Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures

by Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember, Kate O'Riordan

As digital transformations continue to accelerate in the world, discourses of big data have come to dominate in a number of fields, from politics and economics, to media and education. But how can we really understand the digital world, ask the authors of Furious, when so much of the writing through which we grapple with it remains deeply problematic? In a compelling new work of feminist critical theory, Bassett, Kember and O'Riordan scrutinise many of the assumptions of a masculinist digital world, highlighting the tendency of digital humanities scholarship to venerate and essentialise technical forms, and to adopt gendered writing and citation practices. Contesting these writings, practices and politics, the authors foreground feminist traditions and contributions to the field, offering alternative modes of knowledge production, and a radically different, poetic writing style. Through this prism, Furious brings into focus themes including the automation of home and domestic work, the Anthropocene, and intersectional feminist technofutures.

Genres: Feminism, Technology, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published November 20, 2019

Reviews

[Sess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was teetering on giving this book 4 stars because i really enjoyed the middle two chapters, but unfortunately the intro and conclusion were so infuriating (and not as intended by the authors) that I can't offer anything more than 3 stars.

As mentioned, the middle of the book on automation and digital healthcare is really good, well written, and provocative. The introduction, however is chaos - and not the good kind. The authors claim that the book is 'poetic', in efforts I guess to disrupt the normative academic work they refuse to reference, but oh boy do they hammer this home, repeatedly stating things like, "if this book is poetic (which it is)". It's a bit of a stretch to say that the book is poetic as its more hyperbolic, academic jargon interspersed with the occasional quite cringe metaphor (ie. the Cinderella riff), very little of which made much sense. Poetic was also just one of the (unfulfilled) claims the authors make about the book - the most dubious of which was that the book 'decolonised', a claim I am sceptical about not just because it's not clear what exactly they are decolonising, but also because the authors are three Western, white, academic women. This claim was further sidetracked by their questionable citational practice (ie using black feminist theory with no citation at all), which they claim (MORE claims) to be an overt feminist choice.

I just wish, especially given the short length of the book, that the authors had spent more time writing about things (like digital health or automation), rather than writing about writing about writing about the book.

Note to writers: don't tell the reader what the book 'is', just do it and if that is, in fact, what the book is or does, it will speak for itself.

Anyway, rant over... I think.

[Claire James Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

good vibes honestly and helped me think through some ideas.