Gamers, Hunters, Provocateurs: Digital Mediations of Violence, Gender and Faith in the Arab World
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Date
2015-01-26
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
My dissertation examines how digital media and communications technologies shape responses to gendered violence, human security, and women’s rights in the Middle East. I combine discourse analysis with a material investigation of computational media to consider the gendered and racialized dynamics of digital knowledge production about these issues, how this knowledge informs particular kinds of intervention on behalf of women in the region, and new global labor networks emerging from the use of everyday technological devices and practices. First, I show how the use of spatial information technologies and crowdmapping applications for addressing sexual harassment in Egypt depoliticizes sexual violence by subordinating Egypt’s urban landscape to a visual cartography of crowdsourced data attributing harassment to ‘culture,’ while simultaneously erasing the role of the state in perpetuating sexual violence. Second, I consider the use of nudity by Arab women as a form of protest on social media to reveal filtering processes that depoliticize images of protesting gendered bodies as they are forced to travel with millions of other flagged pornographic, violent and other disturbing pictures managed by the hidden network of low-wage, off-shore content moderators tasked with managing this new form of ‘toxic waste.’ Third, I examine how Saudi women gamers use gameplay to transgress gender-based constraints on movement and communication, while articulating alternative discourses of creativity, access, and piety through the practice of gaming as a way to create more relations of accountability to women in the form of education, employment, and increased access to public space. In sum, the project considers the general properties of digital media including software, algorithms, spambots, and other technical infrastructures alongside narratives, psychic investments, and the tendencies of global flows of capital to show how, together, they produce complex and often conflicted fields of action upon with contemporary geopolitical relations play out.
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International Relations, new media and digital technologies, political theory, human security, gender and sexuality, social media, gaming, Middle East