Introduction: Wild Seed in the Machine

Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: Thriving otherwise

“…In so doing they open significant epistemological and political horizons that are urgent for digital geographies thought. At the crossroads of media and performance studies, digital arts and humanities, and critical race, feminist and queer theory, scholars have examined the affordances for identity (re)constructions and plural performances of fluid identities in digital spaces, and the possibilities for solidarities, self-determination, affirming and protecting Black, queer and trans life in amidst material, structural and epistemological violence (Everett, 2002; Nelson, 2002; Nakamura and Chow-White, 2013; Jenzen, 2017; Johnson and Neal, 2017). As one example, Wade (2017) illustrates how Black feminist hashtag campaigns leverage networked digitality to catalyze an ‘uncontainable virality’ that confounds tactics of racial containment, reduction, and removal.…”

“…These bodies of thought offer crucial theorizations of the sites and forms of digital politics of life and thriving. Much Black, queer/trans, and feminist code studies starts from the proposition that in spite of structural conditions aligned to ensure exclusion and death, these subjects are always also surviving and creatively intervening to catalyze possibilities for life and liberation (Byrd, 2014; McKittrick, 2014; Russell, 2012; Ellison, 2016; McGlotten, 2016; Ellison et al, 2017; Johnson and Neal, 2017; Wade, 2017; Gieseking, 2018, Johnson, 2018). This work builds on long lines of Black radical thought, Black/Chicana feminism and queer of color critique that have theorized double/differential consciousness, shape-shifting and other complex registers of being and knowing that arise from Black/Brown and queer life, and are defined by a sustained epistemological orientation to ambiguities/impossibilities as sites of generative possibility (Sandoval, 1991; Du Bois, 1994; Muñoz, 1999; Wynter, 2003; Lorde, 2007; Cox, 2015).…”

“…But reading through the lenses of critical race digital theory illuminates additional registers. These digital mediations re-inscribe racial logics that root personhood itself in ownership, autonomy, and individualism, in ways that rest upon the production and exclusion of a racialized other – and the myriad techniques of control/removal that have stabilized these relations over centuries (Everett, 2002; Nelson, 2002; Johnson and Neal, 2017). These relations underlie not just digital mediations of impoverishment and class and race privilege, but any number of other arenas of digital urban life, such as the insecure and exploitative labor conditions in the platform economy, digital modes of carceral control and much more (Noble, 2018; Eubanks, 2018; Jefferson, 2018).…”

Rhetorical Code Studies

“…Noble (2018) has called attention to the ways that search engines like Google reinforce sexist and racist cultural values (especially those harmful to black women) through their algorithmic mediation and presentation of search results to users. Johnson and Neal (2017) highlighted the growth of black code studies, a related field whose schol-ars explored the radical innovations by people of color to digital technologies and resistances to industrially and politically normative uses thereof.…”