Strange Spaces & Stranger Sensibilities: Feminist Counter-Publicity in the Digital Age.

This dissertation offers a theoretical account of the politics of feminist computer-mediated communication (CMC), arguing that both the discursive dimensions of CMC and the affordances of CMC platforms cultivate new public subjects. The analysis challenges dominant approaches to the politics of online public speech that remain tethered to liberal public sphere theory or more recently, to radical democratic theory. I do so by attending to the enduring significance of embodiment—specifically, the embodied particularity of public speakers and of their addressees—in over thirty years of feminist CMC. Examining diverse moments from that history, I suggest that feminist CMC contributes to democratic theory and theories of language politics through its enactment of a “feminized” public subject: a subject whose acknowledged vulnerabilities demand attention to social and political inequality as they reframe it and whose communicative practices engender productively new, and newly contrary, postures of agonistic struggle. Chapter One explores early discourse about “cyberspace” as a new public sphere. Disambiguating conflicting accounts of what disembodied communication enabled, I show how a liberal conception of public speech was rearticulated as both an ideal and an impossibility online, thus diminishing the perceived political value of CMC. Chapter Two examines feminist speech on Usenet, an early and influential CMC platform. I illustrate how affordances of public CMC defanged the political speech of Usenet feminists, rendering it the equivalent of what Lauren Berlant terms “female complaint.” Chapter Three argues that the “safe spaces” of the contemporary feminist blogosphere cultivate an alternative “feminized” subject whose complaints are better understood as political demands that challenge rather than reflect neoliberal hegemony. Chapter Four considers the recent migration of trigger warnings (TWs) from online to offline spaces, in order to probe the reception of the “feminized” political subject. Pursuing the affective resonances between what researchers have termed “white fragility” and the reception of TWs, I consider how a viscerally-charged rejection of embodied vulnerability works to sustain the phantasmatic figure of an abstract, sovereign self in left-progressive as well as liberal political visions. Key Words: Feminist Theory Public Sphere Theory, Feminist Media StudiesPhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120905/1/bwashick_1.pd