姜 楠
上海政法学院 201701
Despite encountering the book more than two decades apart, both authors of this article view the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) as a cornerstone of our feminist consciousness. Perhaps this is not surprising: published in 1981 by the collectively run woman of color press Kitchen Table, This Bridge is now countercultural canon, one of many radical interventions into white feminist theory that now undergirds much intersectional work on gender, race, class, and homophobia. What is striking, however, are the stark differences between the pedagogical contexts in which each author first read This Bridge. Lisa encountered the book as a teacher of English composition and postcolonial studies in the 1990s and acquired it as a desk copy after assigning it to her students as a required text through Sonoma State University’s campus bookstore. Cass’s first copy of this book was, arguably, not a book at all but instead an illegally shared file into which some anonymous readers had merged various scanned chapters into a single PDF. Encountering the file on the social blogging website Tumblr.com eventually led Cass into a network of online woman of color feminism, a community of learners and vernacular educators who were dedicated to enacting social justice by sharing radical texts and engaging in long, written debates about them. This digital consciousness raising on Tumblr was Cass’s first feminist classroom but one in which nobody—not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online—was compensated for providing his education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr.
To contrast these two pedagogical scenes is not just to make an argument about technological change between the 1980s and today. It is also to bring a critical function of This Bridge—its capacity to represent and interpolate a network of socially engaged readers and peer educators—into conversation with scholarly debates about digital pedagogy and academic labor. By looking at This Bridge, in both analog and digital forms, as a networked pedagogical object, we trace how it calls attention to the social conditions of its production as part of its larger argument about the importance of circulation and connection for “third world” women’s narratives. This Bridge invites readers to become vernacular educators, prefiguring the world of digital pedagogy by invoking the power of networked learning for minoritized reading communities. At the same time, both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces. For scholars and teachers thinking through the transformative potential of digital pedagogy, an examination of This Bridge and its attendant social networks calls us to construct new norms of consent, citation, and remuneration for women of color doing unpaid educational labor online.
Such a conversation is overdue, in no small part because many of our students engage with literary and cultural critique on the Internet. Media scholars such as Henry Jenkins (2006) have long studied how the “convergence culture” of engaging analog texts in digital contexts constructs networked communities and remixed texts. Other scholars have zeroed in on how this vernacular textual engagement online mirrors scholarly and pedagogical labor. In her analysis of Sherlock Holmes fans on the early Internet, for example, Roberta Pearson (1997) identifies how users on online message boards used networks to produce and share “Sherlockian scholarship” or “Conan Doyle scholarship,” as well as building “personal connections” to the characters (some even romantic in nature) and with other readers. Lisa herself (Nakamura 2013) has published previously on how online discussion and curation of analog books on social networks like GoodReads .com blend literary peer education and social play. Such work importantly extends earlier discussions of the role of textual circulation in the constitution of vernacular reading publics, as theorized by scholars such as Stuart Hall and Janice Radway, into digital spaces.
The evidence that readers engage passionately with both peers and texts online is clear. What has been less clear is what these networks of informal education mean to teachers in university classrooms. For many, seeing vernacular engagement with literary work online has fueled a hunt for the sorts of interactive pedagogies that can, as Michelle D. Miller (2014, xii) has written, “connect students socially and fire them up emotionally.” Since at least the 1980s, when experimental pedagogues began workshopping student paper drafts over shared computer terminals on campuses, educators have noticed that the teacher-student and student-student interactions afforded in networked environments could be both productive and progressive. Presaging contemporary proponents of networked pedagogy such as Cathy Davidson (2012) and Jeff Jarvis (2013), Edward M. Jennings (1990, 47) wrote, “Classrooms imply, but do not demand, norms and simultaneity and hierarchy. Networks foster, but cannot guarantee, individuality, unpredictability, and horizontal relationships.” Like the Sherlockians in Pearson’s study, who constructed elaborate communal historiographies of Victorian London while obsessing over their favorite mysteries, Jennings observed that students in his early “networked” writing class learned through reading and commenting on each other’s work in progress online, upending the “writer-mentor” relationship of the traditional classroom. In optimistic accounts of early networked readers and writers like these, the digital space was imagined to be a nonhierarchical and peer-driven sociality that would ultimately lead to more student participation and learning. Today, even though scholars of race and gender have rebutted the “nonhierarchical” thesis, it seems probable that there is important pedagogical potential in the “interest-driven participation” fostered by digital social platforms.
Although a desire to leverage social networks for learning has certainly attracted corporate profiteers, it has also produced a new level of interaction between university spaces and nonacademic communities. The problem with this understanding of pedagogy, however, which the justice-oriented digital pedagogies such as the ones we describe above have largely adopted, is that (as the language implies) “construction” and “maintenance” are hard work.
For women of color, the burden of immaterial labor is often coupled with outright abuse. Saidiya Hartman (2016, 171) has shown how the language of the “housewife,” while valuable here as metaphor, operates in a wholly different register for black women: in addition to the massive labor theft and dehumanizing project that was slavery, women in the “house” were “forced to perform the affective and communicative labor necessary for the sustenance of white families at the expense of their own.” This legacy has seeped into contemporary pedagogical dynamics, as contributors to the anthology Presumed Incompetent describe at length: women of color professors are often positioned as “mammies” or “servants” in traditional classroom settings too (Lugo-Lugo 2012; Wilson 2012). Combine that already racialized and gendered dynamic with the well documented hotbed of sexist and racist harassment that is the Internet, and the stakes of doing teaching labor in open digital forums are even higher (Loza 2014). If the vernacular writing and commentary that women of color produce online is not only producing free content for social networks but is resulting in violence being aimed at their persons, then these feminists are essentially paying to do what professional academics would consider “digital pedagogy.” To argue that these forms of gendered and racial theft deserve remuneration and acknowledgement, then, is not a perpetuation of capital’s commodification of everyday life but a resistant reordering of it.
Dame, Avery. 2016. “Making a Name for Yourself: Tagging as Transgender Ontological Practice on Tumblr.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33, no. 1: 23–37.
Davis, Rebecca Frost, et al., eds. 2016. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. Modern Language Association. https://digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/.
Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital Labor and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.
Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella, et al., eds. 2012. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press.