The reading resource I have chosen is from the online publishing resource The Funambulist which was originally published in Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research which is a queer feminist, open access journal produced in Beirut, Lebanon. The article “From Positionality to Messiness, Archiving Feminist Struggles Online” by Ghiwa Sayegh explores the struggles and triumphs of expanding feminist knowledge in a digital age and the labour involved in making content available and evident. The article focuses on the transition from disruption and locality into a documentation mindset while retaining the tradition of alternatively mapping sites of knowledge to propel feminist epistemologies forward. By creating a feminist archive it consciously produces a political alternative to mainstream media and reactionary responses to empire and western hegemony.
Sayegh articulates so clearly the need for a compendium of feminist intellectual and cultural work in the following lines: “The labor put towards a feminist archive, in its here and its now, becomes an act of resistance to fixed localities and temporalities. Within this framework, contexts are no longer defined by borders imposed by nation-states, but instead become informed by common histories and overlaps in political imaginings” (2019). In transnational feminist scholarship it is imperative acknowledge that geopolitical are not the only site of contestation or struggle therefore our scope must be more encompassing and not limited to the spatial; by considering the dimensions of time and the digital realm we can achieve justice on the ground and on the web. Furthermore, by taking on the task of creating a digital archive it is a way to immortalise and historicise the personal as resistance and creates an outlook for political imaginaries. As a result, with intersectionality as praxis, the aggregate cannot be dissociated from the ways in which struggles move against each other thereby eliminating realities as sediment and obstruct which silences histories. Kohl is multidirectional and does not fall into the patriarchal myth of linear causality which allows for chaos and uncertainty which is part of the beautiful process of being a human and helps to challenge the boundaries of legitimate knowledge. The exploration of the body online and offline in feminisms is a way to watch ourselves becoming political discursive, a moving text or work of art which can be transcribed, prescribed, and signified based on the eyes which behold the subject. Noting Jac sm Kee they stress “the need to think about feminist digital infrastructures not just as technical responses, but a response that subverts the current logic capital of technology and access” (Sayegh, 2019 par. 7). The project of feminist archiving on the internet is not merely a medium for struggle it is rather a platform for emancipation and a launch pad for dismantling systems and structures of oppression.
Keywords: media, feminism, compendium, archive
Author: Anne Goodfellow
Unfortunately I am unable to view the article because it is hidden behind a subscription wall, but I wanted to respond to what you have posted here in your blog entry. As stated in your post, “by creating a feminist archive it consciously produces a political alternative to mainstream media and reactionary responses to empire and western hegemony.” This is so crucial for feminist activists who are so often erased, ignored, or denied in mainstream political discourse, and creating our own spaces and archives to define the issues that impact us, both locally and globally, allows us to define our own experiences without outside all the assumption or interference. As you say, it serves as “a way to immortalise and…