Feminism and writing technologies investigates specific technologies--such as, alphabet, moveable type, index, pencil, typewriter, xerox machine, computer, internet--which are historically and currently enmeshed in multinational divisions of labor. It places this investigation inside a critical analysis of the colonial history of descriptions of orality and literacy, the investments of feminism in specific ethnic, racial, sexual, national literacies, and the international systems of publication and copyright which today affect both academic and market values. The field of feminism and writing technologies deliberately raises such questions as: What counts as literacy? Who is literate? Which communications forms have elaborated literacies? How are the U.S. and European centers overvalued parts of a world economy supporting and creating particular literacies?
Feminism and writing technologies constructs a parallel, comparative and also historically developing analysis. The detailed set of examples I'll be investigating in my current book, centering two great mythic moments in the history of writing technologies--the so-called Printing Revolution and the so-called Information Revolution--converges around new constructions and uses of intellectual property. Thus the book analyzes, on the one hand, the printing revolution and its facilitation of printing, publication and distribution of the religious and political writings of Quaker women on women speaking in the early modern period and, on the other hand, the contemporary legal and cultural battles over global tv and the internet, new uses of copyright and distribution produced by and producing new writing technologies, and women's international media fandoms. Each connected project engages with problems in Lesbian and Gay historiography to describe the "layers of globals and locals" that structure our understanding of such sexual identities.
This is my first web project, so please bear with me as I continue to enhance this page in the near future.
< kk15@umail.umd.edu >