When it comes to immersive computing, digital space-making, and in online spaces, white cis-male experience is favoured, resourced, and normalized (Stanney et al., 2020; Lopez et al., 2019). While social network platforms enable marginalized groups to use the connective and generative instruments for expression and to network, digital space is also a site of harm, exclusion, and data extraction. Transfeminist research finds that digital feminist movements often hold exclusionary discourses (Primo, Zamperini, and Testoni, 2020; Raha, 2017). In the context of worldwide increases of fascism, femicide, ableism and erasure, along with exploitative, extractive, carceral, neoliberal, and settler colonial styles of relating—including practices of digital colonialism and anti-blackness—this facilitated workshop makes intentional space for critical resistance and interdisciplinary feminist exploration.
The need for inclusive design and revolutionary spaces for the typically marginalized is evident. We propose an immersive space solution that will close this gap. More specifically, we hope to build a digital space intended at subverting cis-male ideological, cultural and material representations and interactions. After this exploratory research, we will build an immersive space that will directly feed off these initial explorations. The outcome aims to act as a blueprint for alternative feminist spaces that can enable similar initiatives, creations and processes.
Critical process
Between February and May 2023 we will be piloting a research-creation creation process that seeks to explore the potential frictions, tensions, synergies and trade-offs around safety and representation faced by “othered” users of technology.
This workshop event flows from YU’s Centre for Feminist Research’s (CFR) Feminist Digital Methods Research Cluster (FDMRC). The FDMRC, which is also supported by York University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Centre and Media Creation Lab, launched in the fall semester of 2022 following the open access Feminist Digital Methods Events and Conference in the spring and summer of 2022. The Events and Conference brought hundreds of practitioners and learners together around feminist digital methods, establishing a strong foundation for communities of practice. It was sponsored by YU programs in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies, the joint YU and Toronto Metropolitan University program in Communication and Culture, Science and Technology Studies, English, Theatre and Performance Studies, Film, Translation, Health, Sociology, Anthropology, the and the Department of Politics, as well as Professor Eileen Fischer of Schulich School of Business, Osgoode Graduate Research, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Alongside participants we explore the following questions:
1) What does it mean to be female, non-binary, nongender, cisgender, disabled etc. in a digital space?
2)What does it feel like to be female, non-binary, nongender, cisgender, etc. in a digital space?
Pilot workshop
Some activities that we will engage include framing notions of online safe modes of self representation through a series of co-creation and sharing activities in an immersive makerspace session where participants can share previous critical experience through difital representation and create multi-sensory representations of their aspirational ‘safe from harm’ online selves. Experimenting with forms of representation that provide safe, inclusive, AND creative space for all involving:
Stream 1: Questioning anthropocentric, embodied forms of virtual presence. Asking what those forms are- moving beyond one’s face and body and toward representations that are idiosyncratic to an individual.
Stream 2: Exploring how those spaces impact and define shared and individual digital/immersive experiences and activities.
Stream 3: Experimenting with forms of content co-creation and co-generation through trans-feminist practices and methodologies.
Pilot outcome
The results from the pilot workshop will be used to translate our research into an immersive creative safe digital space. After this exploratory research, we will build an immersive space that will directly feed off these initial explorations. The outcome aims to act as a blueprint for alternative feminist spaces that can enable similar initiatives, creations and processes.
HASTAC workshop
Through the application of speculative design methodologies, we seek to forge a revolutionary space for critical representation, encounters and discussions for the typically marginalized. Ultimately we aim to:
· Engage participants with of the pilot workshop activities aimed at of fears and previous negative experiences within digital space (such as writing a “breakup letter” to a technological system/platform/site/avatar)
· Present research and creative outcomes from the earlier pilot workshop
· Discuss insights related to shifting body/anthropocentric paradigms around embodiment and representation
· Form a research cluster that represents cross-disciplinary knowledge sources and schools of thought
References
Cowan, T.L., and Jasmine Rault. “Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives.” Women & Performance 28.2 (2018): 121–142. Web.
Floegel, Diana, and Kaitlin L. Costello. “Methods for a Feminist Technoscience of Information Practice: Design Justice and Speculative Futurities.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 73.4 (2022): 625–634. Web.
Latzko-Toth, Guillaume. “Users as Co-Designers of Software-Based Media: The Co-Construction of Internet Relay Chat.” Canadian Journal of Communication 39.4 (2014): 577–596. Web.
Lopez, Sarah et al. “Investigating Implicit Gender Bias and Embodiment of White Males in Virtual Reality with Full Body Visuomotor Synchrony.” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2019. 1–12. Web.
Primo, David, Adriano Zamperini, and Ines Testoni. “A Struggle for Definition: Online Narratives of Italian Trans Women.” Journal of gender studies 29.5 (2020): 590–603.
Raha, Nat. “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism.” The South Atlantic quarterly 116.3 (2017): 632–646. Web.
Stanney, Kay, Cali Fidopiastis, and Linda Foster. “Virtual Reality Is Sexist: But It Does Not Have to Be.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 7 (2020): 4–4. Web.
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