Abstract: This presentation explores how many marginalized users of digital technologies are labeled as deviant. Many women and people of color utilize digital technologies for means beyond what they were intended.  For instance, gaming technologies and their associated online environments are often used as spaces to foster community among queer gamers who are not ‘out’ in their physical spaces but have the opportunity to be ‘out online’. Social media and other technologies afford Black users the means to resist physical oppression and mobilize around social justice issues. Ethnographic observations and narrative interviews reveal this Black digital praxis uncovering what Black cyberfeminists would articulate as the liberatory potentials of digital technologies.
 

Bio: Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois - Chicago. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  She also previously served as a MLK Scholar and Visiting Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism.