IntersectionalIty and the Internet

How does Collins (2019) define intersectionality, and what tradition does she locate it in?

Intersectionality is a form of "critical inquiry and praxis" — not a static theory or identity checklist. It emerges from a "far broader political and intellectual landscape" than academic theory alone, rooted in resistant knowledge traditions among subordinated peoples. (Collins, 2019)

Collins (2019, p.10) — complete: "Gender, race, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, ability and age are not just categories…"

"…designed to make intersectionality more user-friendly for academic research. Rather these terms also reference important resistant knowledge traditions among subordinated peoples who oppose the social inequalities and social injustices that they experience." (Collins, 2019, p.10)

Collins (2019, p.15) — give the defining quote on relationality:

"There would be no intersectionality without relationality: focusing on relationships among entities constitutes a defining feature of intersectionality."

Collins (2019, p.17) — give the quote on epistemology:

"I place epistemology front stage in ways that show how ways of understanding truth frame knowledge projects in general and intersectionality in particular."

Collins (2019, p.17) — give the quote on intersectionality as dialogical and reflexive:

"Because intersectionality is fundamentally dialogical, no one person or group can have all of the answers… critical theorising means taking a position while recognising the provisional nature of the positions we take. It means being self-reflexive not only about other people's behaviour but also about one's own praxis."

What is Collins' key distinction between identity-listing and intersectionality as critical praxis?

Identity-listing: treating intersectionality as a checklist — more categories = more intersectional. Critical praxis (Collins): historically grounded, relational analysis of how colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and capitalism produce lived realities. Collins insists intersectionality "does not specify the configuration of categories, or even the number of relevant categories for a particular analysis" (p.40) — it interrogates power, not identities.

Daniels (2016, p.42) — what did early techno-utopian visions of the internet miss? Give the key quote.

Early scholarship imagined an internet with "no race, no gender." In reality: "Race and racism persist online, both in ways that are new and unique to the Internet and alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate significantly both offline and on." (Daniels, 2016, p.42)

Noble & Tynes (2016, p.2) — give their quote reframing the internet as a site of power:

"a way of thinking critically about the Internet as a system that reflects, and a site that structures, power and values."

Noble & Tynes (2016, p.3) — give their quote on what intersectional internet studies must interrogate:

"interrogate naturalised notions of the impartiality of hardware and software and what the Web means in differential ways that are imbued with power."

What do Noble & Tynes mean by "the many global internet(s)" and what does this challenge?

The internet exists in multiple, uneven, geographically and historically specific forms shaped by infrastructure, policy, capital, and colonial history. There is no singular neutral internet. As Daniels notes, "The Internet was developed in specific geographic places, institutional contexts and historical moments." (Noble & Tynes, 2016; Daniels, 2012)

Gray (2017, p.356) — give the quote on why internet access does not equal equality:

"participation is not always the same thing as power sharing."

Nakamura (2002, p.4) — complete: "Identity online is still typed…" and explain cybertyping:

"…still mired in oppressive roles even if the body has been left behind." Cybertyping: digital racial stereotypes produced through the interaction of interfaces, access economics, and racial ideology — not merely porting offline stereotypes but collaboratively producing them anew, stabilising white identity in digital space. (Nakamura, 2002, p.4)

Nakamura (2002, pp.26–27) — give the digital gold rush quote:

"Just as the gold rush depended on the exploited labour of Chinese immigrants, black slaves and Mexican workers and consequently created racial stereotypes to justify and explain their exploitation as 'Western expansion', so too does our current digital gold rush create mythologies of race that are nostalgic."

What does Everett (2002) argue about the "digital divide" narrative?

