Strange Spaces & Stranger Sensibilities: Feminist Counter-Publicity in the Digital Age by Bonnie Marilyn Washick A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Political Science) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Elizabeth R. Wingrove (Chair) Assistant Professor André L. Brock Professor Lisa J. Disch Professor Don Herzog Associate Professor Mika LaVaque-Manty © Bonnie Marilyn Washick 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In undertaking this project, it often seemed that writing was a brutal thing. There’s always more that could be said and, one suspects, more that is worth exploring before committing words to the page. What a pleasure, then, to write with such blistering certainty: I could not have done this without the guidance, advocacy, and support of many people. A thousand thanks are owed; I am grateful for the space to pay some small portion of that debt. I must begin by thanking my committee: Lisa Disch, André Brock, Don Herzog, Mika LaVaque-Manty, and my Dissertation Chair, Elizabeth Wingrove. I am so appreciative of Lisa Disch’s incisive reading and productively challenging feedback. André’s in-depth knowledge and experience with the study of digital media was invaluable, and I’m certain will continue to be so. Many thanks to Don Herzog for his willingness to go over my work with a fine-tooth comb, or simply riff on a theme over coffee. I probably should have taken you up more on the former, but it was the latter that made me excited about work. Thanks to Mika LaVaque-Manty for serving as my teaching mentor in addition to serving on my committee, and modeling an enthusiastic, inquisitive, and student-like (in the best of ways) approach to innovation in the classroom. It’s impossible to acknowledge in a few words the many ways in which my Chair, Liz Wingrove, made this work possible. No one has been a better advocate for me or for ii my project, and no one has had a greater influence on my development as a scholar. Thank you for your time, your encouragement, your expert guidance, and your thoughtful insight—I’m so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with you. Many dedicated thanks are owed to particular University of Michigan institutions and the people I met there. I am grateful for feedback on several dissertation chapters provided by participants in the department of political science’s Political Theory Workshop. Special thanks to my personal cohort of political science graduate students: Erin Baribeau, Diana Greenwald, Marc Levesque, Elizabeth Mann, Neveser Köker, Ben Peterson, Damien Picariello, Justin Williams, and Alton Worthington. And a whole- hearted thanks to the department’s staff and especially Kathryn Cardenas, without whom I would have been lost many times over. Thanks to the Institute for the Research on Women and Gender’s Community of Scholars fellowship program and especially its 2012 coordinator, Hannah Rosen. Thanks to Paulina Duda, Jenny Kwak, Sarah Sutter, and Hunter Werkheiser for feedback and for keeping me on task. And thanks to the Sweetland Center for Writing for organizing and supporting our dissertation writing group and the immensely helpful Dissertation Writing Institute (and here, Louis Cicciarelli deserves a special thanks for his expert guidance). I am grateful to the Center for the Education of Women and the Institute for the Humanities (IH) for providing support in my final year. The time, office space, and inter- disciplinary community afforded by the IH’s Society of Fellows was invaluable, as was the collegial companionship of several graduate student fellows: David Green, Sarah Linwick, Elizabeth Keslacy, Pascal Massinon, and Rostom Mesli. iii Thanks to the many friends and loved ones outside Ann Arbor who provided a much needed respite: Michelle Abramovich, Jennica Bramble, Christine Hassel, Tania Prizio, Colleen Sphar-Nuñez, Rachel Wood, Elissa Yotsuji, and, of course, my family: Al, Christine, Denise, and Laurie. (Here, special thanks must go to Denise Washick for generously taking on the tedious task of proofreading my bibliography and helping with the final edit). And finally, special thanks are owed to three dear friends who are also colleagues: to Logan Casey for helping me wrangle disordered thoughts and writing processes, and reminding me to be kind to myself when I struggled to do these things; to Josh Shipper for office talks and walks, and for modeling intellectual curiosity that is critical, but not combative; and to Jess Steinberg for calling when I “casually” text to ask if you have a minute, for letting me vent, and leaving me laughing. When this work felt monstrous, you helped me remember why I wrote and to find a way forward. