Margaret Rhee

Short-circuiting Citizenship: Feminist Movement Building in our Digital Age
In this talk, I present a work in progress, a set of concerns and questions surrounding the politics of the digital and how it relates to the transformation of feminist and racial equity movement and discourse. I draw from sociologist T.H. Marshall articulation of citizenship, in which citizens exercise “the equal right to be recognized as unequal…” For “citizens,” excluded from democracy, the ability to exercise unequal standing, has been accessible in a way that is unprecedented by way of social media tools such as twitter. The platforms in which marginalized subjects express their possession of speech have transformed. Now, Anderson’s articulation of “imagined community” through the press must be articulated through the new media systems of speech. No longer can the nation-state ignore discourse from citizens expressing marginality. No longer can we understand democracy, citizenship, and nation through a lens that is not of ones & zeros. Through short readings of examples, I offer how feminist discourse and education transforms our notions of participation and citizenship in our digital age.

Biography
Margaret Rhee is a feminist poet, new media artist, and scholar. Her research broadly focuses on technology, and intersections with feminist, queer, and ethnic studies. Her scholarship has been published at Amerasia Journal, Information Society, Cinema Journal, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy. With Dr. Brittney Cooper, she co-edited “Hacking the Black/White Binary,” a special issue of Ada: A Journal on Gender, Technology, and New Media. As a new media artist she is co-lead and conceptualist of From the Center a feminist HIV/AIDS digital storytelling education project implemented in the San Francisco Jail (www.ourstorysf.org ^2). For this project, she was awarded the Chancellor’s Award in Public Service from UC Berkeley and the Yamashita Prize Honorable Mention for young activists by the Center for Social Change. She served on the board of directors for social justice organizations, DataCenter and the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. Currently, she is the Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and new media studies from the University of California, Berkeley.