The Internet Is Full of Jerks, Because the World Is Full of Jerks: What Feminist Theory Teaches Us About the Internet

It is sometimes frustrating being a feminist scholar researching new and emerging technologies. Some of this frustration stems from the shocking amount of violent sexism and misogyny that exists in online spaces. As feminist theories have long embraced intersectionality, this sexism is compounded with racism, homophobia, ableism, and all other forms of hate. Even more frustrating, however, is that decades of feminist scholarship are usually overlooked as researchers make sense of new technologies. For many non-feminist researchers, feminism is often seen as only relevant when women are at issue, and much of the emerging technology spaces are constructed as cisgendered male-only zones. When scholars argue that feminism or even gender studies are irrelevant to these spaces, they are making the assumption that men have no gender and no connection to feminism. However, feminist theory, and its intersections with queer, postcolonial, critical race, and disability studies, offers technology studies a critique of knowledge production even when women using technology is not the object of study. Feminism treats gender as a question that inflects power relations throughout all contexts, in turn making it a critique that is important to all research. This critique is most evident in the way feminist scholarship has and continues to call into question the common sense of new technologies. Feminist new media scholars are not here to ruin everyone’s fun in digital spaces. Rather they offer us the chance to reimagine how we use these spaces and by whom these spaces are used. Feminist interventions into new media have always offered a way to balance the hyperbolic utopic and dystopic framings of technologies. As Terry Flew outlines, many early digital and Internet media studies focused on whether these technologies