My rating—5 of 5 stars

This review is long overdue, and while the details of Knight Steele’s arguments have faded in my mind a bit, her metaphor of the virtual beauty shops where Black digital feminism lives has stuck with me. She uses this metaphor to draw important connections between past and present—demonstrating how Black women have *always* been skilled technologists even as our everyday use of the word “technology” has shifted in ways that exclude their historic expertise in areas such as hair care technologies, building customer bases, and entrepreneurship. Not to mention that fact that while many white women may have been at home, Black women were often laboring in technologically laden fields, such as farming.

Knight Steele draws through lines to contemporary Black feminist bloggers who use their technological savvy to make feminist arguments that “prioritize agency, reclaim the right to self-identity, centralize gender non binary spaces of discourse, create complicated allegiances, and insert a dialectic of self and community interests” (67).

Two areas of particular interest to me while reading were Knight Steele’s explanation for how Black feminism “fucks with the gray areas,” in particular, by being comfortable with cultivating complicated allegiances and understanding self-care as a form of resistance. I also found it interesting to think about how some of these ideas have been co-opted by mainstream white feminism in recent years.

If you’re about to pick this book up, keep in mind that it’s an academic work. It explains connections to similar and earlier theoretical frame works and concepts, and explicitly addresses methodology and epistemology. In other words, it is at times quite dense, and not a journalistic-style jaunt into the topic at hand. That said, the subject matter and popular culture references probably make it a bit more interesting to a lay-reader than might otherwise be the case for an academic manuscript.

Many thanks to NYU Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Some of the most interesting theoretical work on the digital in recent years has been about the intersections of race and digital culture. Centering black women, Steele gives us a welcome addition to this conversation.

In Digital Black Feminism, Catherine Knight Steele centers Black women unapologetically within the study of digital culture. "Digital Black feminism is a mechanism to understand how Black feminist thought is altered by and alters technology," she writes. This work has multiple dimensions. First and fundamentally, Steele exposes the frequent oversight of Black women's contributions as a distortion that limits deeper understanding of the dynamics of the digital world. As Steele establishes, Black women's involvement in digital spaces has been broad-based, influential and persistent. Understanding that digital culture requires getting this part of it right.

----Diving into a wide-ranging digital archive six years in the making, Steele demonstrates how online spaces expand and shape the work of Black feminist liberation while making insightful connections to the Black thinkers and writers that came before. In one chapter, Steele explores the parallels between hip-hop's formative influence on an earlier generation of feminists and the role of digital technology in Black feminism today, noting how money changed both of those relationships. For a book with heft, it strikes an impressive balance of accessibility and intellectual innovation.

See NPR for the full review: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/21/1087494475/5-books-at-the-intersection-of-black-feminist-thought-culture-and-politics

Still processing the information that was provided in Digital Black Feminism - The content was thought provoking and fills a space that is not as populated - Talking about the topics critical to developing and informing Black feminist thought.

This review will be available on 12/26 on my blog. I've directly copied and pasted it from my drafts.

Title: Digital Black Feminism

Author: Dr. Catherine Knight Steele

Rating: 5 / 5 stars

Favorite Quote: “Digital black feminists demand a space that revolves around Black women. Black feminism does not exist to correct white feminism, the beauty shop is not a derivative of the barbershop, and Black feminist technoculture is not defined through its resistance to white technoculture. The critical lesson of Black feminist technoculture is that we stop using whiteness as the lens through which we examine technology and maleness as the lens through which we examine Blackness. When we lift those limitations, Black feminist technoculture provides an essential tool for understanding technology and society.” Catherine Knight Steele. Digital Black Feminism. E-book ed., NYU Press, 2021.

Review: Thank you to the publisher, NYU Press, and the NetGalley platform for the e-ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

From the very first line, I was absolutely hooked. From the title of this book, I picked it up expecting Digital Black Feminism to be about the lives and work of Black feminist in our contemporary, technology-centered culture. And the later chapters of this book very much deliver on that expectation. But even more than that, this book also provides an historical analysis of how Black women have used technology throughout history to create spaces for themselves and others and to advocate for and work towards justice and equality.

