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28
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Research Project - Considerations on the Digital Subaltern: Researching Migrant Women’s Transnational Online Practices
Text.Serial.Journal
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Projects & Abstracts
2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Claudia Minchilli
2017/03/01
Utrecht University
2036-461X
28
en
Research Project - Considerations on the Digital Subaltern: Researching Migrant Women’s Transnational Online Practices
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16301/17187
17
Considerations on the Digital Subaltern:
Researching Migrant Women’s Transnational Online Practices
Claudia Minchilli, Utrecht University




   On April 2016, the Guardian released on its site a report named ‘The dark
side of Guardian comments’.3 The aim of the report was to analyse the content
of more than 70 million comments left on the site since 2006, exploring patterns
and dynamics of online harassment. As stated in the report, ‘the first quantitative
evidence’ is that ‘articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive
trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about’;4
furthermore, the report observed that ‘ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBT
people also appear to experience a disproportionate amount of abuse’. Internet
is not a neutral, disembodied and value-free space,5 as the report shows. The
gendered, geo-political, racial character of online harassment on the Guardian
demonstrates the existence of a matrix of power relations which put the online
and offline realms not at distance but as intertwined, mutually shaped realities.
   My aim in this paper is to show how the postcolonial approach can be
highly productive for the development of digital media studies, exposing the
hierarchical and multiple characters of power dynamics which influence complex
social phenomena, including digital ones.6 As part of the team working for the
ERC consolidator project ‘Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and
Belonging’7 headed by Sandra Ponzanesi, my interest is in investigating the
relation between female migration and digital technologies, through the use of
a mixed methodology which encompasses ethnographic research and digital
methods to gather quantitative data from different digital media platforms. I
will inquire on the symbolical and concrete consequences that transnational and
local digital connectedness has on migrant women’s experiences of displacement,
resettlement and everyday life in a specific urban setting, which in my case will be
Rome. This project has also a comparative aim, focusing on women who belong


3
  Becky Gardiner and others, ‘The Dark side of Guardian comments’, The Guardian, April 12, 2016,
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments>
[accessed April 09, 2017].
4
  Ibidem.
5
  Marìa Fernàndez, ‘Postcolonial Media Theory’, Art Journal, 58.3 (1999), 58–73.
6
   Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs, ‘On Digital Crossing in Europe’, Crossings, Journal of
Migration and Culture, 5.1 (2014), 3–22.
7
  For more information: http://www.digitaleurope.nl/ [accessed April 09, 2017].

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                       Claudia Minchilli


to three different communities, the Somali, Romanian and Turkish ones. The
choice of these three communities is based in the matter of how the use of digital
technologies is intertwined with different histories for transnational mobilities.
The comparison will outline the impact that postcolonial, postsocialist and post-
labour migration pasts have on processes of diasporic identity construction.
Consequently, it will be possible the identification of those intersectional
economic, political, racial, gendered and cultural forces8 which differently impact
on migrant women’s experience of displacement and on their access or use of
digital technologies. Attentiveness towards structural impediments will help, in
other words, to give meaning to the everyday ‘multiple identifications’,9 strategies
and agency that women perform through transnational online practices.10
   Terms such as connectivity, links, crossings are recurrent in digital media
studies. Despite that recurrence, it is essential to investigate the space which is
positioned in between, the territory which is crossed: the border. The imaginative
and concrete deployment of the concept of ‘border’ gives to the researcher a
privileged perspective to look at social patterns, showing the matrix of power
relations that are enacted when the subject tries to cross them. Borders are a
space in which mechanisms of systemic construction of ‘us’ and hierarchically
intelligible ‘Others’11 are set in place, and are hence ‘part of the discursive
materiality of power relations’.12
   The digital realm represents another dimension in which these mechanisms
are reproduced. The role and level of agency of the ‘connected migrant’13, as a
subject who actively creates a culture of bonds through everyday digital border-
crossing practices, is subjected to these dynamics. Rejecting a blind utopianism
that considers the Internet as a space that enables infinite possibilities for identity
construction and allows social relations based on networks of peer subjects,14
I see the online reality as entrenched in gendered, classed, racial ascriptions15
influencing one subject’s voicing and online (in)visibility. This brings me to


8
   Pramod K. Nayar, An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Oxford, UK: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010).
9
   Radhika Gajjala, ‘An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography: Complicity and
Resistance in the “Cyberfield”’, Feminist Media Studies, 2.2 (2002), 177–93.
10
   Mirca Madianou, ‘Migration and the Accentuated Ambivalence of Motherhood: the role of ICTs
in Filipino transnational families’, Global Networks, 12.3 (2012), 277–95.
11
   Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London,
NY: Verso, 1991)
12
   Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, New York: Routledge,
1996), p. 198.
13
    Dana Diminescu, ‘The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto’, Social Science
Information, 47.4 (2008), 565–79.
14
   Judy Wajcman, ‘From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience’, Information,
Communication & Society, 10.3 (2007), 287–98.
15
   Lisa Nakamura, Peter A. Chow-White, Race after the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002);
Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real, ed. by Radhika Gajjala (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2013).

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                            Considerations on the Digital Subaltern


one of my central research questions which borrow very much from Spivak’s16
concerns: when, how and at what price can the digital Subaltern speak? Where
is the space of agency for the connected migrant?
   Imagining the Subaltern’s voice as ‘hearable’ or not at all is a very common
framework but, nevertheless, highly problematic.17 A change of perspective is
needed here, shifting the focus from ‘borders’ as inexpugnable barriers to their
conceptualisation as ‘points of contact’. Borders are a porous and creational locus,
a place where individuals are exposed to different encounters which transform
the barrier in a ‘contact surface’.18 In this context, digital media are a liminal
space where first strategies thought to overcome social, economic, cultural,
political, gender constraints are set in place. The deployment of a postcolonial
paradigm can help to avoid the risk of researching on these ‘new constellations
of power’19 reducing the analysis on binary oppositions which inscribe diasporic
digital practices merely as forms of empowerment/oppression following a
Western-centric approach to the study of media consumption,20 and hiding the
complex, multiple and contextual ways through which different Subaltern voices
emerge or are ‘permitted’ to emerge.21
   Of course, theory alone cannot explain the influence that digital connectedness
has on the creation of diasporic subjectivities, which can only be inquired on
the field, both online and offline. In this site, my aim was specific, and merely
interested in complicating the debate on digital media studies and migration,
outlining some of the main conceptual frameworks that postcolonial theory
gives to my research in order to discern the complex entanglement of power
hierarchies, asymmetrical social relations and hegemonic discourses in studying
digital media usage.




16
   Gayatri Ch. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
17
   Gajjala, Cyberculre and the Subaltern, p. 4.
18
   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968).
19
   Mirjam de Brujin and Rijk van Dijk, ‘Connecting and Change in African Societies: Examples of
“Ethnographies of Linking” in Anthropology’, Anthropologica, 54.1 (2012), 45–59.
20
   Raka Shome, ‘When Postcolonial studies meets media studies’, Critical Studies in Media
Communication, 33.3 (2016), 245–63.
21
   Gajjala, Cyberculre and the Subaltern, p. 15.

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