Conversations Across Generations: Tracing an Intellectual, Political, and Literary Genealogy From Women of Color Feminist Anthologies to Women of Color Feminist Tumblr

This dissertation examines the digital pedagogy and political genealogy of women of color feminist Tumblr, a networked community of antiracist users on the social media platform Tumblr. I show how these users’ free collection and distribution of social justice educational materials online constitutes a digital feminist of color pedagogy, one which challenges entrenched hierarchies of knowledge-production and circulation. Using textual and discursive analysis as well as social media-specific qualitative methods, I argue that women of color feminist Tumblr harnesses social media as an alternative feminist classroom space—one which challenges the presumed location of feminist and ethnic studies as they have come to be incorporated into the neoliberal multicultural university (Ferguson) and which reimagines their “theoretical subject” (Alarcón) as online users who lack institutional access to these fields’ emancipatory knowledge. Further, I show how the very ethics of this online feminist classroom space are derived from the longer history of women of color feminist praxis and the theorization of “women of color” as a cross-racial, coalitional feminist identity. Building upon the work of Norma Alarcón, Chela Sandoval, and Analouise Keating, who argue that Third World feminism’s “most potentially transformational theories” were largely “bypassed and ignored” (Keating) by mainstream feminist scholarship, my dissertation intervenes by analyzing Third World feminism’s “digital afterlife” (Adair and Nakamura) on social media. By centering questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the digital humanities, I join emergent critiques of the digital humanities (Bailey, Cong-Huyen, Lothian, and Phillips 2016) and show how ordinary users transform social media platforms into powerful tools of feminist (re)education.PhDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163201/1/jalzate_1.pd