Digital Black Feminism analyzes the way traditional structures of understanding technology (and other topics in life and culture) have developed by excluding the analysis of Black women and non-binary folks in those structures. Dr. Steele emphasizes the fact that just because Black women and non-binary folks are absent from histories (such as the historical analyses of technological innovation), that does not mean they actually were or are absent. In fact, Dr. Steele draws from a long line of work that shows the opposite - Black women and non-binary folks throughout history have used technology to subvert traditional racial and gender power dynamics and to create spaces for themselves that meet their needs and address issues relevant and of interest to their lives.

The historical analysis is probably my favorite aspect of this book. It roots Dr. Steele’s thesis regarding contemporary uses of technology in a broader narrative that serves to demonstrate her arguments across time.

Another aspect of this book that I really appreciate is the balance between academic theory and the specific examples she provides to illustrate the more theoretical concepts she discusses. I think that this not only furthers the author’s point, it also makes this even more accessible for individuals who may not have as academic of a background. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s been a while since I was in an academic environment where works like this may be widely read and discussed. And some of the concepts are one that are outside the areas I used to study when I was in school, so some of the concepts were new to me. But having the academic side explored alongside examples that are more widely known (for instance, there are multiple sections about Beyonce) provide a context for the more theoretical concepts found in the book.

These examples also serve another purpose - they achieve a goal Dr. Steele articulated in the conclusion of the book:

[INSERT BLOCK QUOTE] While I am committed to doing critical work that unpack these nuances, one contribution I hope this text makes to future researchers is a commitment to the people at the center of the work . . . I take caution in whom I cite . . . In this text, I choose to cite and publicize the work of those who through their public writing, signal a willingness to enter the public discourse on issues of race and gender.
Catherine Knight Steele. Digital Black Feminism. E-book ed., NYU Press, 2021.

Finally, I think Dr. Steele strikes a really great balance between the utility of and necessity of digital black feminism and the limits placed on advocacy in general, including digital black feminism, when it exists in a capitalist structure.

This is a book that I intend to read more than once because I feel like it has so much more to offer than I was able to learn in just one reading. Dr. Steele is clearly a brilliant academic and it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to read an academic work critically - I want to exercise my brain muscles a bit more before I read it again so that I can learn and understand even more. I plan on buying myself a copy and will likely keep it in mind for books I give to or recommend to friends and family.

About that Quote: While it’s impossible to capture the nuances of this book, I think this particular quote goes really far in capturing the broad themes of this book. It touches a bit on the analogy to the beauty shop that Dr. Steele uses to develop her arguments, thus tying the book together, and provides a roadmap for the arguments that are developed throughout the book.

Have you read Digital Black Feminism? It’s out now and I highly recommend it. Share your thoughts below!

This book was really cool and I loved how it centered around Black women. It did come off as academic reading which can be a turn off, however.

Digital Black feminist ladies forge forward using their own survival strategies to nab center stage position, not as a "sub-group" of the white suffragette victories, but in their own rite for their own rights and place to breathe and grow. They are of digital Black feminists, moved by digital Black feminists, for digital Black feminists, moving and shaking the 'cast aside' place and making inroads and grip, "stitching together" a safer niche of world for themselves. Women who think, who strive, who succeed for themselves and not on the behalf or for benefit of others. These ladies are popping up in all echelons of "beauty shops;" literally and figuratively.

This is certainly a thought-provoking discourse on how Black women are using digital means to move forward for themselves. The author, Catherine Knight Steele, sets up her research in thesis form with many convincing proofs of data she has collected over the course of seveal years. Therefore, this contention is a methodical, comprehensive representation on behalf of the digital Black feminists, meant to disrupt 'norm' fossilized thinking.

Due to the very academic style, and perhaps because this reviewer in not Black, it is at times challenging to fully understand the depths of the thoughts, conflicts and world of these valient, often overlooked, women, as presented in this dissertation. The good news, according to this eye-opening treatise, is that progress is being made and is sticking. May they continue to have more such successes and greater understanding, empathy and standing tall among folk, men or women, of whatever color.

~Eunice C., Reviewer/Blogger~

September 2021

Disclaimer: This is my honest opinion based on the review copy sent by the publisher.

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