A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Remediating politics: feminist and queer formations in digital networks Aristea Fotopoulou University of Sussex Thesis submitted September 2011 in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Acknowledgements Particular thanks go to my supervisors Caroline Bassett and Kate O'Riordan for their unreserved encouragement, support and feedback. I am grateful to Olu Jenzen, Beth Mills, Russell Pearce, Polly Ruiz, Rachel Wood and Lefteris Zenerian for commenting on drafts and to Ruth Charnock and Dan Keith for proof-reading. I'd also like to thank my colleagues in the School of Media, Film and Music and especially Sarah Maddox for being so understanding; my fellows in English, Global Studies, Institute of Development Studies, and Sociology at Sussex for their companionship. I am grateful for discussions that took place in the intellectual environments of the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network (BSSN), the Digital Communication and Culture Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the ECREA Doctoral Summer School 2009 in Estonia, the 2011 Feminist Technoscience Summer School in Lancaster University, the Feminist and Women's Studies Association (FWSA), the 18th Lesbian Lives Conference, the Ngender Doctoral seminars 2009-2011 at the University of Sussex, the Research Centre for Material Digital Culture, and the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies. I would like to thank all the participants for the accounts and time they provided for this research. To my parents Georgia and Demosthenis, to my good friends and the cat, I am grateful for the love, the food, the music and the heartache. This thesis is dedicated to my brother. 3 Statement I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature:……………………………………… 4 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Aristea Fotopoulou Doctor of Philosophy Remediating Politics: Feminist and Queer Formations in Digital Networks SUMMARY This thesis examines feminist and queer actors emerging in highly mediated environments and the forms of political organisation and critical knowledge production they engage in. It indicates that older debates around gender and sexuality are being reformulated in digital networks and identifies alternative understandings which are being developed. The study foregrounds a performative conceptualisation and argues that political realities are produced in dynamic configurations of communication media, discourses and bodies. It suggests that network technologies constitute sources of vulnerability and anxiety for feminists and stresses the significance of registering how embodied subjectivities emerge from these experiences. To achieve its aims and to map activity happening across different spaces and scales, the project attended to context-specific processes of mediation at the intersections of online and offline settings. It employed ethnographic methods, internet visualisation, in-depth interviewing and textual analysis to produce the following key outcomes: it registered changing understandings of the political in relation to new media amongst a network of women's organisations in London; it investigated the centrality of social media and global connections in the shaping of local queer political communities in Brighton; it complicated ideas of control, labour and affect to analyse emerging sexual identities in online spaces like nofauxx.com, and offline postporn events; finally, it traced feminist actors gathering around new reproductive technologies, at the crossing fields of grassroots activism and the academy. Today, women's groups and queer activists increasingly use networked communication for mobilisation and information-sharing. In a climate of widespread scepticism towards both representational politics and traditional media, questions about the role of digital networks in enabling or limiting political engagement are being raised. This thesis aims to contribute to these debates by accounting for the ways in which feminist and queer activists in digital networks reformulate the relationship between communication media and politics. 