Much of my recent research, as part of my Masters Degree in Art Museum and Gallery Studies, has revolved around navigating present-day feminist advocacy, which has taken centre stage for the better part of the last couple of years. In light of the Time’s Up and #metoo movements, self-identified women have come forward to draw attention to various types of discrimination they have been subject to. Social media has played a particularly vital role in expanding the reach and impact of their agendas, and has added diverse voices and experiences to these conversations. Nonetheless, the global coverage that feminism has attained is limited at present by means of access to technology, therefore still far from accomplishing complete inclusiveness.
We find ourselves in a state of being almost permanently on, the boundary between real and virtual becoming increasingly blurred. We live in a moment in time where tweets can make or break someone’s life, where post-truths exist to govern our political and social experiences to the point where facts aren’t nearly as important, and where being on and of the online reaffirms one’s existence or relevance.
In this ever-evolving context where information is exchanged at high speed, there is often very little talk about who stays in the margins and why. What voices are left unheard, which histories go on undocumented, what cultures fold under the prevalence of Western ways? And more importantly, how can we give a platform for visibility to those that have been denied it? How can we grow more mindful, to embrace others without otherizing them, without exoticizing their heritage?
For almost fifty years feminist theory, and later queer and postcolonial studies have attempted to explore and integrate the complex relationships that we build under hierarchies of power that are often out of our immediate control. This task has proven ambitious and, at times, delicate, as many voices and variables continue to add meaning, shift direction and guide the discourse, relating and reacting to real-life developments. Feminism has become an umbrella term, a path to address countless issues that intersect in one or more points, something like circle diagrams; there is no fixed definition, because the definition is always revised, always adapted, always improved.
Nowadays, the term feminism often appears accompanied by a prefix or an adjective: post-feminism, cyberfeminism, parafeminism, xenofeminism, global, transnational or intersectional feminism. These have been necessary additions that seek to clarify the aim and scope of certain strands of feminism; the early years of feminist discourse underwent much re-evaluation so as to include and represent diversity in all aspects of gender, sexual orientation, class, race, creed, etc. Nonetheless, Euro-American Centrism is still prevalent, and so, by consequence, there still exists a need to reaffirm and re-include the margins. As such, sometimes contradictions arise from the need to single out a certain category in order to make it visible; one can’t address gender inequality without ultimately reinforcing the gender binary, as one can’t aim to include the other without reinforcing that they are not of the centre.
However, there is always the possibility of focusing on the root of the problem, so as to explore the factors that validate such hierarchies, while exposing them and proposing alternatives for change. Digital colonialism—the theory which explains how tech companies are controlling the information market and leading to a new concept of empire—is one direction in which the conversation can be pointed, as it builds its thesis on the tensions arising from the attempt to control information and access to technology of entire populations and regions, creating a division between the dominating North and the dominated South.
