Catherine Knight Steele's Digital Black Feminism has two goals. The first is one of recovery: Digital Black Feminism contributes to a growing area of scholarship that attempts to uncover and, in doing so, center the role of women and minorities in the development of digital tools and practices. The second goal is the centering of nonacademic online critical voices as central to Black feminist thinking. Out of these two goals emerges the argument of the book—that "the use of online technology by Black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome and possibilities of Black feminist thought in the digital age, and Black feminist thought has simultaneously changed the technologies themselves" (4–5).
This argument is built on an analysis of Black feminist online discourse, the empirical material comprised of a large collection of tweets, blog posts, Instagram posts, and similar digital text. Methodological choices here are central. Knight Steele has not utilized computationally driven digital humanist methods, instead choosing to follow threads as a member of the Black feminist online community, "yielding access to both the digital artifacts and the context required to interpret them" (13). This emphasis on context is key, and digital humanists might take note of this political and scholarly rationale for eschewing the array of web scraping and automated analysis technologies. I would especially recommend reading the note in Knight Steele's conclusion on how digital media breaks down a divide between public and private that we researchers must think about and navigate as ethically as we can (155–56).
Digital Black Feminism is comprised of five chapters. The first demonstrates how the historical societal position of Black women in the United States has resulted in the development of particular skills with communications tools. The second chapter deals with the "virtual beauty shop," a metaphor for spaces built for and run by Black women that traverse the physical and digital. The third chapter examines Black feminist bloggers in order to uncover the discursive practices that have reacted to and had generative effects on the development of digital platforms. The fourth chapter discusses the public intellectual projects of three historical Black feminists (Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anna Julia Cooper) and three contemporary Black feminists (Luvvie Ajayi, Jamilah Lemieux, and Feminista Jones). The final chapter examines Black feminism as a digital product, elaborating the tensions inherent in selling a kind of politics in capitalist digital landscapes.
Digital Black Feminism focuses primarily on discourse rather than identity, but identity groups still emerge. Knight Steele contrasts an older generation of Black feminists who fail to "embrace the 'gray'" in feminism (59) with two younger groups—hip-hop Black feminists and digital Black feminists. The first group is largely located in the academy, [End Page 217] hip-hop feminists bridge the divide, and digital Black feminists are portrayed as non-academics and often entrepreneurs whose feminism is part of their online branding. There are class issues at work here that would reward unpacking. There are a few classed historical terms—"the cult of true womanhood" and "respectability" among them—that might benefit from more nuanced treatment. Shifting histories of class politics are pertinent to the ways in which Black women have historically navigated institutions such as education systems, business opportunities, and eventually digital tools and cultures both as individuals and as an imagined collective.1
This book weaves together several threads that have long deserved further analysis. Black women's approaches to technology, feminism, and business have often been treated separately, but Digital Black Feminism demonstrates that these areas are interdependent in ways that affect the development of digital culture, as well as the arc of Black feminism, as a source of intellectual production. Importantly, Black digital feminist writing has made the existence of a Black female audience of readers inescapable, making this work more marketable. But as Knight Steele writes, "Digital Black feminist writers do not have just one patron to whom they are responsible; they have thousands" (104). This multitude interacts with feminism on platforms that encourage disputation as a method of engagement and encourage users to reduce individuals to brands. Grappling with the question of whether truly radical work is compatible with the "digital capitalistic superstructure" (3) is critically important. Extending this kind of analysis outside the United States is also crucial if we want to understand the interlinked development of capitalism, digital technologies, and (Black feminist) political activism.2
All social movement work involves the development of both discourses/ideologies and concrete careers that involve flexible relationships with power structures. Less well studied is the way in which feminism(s) themselves become products via their deployment on digital platforms that reduce arguments to products and their adoption as scholarly trends, both of which strip concepts of radical underpinnings (see the discussion of intersectionality on pages 53–54 as well as chapter 5). Knight Steele argues that these two trends are now interwoven, blurring boundaries between discussions of pop culture and academic debate. Whether this means that sustainable careers in activism are becoming more accessible is another question, one that feeds into questions of class, positioning within or outside the academy, geography, and gender. This is a subject that deserves more scholarly attention.
—Rachel Pierce, University of Gothenburg
- Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham coined the term "politics of respectability" to describe Black middle-class activism at the turn of the nineteenth century, while Barbara Welter examined the "cult of true womanhood" as a facet of nineteenth-century white popular discourse. These terms are both useful and historically complicated and malleable, with class at the very center of their definition. See Higgenbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860," American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74.
- Zhasmina Tacheva, "Tracking a Critical Look at the Critical Turn in Data Science: From 'Data Feminism' to Transnational Feminist Data Science," Big Data & Society 9, no. 2 (July 2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221112901.