5 CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 9 Rethinking mediation, politicisation and embodiment I. Introduction 10 a) Rationale for the research design 11 b) Summary of argument 14 II. Structure of Thesis 15 III. Theorising affect, communication and politicisation 18 a) Mediatization, mediation and medium theory 18 b) Representation 24 c) Posthumanist Performativity 31 IV. Methodology and Topology 36 V. Conclusion 42 CHAPTER 2 44 Feminist digital networks: remediating issues and identities I. Introduction 45 II. The ‘Feminism in London 2009’ Conference 50 a) Methodology 51 b) Participants 54 c) Versions of contemporary feminism 58 III. Network imaginaries: making meaning of digital media and changing 63 organisational practices a) “A building with women through its veins”: The network and 63 the movement b) Catching up with technologies and changing organisational 67 routines c) “That's our own Facebook, we meet face-to-face”: New 70 media literacy and offline networking d) Dominant digital culture as a regulatory apparatus: 76 Challenges and responses IV. The issue of “violence against women”: Remediating feminist 78 identities Constructions of “violence against women” and anti- 82 prostitution politics V. Materialising online networks with Issue Crawler 87 a) Issue Crawler as a technoscientific entity 88 b) The “violence against women” hyperlink-network 93 6 c) The materiality of Issue Crawler 97 VI. Conclusion 100 CHAPTER 3 102 Reterritorialisation and queer counterpublics: Producing locality and referential metacultures in digital media networks I. Introduction 103 a) Theorising the production of locality in digital networks 108 b) Gay pride, the “village” and consumerism 110 II. Methodology 115 III. Queer Mutiny and anti-capitalist politics 118 a) Queer Mutiny Brighton as a counterpublic 121 b) Commodification and Brighton Pride 125 IV. Digital Media, local politics and mobility 127 a) “Brighton is incredibly white...”: Creating locality on the La- 131 didah mailing list b) Reterritorialisation and queer cosmopolitanism 134 V. Queer metaculture and queer consumer citizenship 137 a) “I'm not the kind of person who would put on my hood and 137 fight the police...”: Understandings of activism b) Creating references: parties, “education” and cultural capital 142 VI. Conclusion 150 CHAPTER 4 152 Postporn networks: making scarcity and forming affective intensities I. Introduction 153 a) “Sex wars” and radical sex art 160 b) Posthumanism and postporn politics 162 c) “Porn 2.0”, affective labour and gift economies 166 II. “Real” bodies and the making of scarcity/abundance in commercial 169 porn a) Genderqueer online porn production companies: 171 NoFauxxx.com and FurryGirl b) Women-owned porn production companies: Anna Span and 180 Petra Joy III. “Collective orgasms” and “intellectualised unpleasure”: ways of 189 viewing and affective intensities in non-commercial spaces a) “Should I be aroused by this?” Watching I.K.U. and making 192 meaning collectively b) Affective intensities at the skin of the social body: the 197 political potential of viewing with others 7 IV. Conclusion 202 CHAPTER 5 204 Feminist networks of Reproductive technologies: Egg donation debates I. Introduction 205 a) Revisiting biopolitics 207 b) The background of the HFEA Consultation 214 c) Egg scarcity and new forms of labour 216 II. Constructing credibility and connecting local struggles 221 Challenging the academy/grassroots binary: The 225 No2Eggsploitation campaign III. “Why is the commodification of my eggs so bad?”: 227 Representativeness, choice and responsibility IV. Differentiation and articulation of “we” 232 a) The Corner House 233 b) CORE 237 IV. Conclusion 240 CONCLUSION 243 Looping threads Bibliography 252 Books and Journals 252 Online articles and Websites 274 Audio and Visual Material 284 Governmental Documents 285 Zines and other Documents 286 Appendices 287 APPENDIX A (Chapter 2) 287 APPENDIX B (Chapter 3) 297 APPENDIX C (Chapter 4) 301 APPENDIX D (Chapter 5) 308 LIST OF ACRONYMS 313 List of illustrations Figure 1: Photograph from the FiL09 Conference. 51 Figure 2: The Feminist library stall at FiL09. 52 Figure 3: Stall setting at FiL09. 53 Figure 4: The participating organisations which appeared in the FiL09 website. 54 Figure 5: Beatrix Campbell at the FiL09. 54 Figure 6: Finn Mackay and Kate Smurthwaite at FiL09. 55 8 Figure 7: Slide from Susie Orbach's opening speech at FiL09. 55 Figure 8: Anna van Heeswijk receiving an award for Object! 56 Figure 9: Women's Resource Centre stand at the FiL09. 57 Figure 10: Overview of the conference hall and stands at FiL09. 57 Figure 11: Snapshot from the documentary Women: Activists. 60 Figure 12: Women's Resource Centre campaign material.