La Red Informativa de Mujeres de Argentina

This chapter takes a deeper look at a transformation of the simple distribution list application into a vibrant online counterpublic. It profiles one of the region’s longest-lasting national feminist discussion lists: RIMA, the Red Informativa de Mujeres de Argentina (Women’s Information Network of Argentina). Large and diverse, it includes members from every Argentine province, all South American countries, and beyond; and incorporates women from many walks of life, who espouse different political ideologies. The chapter analyzes how RIMA’s values, developed through pre-existing national feminist counterpublic spaces, inform their online practices. Together, “Rimeras” have built a counterpublic that encourages personal and community growth, difficult debates, and campaigns for social change.

From Privacy to Lesbian Visibility

This chapter shows how Latin American lesbian feminist internet practices reflect their own circumstances and values. These have led them to focus their internet-based counterpublic work on privacy and visibility. They need a place for their private life, where they can find each other and build community away from the threat of violence and rejection that still, despite significant changes in their legal status, characterizes their daily existence. Yet they also need support for visibilidad lesbica, lesbian visibility, to confront exclusion, bringing the fact of their existence and their demands for the worlds in which they want to live to larger publics. In doing so, they have also reinterpreted internet applications towards their own ends, such as through the innovative project of a blog-based archive of lesbian history.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the conceptual framework and main subjects of the book. It acquaints readers with a feminist sociomaterial approach, which analyzes technology and society, particularly its gendered aspects, as an integrated whole, by insisting on the need to analyze internet practices in context. It also explains why Latin American feminist and queer counterpublics are ideal sites for the evaluation of global trends in digitally enhanced activism. This has been the Global South region at the forefront of internet adoption, as well as one where long-standing, vibrant, and diverse gender- and sexuality-based organizing has achieved notable successes in terms of political representation, legal reform, and identity recognition. The introduction also delves into why counterpublics are a key “information ecology” in which to study the mutual constitution of internet and society. It then covers the field research upon which the analysis is based, and offers an overview of the remaining chapters.

Conclusion

The conclusion to this book offers a brief portrayal of how the 2014 Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter used internet applications to expand and enrich this unique regional counterpublic. It then summarizes the ways in which feminist and queer counterpublic organizations have reoriented and refined the way they have woven the internet into their alternative media-fueled counterpublics. Despite ongoing struggles with inequality and resources, they have used the internet to enhance each of the three elements of their counterpublics: developing members’ identity, constructing community, and negotiating strategies to influence wider publics. But, perhaps even more remarkably, their engagement with the physical, content, and logical layers of the internet that show how a diverse set of activists have interpreted the internet into their own vernacular.

Weaving the “Invisible Web”

This chapter explores how architects of more recent Latin American counterpublics – particularly feminist, women’s, and queer organizations in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil – have integrated the internet to support their goals of inclusion, community-building, and strategizing for social change. It focuses on the early experiences with the internet to capture that time of experimentation, exultation, and confusion, but also incorporates the advent of social media. Activists have struggled to confront how class, ethnic and racial inequalities, as well as workloads, are exacerbated by a new technology. Nevertheless, they have linked chains of access across their own digital divides; built community on the basis of low-cost services; and made an impact on national and international politics using a range of applications.

The Creation of “a Modern Weaving Machine”

This chapter offers an alternative account of the invention of the internet. It tells the story of how social justice-oriented web enthusiasts built the internet as we know it today – a networks of networks – because they wanted to ensure access for activist counterpublics around the world. They concretized their goals with the formation of the Association for Progressive Communications, a network of civil society-based Internet Service Providers. Within this global project, feminist communication activists carved out a space for women’s organizing through the APC’s Women’s Networking Support Programme. From their early efforts to today, such activists have contested the gendering of internet technology as the province of men. In doing so, they have also subverted the West’s domination over the internet by extending resources to women from the Global South, particularly Latin America, to nurture their own counterpublics.

Conceiving Latin American Feminist Counterpublics

This chapter traces the historical outlines of Latin American feminist counterpublics to show the kind of organizing, including alternative media use, that provided the foundation upon which more recent counterpublics would build. Through their publications and face-to-face meetings, activists during the late 19th and early 20th century developed strategies to name and claim women’s rights long before the advent of the internet. Their work served as a model for the explosion of activism beginning in the 1970s, when new regional publications enriched an unprecedented, and globally unreplicated counterpublic space, that of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters, or large regional meetings. The chapter also profiles two global communication projects in which Latin American counterpublics were embedded, and ends with an analysis of the very first computer-mediated project to promote women’s rights at the international venue of the 1975 UN World conference on women.