to adopt a critical stance as a consumer of media, even beloved video games. By referencing her own experience as a young (female) gamer, she thus builds her credibility as a lover and early adopter of video games while at the same time reminding audiences of the diverse subject positions gamers may occupy. Sarkeesian’s choice to speak directly to her personal experiences in this way is not typical of Feminist Frequency videos, but, I argue, is a deliberate attempt to address criticisms of her legitimacy as a gamer by relying on an experiential, embodied feminist epistemology. I searched Twitter to see what kind of responses Sarkeesian received in the first 24 hours after the video was released. The vast majority of tweets mentioning her Twitter account, @femfreq, were positive or supportive (257 tweets), and many other (59) tweets were devoted to simply sharing the link, engaging in second-hand circulation. Positive tweets praised Sarkeesian’s attention to women’s representations in video games (“Part 1 of TropesvsWomen

111 in Video Games is now up. Very well made. We in the industry NEED this discussion” [M. Sullivan, 2013]), her careful research (“I’m really impressed with the first episode of @femfreq’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games, really thorough and thoughtful research throughout” [Cookson, 2013]), and her tenacity in the face of online abuse (“@femfreq I just watched the first instalment of your video game series and I loved it! Congrats on overcoming all that negative junk <3!!!” [ruin yourself, 2013]). Many simply expressed excitement that Sarkeesian had posted a new video (“OMG SO EXCITED to watch this new video by @femfreq!!! I <3 what she does” [Robles, 2013]). “Damsel in Distress” and other Feminist Frequency videos benefit greatly from the second-hand circulation function of Twitter. Of those 59 second-hand circulation tweets posted within the first day of the video’s release, several were from popular accounts. For example, the Twitter account for Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform that hosted Sarkeesian’s fundraising efforts, shared the link with its 978,700 followers (Kickstarter, 2013), and @RepresentPledge, the Twitter account for the feminist documentary Miss Representation tweeted the link to its 80,100 followers (Miss Representation, 2013). By sharing the link to “Damsel in Distress,” these accounts ensured the video would make its way into the Twitter feeds of millions of users, many of whom may not even be necessarily interested in feminism and/or gaming. What’s more, Feminist Frequency’s tweet announcing the debut of the new video was retweeted 1,500 times alone. In this way, Twitter immediately and effectively facilitated rhetorical velocity (Sheridan et al., 2012), the circulation of Feminist Frequency videos, and helped to enact the networked model of rhetorical agency that is so central to Feminist Frequency’s visibility. Despite the immediate affirmative reaction to “Damsel in Distress,” there were still at least 38 overtly hostile or abusive tweets on the first day of the video’s release. Users tweeted such messages as “feminist frequency can suck my dick #sexism” (Nikoran, 2013), “@femfreq kill urself you fucking jew” (gottem, 2013), and “@femfreq I hope some women slices off your head and menstruates down your throat” (Pris0n, 2013). It is worth noting once again that likely many other menacing messages were deleted by Twitter after Sarkeesian reported them as abusive. However, the tweets that are still visible mostly rely on gendered and raced readings of

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Sarkeesian’s body and often result in threats of sexual and physical violence. The content of such messages makes it clear how central embodiment is to Sarkeesian’s argument, even if some viewers simply resort to harassment instead of reflecting on the ways in which bodies shape knowledge claims. These tweets also demonstrate Twitter’s potentially contradictory role for feminist activism: while it can be a remarkable resource for circulating feminist knowledge, it can also focus attention on efforts to silence and exclude multimodal feminist epistemologies like that enacted by Feminist Frequency. In other words, Twitter’s very nature inherently supports rhetorical velocity (Sheridan et al, 2012), thus enabling users to easily reappropriate feminist rhetorics for different purposes entirely— in this case, to intimidate and suppress. While the feedback on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive despite the aforementioned hostility, YouTube eventually began to generate a decidedly more negative reaction through the many response videos that emerged in the wake of “Damsel in Distress: Part 1.” Viewing the video today will automatically generate a list of related videos to the right of the video player, directing the user to videos such as “‘Feminism’ Vs FACTS (Anita Sarkeesian DESTROYED!)” and “Anita Sarkeesian Isn’t Worth Your Attention.” YouTube thus frames Feminist Frequency videos, through the lens of other users, as at best controversial, or at worst downright misleading. In fact, typing “Re: Damsel in Distress: Part 1” into YouTube’s search bar, yields more than 10,700 results, only a small number of which are Feminist Frequency videos. Scrolling through the first two pages of results alone, users will see video descriptions and thumbnails that claim Sarkeesian “sucks,” is “stupid,” and describe her as a liar, manipulator, and a fascist. YouTube response videos rarely resort to the outright name-calling and threats that Twitter can bring; instead they often take advantage of more subtle dismissive and condescending language, with reliance on sarcasm, hyperbole, and “mansplaining.”36 Likely, this is because of the different economics and uses of each space. YouTube’s terms of service

36 Urban Dictionary’s top definition for “mansplaining” is “to delighting [sic] in condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation” (“Mansplain,” 2010). The term has become a popular way to describe men who offer patronizing explanations to women, based on the assumption that men’s knowledge is somehow more correct than women’s. 113 explicitly hold users to their community guidelines, which reminds viewers to not “cross the line” by posting, among other things, “hateful content” (“content that promotes or condones violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity, or whose primary purpose is inciting hatred on the basis of these core characteristics”) or “threats” (“Things like predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people's personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts”) (“Community Guidelines,” n.d.). Twitter, in fact, has similar user guidelines, but many users create disposable Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of harassing others, with the expectation their account will be disabled. Many YouTubers, however, seek a high number of subscribers and views in order to share in ad revenue or even receive corporate sponsorship. Thus, it is very much in the interest of those YouTubers with a large viewership to not violate the community guidelines and ensure their account stays active. However important it may be for popular YouTubers to not “cross the line” and indulge in overt harassment, the comments on these antagonistic response videos are much less careful about respecting the community guidelines. Thunderf00t’s “Feminism versus FACTS (RE Damsel in Distress)” video (2013a), which has over 750,000 views, has comments such as “if I'd get face to face with a feminist in the desert and get into an argument I'd probably kill her and bury her” (TheEXpothead, 2015), “that bitch needs a good dicking down lol” (RobertC, 2015), and “all this bitch needs is my cock up her ass and that puts an end to all this feminest shit” (Delbasso, 2014). There are also many more thoughtful and respectful comments addressing both Sarkeesian and Thunderf00t, but the video’s overall like/dislike ratio of 35,713 likes vs. 6,481 dislikes, and the fact that sexist and hateful comments like those quoted above have not been reported suggests there are many YouTubers who condone both subtle and more overt attempts at silencing Sarkeesian and other feminists.

“The Scythian- Positive Female Characters in Video Games” Although “Damsel in Distress: Part 1” certainly received plenty of pushback, it was also released prior to the Gamergate fiasco, which helped unite those attempting to silence feminist

114 criticism of the gaming industry. What, if any, effect did Gamergate have on Sarkeesian’s current work? On the morning of March 31, 2015, Feminist Frequency released a new video titled “The Scythian - Positive Female Characters in Video Games.” At just over 7 minutes long, this video garnered nearly 200,000 views in its first week on YouTube and is the first of Sarkeesian’s to be exclusively devoted to positive representations of women in video games. Like the other videos in Feminist Frequency’s series on women in video games, “The Scythian” opens with clips from the focus of her analysis—in this case, the game Sword and Sorcery—accompanied by upbeat music and the Feminist Frequency logo. Sarkeesian occupies the frame in the same familiar pose she’s used in most of her other videos, seated in front of a plain background (this time, it’s dark blue) with an image next to her in the upper left portion of the screen. She wears her trademark large hoop earrings, a grey-and-white striped sweater, and her red-and-black hair is down. Here, Sarkeesian assumes the embodied performance of femininity in a casual and relaxed manner. Sarkeesian’s analysis begins by pointing out the similarity of the quest in Sword and Sorcery to The Legend of Zelda. She argues that by drawing on such recognizable narrative patterns, Sword and Sorcery “quietly asserts that women can fill the role of mythic hero as effectively as men can” (2015b, 1:01). Again, Sarkeesian demonstrates her recognition of the ways in which multimodal texts can shape cultural narratives of gendered identities. Throughout the video, Sarkeesian’s analysis is focused on the multimodal elements that comprise the game, such as its soundtrack, visual style, game controls, and use of alphabetic text. In fact, it is this close attention that leads Sarkeesian to note that although some players have mistaken the game’s hero, the Scythian, as a male, textual cues such as pronouns indicate that she is in fact female. Sarkeesian argues that the game presents the Scythian as a positive female character because instead of acquiring value in relationship to men, she is valuable in her own right as a hero. Games that value women’s lives and actions are crucial, says Sarkeesian, because when archetypal fantasy heroes in games are overwhelmingly portrayed as men, it reinforces the idea that men’s experiences are universal, and that women’s experiences

