Lesbians and Tech: Analyzing Digital Media Technologies and Lesbian Experience

The rise of the popular Internet has coincided with the increasing acceptance, even assimilation, of lesbians into mainstream society. The visible presence of lesbians in the tech industry and in digitally mediated spaces raises a set of questions about the relationship between queer identities and Internet technologies. This introduction to a special issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies explores some of these questions and provides an overview of the articles that follow

On Epistemology, Whiteness, and Sexual Politics: Personal Reflections on Standpoint and White Supremacist Discourse

The preface to White Lies in which the author explains her personal relationship to the work of scholarship in the book

Race, Civil Rights, and Hate Speech in the Digital Era

The emergence of the digital era has had unintended consequences for race, civil rights, and hate speech.This chapter looks at the prevalence of both overtly racist sites, such as Stormfront, and at cloaked sites, that purport to advocate civil rights but disguise a racist agenda

Intervention: Reality TV, Whiteness, and Narratives of Addiction

Purpose – Reality TV shows that feature embodied “transformations” are popular, including Intervention, a program that depicts therapeutic recovery from addiction to “health.” The purpose of this chapter is to address the ways whiteness constitutes narratives of addiction on Intervention. Methodology – This analysis uses a mixed methodology. I conducted a systematic analysis of nine (9) seasons of one hundred and forty-seven (147) episodes featuring one hundred and fifty-seven individual “addicts” (157) and logged details, including race and gender. For the qualitative analysis, I watched each episode more than once (some, I watched several times) and took extensive notes on each episode. Findings – The majority of characters (87%) are white, and the audience is invited to gaze through a white lens that tells a particular kind of story about addiction. The therapeutic model valorized by Intervention rests on neoliberal regimes of self-sufficient citizenship that compel us all toward “health” and becoming “productive” citizens. Such regimes presume whiteness. Failure to comply with an intervention becomes a “tragedy” of wasted whiteness. When talk of racism erupts, producers work to re-frame it in ways that erase systemic racism. Social implications – The whiteness embedded in Intervention serves to justify and reinforce the punitive regimes of controlling African American and Latina/o drug users through the criminal justice system while controlling white drug users through self-disciplining therapeutic regimes of rehab. Originality – Systematic studies of media content consistently find a connection between media representations of addiction and narratives about race, yet whiteness has rarely been the critical focus of addiction

Transforming Student Engagement Through Documentary and Critical Media Literacy

Young people entering college today have grown up in a multimedia environment, yet the classroom they most often encounter reflects nineteenth-century pedagogy. This paper explores the paradigm shift that is making documentaries more widely accessible for use in the classroom; describes a pedagogical strategy for connecting a critical media literacy ‘reading’ of documentaries with more traditional reading of written texts; investigates the effectiveness of this method to engage students through critical media literacy in ways that encourage transformation. Effectiveness was measured in a voluntary, self-reported questionnaire, emailed to students after the semester they took Introductory Sociology. Students in the sample favored the use of documentary films in the classroom, reported seeing connections between assigned readings and films, and said that because of the films they were more able to grasp core sociological concepts

Race and racism in Internet Studies: A review and critique

Race and racism persist online in ways that are both new and unique to the Internet, alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate significantly both offline and on. As we mark 15 years into the field of Internet studies, it becomes necessary to assess what the extant research tells us about race and racism. This paper provides an analysis of the literature on race and racism in Internet studies in the broad areas of (1) race and the structure of the Internet, (2) race and racism matters in what we do online, and (3) race, social control and Internet law. Then, drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, including Hall’s spectacle of the Other and DuBois’s view of white culture, the paper offers an analysis and critique of the field, in particular the use of racial formation theory. Finally, the paper points to the need for a critical understanding of whiteness in Internet studies

Methodology Appendix: On the Craft of Sociology in the Digital Era

An appendix to the book that explores the methodology of studying the Internet

Race, Civil Rights, and Hate Speech in the Digital Era

The emergence of the digital era has had unintended consequences for race, civil rights, and hate speech.This chapter looks at the prevalence of both overtly racist sites, such as Stormfront, and at cloaked sites, that purport to advocate civil rights but disguise a racist agenda

Twitter and White Supremacy: A Love Story

Social media is a haven for hate groups, who use the instantaneous medium to organize and troll. So why do the platforms continue to protect them and not those they abuse

Racism in Modern Information and Communication Technologies

These are the remarks given at a keynote address at the United Nations, before the 10th session of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Geneva, Switzerland