Race at the Interface: Rendering Blackness on WorldStarHipHop.com

Cramer, Lauren McLeod

doi:10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.205

Cited by 3 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is especially important to note given debates about disembodiment and online sociality over the decades, and the implications for Black women, especially in that one cannot simply separate Black women's bodies from our practices online. 6 Considering these scholarly and historical perspectives, inDmix might also be read as a Black primitive space in the sense that it lacks the modernist or bourgeois aesthetic characteristic of digital whiteness (boyd, 2012;Cramer, 2016).…”

Section: Indmix's Intracommunity Gaze and Web 20mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com

Conley

2022

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of Black digital and Internet cultures is a burgeoning site of inquiry. While prior research on identity and the Internet does well to address racialized experiences online, further exploration into so-called niche or under-the-radar Black digital spaces is necessary for a more comprehensive documentation of early Internet applications, practices, and digitally mediated sociality during the early 20th century. This article centers Black southern Internet culture by examining the website, InDmix.com, a photo-based asynchronous web media platform, and one of the first Internet visual catalogs of southern Black college nightlife of the aughts. Combining scholarly inquiry with first-person storytelling, this article provides historical references to contextualize an aspect of early Black Internet culture while arguing that Black women, in particular, mediate the process of visibility and valuation since they carry conceptions of beauty and Blackness across the platform. Engaging with concepts of architectural Blackness and informational Blackness, this article demonstrates the ways in which southern Black youth culture combined with early Web 2.0 technology practices provides a digital snapshot of college and urban nightlife experiences along the backdrop of socioeconomic and cultural shifts in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. In the spirit of documenting Black digital cultures, this article concludes with a conversation with founder Ikem Onyekwena, the Phi Beta Sigma photographer and tech entrepreneur who founded InDmix.com in 2004.

show abstract

Section: Indmix's Intracommunity Gaze and Web 20mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. not bounded by phenotype or figurai representation” (Cramer, 2016, p. 2). Informed by Black feminist approaches to visual culture, I examine inDmix’s web interface as racialized gender discourse.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com

Conley

2022

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Nelson 2002;Nakamura 2007). This separation renders online spaces "free" from marked difference and therefore neutral platforms for social life (as I argue in Kraemer 2021; see also Gillespie 2010;Cramer 2016).…”

Section: Gender Of/as Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She asks instead who are the objects of interactivity, emphasizing that the boundaries between objects and subjects are not fixed: "Women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity; they participate in digital racial formation via acts of technological appropriation, yet are subjected to it as well" (2007,16). Lauren Cramer (2016) further analyzes nonrepresentational processes of racial formation through interface design, in which Blackness operates through spatial ordering of a hip-hop video website rather than figural representation of Black bodies. Despite allegedly neutral website design, adapted from principles of Modernist architecture, Blackness materializes and becomes shareable through a coherent visual style that renders "blackness in the disembodied space of the Internet" (Cramer 2016, 16).…”

Section: Gender Of/as Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Cramer's (2016) analysis, for example, the white backgrounds and minimalist design of social media sites recapitulates the aesthetic of Modernist architecture. Adherents of this postwar design philosophy endeavored to order space in an "objective" manner, to solve social problems through transparency and rationality and without ornament (Cramer 2016). But this minimalist style encodes implicitly white, masculine norms of social space and interaction.…”

Section: Crafting Femininitymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Gender of the Interface

Kraemer

2021

Catalyst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.

show abstract

Quilombo Portness / Quilombismo Portuário

Sodré,

Lisio

2024

Rio as Method

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite popular perception, racial capitalism and indentured labor fail to create a neatly closed or coherent system. Rio’s portside areas have been at the center of privately led renovation projects since 2011. Paralleling these efforts, Afro-Brazilian memorialization processes involving the ruins of the Valongo, the hemisphere’s most significant slave trade wharf, have contrasted with and challenged this urban intervention. Established as a slave trade shore in the eighteenth century, this section of Rio de Janeiro’s bayside area consolidated as an important Afro-Brazilian zone in the nineteenth century. This chapter, drawing from sources of Rio’s historically global port area, juxtaposes the concepts of porosity and quilombismo in order to propose the concept of portness. As a place of movement, culture, death, life, and resistance, Rio’s port area constitutes an analytical unit that allows for a better understanding of grassroots developments taking place at the global stage.

show abstract

Race at the Interface: Rendering Blackness on WorldStarHipHop.com

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com

Encoded Subjectivities: Interpreting Blackness and Representations of Black Women on inDmix.com

Gender of the Interface

Quilombo Portness / Quilombismo Portuário

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About