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are gendered, that women should be able to empathize with male characters, but that men needn’t be able to identify with women’s stories. (2015b, 6:49) In other words, games like Sword and Sorcery present women’s stories and experiences as worthwhile, and can therefore encourage a more widespread appreciation of female embodied experiences. “The Scythian,” like “Damsel in Distress: Part 1,” demonstrates Sarkeesian’s commitment to supporting and enacting a multimodal feminist epistemology. Despite this more optimistic take on women’s representations in the video games, Sarkeesian still faced resistance from YouTube and Twitter users. In just the week after its release, 11 response videos emerged on YouTube, only two of which engaged in constructive criticism or sincere attempts to continue the conversation about positive female characters in video games. The rest criticized Sarkeesian’s “hypocrisy” (Soul Mystique, 2015), accused her of “glossing over a piece of junk” (Warcorpse666, 2015), and described her research as “com[ing] right out of her ass” (The Amazing Atheist, 2015). Like other YouTube videos responding to Sarkeesian’s work, these videos were more subtle in their attempts to silence Sarkeesian, but comments like “feminist cunt alert!!!” (Correia, 2015) and “I feel a weird urge to rape Anita” (Rialto57, 2015) still appear from viewers. Twitter’s response to “The Scythian” was decidedly more positive, however. Like her “Damsel in Distress: Part 1” video, tweets mentioning @femfreq the day after the debut of the new video were overwhelmingly either supportive, with 193 positive messages, or simply promoting her video, with 88 tweets. Twitter users praised Sarkeesian’s work, tweeting messages such as “@femfreq did a great job here. Thanks for bringing this game to my attention it looks amazing. Loved your analysis of it. Again great work” (Issac of Eternia, 2015) and “@femfreq great video, thanks for making and sharing :)” (Kelly, 2015). “The Scythian” also benefitted from second-hand circulation from popular Twitter accounts like @TheMarySue, the Twitter presence of “geek girl” blog The Mary Sue, with 48,900 followers, and Polygon, a popular gaming website that counts 240,000 Twitter followers. Additionally, Feminist Frequency’s tweet announcing the debut of “The Scythian” was retweeted 712 times, ensuring the video was widely circulated to Twitter users.

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In spite of these very visible messages of support, the number of overtly negative tweets rose significantly in comparison to the release of “Damsel in Distress: Part 1.” Users sent 82 explicitly hostile and/or abusive tweets to @femfreq in the day following “The Scythian’s” debut. These tweets contained comments like “I noticed that she’s gotten fat sine this whole thing started. #ChubbyFrequency” (Shogun Whedon, 2015) and “@geekbrat my patriarchal tool will fill you with misogyny all night” (Caputo, 2015). One user even tweeted a racist caricature of Sarkeesian (Figure 16).37 Again, it’s notable how this harassment is largely focused on Sarkeesian’s gendered and/or raced body, indicating just how resistant some users are to Sarkeesian’s multimodal feminist epistemology.

Figure 16: Racist harassment after release of “The Scythian”; from twitter.com

37 This illustration is not new; it has been circulating since at least 2012. 117

Because I was able to track these responses in real time, more or less, it is possible that I was able to count more of these hostile Tweets before Sarkeesian could report them. But it is also quite likely that the additional attention Gamergate brought to Sarkeesian has made her an even more visible target on Twitter. Twitter itself, then, presumably played a role in facilitating the immense resistance to Feminist Frequency and other feminist criticisms of the video gaming industry. Those users opposed to Sarkeesian were able to use Twitter’s affordances (like hashtags) to organize and coordinate their attacks, making their resistance to feminist rhetorical action visible. Although these hateful, misogynistic messages are ostensibly directed to Sarkeesian alone (tweeting at her Twitter handle, @femfreq), the choice to use a very public space like Twitter to deliver such malice suggests that these users also intend to prevent other feminists from speaking out by frightening them into silence.

Countering Publics: Resistance and Resilience The reaction to “Damsel in Distress: Part 1” and “The Scythian” demonstrate just how difficult it can be to enact a multimodal feminist epistemology in public, digital spaces. While Sarkeesian’s efforts to create and circulate networked feminist knowledge may have increased attention to the problematic representation of women in video games, they’ve also resulted in unacceptable harassment. Scholars are only beginning to theorize this kind of mass invective on social media, but Jane has contributed significantly to the growing body of scholarship on what she calls “e-bile,” which “involves an extensive variety of interlocutors who may post anonymously, quasi-anonymously or in a manner which renders authors identifiable” and often relies on “profanity, ad hominem invective, and hyberbolic imagery of graphic—often sexualized—violence” (2014, p. 533). The purpose of such attacks, she suggests, is not to engage in productive argument, but to silence victims by “out-shout[ing] everyone else” (p. 534). For Jane, e-bile is most often gendered and although it is often dismissed as simple “trolling” or “flaming,” it can have very real consequences for its targets, including “emotional responses ranging from feelings of irritation, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, vulnerability, and unsafeness; to feelings of distress, pain, shock, fear, terror, devastation, and violation” (p. 536). In a recent speech at the All About Women conference this year, Sarkeesian spoke to this very

118 experience, explaining, “I don’t get to publicly express sadness or rage or exhaustion or anxiety or depression. I can’t say that sometimes the harassment really gets to me, or conversely, that the harassment has become so normal that sometimes I don’t feel anything at all” (Ideas at the House, 2015a, 2:36). While the consequences of e-bile are indeed harsh for its targets, such gendered attacks also have the consequences of silencing other women. As Karla Mantilla writes, e-bile (or “gendertrolling,” as she calls it) “is about patrolling gender boundaries and ensur[ing] that women and girls are either kept out of, or play subservient roles in, male- dominated arenas” (2013, p. 568). It appears, then, that at least a part of the gaming public that Feminist Frequency hopes to reach is engaging in this very process of systemically excluding female and/or feminist critics. I suggest that the massive amount of hate directed at Sarkeesian is in fact the by-product of her attempts to enact a multimodal feminist epistemology in a public that does not recognize or value such modes of knowledge-making. Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett argue that although the gaming public has enthusiastically centered its identity around various technologies that may “put on an air of openness and inclusiveness,” they suggest that “this is mask behind which a form of gender essentialism hides which precipitates a harsh reprisal for any who dare to speak out about the dominant paradigm” (2012, p. 401-2). They write that the “silencing of marginalized voices is part of a larger trend in the hardcore gaming public” (p. 411) because “the white male ‘gamer’ identity is under contention at the boundaries of the gaming public and marginalized communities” (p. 413). In other words, Feminist Frequency challenges the “traditional” gamer identity by embodying a very different gamer subjectivity— one that is very distinctly female and feminist. Perhaps that is why so many criticisms of Sarkeesian revolve around her identity: most commonly, calling into question her credibility as a gamer, or, less frequently, denouncing her as “not a real feminist.” YouTube videos condemn “the whole crusade [Sarkeesian’s] got here against games she doesn’t even play” (Thunderf00t, 2013b, 3:25) and demand that Sarkeesian “should actually play the games that [she] attempt[s] to criticize” (MrRepzion, 2015, 11:20), while on Twitter, messages like “@Femfreq u are not a real gamer go die get out of here #GamerGate #fuckyouanita #DramaAlert” (Doctor, Doctor who ?, 2015) work to position

