About the Book

Feminist Solidarities after Modulation produces an intersectional analysis of transnational feminist movements and their contemporary digital frameworks of identity and solidarity. Engaging media theory, critical race theory, and Black feminist theory, as well as contemporary feminist movements, this book argues that digital feminist interventions map themselves onto and make use of the multiplicity and ambiguity of digital spaces to question presentist and fixed notions of the internet as a white space and technologies in general as objective or universal. Understanding these frameworks as colonial constructions of the human, identity is traced to a socio-material condition that emerges with the modernity/colonialism binary.

In the colonial moment, race and gender become the reasons for, as well as the effects of, technologies of identification, and thus need to be understood as and through technologies. What Deleuze has called modulation is not a present modality of control, but is placed into a longer genealogy of imperial division, which stands in opposition to feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism that insists on non-modular solidarities across seeming difference. At its heart, Feminist Solidarities after Modulation provides an analysis of contemporary digital feminist solidarities, which not only work at revealing the material histories and affective “leakages” of modular governance, but also challenges them to concentrate on forms of political togetherness that exceed a reductive or essentialist understanding of identity, solidarity, and difference.

About the Author

Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a cultural and media theorist, researcher, and curator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Sara’s research interests lie at the intersections of feminist art and political practices, digital technologies and narrations of (human and non-human) subjectivity and togetherness. Her work centers on digital practices within non-hegemonic geographies, looking at the technosocial through feminist, queer, and decolonial theory. Sara completed their PhD with the DFG research training group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. She has collaborated with the English and Foreign Language University in Hyderabad, the Center for Internet and Society, Alternative Law Forum, and the Srishti School of Art and Design, Sangama in Bangalore. Sara was the lead researcher with the Technicsche Universität Dresden’s “Digital Gender” project (2020–2022), which produced two edited volumes on Queer AI as well as a special journal issue on gender-based knowledges in AI systems (in preparation). Sara is on the board of diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery, a non-profit space for theory conversations, speculative thinking, and the arts in Berlin and an editor at kritisch-lesen.de, an online review magazine that seeks to translate academic discourse into political practice.

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