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii LIST OF FIGURES vi ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Cultivating ‘the Real’ Cyberspace: The Ontopolitics of Computer-Mediated Communication 27 CHAPTER TWO: ‘Unconventional’ Women and the Paradoxes of Early Feminist Computer-Mediated Communication 67 CHAPTER THREE: Embodying Public Speech: The Feminist Politics of Safety Online 103 CHAPTER FOUR: On ‘Trigger Warnings’: Tough Subjects, Revolting Subjects, and the Publicization of Structural Harm 151 CONCLUSION 180 BIBLIOGRAPHY 190 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: Screenshot of the Object-Oriented MUD, LambdaMOO. 36 FIGURE 2: Screenshot from Olduse.net, a real time exhibit showing 73 what Usenet looked like 30 years prior. FIGURE 3: Screenshot from the feminist blog, Feministe, illustrating the 120 prominent placement of a comment policy. FIGURE 4: Screenshot of a “fluffinated” comment at Feministe. 122 FIGURE 5: Screenshot of a “disemvoweled” comment at Finally, a 122 Feminism 101 Blog. FIGURE 6: Screenshot of a “trigger warning” at the feminist blog, Crunk 125 Feminist Collective. FIGURE 7: Screenshot of “content notes” at the feminist blog, Shakesville. 126 FIGURE 8: Screenshot from the Twitter feed of “Jock Halberslam” 179 (@halberslam) . FIGURE 9: Image from Amanda Marcotte’s It’s a Jungle Out There: 183 The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments (2007). vi ABSTRACT Strange Spaces and Stranger Sensibilities: Feminist Counter-Publicity in the Digital Age by Bonnie Marilyn Washick Chair: Elizabeth Wingrove This dissertation offers a theoretical account of the politics of feminist computer- mediated communication (CMC), arguing that both the discursive dimensions of CMC and the affordances of CMC platforms cultivate new public subjects. The analysis challenges dominant approaches to the politics of online public speech that remain tethered to liberal public sphere theory or more recently, to radical democratic theory. I do so by attending to the enduring significance of embodiment—specifically, the embodied particularity of public speakers and of their addressees—in over thirty years of feminist CMC. Examining diverse moments from that history, I suggest that feminist CMC contributes to democratic theory and theories of language politics through its enactment of a “feminized” public subject: a subject whose acknowledged vulnerabilities demand attention to social and political inequality as they reframe it and whose communicative practices engender productively new, and newly contrary, postures of agonistic struggle. vii Chapter One explores early discourse about “cyberspace” as a new public sphere. Disambiguating conflicting accounts of what disembodied communication enabled, I show how a liberal conception of public speech was rearticulated as both an ideal and an impossibility online, thus diminishing the perceived political value of CMC. Chapter Two examines feminist speech on Usenet, an early and influential CMC platform. I illustrate how affordances of public CMC defanged the political speech of Usenet feminists, rendering it the equivalent of what Lauren Berlant terms “female complaint.” Chapter Three argues that the “safe spaces” of the contemporary feminist blogosphere cultivate an alternative “feminized” subject whose complaints are better understood as political demands that challenge rather than reflect neoliberal hegemony. Chapter Four considers the recent migration of trigger warnings (TWs) from online to offline spaces, in order to probe the reception of the “feminized” political subject. Pursuing the affective resonances between what researchers have termed “white fragility” and the reception of TWs, I consider how a viscerally-charged rejection of embodied vulnerability works to sustain the phantasmatic figure of an abstract, sovereign self in left-progressive as well as liberal political visions. viii INTRODUCTION THEORIZING THE POLITICS OF COUNTER-PUBLICITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE … they fight as much for the preservation of themselves as they fight for the preservation of others. This movement toward consciousness—born of techno advocacy practices that span computer mediated and non-computer mediated contexts– is a threshold where we can see ourselves through the eyes of others and by way of panoramic views. - Tara L. Conley, “An Open Letter to Amanda Marcotte”1 I. Introduction This dissertation offers a theoretical account of the politics of feminist computer- mediated communication (CMC). I proceed by tracing the development of collaborative, formally open-access online feminist speech communities over more than thirty years. My account attends to the entanglement of, on the one hand, the “poetic” function of public address in cultivating—through generic form, style, mode of delivery, protocols, and content—the