It is one thing to analyze and critique a technofeminist space, and another thing entirely to code and create one. Because we believe in the power of online spaces to have transformative effects on our lives, we would like to share a road map to our philosophy toward curating agnès films in hopes that it may be of use to others working toward similar goals. The following principles have helped us not only curate a feminist publication and space, but to do so while interacting and collaborating through feminist practices.
Hocks and Balsamo (2003) described using “a collaborative team model that is commonplace in multimedia development” (p. 207) for their technofeminist digital project that featured women’s narratives around gender and social change. We, too, as previous sections have shown, highly value collaboration. Like Hocks and Balsamo, we find ourselves navigating an editorial situation where “although our project construction process was entirely collaborative, there was an institutionalized, hierarchical relationship among project team members” (p. 207). For Hocks and Balsamo, they, as faculty, “served as project directors… [and] provided design, information structure, and content for the project,” while students did “[t]he bulk of the multimedia production work” (p. 207). Content for agnès films is produced by students, staff, and guest writers, so many of our student staff members do content production. However, we too find ourselves working within hierarchical spaces in terms of supervision and funding, as our final video essay discusses.
In this final video essay, we also tackle how how we manage that collaborative interaction between students and faculty and how we handle mistakes when they happen. Mistakes, although problematic, usually have solutions we can work through together. Harder to solve as a team are the limitations of our technofeminist publication. As Kristine Blair (1998), reminded us, there are limits to what a digital publication like agnès films can accomplish. She invited us “to question the extent to which the predicted or currently self-described utopias within cyberspace can help to achieve social transformation” (p. 318). No matter how hard we strive to create a collaborative and supportive space during the production of agnès films and through the site itself, we have not created a utopia. We still operate inside a deeply flawed society within which our ability to bring about change is limited.
We as a team are also limited; we have had to retire a number of initiatives after being unable to sustain them. Perhaps the most ironic failure of agnès films—given that we are an organization that supports women behind the camera—was our short-lived attempt to create activist video content. Although some of our videos were reasonably popular (our inaugural video received 470 views), we didn’t have enough staff members to both make videos and continue to produce the publication’s written content. Similarly, our monthly Twitter Chats featuring topics like women screenwriters and the history of women in film became too burdensome for our small staff to sustain and also had to come to an end.
Although those examples and many others like them are similar to those of fellow publications that are trying to figure out their organizational identity, one of our biggest limitations is harder for us to view as being a natural part of our development. As Gajjala (1999) argued, access to technology is not enough to bring everyone to the table. She asked, “is it true that technology or Internet access and use in and of itself will perform the great task of `equalising’ power structures? Do they guarantee a reduction in the social, political, and economic injustices faced by the de-empowered within the world’s hierarchies?” (p. 618). Her questions are aimed at non-Western women, but they can also be applied to the women who, as we’ve discussed throughout this text, are left out of many versions of the feminist movement: women of color, queer women, disabled women, and working-class women. Although we feature women from these denominations in our editorial and writing staff and in the content we produce, our content is still primarily written by and about white, middle-class women. Our very conscious attempts to change that aspect of our publication have only resulted in small improvements. We continue to struggle for a more diverse team and more diverse coverage, knowing that not featuring more stories by marginalized populations is our main liability as a publication.
We understand that some of our practices are couched in our particular situation of a faculty member collaborating with a group of undergraduate students; however, we believe that most people already running or wanting to start a technofeminist space will find at least some—if not all—of our principles useful. It is our belief that these principles will help others to navigate the at times thorny art of working with others to create something meaningful, knowing that the work will be imperfect and limited like the technofeminist movement itself.
Password: TechnofeministPart3
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