Precarious Safety: Contradictions in Cultivating Digital “Safe” Space for Transnational Feminist Organizing

Abstract

This paper examines a case of what I refer to as resistant spatial praxis—efforts by minoritized groups to cultivate counter-spaces to contest their exclusion from broader spaces of power and to organize. Specifically, I interrogate how digital “safe” counter-spaces for transnational feminist organizing are communicatively constituted and their potentials and limitations for organizing for social change. I draw on a participatory and qualitative study of a digitally based transnational feminist network, World Pulse, to interrogate how digital counter-space becomes constituted as “safe” through material-discursive practices as well as how those practices produce contradictions, as safety is precariously experienced by members. Responding to calls to better theorize how space constitutes and organizes power, this study advances understanding of the communicative constitution of (digital) space by expanding our understanding of where organizing is located, making visible the relations between multiple spaces and scales and illustrating the ways these relations are shaped by power and produce contradictions in ways that have consequences for efforts to organize.