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Sarkeesian as a gaming outsider who doesn’t truly understand the community. Likewise, several YouTube videos and tweets call into question Sarkeesian’s feminism, alternately depicting her as a radical (“you’re not a Feminist, No. You’re a Feminazi” [Michael, 2015]) or as a dilettante unconcerned with “real” feminist issues (“@Femfreq well try sorting issues like Saudi Arabias REAL patriarchy instead of telling me how to sit on public transport you silly cunt!” [Pwn0graph, 2015]). One of YouTube’s most popular Feminist Frequency critics, The Amazing Atheist, even made a video titled “ANITA SARKEESIAN, YOU OFFICALLY SUCK AT FEMINISM,” accusing Sarkeesian of being “really fucking awful at [feminism]” (2015, 8:20). By depicting Sarkeenian as neither a “real” gamer nor a “real” feminist, these criticisms seek to damage her legitimacy as a feminist critic of games. YouTubers and Twitter users attempt to diminish Sarkeesian’s credibility through more direct ad hominem attacks as well. Many of these messages paint Sarkeesian as a liar who whines about or even makes up the threats against her. On Twitter, Sarkeesian has been called a “bitch” (Kai, 2015) who spreads “lies” and “makes false statements” (That Guy, 2015) Predictably, these sentiments are echoed on YouTube. In “Anita Sarkeesian- BUSTED!,” a video that’s received well over half a million views, Sarkeesian is described as a “liar without shame” (Thunderf00t, 2014, 6:23). Most of criticisms of Sarkeesian’s integrity revolve around her “dishonest” behavior. YouTuber TheFeministCrusher, for instance, says that “she’s deceiving people by making them believe there’s an issue when there really isn’t, and getting them to donate their hard-earned money to a fundraiser centered around this nonexistent issue” (2012, 1:47) Others, however, have accused her of inventing violent threats against herself. One tweet asks, “Why can’t I shake the feeling that @femfreq is picking Twitter handles out of a hat and shooping [photoshopping] together threat screenshots?”(Zap-It Zeph, 2015). Even when critics see the threats against Sarkeesian as originating from real users, they still often dismiss her as over-reacting by acting as “a professional victim” (Da-Man-With-A-Plan, 2015) and “whin[ing] about how she is being harassed on the internet” (The Amazing Atheist, 2013, 6:02). Portraying Sarkeesian as a crybaby who simply isn’t tough enough to field such harassment has the double effect of delegitimizing the severity of the many violent, sexist threats she receives

120 and of again undermining her credibility as a gamer who doesn’t play enough to know that “any hardcore gamer [gets threatened]” (mike, 2015). Jane points out that such ad hominem attacks are typical of e-bile (2014, p. 533), but I argue that, in this case at least, these direct assaults on Sarkeesian’s credibility arise from a larger resistance to her epistemological assumptions. The multimodal feminist epistemology demonstrated by Feminist Frequency rests on the premise that texts can both affect and reflect real-life gendered power relationships, and that those gendered power relationships are sustained and potentially subverted by diffusive networks. Feminist Frequency demonstrates a clear recognition that texts can create publics and articulate ways of being, both in its analysis of women’s representations in media and in its own activist goals—after all, why create Feminist Frequency in the first place if Sarkeesian didn’t hope it might change sexist depictions of women? But many of her critics do not share this position and deny that video games can lead to any social change, positive or negative. These arguments are often couched in language describing video games as “just a game” (AlphaOmegaSin, 2015, 3:47) or as simply “serv[ing] a market” (Thunderf00t, 2013a, 11:05). YouTuber AlphaOmegaSin explicitly dismisses the ways in which video games—like any text— can shape real-life behavior and attitudes, saying “[Video games are] in no way some kind of a simulator or a teaching device for people to go and re-enact all these fucking things they’re doing within it” (2015, 3:47). Those who argue that video games shouldn’t incorporate Sarkeesian’s “social justice” agenda fail to recognize how texts constitute our epistemological and ontological conditions, which is especially ironic since the gaming community is itself so clearly formed by the production, consumption, and reworking of video game texts. What’s more, Sarkeesian’s critics often reject her assumption that patriarchal power is networked and diffusive: for them, sexism is a matter of individual agents exercising overt discrimination based on sex. Sarkeesian explicitly rejects this view, as she explained while speaking on a panel at the All About Women conference. She recalled how she “had to learn how to be a feminist that understands systems” and expressed concern that “many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyperindividualism.” Sarkeesian describes her feminism as “being committed to something much larger than

121 ourselves” and thus demonstrates a recognition that feminist agency is relational, multifaceted, and, above all, networked (Ideas at the House, 2015b, 19:54). Yet, YouTuber TL;DR’s response video to this panel discussion denies that sexism is systemic and exercised from many overlapping locations: “just like racism, just like homophobia. They are not the wider pervasive views of society. They are the views of a select few vast minority of society” (2015, 6:01). Sarcastically reacting to Sarkeesian’s observation that sexism is systemic, he declaims, “because the individual doesn’t fucking matter, right? People are not individuals. People are incapable of making their own decisions. People are all merely blind walking cogs in a machine that they can never possibly hope to understand” (8:37). In other words, critics like TL;DR depend on a model of agency that grants the individual subject authority over all his or her actions, and refuse to acknowledge the ways in which agency is networked within a larger system of material and discursive locations that can exercise gendered power relationships in a multitude of ways, quietly or not. YouTube in particular makes these networks of power visible in a way that Twitter does not. While there are response videos that are supportive of Sarkeesian, these videos receive far fewer views and are thus much more difficult to locate within YouTube’s interface. The suggested videos that appear next to Feminist Frequency videos (automatically generated by YouTube) are overwhelmingly negative responses to Sarkeesian and her work. In fact, of the 36-most viewed videos returned under a search for “Feminist Frequency response” (excluding those videos that are of or by Sarkeesian), just one offers what could be considered a positive or supportive take on Sarkeesian’s work. Users who are seeking responses to Feminist Frequency videos on YouTube, then, will have difficulty locating favorable reactions and will instead find videos with titles like “Fuck Feminist Frequency and Fuck Anita Sarkeesian” and “Anita Sarkeesian Doesn’t Understand Words.” Of the few positive and/or supportive reactions to Sarkeesian’s videos, many are framed as takedowns of her critics. The winged Babyseal’s “Video response to MrRepzion” (2015) and hbomberguy’s “The Sarkeesian Effect: A Measured Response” (2014) both follow this format, and pick apart the arguments of some of Sarkeesian’s most prominent YouTube critics. While there are a handful of videos directly engaging with Feminist Frequency videos in a positive

122 and constructive way, (Andrew Eisen’s 2015 “My Favorite Thing About Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women Videos” and Claudia Boleyn’s 2015 “Feminist Thought of the Week: Anita Sarkeesian,” for example), the fact that some fans choose to engage with Sarkeesian’s critics rather than with Sarkeesian herself reflects the networked rhetorical agency at work. Indeed, in a 2014 Tumblr post, Sarkeesian suggested fans who want to help Feminist Frequency might “create positive video responses to our series and/or refute some of the many strawman fallacies floating around the internet about Tropes vs Women,” and points to Char42’s 2013 rebuttal to vocal Sarkeesian critic MrRepzion as an example. Sarkeesian thus recognizes that it is just as important it is to acknowledge, manage, confront arguments about her as it is to make her own arguments. Sarkeesian, in other words, skillfully exercises networked rhetorical agency by working to “choreograph” the complex, ever-shifting networks that sustain rhetorical action. Sarkeesian has spoken and written at length about the abuse she’s received as a result of her work on Feminist Frequency, which perhaps fans the fires of harassment even more. Yet, I suggest that Sarkeesian’s choice to make visible the silencing networks with which she must contend is a valuable rhetorical strategy. By sharing the most offensive, most violent messages she’s received with audiences online and off, she is able to shed light on an issue facing many women on the internet today, and, perhaps more importantly, she is able to illustrate the gendered networks of power that can simultaneously enable and constrain rhetorical action. At the same time, she gained fans and financial contributions: in 2014 alone, Feminist Frequency gained 157,435 Twitter followers38 and raised $441,960 (Feminist Frequency, 2015a). Although Sarkeesian has encountered undeniable resistance and even threats to her safety, she has also managed to successfully create and share feminist knowledge with millions of internet users. The success of Feminist Frequency lies in Sarkeesian’s ability to enact a feminist epistemology grounded in a networked model of rhetorical agency. Her resistance in the face of such overt sexism is an example of what Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady term “feminist rhetorical resilience” which is

