Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan
The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan’s theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan’s discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes.
Table of Contents
Preface: The Centre on the Margins / by Sarah Sharma
Introduction: A Feminist Media is the Message / by Sarah Sharma with Rianka Singh
PART I. Retrieving McLuhan’s Media
1. Transporting Blackness: Black Materialist Media Theory / by Armond Towns
2. Sidewalks of Concrete and Code / by Shannon Mattern
3. Hardwired / by Nick Taylor
4. Textile, the Uneasy Media / by Ganaele Langlois
PART II. Thinking with McLuhan: An Invitation
5. Dear Incubator / by Sara Martel
6. WifeSaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment / by Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer
7. “Will Miss File Misfile?” The Filing Cabinet, Automatic Memory, and Gender / by Craig Robertson
8. Computers Made of Paper, Genders Made of Cards / by Cait McKinney
9. Sky High: Platforms and the Feminist Politics of Visibility / by Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser
PART III: Media after McLuhan
10. Scanning for Black Data / A Conversation with Nasma Ahmed and Ladan Siad
11. 3D Printing and Digital Colonialism / A Conversation with Morehshin Allahyari
12. Toward a Media Theory of the Digital Bundle / A Conversation with Jennifer Wemigwans
Afterword / by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Praise
“This brilliant collection thrillingly updates and interrogates Marshall McLuhan’s work, with abundant insights from feminist and critical race studies. Starting from the insight that ‘the medium is the message,’ Re-Understanding Media refuses the idea of technology as a mere tool, instead showing how it is a structuring form of power—from incubators to platform heels to facial recognition scanners. A challenging and important book.” — Rosalind Gill, City, University of London
“From wires, sidewalks, platforms, and records of Black escape to technologies of containment, fabrication, and incubation, the essays and conversations in this innovative collection bring new insight and crucial analysis to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. Re-Understanding Media is rich with feminist methods of extending, troubling, and undoing disciplinary modes of knowledge production at the McLuhan Coach House, within media studies, or elsewhere.” — Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Reviews
Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan by Jan Baetens (Leonardo, June 2022)