Feminism’s Archives: Dr. Catherine Knight Steele and Jamilah Lemieux

Review the video recording and a write-up summary of our first event by our undergraduate assistants, Anika Asthana and Thomas Coulouras, this semester on March 3rd: a dynamic workshop featuring Professor Catherine Knight Steele in conversation with cultural critic and writer Jamilah Lemieux about feminism’s archives, with the two speakers drawing from their writing, media, and scholarly experiences to discuss what it means to create digital archives of Black feminist practice.

In this workshop featuring Professor Catherine Knight Steele and Jamilah Lemieux, we explored what it means to create digital archives of Black feminist practice.

Professor Catherine Knight Steele is a Professor of Communication at University of Maryland - College Park, whose research examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how groups resist oppression and practice joy using online technology to create spaces of community. She helps direct the African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum) and Black Communication and Technology Lab (BCat).

Jamilah Lemieux is a renowned cultural critic and writer, who has played a key role in shaping the construction of the Black feminist blogosphere of the early twenty-first century. Her written work has been featured via a host of print and digital platforms, including but not limited to Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. She has provided news and cultural commentary for outlets from CNN to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

At the beginning of the discussion, Professors Monica Huerta and Autumn Womack briefly highlighted the four principles that guide Organizing Stories: honoring the intellectual labor of activists; prioritizing relationship-building between students and activists; creating a collaborative space; and building relationships between organizers, students, and activists. 

Lemieux opened up the conversation by discussing the importance of digital Black feminism, and keeping a record of Black women’s contributions and experiences. Her goals for conceptualizing digital Black feminism aim to better center Black women’s perspectives and lived experiences online and show how technology has often been a double-edged sword for them. This repositioning allows people to better understand the continuities between Black women’s historic contributions to activist movements and their transformative participation in digital spaces. 

Another goal of digital Black feminism is to document a shift in Black feminist principles and practices and ensure that we consider the work of digital Black feminist thinkers as central to the ongoing work of liberation. Knight Steele discussed how the blogosphere was an early form of this work as well as a safe space for communities of Black women, and the importance of tracking and archiving this content before it gets lost. The two also discussed the ways digital culture has shifted and the importance of bringing nuance and mutual respect back into conversations. 

To examine what digital Black feminist conversation looks like online, it is important to see who was in certain spaces and is no longer there. There is a history of harassment and negative engagement online for Black women on social media, as hostility towards Black women has been normalized online. Negative engagement can even drive away positive engagement. Furthermore, the cutthroat nature of social media also has increased harm to Black women because of how common it is to critique people’s smallest imperfections and to see the personal lives of people with digital prominence. Both speakers discussed their shared struggle of being single black mothers in the public eye. People were invested in seeing them fail; they wanted these injustices against Black women to manifest in both of their lives. But they continue to find ways to create communal spaces for healing and dialogue in the digital blogosphere or scholarship for themselves and others. 

In conclusion, this event informed the audience of the importance of engaging with digital spaces in a way that acknowledges how media perpetuates racism and sexism. While media can be harmful in these ways, it can also be used to create communal space and spread ideas of social justice and love. When thinking about social media as a mechanism for social organizing, we must differentiate between activism that is truly influential and activism that is performative. Social media can be a powerful tool, enabling messages to be sent to broad crowds of people, and plays a large role in the social movements of today. Professor Catherine Knight Steele and Jamilah Lemieux remind us that we must be reflective while using its platforms and consider how our various identities impact our user experience.