38 Of course, there’s no way to tell for certain if these users are fans or critics of Sarkeesian, but it does indicate a growing visibility and potential circulation of Feminist Frequency videos. 123

a significant feminist alternative to traditional conceptions of rhetorical agency in that the pregiven nature of rhetors, resources, exigencies, or change is replaced by a conception of dynamic creativity, reshaping possibilities, opportunities, meanings, and subjects. Resilience as feminist rhetorical agency is thus a relational dynamic, responsive in and to contexts, creating and animating capacities and possibilities. (2012, p. 7-8) Sarkeesian skillfully read and navigated the networks that attempted to silence her by publicly sharing the abuse she’s encountered online. Through the multimodal affordances of internet spaces like Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube, Sarkeesian was able to make her embodied experiences public and assemble a feminist counterpublic. In this way, Sarkeesian shows that while digital networks may enable gendered power relations, rhetors who can successfully recognize and navigate these networks can potentially upend gendered power relations altogether. Feminist Frequency videos (and their circulation) demonstrate this kind of networked feminist agency for more visible and potentially powerful publics, articulating an epistemology that recognizes the role of networks and relationality in the production of knowledge. The outright hatred and violence directed at Sarkeesian is not just due to the content of her criticisms, then, it is due to the very epistemological nature of her criticisms. Like feminists on Wikipedia, Sarkeesian is punished not necessarily for speaking about feminism, but for exercising a feminist mode of knowledge-making. This resistance, however, serves as a powerful reminder of the gendered networks of power that surround any rhetorical act. Moreover, Sarkeesian’s response demonstrates how rhetors might successfully enact networked rhetorical agency to make and share feminist knowledge.

Making Space for Feminist Rhetorics Online Feminist Frequency is a valuable example of how complex networked rhetorical agency can be, especially when unequal power relations are at play. These videos—and the many responses to them—are important because they demonstrates how feminists can enact and circulate a multimodal feminist epistemology in the face of resistant publics, and should inform

124 conceptions of circulation and agency. Acknowledging that agency is interwoven within the vast material and discursive networks that enable rhetorical action and circulation offers individual rhetors the ability to more fully account for the life their arguments may take after the moment of publication and ultimately makes room for responsive, situated feminist epistemologies online. Those same networks, however, enable the possibility that those epistemologies may be more easily silenced altogether. Despite the overwhelming promise internet technologies may hold for feminist rhetorical action, then, there are still many difficulties that face feminists online. The astonishing abuse directed at Sarkeesian may not have silenced her, but it may have potentially silenced other would-be feminist critics. Clearly, any sexist, racist, or violent harassment is deplorable, but the sheer amount of hatred targeting Sarkeesian indicates there is still much resistance to feminist rhetorical action online. Although it may be easy to look to spaces like YouTube and Twitter as examples of how internet technologies make composers out of consumers, the hatred Sarkeesian has encountered illustrates less visible barriers to equal access. As Jessica Megarry writes, “equality online is dependent not only on the ability to occupy a space, but to be able to influence it and speak without fear of threat or harassment” (2014, p. 46). Women and people of color are harassed and threatened online everyday—often simply because of the bodies they inhabit. Twitter’s terms of service, for example, may prohibit violent or hateful messages, but as this chapter demonstrates, users are still routinely posting and sharing such messages. Until users demand that platforms like Twitter do a better job of policing and preventing harassment, it will persist. Unless this gendered and raced harassment ends, that is, the internet will remain continue to silence and exclude. This is an especially important point for those of us who study and teach digital and internet rhetorics. We must remain attentive to the inequalities that inevitably permeate the online spaces we study, asking ourselves whose voices are privileged and whose are excluded. These unequal power relationships may also affect the kind of scholarship we produce. The internet offers remarkable potential to make our research more accessible and immediate, but scholars who make use of online platforms like Twitter and YouTube may already be well aware of the ways in which harassment can affect feelings of safety and equity. But the most

125 critical concern lies with our students: as composition studies more fully embraces the affordances of internet technologies, we must consider how ethical it is to ask our students to write themselves into possibly racist, sexist, or abusive networks. While online spaces provide students with “real” publics and “real” rhetorical situations, we must also recognize the very real and very dangerous consequences potentially facing students who inhabit gendered and/or raced bodies. Because of this possible harassment, we must equip ourselves and our students with the tools to recognize, analyze, and contend with gendered networks of power. Acknowledging that agency exceeds the individual rhetor is the first step in the process. Once we accept that rhetorical agency is a process of assessing and navigating complex webs of power, discourses, bodies, and tools, then we can begin to develop methodologies and pedagogies for effective rhetorical action. For scholars and students alike, this means carefully studying the online spaces that we intend to study or use to deliver and/or circulate our work. Before engaging with a site like YouTube or Twitter, for instance, we must ask ourselves questions such as: how does information move in this space? What content is privileged here, and why? How do users interact with one another? What bodies and epistemologies are most visible here? Researchers and writers may choose to make use of the site’s affordances to begin to answer such questions: searching hashtags and retweets on Twitter, for example, or analyzing YouTube response videos and comments. While careful examination of an online space may offer some sense of what inequalities may exist in any given community, it’s still difficult to account for all facets of the networks that sustain rhetorical action. It’s equally important to know how to react to gendered or raced harassment. Writers may choose measures such as turning off comments, blocking abusive accounts, or asking the site’s administrators to enforce community guidelines and/or terms of service. However, as Sarkeesian’s experience demonstrates, such actions may not be enough to counteract larger matrices of resistance. That’s why it’s so crucial to support and even engage in efforts to make and circulate feminist knowledge online. Multimodal texts like Feminist Frequency can foreground embodiment and positionality in significant ways, making feminist knowledge both visible and accessible through strategic networked rhetorical agency. If we

126 intend to legitimize situated knowledges, it is imperative that we value such texts in our pedagogy and scholarly activities. Despite the many challenges that confront feminist rhetorical action online, Feminist Frequency is a valuable example of how to make feminist criticism, activism, and knowledge- making accessible to non-specialized audiences. Sarkeesian relies on a robust understanding of multimodality as an embodied epistemology, and ultimately demonstrates the potential the internet offers for feminist rhetorics.

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Chapter 5 Reading, Resisting, and Remaking: Multimodal Feminist Epistemologies at Work

In many ways, digital technologies have tended to erase or normalize the body (Balsamo, 1996). After all, it’s easy to forget bodies when they are not visible. However, as the multimodality of digital technologies becomes increasingly visible, so too does the body. Digital scholars, therefore, are compelled to consider the body’s role in the creation and circulation of knowledge— a familiar practice for scholarship on feminist rhetorics and epistemologies, which has long recognized how knowledge is generated through embodied experience and is therefore situated and partial. As our field continues to grapple with digital multimodality, then, I suggest that feminist theory provides a fruitful starting point for theorizing how and why knowledge production unfolds as an embodied, relational process in online spaces. More importantly, it also offers resources for subverting gendered identities altogether. Accounting for the ways in which bodies matter online is no mere theoretical exercise. Rather, acknowledging embodiment has very real political consequences as it may ultimately help us create more equitable and accessible online spaces. Susanna Paasonen argues that power relations—as articulated through bodies—don’t disappear online but instead “structure access and participation.” Therefore, she writes, gender, race, and class (and age, nationality, sexuality, and religion) are not to be rendered insignificant for the reason that there is no Internet user not conditioned through these very categories. Identity presupposes embodiment—and this embodiment, again, is socially and culturally situated and signified. (2002, p. 28) Developing theory, pedagogy, and public policy that accounts for the varied bodies of internet users is crucial if we intend to realize the full liberatory promise of the internet. The body, however, is just one of many material locations from which power relations intersect with rhetorical action. Feminists have drawn attention to the role of the body in knowledge-making, but compositionists are increasingly beginning to consider the ways in which other material locations—particularly writing technologies— shape rhetorical practice

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(Kress, 2003; Sheridan et al., 2012; Shipka, 2011; Wysocki 2004, 2005; Yancey, 2004). This important scholarship demonstrates how rhetorical action is embedded in and arises from complex interactions between both material and discursive structures. How power intersects with these structures matters in terms of rhetorical agency, particularly for marginalized individuals. In this dissertation, I have shown how digital spaces are not free from the gendered power relations that interlace all rhetorical interactions. Feminist epistemologies and rhetorics are largely dismissed by more powerful internet publics, as demonstrated in my discussions of Wikipedia and the GamerGate mobs. However, multimodality can productively complement feminist epistemologies by locating knowledge claims and articulating new possibilities. Ravelry and Feminist Frequency are but two examples of how rhetors can make use of multimodal texts to craft new identities and resist hegemonic power structures. The multimodal feminist epistemology I’ve outlined here, then, helps explain how internet technologies can simultaneously reify and upend gendered identities. In this chapter, I will first define a multimodal feminist epistemology before considering what implications it might offer for writing studies pedagogy and scholarly practice. Multimodal feminist epistemologies are material, networked, and ultimately subversive, making them a particularly valuable resource for rewriting power relations, identities, and the world itself.