The "digital divide" is a racialised discourse allowing whiteness to attach itself to the internet as "progress and the future," positioning Black communities as temporally behind. Racial power is encoded from the outset — DOS command language used "master/slave" terminology. The divide frames inequality as a deficiency in Black communities rather than asking who built these systems and on whose terms. (Everett, 2002)

Boyd (2011, p.220) — give the key quote on how Facebook users described MySpace after the "white flight":

"The language used in these remarks resembles the same language used throughout the 1980s to describe city dwellers: dysfunctional families, perverts and deviants, freaks and outcasts, thieves, and the working class." Platform migration as racialised erasure — forgetting MySpace was itself classed and racialised erasure. (Boyd, 2011, p.220)

McMillan Cottom (2016, p.225) — give the quote on algorithmic targeting, and state her broader argument:

"Targeting inequality is transformed into a technical efficiency." For-profit college algorithms exploit the intersection of race, class, and gender — shared vulnerabilities across social locations. Black cyberfeminism: centre Black women's digital experiences to expose how structural algorithmic inequality actually works. (McMillan Cottom, 2016, p.225)

Kanai & Gill (2021, p.11) — give their definition of woke capitalism:

"we use 'woke' to signify the corporate extraction of value from the struggles for recognition led by historically oppressed populations."

What are Kanai & Gill's (2021) four mechanisms of woke capitalism?

1. Disarticulation of social struggle — movements absorbed and neutralised / 2. Aestheticisation of difference — diversity becomes visual, not political / 3. Reformulation of injustice in individual terms — structural becomes personal / 4. Renders visibility as good in itself — representation without redistribution

Kanai & Gill (2021, p.24) — give the quote on what woke capitalism does to marginalised identities:

"Nondominant people are recast as visible, neoliberal subjects of potential value, their historical experiences of oppression intertwined with an associated generalised sense of positivity, possibility, belief in capitalist futurity, and commitment to self-work."

Sobande (2021) — what do CGI Black influencers like Shudu represent? Give both key quotes.

"digitally rendered depictions of an ultimately agentless and impersonated form of Blackness" that reproduce "colonialist ways that Black African people and their cultures are treated as a marketable and exploitable commodity." (Sobande, 2021)

Sobande (2019, p.2725) — how does she use Audre Lorde to illustrate woke-washing? Give the quote.

"A clear example of how feminist ideas have been decontextualised and recontextualised via consumer culture is the co-optation of Black lesbian feminist Lorde's (1988) notion of 'self-care' and its radical potential." Lorde's radical political critique of capitalism is reduced to consumerism. (Sobande, 2019, p.2725)

Miyake (2023) — how is race encoded in Imma's virtual body? Give both key quotes.

Through "virtual signifiers — immaterial skin — that materialise the semiotics of Japanese-ness." Imma is "a self-referential being without a being yet burdened by racialised and gendered reference." (Miyake, 2023)

What is Miyake's (2023) concept of "digital Orientalism" and how does Imma exemplify it?

Digital Orientalism: the Western consumption of racialised and gendered fantasies of Asian femininity through digital media. Imma commodifies Japanese-ness as immaterial aesthetic — exotic, submissive, flawlessly decorative — for global consumption, echoing colonial visual fantasies while appearing futuristic and diverse. (Miyake, 2023)

Shin & Lee (2023) — what gaze shapes Black CGI influencers like Shudu, and what does it express?

A "discriminatory gaze" expressing "sexual desires and voyeuristic fantasies" — conforming to colonial visual regimes that objectified and exoticised women of colour, now re-encoded digitally. (Shin & Lee, 2023)

Shin & Lee (2023) — how do they describe the structural function of Black virtual fashion influencers?

They "function as colonial bodies in the fashion industry." Aesthetic extraction of Black cultural symbols — geometric patterns, stacked neck rings, face markings — constructed by white creators as fantasy "authentic" African femininity, furthering an exploitative textile industry disproportionately based in the Global South. (Shin & Lee, 2023)

Sigurðardóttir (2020) — why must we distinguish CGI figures from the women of colour they claim to represent?

Feminist discourse risks "naturalising their existence and equating them to real women," obscuring that avatars are produced within colonial and patriarchal logics, not by the communities they visually appropriate. One cannot "do intersectionality" without the historical processes that made it necessary. (Sigurðardóttir, 2020)

Lundström (2012) — how does she describe racialised representation in popular culture, and how does this apply to CGI?

