Abigail De Kosnik - #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, Editors

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright 2019 by Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-472-07415-0 (Hardcover : alk paper)

ISBN: 978-0-482-05415-2 (Paper : alk paper)

ISBN: 978-0-472-12527-2 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-0-472-90109-8 (ebook Open Access)

This title is freely available in an open access edition with generous support from the Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman

Abigail De Kosnik

Malika Imhotep

Paige Johnson

Aaminah Norris and Nalya Rodriguez

Grace Gipson

Lyndsey Ogle

Julia Havard

Jos Ramn Lizrraga and Arturo Cortz

Rene Pastel

Kyle Booten

Abigail De Kosnik

Bonnie Ruberg

Neha Kumar

Reginold A. Royston and Krystal Strong

Naveena Karusala, Trevor Perrier, and Neha Kumar

Kimberly McNair

Centering questions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation in this book has been as much a reflection of the topics of scholarly inquiry as it is an intentional way of coproducing knowledge across axes of power and difference. #identity reflects several years of collaboration and community-building among the faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students who make the Color of New Media working group what it is. The book is one outcome of a shared desire to create the scholarship we want to see in the world and an orientation toward collaboration and co-mentorship that we consider foundational to interdisciplinary work. We want to thank all of the students, faculty, and staff who have made the Color of New Media working group their own over the years.

UC Berkeleys Center for Race and Gender, especially Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Leti Volpp, Alisa Bierria, and Pamela Matsuoka, and the Center for New Media, particularly Greg Niemeyer, Nicholas de Monchaux, and Lara Wolfe, have generously provided necessary institutional support for this project. We are grateful to the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative at the Library of the University of California, Berkeley for supporting the production of an open access version of the book. Nic Chang, Monica Khachatrian, and Lida Zeitlin Wu demonstrated consummate professionalism and care in formatting our chapters and preparing the final manuscript, and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their time, dedication, and labor. Rachel Nishan at Twin Oaks Indexing was a dream to work with. The team at the University of Michigan Press has been generous and supportive throughout the long gestation of this book. Susan Cronin fielded countless questions from us and helped our manuscript enter the production process as gracefully as possible, and Mary Hashman was an outstanding production editor. Mary Francis saw possibilities in this project in its earliest glimmers and has guided it into the world with patience, enthusiasm, and many excellent ideas. We owe Mary a million thanks for her crucial role in making manifest our dream of a collaborative original publication. (In case anyone reading this is wondering how and why a UC Berkeley working groups project ended up at the University of Michigan Press, the answer is that Mary first expressed interest in #identity while she was an editor at University of California Pressand her initial input was so crucial to this undertaking that we decided that the book should follow her to her new professional home!)

Finally, to our family members and friendsall those who have helped to give this book life by sustaining and nurturing the people whose names are printed on its pagesthank you, thank you, thank you. This book is the product not only of work but of love.

Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman

In August 2017 the Bay Area ensemble Campo Santo performed Ethos de Masquerade, an original theater and dance work about the HIV/AIDS crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement, at the A.C.T. Strand Theater in San Francisco. Before the performance began, assistant director Ashley Smiley led the audience through some breathing exercises as a means of helping us achieve the proper orientation of mind, body, and spirit necessary to receive the experience that was about to transpire. She encouraged us to inhale, to dwell for a moment on the hashtags youve been forced to remember, and then to breathe them out and release them. This book is about the hashtags that weve been forced to remember. Its pages contain our meditations on those hashtags, our coming to terms with them, our processing their contexts and meanings, and our releasing them into the worldnot as a means of forgetting or erasing them but as a way of sharing the understandings weve come to about what these tags mean, individually and together, and how they have served as labels, metadata, organizing ideas, and rallying cries for the last several years of our lives.

#identity was collectively produced by a working group called the Color of New Media, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley, and is sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, with additional support from the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). In September 2013 Abigail De Kosnik, a Berkeley faculty member, and Paige Johnson, then a PhD student, decided to launch the Color of New Media as a response to a question that they had been asking each other for some time: Is the color of new media studies white? Both women of color, De Kosnik and Johnson wanted to create a space on the campus in which nonwhite, non-male, non-straight people as well as white, male, or straight people who were seriously interested in difference and inclusion could gather and discuss the multifaceted ways that minorities are, and have been, actively engaging with, shaping, and expanding new media, inclusive of desktop computing, the blogosphere, mobile culture, social media, UGC (user-generated content), IPTV (Internet Protocol television), gaming, and other emergent or transitional media forms. One of the two dozen or so people to attend our first meeting was Keith Feldman, a Berkeley faculty member in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and soon after, De Kosnik asked Feldman to sign on as the cofaculty organizer of the Color of New Media, to which he agreed. Today the Color of New Media meets monthly in the BCNM Commons (the centers seminar room), and between five and fifteen people attend each meeting. Anyone who attends one meeting, or emails one of the organizers to express interest in the group, is considered a member and is added to the groups mailing list. As of this writing, our mailing list currently has seventy-six members, with the following demographics: 21 percent African American, 32 percent Asian American, 10 percent Latinx, 37 percent white, 70 percent female, 27 percent male, 3 percent nonbinary gender, and 11 percent LGBTQ. In contrast, the demographics of UC Berkeleys graduate student population are 5 percent African American, 23 percent Asian American, 5 percent Latinx, and 50 percent white (with the remainder reported as Other/Unknown [Graduate Division 20162017]), and 46 percent female (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley 2013).