Defining a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology A multimodal feminist epistemology is, above all, committed to legitimizing and circulating feminist ways of knowing grounded in embodied, relational experience. As I described in Chapter 1, the history of women’s rhetoric has been particularly attuned to materiality, especially in terms of embodiment (Eves, 2005; Fleitz, 2010; Goggin, 2002; Mattingly, 2002; Ritchie & Ronald, 2001; Rohan, 2004; Rumsey, 2009). Foregrounding the role of the body in this way contests positivist epistemologies that position knowledge as universal, transcendent, and neutral, and instead figures knowledge production as partial, relational, and situated (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1992; Hartsock, 1988; Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 2004). Several compositionists have made use of these insights to develop theoretical approaches to

129 embodied rhetorics (Fleckenstein, 2010; Helmers, 2006; Ratcliffe, 2002). William P. Banks (2003), for example, argues the value of embodied rhetorics lies in their recognition that “it is, quite simply, impossible (and irresponsible) to separate the producer of the text from the text itself” (p. 33). In other words, embodied, feminist rhetorics prompt us to account for the situated, contingent, and partial nature of knowledge production and rhetorical practice. Failing to do so renders bodies invisible, making normative bodies— and the knowledge that arises from such bodies— the default (Dolmage, 2012). Feminism’s insistence that embodiment shapes knowledge production, along with the attendant awareness of power relations, is especially important in online spaces that attempt to erase the body (such as Wikipedia). The body does still matter online, even if internet technologies change the way we understand or interact with our bodies (Hawisher & Sullivan, 1999; Porter, 2009; Ratliff, 2007). The multimodal feminist epistemology I have theorized in this dissertation, however, explicitly considers the many material locations—including and exceeding the body itself— from which rhetorical action emerges. This more expansive understanding of materiality is critical, because although many scholars are beginning to acknowledge the role of materiality in composing (Edbauer, 2005; Gries, 2013; Rivers & Weber, 2011; Sheridan et al., 2012), Micciche (2014) suggests that this “new materialist” work largely fails to incorporate the insights of feminist theory, particularly its recognition that materiality is political. A multimodal feminist epistemology brings a much-needed attention to bodies—as political, epistemological locations— to new materialist work. Multimodality is particularly valuable for feminists because of its inherent focus on the material. As Kress (2005) argues, “the emphasis in multimodal work is very much on the materiality of the resources for representation” (p. 290). Multimodal texts foreground the material through the juxtaposition of different media and thus make visible how knowledge itself is mediated through bodies, cultures, histories, relationships, and technologies. Multimodality, in other words, asks us to consider the very materiality of knowledge production. Feminist epistemologies, therefore, stand to benefit from theoretical and pedagogical engagement with multimodal texts, which can stress embodied positionality as generated through relationships with people, objects, and discourses.

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It is this awareness of the role of materiality in the construction of knowledge that leads a multimodal feminist epistemology to understand rhetorical agency as networked and responsive. As Alcoff writes, feminist approaches to knowledge-making necessitate more complex theories of agency: “individual agency does not require separation and independence from others but actually the reverse. Individual agency is not intrinsic but made possible through certain kinds of social relations” (2006, p. 116). Like the production of knowledge itself, feminist rhetorical action complicates strict subject/object binaries and is ultimately relational. Agency, in this approach, is found in strategically reading and responding to material and discursive networks. Multimodal feminist epistemologies are particularly attuned to gendered power relations and therefore are concerned with identifying how networks—and the power that is manifested and perpetuated through networks—can constrain rhetorical action. However, because it acknowledges the many locations from which rhetorical agency emerges, a multimodal feminist epistemology offers resources for building collective feminist identities and feminist counterpublics (Fraser, 1992; McLaughlin, 1995; Warner 2002). Approaching rhetorical agency as a relational, collaborative process presents opportunities to build collective identities and epistemologies that resist the propensity to delegitimize and trivialize feminist rhetorics online. Wikipedia and the vicious response to Feminist Frequency both illustrate this dynamic at work, but Jack’s (2009) study of women’s blogging communities also points to how feminist rhetorical action is often dismissed as insignificant. She suggests that this problem has its roots in traditional conceptions of the public sphere, as “the border between public and private has historically been drawn in ways that exclude women and devalue their activities” (Jack, 2009, p. 332). When internet spaces are predicated on a Habermasian public sphere that denies difference, in other words, we risk discrediting or even silencing women’s rhetorical actions. Ignoring the very real embodied differences that may limit participation in the public sphere only further silences marginalized speakers and obscures the ways in which power operates through material and discursive networks that enable and constrain rhetorical agency. A multimodal feminist epistemology—and the networked rhetorical agency that facilitates it—can serve an essential role in ensuring that online spaces can build and address feminist

131 counterpublics, and provide opportunities for those feminist counterpublics to strategically challenge more dominant internet publics. Through its emphasis on the materiality of knowledge production, as well as its recognition that rhetorical agency is networked, a multimodal feminist epistemology is well-suited to the task of circulating the texts that create counterpublics and “work to elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender and sexuality can be lived” (Warner, 2002, pg. 57). When rhetorical agency is refigured as networked, we must consider our epistemological and political responsibilities to others. Knowledge, in this view, is situated within and arises from “webs of connections” that can ultimately bring about “solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (Haraway, 1991, p. 191). A networked understanding of rhetorical agency is therefore critical if we are to make space for collective feminist rhetorical action online. Recognizing the many material locations that structure rhetorical agency presents new epistemological possibilities as well. Just as a multimodal feminist epistemology disrupts that idea that rhetorical agency arises from an isolated, singular rhetor, it also destablizes meaning itself. Through their emphasis on materiality, multimodal texts point to epistemologies that exceed the written word. Alexander and Rhodes (2014) argue that composition has too quickly appropriated multimodality to serve the epistemological and rhetorical ends of print-based literacies and instead should question what new possibilities multimodality offers. A multimodal feminist epistemology is fundamentally interested in exploring this question. The value of multimodality lies in its ability to productively challenge normative epistemologies and identities by offering new ways of being and composing. In many ways, multimodal texts are already participating in the same project as standpoint feminism: calling attention to the relationship between materiality and meaning. Standpoint feminism is of course particularly focused on the body, so it’s important to understand how the body functions within the materiality of knowledge-making. The body is inherently political, so when multimodality recognizes the body’s epistemological capacities it is better attuned to gendered power relations. An awareness of the embodiment of multimodal producers and consumers will in turn alert us to new rhetorical and political possibilities for these texts. The body, of course, is only one of the many material locations that multimodality invokes. Feminist

132 epistemologies offer ample starting ground for understanding how the body makes meaning, but we must also consider how the body interacts and intersects with multiple modalities. Doing so will ensure that we do not impoverish our theories of multimodality by neglecting to account for its “distinct modes, logics, methods, processes, and capabilities” (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014, p. 4). By making visible how materiality, including embodiment, shapes knowledge claims, and by refiguring rhetorical agency as networked and arising from many discursive and material locations, multimodal feminist epistemologies are ultimately subversive, as they make use of multimodal texts to challenge gender identities and offer new ways of being and composing. Multimodal feminist epistemologies, then, challenge us to rethink what our pedagogies and scholarly practices might look like, and how they might contribute to building dynamic, ethical relationships with the world around us.

