Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking

Keisha Edwards Tassie is associate professor of communication at Morehouse College. Sonja Brown Givens is associate vice president for academic affairs at Medaille College.

These accessible, data-driven essays make the argument that women of color have affirmatively used social media as a way of leveraging themselves out of being 'a double-minority in society.' The first essay observes that 'women now tend to dominate Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram,' whereas Twitter and Tumblr reveal 'no significant gender differences.' From Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui's exploration of the role of Twitter in the Arab spring to essays about 'glamalectual' literary communities and bodily self-image, the essays look at how social media redress patriarchal and racist hegemonies of force. Indeed, as Minu Basnet argues, the web provides 'subaltern enclaves' to counter the derogations of street harassment. In his work Gary Lemons has contended that black men can add an extra disunion to intersectional feminism as allies; Tassie and Givens show that social media can further extend the identities of women of color without diffusing or assimilating them. The book is successful in arguing that cyberspace has amplified the maneuvering room available to women of color. The reality persists, though, that corporate interests own most major social media spaces. Even in virtual reality, privilege and oppression may remain. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers; professionals; general readers.

• Chapter 1: Surviving and thriving: Women of Color Cultivating Virtual Social Capital,Linda Charmaraman, Bernice Huiying Chan, Temple Price, and Amanda RicherChapter 2: Hashtagging from the Margins: Women of Color Engaged in Feminist Consciousness-Raising on Twitter, Caitlin GunnChapter 3: The Arab Spring between the Streets and the Tweets: Examining the Embodied (e)Resistance through the Feminist Revolutionary Body, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi AlaouiChapter 4: Move, Get Out The Way: Black “Women-of-Words” Voyaging on the Information Superhighway, Alexa HarrisChapter 5: Virtual Homeplace: (Re)Constructing the Body through Social Media, Latoya LeeChapter 6: Epistemic Advantage and Subaltern Enclaves: Tracing Anti-Street Harassment Discourse through Social Media Usage by Women of Color, Minu BasnetChapter 7: “Follow Me on Instagram”: “Best Self” Identity Construction and Gaze through Hashtag Activism and Selfie Self-Love, Kandace HarrisChapter 8: A Blog, A Bittersweet Mess, and Black and White Identity Development, Makini L. King