Erik McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom a “black left feminism” framework to place the lives and actions of black female American Communist Party members into a genealogy of black feminism that has previously focused on the 1960s and 1970s. He draws from archival material (personal writings, CPUSA records, FBI surveillance files, etc.) and interviews in order to reconstruct the personal, professional and activist lives of women tied to CPUSA and trace personal continuities and disjuncture as well as how these women’s lives fit into the continuities and disjuncture of the radical left more generally.
While he tries to fill in the gaps of these women’s lives, the text is filled with conditional statements and hedges. For the most part, these women did not write about themselves, and when they did, it was often part of a “communist conversion” narrative that culminated with enlistment into the party to the erasure of the particular path they took into the party and the sexism, racism, and classism they faced as part of the party many of them nonetheless felt was their best chance for effectively fighting for systematic change. When recounting their personal lives for communist documentations, the very textures of personal narrative that McDuffie is committed to articulated are smoothed out.
McDuffie’s method, and his conditional writing, drawing attention to what is circumstantial or likely, rather than confirmed, highlights the constructed nature of his method. In my own work, I come back again and again to the theme of a website’s architecture influencing the tone/texture of social interaction and usage patterns on the site. I try not to cast such statements in a technological deterministic light, even though I know some readers have taken it as such. My argument isn’t that we’re somehow locked into the coding of a site, but that prior interaction and behaviors on other websites inform subsequent sites (particularly social media sites where interaction and personal sharing are stated as explicit goals). The site is an interlocutor just as the participants on a given site take up social roles. Because coding is flexible, social media sites can “talk back” to their users.
Facebook is one such example. In 2004 one prominent feature of “the Facebook” was a field to input your class schedule (this was before you could friend people from other schools). You could use Facebook to tell whether or not someone else from your school was currently in class, or likely to be available. “Oh, well she’s in class until 1:30, so I can probably meet her for lunch after that.” Having the option to display class schedules prompted informal, in-person meetings on my small residential campus. As the site expanded, this feature was dropped. The site became less about people in your proximity, and more about maintaining relationships at a distance (everyone can be linked to everyone else, the timeline documents events that are remote from me that my friends participated in, rather than individual photo albums that may have been taken at a party I actually attended).
McDuffie is aware of these same sorts of conditional documentation and speech. In several cases, he cannot confirm if this particular individual read this bit or that bit of writing by another black leftist feminist. While women of the 1960s and 1970s may have been aware of Claudia Jones’ writings on triple exploitation after they wrote and published similar positions on the interlocking oppressions facing black women, McDuffie shows how the movement of these women through literal space, crossing Harlem, the Soviet Union, and Mississippi, along with a shared language between them in what they did write, demonstrate structural links between diverse women. The difference in trajectory between Jones, who was educated and elevated within the party, and Moore, who never finished school and came up through the “bottom” of the party at the level of on-the-ground organizing, makes their similarities all the more striking. The social architecture of CPUSA produced certain analytic perspectives that moved between and among these women, even as they may have only occasionally physically crossed paths.
The idea of a social architecture without code helps me conceptualize how social network site architecture is not a technologically deterministic argument. It is an argument about social constraint and formalization of practice. As black female CPUSA members encountered different external conditions, McDuffie traces how individual women negotiated new constraints, such as the targeting of their husbands or facing deportation themselves. With the introduction of McCarthyism, more radical concepts of sexuality and gender were subsumed in order to ensure material safety. While the women in McDuffie’s book react to constraints in different ways, there remains some ideological consistency, even if at some times it is as bare as the party still offering the best route to change. Adhering to this ideological position produced a chain or subsequent reactions, such as performing respectability. This action has repercussions that also enter the genealogy and the black feminist left.
This is a little more specific than simply arguing that every action has a reaction, because it remains that most of these women (and all of the leading women in McDuffie’s genealogy) did share the organizational tie of being members of CPUSA. Furthermore, they were women assigned formal leadership positions within the organization at various levels. What they did write about themselves was often within the context of their party activity. While McDuffie wants to cast them as women who came to the party in diverse ways, they are by-and-large women who publically did want to been see at least in the context of political action and party membership/leadership. These structures of affiliation and the reproduction of behaviors that are seen to align with affiliation of a specific group can be seen all over the internet and social network sites.
When I say “I don’t have a Facebook,” this is a (dis)affiliation move. It means more than just “I do not have a Facebook account.” I know that there will be a follow-up question. I try not to be that person who can’t shut up about how I don’t have a Facebook anymore, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m asked about it, or that many of my social behaviors are influenced by my choice to (dis)affiliate. People literally forget to invite me to social events. I never see pictures from the parties I do get invited to, and no one knows what I’m doing with my life.
I see again and again on Tumblr (my social media addiction of choice, if the semester hasn’t made it obvious) people (dis)affiliating with Facebook and instead affiliating with Tumblr. Still, they admit that they interact less with other Tumblr users when compared to when they are/were on Facebook. They “know” their Tumblr followers less than their Facebook friends, but still often say that they “like” their Tumblr followers more. They may have never spoken a word to their Tumblr users (you can send messages between users privately via the ask box, or reblog someone else’s post and add your own comment, displaying both the original and your addition on your blog), but they feel a sense of connection with them. I rarely engage directly with my Tumblr followers, but I reblog posts from them all the time. When someone reblogs a post from me, I do get a warm feeling, like we shared something because we both enjoyed the same post. It’s strange and abstract and indirect, like the crossing paths of affiliation McDuffie relies on to move between women, time, and place. I do consider the reactions of my followers when I choose to reblog something rather than simply like it. They won’t see my liked posts on their own dash, but they will see my reblogs. These are parts of the social architecture of Tumblr as a site. The code has contributed to my actions, certainly, but I’m complicit in the reproduction of behaviors, both my own and others’.
No comments:
Post a Comment