Enacting a Multimodal Feminist Epistemology In this project, I have theorized multimodal feminist epistemologies in order to argue for their rhetorical and political efficacy for feminists. A multimodal feminist epistemology can not only help to identify the gendered power relations that may restrict rhetorical action, but, more importantly, can empower individual rhetors and communities alike to create and circulate resistant, subversive texts, communities, and epistemologies that value diverse embodied identities. However important it may be to articulate the theoretical underpinnings of multimodal feminist epistemologies, though, it is equally critical to interrogate how it might engage with and potentially improve the lives of real women, both in the classroom and beyond. Here, then, I will trace the implications a multimodal feminist epistemology presents for pedagogical and scholarly practice, as well as how it might inform future activist work in academic and public spaces.

Pedagogical Insights As the field increasingly embraces online composing, embodied rhetorics must play a crucial role in our theory and pedagogy if we hope to minimize power differentials on the

133 internet. Foregrounding the body in this way calls for a pedagogy attuned to the ways our locations, relationships, and experiences shape our rhetorical possibilities. There is much at stake, claims Jay Dolmage, because “a composition pedagogy that ignores the body might actually limit our ability to make meaning” (2012, p. 125). A composition pedagogy that ignores the material more generally, I would add, similarly restricts our rhetorical and epistemological options. We must therefore invest in a pedagogy that asks students to consider how the material shapes them, and how they might in turn shape the material. Broadening our understanding of multimodality—and its feminist potentials—demands that we take a more expansive notion of “composing” in our own classrooms. While digital media may be particularly well-suited for engaging with networked publics (Sheridan et al., 2012), we might also consider the ways in which non-digital multimodal texts allow students to articulate their own positionalities and to build new relationships altogether. Wysocki (2004) argues that by relying on different semiotic resources, multimodal texts allow students “to see themselves as positioned, as building positions in the world” (p. 20). By making deliberate and ethical decisions about the materiality of the texts they compose, students reflect on the networks that shape rhetorical agency and, more importantly, are equipped to engage with and even contest those networks. To this end, our courses ought to prepare students to read and produce texts in a wide array of modalities. From first-year composition through graduate seminars, it is important to offer students the opportunity to engage with multimodality, and to consider the differing rhetorical and epistemological functions of various modalities, both in isolation and in more robust multimodal texts that incorporate multiple semiotic resources. Teachers can begin in small steps, for example, by asking students to consider questions such as: how does a photograph persuade? Why does this song make you feel sad? By first examining how different modalities make meaning, students can then begin to create more complex multimodal texts of their own. For instance, a student might assemble a “writing survival kit” complete with all the tools he considers essential for composing, including his laptop, earbuds, a pillow, and even his roommates. Another student may compose a pamphlet—meant to be passed out to members of her church—arguing for the necessity of funding Planned Parenthood. A student could create an

134 architectural model of a pyramid, complete with multi-level winding, maze-like tunnels, to reflect on her experience learning to navigate college-level writing. Or, a student might use interviews with female STEM majors to create a video that contests stereotypes about women (a video ultimately used by the College of Engineering to recruit more female students). These examples, all drawn from my own courses, illustrate how multimodal composing, broadly conceived to include digital and non-digital texts, can help students understand how their composing processes are tied to materiality, how the networks that surround them shape their rhetorical agency, and how they can make use of multimodality to articulate new identities, new meanings, and new worlds altogether. We must also ask students to reflect on the materiality of their own literate practices by posing questions such as: do you prefer reading books in print or on a screen? What economic conditions enabled or hindered your literacy? What time of day do you do your best writing? One way a teacher might begin to address these questions is to ask students to write a technological literacy narrative that explores the relationship between their material conditions and their literacy development. Students might then remediate their narratives using different modalities. Through composing these two related but inevitably different texts, students can begin to recognize the materiality of rhetoric, and reflect on how that might affect their own composing practices. Calling students’ attention to the materiality of rhetoric asks them to be accountable for the knowledge claims they make, and ultimately offers them a wider range of semiotic resources. Because multimodality invokes such diverse and oftentimes unfamiliar epistemologies, we must ensure that teachers are comfortable designing and assessing multimodal assignments. While a number of scholars have taken up this call, and have offered various strategies for teachers working with multimodal assignments (Adsanatham, 2012; Charlton, 2014; McKee & DeVoss, 2013; Neal, 2011), it is clear that there is still room for more work in this area. Along those lines, if we, as a field, intend to meaningfully integrate multimodal composing into the work of our classrooms, we must ensure institutional and programmatic support for instructors and students alike (Lee, 2014; R. Selfe, 2005; Szymanski, 2014). Writing program administrators especially should consider how teachers are trained in the designing and

135 assessment of multimodal assignments, as well as what resources (digital or otherwise) are available to support such work. Unless we ensure that teachers have adequate support for teaching multimodality, we risk undermining its potential and impoverishing our students’ meaning-making possibilities. Attending to the materiality of composing and rhetorical processes in our classrooms also necessitates pedagogies that account for the networked approach to rhetorical agency I outline in this project. To more fully address the many locations which alternately constrain and/or enable rhetorical agency, then, we must invite students to rethink fundamental concepts such as the rhetorical situation (Bitzer, 1992). Compositionists have already pointed to the interface as one way to help students understand rhetorical agency as networked (Arola, 2010; Selfe & Selfe, 1994; Wysocki, 2004; 2005) because it makes visible how discursive and material networks work together to structure rhetorical action. However, we might also ask students to take a more capacious view of rhetorical agency in other ways— by asking them to consider the rhetorical velocity (Sheridan et al., 2012) of their texts, for example, or by more carefully investigating how discourse communities (such as Wikipedia or even academia) exercise power. By identifying the impediments to their composing— as well as the opportunities available to them— students will ultimately exercise a more informed and sophisticated rhetorical agency, potentially preparing them to develop texts that successfully resist or even disrupt networks of power.

Scholarly Engagement A multimodal feminist epistemology also offers new possibilities for our own research and writing, both in terms of how we produce knowledge as well as how we circulate that knowledge. Methodologies that more completely recognize the role of materiality in rhetorical processes and practices will enable us to produce research that has the potential to resist gendered power relations online and off (Blair, 2012; Schell, 2012a). While feminist methodologies have long advocated that we reflect on our own positions as researchers, especially in relation to participants (Cushman, 1996; Kirsch, 1999; Lather, 1991), attending to materiality within and beyond the body means broadening our research methods to more fully

136 account for the many locations from which rhetorical action emerges (DePew, 2007; Takayoshi, 2000). This is especially critical as our research moves online. We must consider how specific material conditions—technologies, economic structures, intersectional bodies— affect not only our own identities, but also the relationships we build with participants and other stakeholders. What difference does it make, for example, if you interview a participant over Skype instead of email, or in person? How can you make use of online spaces like Google docs to collaborate with participants? Does relying on digital spaces to recruit participants for studies not focused solely on internet use limit the kind of claims we can make? Turning our methodological attentions to the material also demands that we employ methods that will better account for our own material conditions and that of our participants. Almjeld and Blair (2012) have already pointed to how multimodality might change our research practices and methodologies, arguing that we must make use of multimodal methods to study multimodal texts. They offer the techno-biography as one possible approach, but we must continue to develop methods that track the material aspects of composing if we are to more fully understand the locations from which gendered power emerges. What methods are best for tracing the circulation of a tweet, for example? How should we analyze the role of social networks in circulating a YouTube video? What’s the best way to account for the design and composing of a rhetorical artifact such as a knitted scarf? How do our own relationships with and assumptions about writing technology shape our research designs? If we intend to focus our scholarly attention to multimodality, we must remain committed to developing innovative, flexible methods that consider the materiality of rhetorical practice in a variety of contexts. We should not ignore how a multimodal feminist epistemology might change how we choose to deliver and circulate our work, either. Like Cheryl Ball, I believe that compositionists ought to consider how we might employ multimodality to “[enact] our scholarship” (2004, p. 183). Those of us interested in questions of power and technology are particularly fit for the work of exploring all the epistemological potentials available to us in multimodal scholarship. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the field of composition and rhetoric is increasingly offering avenues for multimodal and new media scholarship, and supporting such venues is vital if we intend to produce accessible, constructive scholarship that expands our understandings of

137 rhetorical practice. Digital, open-access journals and presses are a promising start, but too often scholars import their expertise with print literacies into these spaces, undermining the truly radical potential of multimodality. We must therefore continue to push at our expectations of what scholarship should be, or what it should look like. Some compositionists, for example, are exploring audio media, with podcasts like Rhetoricity, This Rhetorical Life, and Mere Rhetoric emerging in recent years. Exploring alternative and diverse modalities may expand our own rhetorical and epistemological possibilities, and may ensure that our work is not just accessible to more people but that it is attuned to the lives of those who may benefit most from the insights composition studies and feminist theory have to offer. To encourage scholars to undertake this work, we must recognize multimodal and new media scholarship as valuable contributions to our scholarly community, and provide support and recognition for the production of such texts. Taking multimodal scholarship seriously means rethinking graduate curricula, establishing opportunities for young professionals to read and compose multimodal scholarship beginning in coursework and extending into thesis or dissertation work. Likewise, hiring and tenure and promotion committees must recognize multimodal scholarship (Lee & Selfe, 2008). To ensure that the profession values multimodal and new media scholarship, then, it behooves us to reach out beyond our specific discipline and articulate the scholarly rigor of multimodal scholarship to others in our departments and in our institutions.

