Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In a self-evaluation paper in 1979, the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) asked, “What have been the things—politically, historically, and socially, that have added to and made our conditions? How can we take those things and form ourselves so we begin to destroy these conditions and build ourselves a new environment?” This paper draws on the archives of the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968-1979) as an intervention in histories of computing to tell an alternative history of networks. Rather than emphasize individual, personal autonomy afforded by network technologies, I turn to the archives of the TWWA, reading their security protocols and network principles that confront liberalism and individualism as security threats and barriers to movement organizing. Using women of color feminist networking as an analytic framework, rather than an object of study, engages critically with how power manifests between relationships, to focus on how the lines between nodes come to be, how they change, and how they are maintained. Further, this study connects the archives of TWWA to present moments of organizing where social movements rely on data-driven network technologies. Connecting archival research to ethnographic fieldwork and original interviews, I demonstrate how decisions around communications practices within technological infrastructures address how interdependent relations of power operate within networks premised around collectivity in the face of unequal difference.