Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking

Blogs, Timelines, Feeds, and Community

Contributions by Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, Minu Basnet, Robin R. Means Coleman University of Michigan, Sonja M. Brown Givens, Bernice Huiying Chan, Linda Charmaraman, Caitlin Gunn, Alexa A. Harris, Kandace L. Harris, Makini L. King, Layota Lee, Temple Price, Amanda Richer, Keisha Edwards Tassie Edited by Keisha Edwards Tassie, Sonja M. Brown Givens

Publication date:

11 November 2015

Length of book:

188 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

237x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498528474

Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking: Blogs, Timelines, Feeds, and Community explores and critically analyzes the motivations and uses of social media by women of color. This edited collection seeks to determine how, and why, women of color make strategic use of social media as a social, professional, personal, and political tool for navigating the world. The contributors uniquely address the motivations and pathways for establishing virtual communities by, and for, women of color. Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking contributes to dialogues concerning gender, race, class, sexuality, politics, and uses of social media.

Chapter 1: Surviving and thriving: Women of Color Cultivating Virtual Social Capital,
Linda Charmaraman, Bernice Huiying Chan, Temple Price, and Amanda Richer
Chapter 2: Hashtagging from the Margins: Women of Color Engaged in Feminist Consciousness-Raising on Twitter, Caitlin Gunn
Chapter 3: The Arab Spring between the Streets and the Tweets: Examining the Embodied (e)Resistance through the Feminist Revolutionary Body, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui
Chapter 4: Move, Get Out The Way: Black “Women-of-Words” Voyaging on the Information Superhighway, Alexa Harris
Chapter 5: Virtual Homeplace: (Re)Constructing the Body through Social Media, Latoya Lee
Chapter 6: Epistemic Advantage and Subaltern Enclaves: Tracing Anti-Street Harassment Discourse through Social Media Usage by Women of Color, Minu Basnet
Chapter 7: “Follow Me on Instagram”: “Best Self” Identity Construction and Gaze through Hashtag Activism and Selfie Self-Love, Kandace Harris
Chapter 8: A Blog, A Bittersweet Mess, and Black and White Identity Development, Makini L. King

These accessible, data-driven essays make the argument that women of color have affirmatively used social media as a way of leveraging themselves out of being 'a double-minority in society.' The first essay observes that 'women now tend to dominate Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram,' whereas Twitter and Tumblr reveal 'no significant gender differences.' From Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui's exploration of the role of Twitter in the Arab spring to essays about 'glamalectual' literary communities and bodily self-image, the essays look at how social media redress patriarchal and racist hegemonies of force. Indeed, as Minu Basnet argues, the web provides 'subaltern enclaves' to counter the derogations of street harassment. In his work Gary Lemons has contended that black men can add an extra disunion to intersectional feminism as allies; Tassie and Givens show that social media can further extend the identities of women of color without diffusing or assimilating them. The book is successful in arguing that cyberspace has amplified the maneuvering room available to women of color. The reality persists, though, that corporate interests own most major social media spaces. Even in virtual reality, privilege and oppression may remain. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers; professionals; general readers.