Future Directions for Activism and Advocacy While a multimodal feminist epistemology offers significant implications for our pedagogies and scholarship, it also points to several crucial barriers to access that may inhibit feminist rhetorical action. If we intend to make full use of a multimodal feminist epistemology and create a truly inclusive, progressive internet, then we are compelled to consider how inattention to transnational networks, the increasing monetization and surveillance of internet spaces, and gendered harassment threaten to compromise the internet’s emancipatory potential. Through engaged activism and advocacy, I argue, we can make certain to include all voices in the making of the internet.

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First, a multimodal feminist epistemology calls us to more explicitly engage transnational approaches in our classrooms and beyond. Feminists who hope to equalize power relations in digital spaces must be attentive to how power moves through material and discursive networks in local and global contexts. As Anne Scott (2001) argues, “as transnational feminist networks rely on the use of electronic media, we must address the serious inequalities in economic, social, and cultural power which restrict access to these technologies” (2001, p. 414). Despite the rapid increase in worldwide internet connectivity, a 2013 report from UNESCO’s Broadband Commission Working Group on Broadband and Gender indicated that only 37% of women worldwide use the internet (p. 18), and “the relative [gender] gap [in worldwide internet usage] is 16% in the developing world and 2% in the developed world” (p. 17). That is, while women in developed nations might still be under-represented in terms of authorship or authority in online spaces, many women in developing nations cannot or do not access the internet at all. The same report notes that internet access “enables the exercise of human rights and freedom of expression, a sense of self-identity, cultural rights and the right to assembly” (p. 10). Women’s ability to access the internet, in other words, is a fundamental human right. While a handful of feminist scholars have argued for adopting transnational approaches (Dingo, 2012; Queen, 2008; Royster & Kirsch, 2012; Schell, 2012b), it is crucial that we do not exclude women from developing nations in our claims about gender and online spaces, and that we advocate for increased internet access and expertise across developing nations. This is indeed a pressing matter, writes Leslie Regan Shade: given the fast pace of the implementation of a global information infrastructure, it is urgent that women in developing countries have a voice in the development, dissemination, and deployment of the technology, and that women in developed countries assist them in these endeavors. (2002, p. 109-110) Through activist scholarly practice, then, we must support the inclusion of women from all national, ethnic, and economic locations in the construction of internet technologies. As the internet becomes increasingly globalized, so too do corporate and governmental oversight grow, thus presenting critical questions for digital rhetorics, particularly in terms of how power intersects with rhetorical agency. Estee N. Beck (2015), McKee (2008), and Jessica

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Reyman (2013) have all pointed to the many ways in which online activity is increasingly monitored and collected by government and corporate entities. While practices like data mining and surveillance threaten “to transform our composing activities into data to be appropriated and used for privatized and commercial ends, commodifying each social, creative, and intellectual act” (Reyman, 2013, p. 516), they also demonstrate the very complex agency at play in online environments. Public policies will likely grapple with online privacy for some time, but while laws and regulations continue to evolve, we must prepare ourselves to consider how such oversight shapes rhetorical agency. Ethical and thoughtful digital composing demands what Reyman (2013) calls “network literacy” (p. 530), which empowers users to ask who is collecting their data and for what purpose— ultimately, another way of thinking about power relations online. We must therefore consider who benefits from data collection and surveillance, and if any users are more at risk than others. What is our responsibility to students when we require them to compose in for-profit online spaces that may collect (and sell) user data? Does data surveillance and/or collection effect our relationship to participants? Approaching rhetorical agency as networked in such ways—as a multimodal feminist epistemology does— compels compositionists to confront such such questions. While data monitoring may inhibit rhetorical agency, these practices remains largely invisible. Sexist harassment, on the other had, presents a prominent—and dangerous—threat to feminist rhetorical action. The response to Anita Sarkeesian’s work on Feminist Frequency provides a very public example of such harassment, but she is certainly not the only woman who has experienced abuse online: as a 2014 Pew study reports, “young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment.” (Duggan). This “e-bile” posits real risks to women and undermines the internet’s potential to support feminist rhetorical action (Jane, 2014, 2015; Megarry, 2014). It is therefore imperative that scholars and users alike work together to end these systematic attempts to silence women online. Jane (2015) suggests that, as a whole, internet researchers are too quick to dismiss gendered harassment as a harmless, if unpleasant, practice. By downplaying the seriousness of these attacks, researchers may inadvertently perpetuate abuse online and discourage women

140 from speaking out against it. Anita Sarkeesian has shown how the simple act of sharing experiences of harassment can turn sexist networks against themselves, but individual women cannot be expected to bear the burden of ending gendered abuse online. Instead, we must commit ourselves to understanding what specific mechanisms enable systemic misogyny online—a task well-suited to networked approaches to rhetorical agency. By examining instances of harassment, scholars may begin to identify how factors like interface design and community guidelines enable sexist abuse, and, more importantly, how web designers might create spaces that resist it altogether. Researchers might conduct person-based research, examining the experiences of both those who produce online harassment as well as those who receive it, in order to better understand the motivations behind harassment, its various forms, and its effects. In the meantime, however, digital scholars—especially those interested in maintaining a presence in digital spaces—should not hesitate to identify and resist instances of harassment, and support efforts such as the Ada Initiative that aim to raise awareness and put an end to gendered harassment in digital communities. Although there are no doubt significant barriers facing feminist rhetorical action online, a multimodal feminist epistemology ultimately presents important opportunities for making and sharing feminist knowledge. Not only will this help realize the subversive potential of the internet, but will challenge us to reconsider rhetoric itself. As I discussed in Chapter 1, women’s rhetorical practices have always pushed us to expand our definitions of rhetoric. When rhetorical practice is understood as networked through material and discursive locations, we must consider our definitions and expectations of technology as well, asking ourselves, as A. Haas (2007) pointedly does, “whose definition of technologically advanced are you using when evaluating your technological proficiency?” (p. 94). Communities like Ravelry, whose users demonstrate complex layers of technical skill—both in their use of the internet and in their knitting—demonstrate how a multimodal feminist epistemology attuned to networked agency can challenge conceptions of technological literacy. Through continued critical interrogation of the meanings and boundaries of “technology,” we will ensure that we do not limit our theories, pedagogies, or scholarship by relying on a reductive or deterministic understanding of technology.

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*** As I have shown in the previous chapters, there is much at stake in how we choose to use, research, teach, and theorize the internet. Identity still very much matters online: internet spaces construct identities while at the same time offering users the means to reconstruct those identities. As Judy Wajcman (2010) notes, we must “understand that technology as such is neither inherently patriarchal nor unambiguously liberating” (p. 148). Technology, that is, only acquires its meaning through interactions with material and discursive networks. By understanding how power moves through those networks, and how it manifests in particular writing technologies, our field can begin to articulate new epistemological and rhetorical possibilities. A multimodal feminist epistemology offers one way to identify and explore those possibilities, and, ultimately, can help to craft a more inclusive, more subversive, internet for all users.

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Appendix A Survey and Interview Questions for Wikipedia Study

Survey In the spring and summer of 2012, 13 participants responded to the following questions about their experiences using Wikipedia. The survey was hosted by Survey Monkey, and required participants to indicate their consent before beginning. Participants were also offered the chance to contact me to participate in a follow-up interview if they wished.

