Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and queer counterpublics in Latin America

When I was invited to read Elisabeth Jay Friedman’s book Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America, released in December 2016, its title struck me as surprisingly timely. Why? Because feminist activism has been visibly on the rise in the region since 2015, communicating its claims both in public spaces and online. In June 2015, the Argentinian movement #NiUnaMenos hit the streets to protest against gender violence, thus marking the start of a mobilization process that so far has continued to gain traction. On 8 March 2018, coinciding with International Women’s Day, women throughout Latin America went on strike to call attention to gendered injustice. Digital connectivity has been instrumental in facilitating some of the political work required to organize actions like the strike, and to further extend their impact—the latter, particularly, though not exclusively, via the progressive use of hashtags. In Chiapas, Mexico, 5,000 attendants from 34 countries marked International Women’s Day 2018 with a meeting convened by the women of the National Liberation Zapatista Army by combining a communiqué with an email address for registration. More than twenty years after the Zapatista indigenous rebellion inspired a host of communication studies looking into the Internet’s role in the internationalization of protest and solidarity, the communicative simplicity driving this particular manifestation of feminist agency reminded us that there is no such thing as “old media” (Natale, 2016). What changes, instead, is the ways in which we perceive media, and how we refer to specific ways of relating to media at particular points in space and time. Which brings us back to Interpreting the Internet.