Chapter 16 Online Feminist Publishing and Content Creation as Feminist Infrastructure in India

Technopolitics of Infrastructure

Drawing on literature and insights from our study, we take feminist infrastructures here to mean infrastructures that are inclusive, accessible, multimodal, and developed with an ethics of care. This is an understanding of infrastructure as inherently political and determined by structures of power and privilege. The gendered production of infrastructures (Siemiatycki, Enright, and Valverd) and its impact on the visibility, access to resources, and safety of marginalized and vulnerable communities has been an underlying theme of feminist work and writing in India (Mehta and Eapen; Gurumurthy; Surepally; Kumari). The affordances of the digital in facilitating the creation of a public sphere in India that allows creative expression, activism, and building networks of solidarity and care has been a primary reason that many content creators and publishers working on gender, sexuality, and feminism have turned to digital media (see section 3 of Figure 16.1). As section 1 also indicates, the transition from print to digital and multimodal forms of content creation in social media has been a significant aspect of this change in India as well, gradually shifting content beyond text as the primary publishing and content creation medium.5 This shift is related to important issues of limitations in the formats, languages, and accessibility of content, which are also not entirely resolved in the digital medium.

A related development in India is the growth of public discourse on the internet and in mainstream media about rights, access, and identities and the availability of online content (especially on social media); that is, about a diversity of voices that were earlier less heard in the public sphere due to systemic and intersectional forms of social exclusion across gender, sexuality, religion, caste, and disability. These former absences in public discourse, however, were not new. At the same time, the engagement of women in nationalist and anticolonial movements, including social movements related to caste, language, and ethnicity, has become increasingly prominent in recent years in ways that inform Indian feminist writing—particularly on access, identity, and marginalization (Pawar and Moon; Roy; Schöningh, Maya, and Eismann). Debates around intersectionality, therefore, continue to be an important aspect of the discussion in India on antisubordination frameworks in feminist writing and feminist practice (Abhishek Shah). Many emerging content-production platforms also increasingly incorporate feminist principles into their visual design (Costanza-Chock; Bardzell), thereby offering a critical perspective on the form, diversity of representation, and accessibility of existing digital infrastructures. (See points connected to the visual design icon—under “Technopolitical Dimensions of Infrastructure”—in Figure 16.1.)

Despite the many affordances of digital platforms that have aided the growth of feminist publishing and content production, however, constraints remain. Safety continues to be a primary concern because of the urgent need for methods and tools to address online gender-based violence, discrimination, and hate speech. Also needed are policies to address data protection, surveillance, and censorship, along with measures to safeguard privacy and anonymity. (See points under “Safety” in section 5 of Figure 16.1.) Uneven access to capacity-building in some of these areas—not just in terms of technical skills or languages of access, but also of legal expertise—is also a significant problem. The growth of community infrastructures such as feminist servers, anticaste and queer archives, and alternative social media networks has been an essential intervention in this regard.6 Many community infrastructures have been set up with limited funding, resources, and technical capacities. Open-access platforms, tools, and software are crucial aspects of such community initiatives, enabling a minimal-computing approach to infrastructure-building that is adapted for the challenges imposed by prohibitive costs of proprietary technologies (especially as it relates to accessibility and digital security). However, open-access tools and software often entail their own challenges in ease of use, safety, and sustainability. The very terminology required to navigate their policies and best practices (a terminology that is technical, legal, and difficult to translate conceptually across languages) is an impediment for which approachable solutions are needed that would much aid in feminist infrastructure building. (See under “Languages” in section 4 of Figure 16.1.)

Many of these affordances and constraints of digital platforms bearing on feminist infrastructure also need to be contextualized in a changing environment in India of media-platform ownership and regulation (see “Ownership” in section 5 of Figure 16.1), the growing digital economy, and increasing digital surveillance. These factors shape the growth of feminist infrastructures and affect the nature and forms of the content that they convey about gender, sexuality, and feminism.

On Infrastructure and Content

The number and variety of feminist content-production platforms using digital media for the purposes listed in sections 1 and 3 of Figure 16.1 indicate how infrastructure significantly influences content related to feminism, gender, and sexuality. As also occurs in the general case of the publishing industry and commercial interests affecting work on these issues (Butalia and Menon), infrastructure that amplifies and alters the spaces of activism, research, and policy-making opens up new possibilities for focus and intervention—and thus for the overall advance of the women’s movement in India as it has coevolved over the last few decades with social movements addressing identities, languages, and exclusion. Social media platforms and self-publishing initiatives, for example, have enabled the emergence of more work previously considered niche, such as on sexuality and disability.7 Also, more publishing venues for positive narratives about bodies, desire, and pleasure and for the creation of affective networks of care and solidarity are now mediated through some of these platforms.8

At base, such new discursive spaces for content creation are motivated by the need to critique colonial infrastructures of knowledge production that once determined not just what content was produced but how it could be distributed through networks of publication, translation, archiving, and now digitization. The question that we ask based on our study and visualization is how the development of critical digital infrastructures can help advance work that, while it acknowledges continuing constraints on knowledge production and sharing, advances openness, inclusivity, and accessibility.