1) How long have you been a Wikipedia contributor? (10-12 years, 6-9 years, 3-5 years, 1-2 years, less than one year) 2) How often do you contribute to Wikipedia? (Daily, Several times per week, About once a week, A few times a month, Once a month, A few times a year, Rarely-less than once per year) 3) What kind of edits/contributions do you typically make? (A likert scale with options Never, Infrequently, Sometimes, Frequently will be presented for the following categories: Formatting changes, Editing/Proofreading revisions, Incorporating additional resources/citations, Clarifying grammar/syntax, Correcting factual inaccuracies, Deleting inappropriate/irrelevant content, Expanding an existing article, Creating a new article, Other) a) If you answered Other for Question #3, please describe the kinds of edits/contributions you make: (open response) 4) Are there particular topics/areas you focus on when editing? (Yes, No) a) If you answered yes, please describe which topics/areas you tend to edit the most: (open-ended) 5) Why do you contribute to Wikipedia? (open-ended) 6) What, if anything, do you find difficult about contributing to Wikipedia? And has that changed over time? (open-ended)

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7) What, if anything, hinders your ability to contribute to Wikipedia? (Check all that apply: Lack of time, Lack of technical knowledge, Lack of content knowledge, Lack of resources [such as computer or internet access], Worry that my contributions will be deleted, I’m uncomfortable editing others’ writing, I’m afraid of making a mistake, Other-open response) 8) What do you enjoy about contributing to Wikipedia? (Check all that apply: I like sharing my knowledge with others, I like correcting factual or conceptual errors, I like correcting mechanical or stylistic errors, I like learning new things, I like meeting new people, I like collaborating with others, I like belonging to the Wikipedia community, Other- open response) 9) Only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. Why do you think this is? (Check all that apply: Women may not have enough free time, Women may not have the technical knowledge to edit/create an entry on Wikipedia, Fewer women may have internet access, Women may not have enough expertise to add to existing content, The Wikipedia community may be hostile to women, Women may believe they not have anything to contribute, I don’t know, Other-open response) 10) Do other users/contributors know that you are a woman? (Yes, No, Some, I Don’t Know) 11) Have you ever been involved in an editing dispute? (Yes/No) a) If yes, and if you feel comfortable doing so, please describe what happened: (open- ended 12) Do other users/contributors know that you are a woman? (Yes, No, Some, I Don’t Know)

DEMOGRAPHICS SECTION (OPTIONAL): These questions, aimed at developing a collective picture of female contributors to Wikipedia, are optional. You may choose to answer some of these questions, or none at all. This survey is completely anonymous and cannot be linked to any individual who takes it. IP addresses for computers are not collected or stored. • Age (radial buttons with ranges)

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• Income radial buttons • In which country do you currently live? (drop down menu) • Marital status (radial buttons) • Do you have children? (Yes/no) • Racial/Ethnic background: open-write in • Education: Primary Education, Secondary Education, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education, other

Interview Below is my script for interviews. Because participants agreed to a 45-60 minute timeframe, and because I wanted to keep the interview open-ended, I was not able to address every question with each participant. These interviews were conducted in June, July, and August of 2012 via Skype or telephone, only after each participant returned a signed consent form—which stressed the voluntary nature of the study—to me.

• How long have you been a Wikipedia contributor? • How often do you edit or contribute? • Why did you start contributing? Why do you continue to contribute? • What, if anything, prevents you from contributing? • What kinds of entries do you typically create or edit? • Who do you envision as your audience when you write/edit? • If you feel comfortable doing so, could you share some entries you have been primary contributor or editor for? Looking at this, what did you think about/what concerns were foremost in your mind as you wrote/edited? • Have you ever been involved in some kind of editing dispute? • Do other users/contributors know that you are a woman? And do you think that matters?

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• Only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are women. Why do you think so few women contribute to Wikipedia? • How might Wikipedia attract more female contributors? How might Wikipedia further support female contributors? • Do you try to recruit other women to contribute to Wikipedia? • How would you characterize Wikipedia as a community? • Can you tell me about your most positive Wikipedia experiences? • Are you familiar with Wikipedia’s NPOV policy? Has it ever been invoked in an editing dispute? • Do you actively participate in any other online communities? If you feel comfortable, would you tell me where else you participate online? • How would you like me to describe you in my report? For example, I would describe myself as a white, middle-class straight woman. • If you feel comfortable, could you please describe your family/personal life, your education, and your occupation? For example, I would say that I am single with no children, am enrolled in a doctoral program, and work as a graduate student.

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Appendix B Survey and Interview Questions for Ravelry Study

Survey In Novemeber and December 2013, 61 participants responded to the following questions about their use of Ravelry. I recruited participants through Ravelry groups. The survey was hosted by Survey Monkey, and required participants to indicate their consent before beginning. Participants were also offered the chance to contact me to participate in a follow-up interview if they wished.

1) How long have you been using Ravelry? (5 years or more, 3-4 years, 1-2 years, less than a year) 2) How often do you typically visit Ravelry? (Daily, a few times a week, a few times a month, a few times a year) 3) How long have you been knitting? (20+ years, 10-19 years, 5-9 years, 1-4 years, less than a year) 4) How often do you typically knit? (Daily, a few times a week, a few times a month, a few times a year) 5) Why do you knit? (Check all that apply: To relax, to get better at knitting, to make things for myself/my home, to make things for loved ones, to connect to family or community traditions, other—explain) 6) Why do you use Ravelry? (Check all that apply: to find patterns/yarn, to share my own patterns or projects, to learn more about knitting, to talk to other knitters, to find other local knitters, to shop, other—explain) 7) Do you share any of your completed projects on Ravelry? (Always, Usually, Sometimes, Never) a) If so, why? (Check all that apply: To keep track of projects for myself, To show off my work!, To share any pattern alterations or changes with the Ravelry community, Other— explain). In your own words, please explain the most valuable aspects of using Ravelry

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(short answer)In your own words, please describe the most difficult or challenging aspects of using Ravelry (short answer) 8) How would you describe the Ravelry community? (Short answer) 9) Do you belong to or participate in any groups on Ravelry? (Y/N) a) If so, how many? (More than 20, 15-19, 10-14, 5-9, less than 5) b) What kind of groups do you belong to? (Check all that apply: Knitting patterns/ techniques, Hobbies and Interests, Family, Local, Entertainment & Culture, Life, Other, explain) c) Why do you belong to/participate in these groups? (Short answer) 10) If you interact with other users via forums or groups, what do you usually talk about? For example: Choosing patterns, local knitting events, politics. (Short answer) 11) What, if any, other “crafty” or “domestic” arts do you practice? For example, scrapbooking, cooking, sewing. (Short answer)

DEMOGRAPHICS SECTION (OPTIONAL): These questions, aimed at developing a collective picture of Ravelry users, are optional. You may choose to answer some of these questions, or none at all. This survey is completely anonymous and cannot be linked to any individual who takes it. IP addresses for computers are not collected or stored. • Age (radial buttons with ranges) • Income radial buttons • In which country do you currently live? (drop down menu) • Marital status (radial buttons) • Do you have children? (Yes/no) • Racial/Ethnic background: open-write in • Education: Primary Education, Secondary Education, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education, other

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Interview Questions The following questions guided my interviews, which were held over the phone in December 2013 and January 2014. After obtaining signed consent forms from each participant, I asked about Ravelry usage as well as more general knitting habits. Interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes, and each participant whose interview appeared in my study had the chance to review and approve a draft of the chapter.

• How long have you been knitting? • How often do you knit? What do you typically like to knit? • How did you learn to knit? • Why do you knit? What kind of feelings or thoughts does the act of knitting evoke for you? • What choices do you make when deciding on a new knitting project? • How long have you been using Ravelry? Why do you use it? Has it changed your knitting practices? How? • How would you describe the Ravelry community? • Do you change/alter patterns you find on Ravelry at all? How/why? Do you share these changes with other users? • What, if any Ravelry groups do you belong to or are most active in? Why are you drawn to these groups? How do you participate in these groups, on and/or offline? • Are you active in any “real life” or “face-to-face” knitting groups? Why do you participate in these, and how do these groups differ from any Ravelry groups you may belong to? • How would you like me to describe you in my report? For example, I would describe myself as a white, America, middle-class straight woman. • If you feel comfortable, could you please describe your family/personal life, your education, and your occupation? For example, I would say that I am single with no children, have a Master’s degree, and work as a graduate student. 174