Bodies of colour become "commodities of colonialism." Applied to CGI: Shudu and Imma represent colonial extraction — cultural symbols, skin tones, and bodily aesthetics appropriated for commercial value, detached from the communities and histories that produced them. (Lundström, 2012)

How does the internet reproduce racial inequalities? Span the chronological arc in your answer.

Design: Nakamura — cybertypes fix racial hierarchy in interface cultures. Platform economics: Boyd — white flight racialises platform migration. Algorithms: McMillan Cottom — algorithmic targeting exploits racialised vulnerability. Representation: Sobande — CGI extracts Black aesthetics without compensating Black creators. Resistance: Carlson & Frazer — settler gaze and politics of hope. Underlying all: "Race and racism persist online…alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms." (Daniels, 2016, p.42)

What can Black feminist thought contribute to the study of digital media and culture?

Collins: intersectionality must reference "resistant knowledge traditions among subordinated peoples." McMillan Cottom's Black cyberfeminism reveals how algorithms exploit shared racialised and gendered vulnerabilities. Noble & Tynes use intersectionality as "both analytic strategy and critical praxis" grounded in "offline and online subjectivities of participants" (p.26). Sobande shows how Black feminist concepts are extracted and depoliticised by digital capitalism.

Carlson & Frazer (2020) — what is the "settler gaze" and what does it reveal about intersectional internet studies?

Indigenous Australian social media users navigate awareness of an imagined anti-Indigenous audience observing "in bad faith" — a digital panopticon causing self-policing. Reveals that internet freedom is structurally uneven: colonial power determines whose expression is free vs surveilled. Their "politics of hope" = counter-practice refusing colonial legibility. (Carlson & Frazer, 2020)

What is "digital epidermalisation" and which thinkers does it draw on?

Drawing on Fanon (via Simone Browne), digital epidermalisation is the process by which racial meaning is imposed on the surface of the body — even in virtual spaces. Race is encoded through visual surfaces and design, producing racialisation without lived embodiment. Applied to CGI: Shudu and Imma are epidermal surfaces without subjects — race extracted as skin, divorced from experience.

What is "cosmetic multiculturalism" and how does it connect to woke capitalism?

Superficial inclusion of racialised identities (diverse avatars, CGI models, diversity branding) that appears progressive while leaving colonial, capitalist, and racial hierarchies intact. Prioritises visibility over structural change. Maps onto Kanai & Gill's fourth mechanism — rendering visibility as good in itself. Term appears in Nakamura (2002) to describe how structural racism is erased through the veneer of diversity.

What is "identity tourism" (Nakamura, 2002) and why is it a problem rather than liberation?

White users adopting racialised online personas (e.g. as Black women in early chat rooms), treating race as a costume to be worn and discarded "without real life consequences." Not freedom from race but its commodification — users produce stereotyped caricatures reinforcing hierarchy. The tourist consumes the Other as spectacle without inhabiting the experience. (Nakamura, 2002)

Map the key scholars across the 2000s → 2010s → 2020s arc of intersectional internet studies:

2000s: Nakamura (cybertyping, identity tourism); Everett (digital divide as racial discourse; DOS encoding) / 2010s: Boyd (white flight); Noble & Tynes (intersectional internet); McMillan Cottom (Black cyberfeminism); Sobande (woke-washing, Lorde) / 2020s: Kanai & Gill (woke capitalism); Carlson & Frazer (settler gaze); Dosekun (#BeingFemaleInNigeria); Cololo (Crazy Rich Asians — digital blackface)

What is your core essay argument for II, and how do you reframe it for each question type?

Core: "doing intersectionality" = tracing colonial logics and power structures, not listing identities. Empirical anchor: CGI influencers (Shudu, Imma) — bodies without subjects. / Supo Q: Collins → Noble & Tynes → CGI case. / "To what extent productively?": productive = exposes woke capitalism + colonial logics; unproductive = cosmetic multiculturalism. / Woke capitalism Q: Kanai & Gill 4 mechanisms → CGI as textbook case → Sobande on woke-washing.