Digital Infrastructures as Sustainable Communities

DH in a global context can contribute to work on critical infrastructure studies and, specifically, feminist infrastructures through shared values of openness, accessibility, multimodality, and inclusion—especially in the context of efforts to decolonize DH by drawing attention to the uneven and inequitable development of digital infrastructures in different parts of the world. While the early focus of DH in India has largely been on academic research (because the field evolved primarily in the university setting), Indian DH has increasingly turned to broader, socially engaged questions of access, ownership and regulation of the internet, and digital infrastructures. In the process, however, DH in India reveals itself to be open to critical questions about its own resource-intensive infrastructure. Subject to limitations in access and digital literacy across regions in a way that affects what content can be digitized and whom that content can reach, DH in India does not just revolve around classic DH problems regarding, for example, corpora, tools, and skills, but also around the infrastructural conditions for those capacities. These are issues bearing on intersectional forms of marginalization (including linguistic and sociocultural ones) both within and outside academic research. The issues are critical for the development of feminist infrastructures that, creatively and innovatively, might advance access to information, an affordable internet and devices, digital literacy, capacity-building, safety, resources, and funding, and, importantly, the centering of the voices and ownership of the communities affected by systemic forms of marginalization and disparity. (See “Access,” “Safety,” “Inclusion,” and “Ownership” in section 5 of Figure 16.1.) The outcomes to be hoped for from feminist infrastructures in India, assisted by a DH that addresses critical infrastructure problems, will be the feminist infrastructural institutions, organizations, practices, tools, community libraries, mechanisms, and platforms set forth in section 6, on “What could feminist infrastructures look like?” Additional future goals include creating sustainability for online feminist publishing and content production in India by doing the documenting and archiving work needed to build a legacy for such infrastructure.

Such is a vision, which is what our visualization really is, of what digital feminist infrastructures in India—engaging with critical infrastructure studies and global DH to develop open and inclusive technologies spanning across geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries—can be.

Notes

1. 1. Although there is no available definition of this concept, one of the earliest instances of the use of the term was the first “Imagine a Feminist Internet” meeting called by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in 2014, and subsequent efforts to build a “framework to articulate how we imagine the internet as a public space that is safe, engaging, open, free, and conducive to feminist movements.” See Fascendini.

2. 2. While still to be defined, this term denotes several infrastructural aspects that have been imperative to the growth and sustenance of feminist networks and practice. See Toupin and Hache.

3. 3. Our full-size visualization is downloadable as a PDF file at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/critical-infrastructure-studies-and-digital-humanities/resources?tag=chapter%2016

4. 4. This study was conducted by Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu at the Centre for Internet and Society, India. It includes a literature review and twelve semistructured interviews with founders, editors, and contributors of feminist publications and content creation platforms in India. The authors also conducted two workshops with a diverse set of participants working in the areas of arts and design and urban infrastructures to understand the current perception of a feminist internet or feminist infrastructures among the public and what they could be. The study commenced in the latter half of 2018, and while the research was completed, the final report was significantly delayed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and other institutional challenges; it was published in March 2024 and can be seen here: https://cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures.

5. 5. As an illustrative example of this, see Genderlog India and work by Indu Lalitha Harikumar on Instagram.

6. 6. For work on feminist servers, see the Community Owned Wireless Knowledge Infrastructure (COWKI) and Co-Creating Local Knowledge Network (CLKN) projects in Karnataka, India (Ray Murray et al.). An example of an anticaste archive is Dalit Art Archives. An example of an alternative social media network is Smashboard.

7. 7. For example, see a website created in India, Sexuality and Disability.

8. 8. For example, see the Agents of Ishq website, created in India. This is a “multimedia project about sex, love and desire with the aim of creating an inclusive, pleasure-positive and celebratory language for sex and sexuality,” thus opening a space to engage with topics that may still be considered taboo, especially in mainstream media. The reference here is also to networks of care that emerge with increasing online feminist content, often mediated through social media. See Toffoletti et al.

Bibliography