Information and intersectionality in the digital millennium

1.1Analysis and methodology

This chapter aims to address and consider the information contributions of people at the intersection of the BIPOC, Queer, and disabled communities, through my own lens of lived experience. We should not underestimate even small ways of information sharing and so we will look at two methods of unlikely information sources utilized by people at this intersection: Tumblr and zines. I am here to argue that these mediums, or other non-standard alternatives, should also be considered when seeking information to benefit and support marginalized communities. These alternative information sources have led to the community co-creation of accessible and inclusive knowledge.

The counter-storytelling that these information sources facilitate challenges traditional information repositories and forces them to grow beyond the information needs of the privileged majority (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). I intend for this chapter to be for the information community of library workers and people in the information sciences who wish to disrupt the present system that picks and chooses which person of privilege is able to have their voice heard. I have personally spent extensive time getting information from Tumblr (personal experience from 2010–2018) and zines. My lived experience inspired me to apply a deeper lens as to what re-search can look like when it comes to multi-marginalized community experiences with information. I push back against conventional academic research paradigms because, as an individual living an intersectional existence within multiple marginalized identities, voices like mine in academia are a privileged few. I’ve had to diverge from many of the standard pathways of information science as a result of the impact of my lived intersectionality and the hostility I experienced as a result of navigating the kyriarchy in the field. I learned that my lived experience has shown me that the information needs of people like me are overlooked. As an individual who inadvertently ends up subverting conventional scholarly boundaries by speaking on my Black, Deaf, and transgender presence and experiences in information sciences, this analysis itself is a vulnerable re-search from the inside out.

2.1The conflicts between social media censorship and counter storytelling

When it comes to counterstorytelling, it’s clear that on the more mainstream social medias like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, there is a certain degree of censorship of people of the global majority (Botella, 2019). Even as I type, there is a genocide happening in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan, and it is a constant struggle to make sure that enough traction is gained against social media algorithms that are biased against people experiencing racial oppression (Noble, 2018). There is a consistent amount of what is known as “shadowbanning”, an algorithmic suppression by social media platforms based on what a social media platform determines to be unfavorable (Delmonaco et al., 2024).

Naturally shadowbanning impacts marginalized people the most. For example, my own experience of reporting multiple blatantly racist pages on Instagram that have racial slurs and white supremacist ideology, and the pages will not be taken down by the platform. Yet, on that same platform, I simultaneously deal with suppression of a page I created to focus on building an accessible BlackQueer resource and event page for local community building and sharing of Black Queer Joy. The reasoning …the algorithm accused me of “automation”, even though I personally made and posted everything on that page; while simultaneously virulently racist pages are allowed to remain up. This suppression has led to many Black people and other racially marginalized groups to resort to shortening terms like “white” to “yt”, “wheat”, emojis, or other code so that algorithms don’t flag their pages for talking negatively about white supremacy. In essence, anything posted by a racially marginalized person on the topic of whiteness and white supremacy can be flagged as hate speech without this internet speak change (Joseph, 2019).

Additionally, this results in the need to change terms like Palestine to “pals” or an watermelon emoji, or “racism” to “racizm”, “g3n0c1de” instead of “genocide”, and other such edits to avoid censorship of topics that matter to those in marginalized groups. Queer people of color have to consider what they post visually, especially if they are living in a fat or disabled body simultaneously (Fitzsimmons, 2021). This level of censorship of social justice issues and related disparities of treatment by the algorithm does not seem to happen to the same degree on Tumblr, in part, due to internet speak. Internet speak here is being used to refer to the way language transforms due to the varied nature of internet communication (Eller, 2005). Additional censorship includes suppression of anything determined to be sexual content in 2018, as well as suppression of mental health and other topics deemed as “sensitive” (Nguyen, 2022).

3.1Lessons from Tumblr: Cultural appropriation and racebending

Tumblr allowed me to connect with what Calhoun (2020) defined as “Black Tumblr” and to engage in collective organizing and information sharing with other Black people with additional marginalizations. When it comes to social justice topics around race, I originally found out about cultural appropriation and racebending from Tumblr. This knowledge gave me an immediate awareness about the media I consumed. It made me become a better researcher because I questioned more in my IRL world than I may have otherwise around politics, around who gets to access information.

Cultural appropriation is the process of those who oppressed a culture benefiting from cherry picked aspects of that culture, whether it be socially, financially, or otherwise, in a way that is denied to the oppressed culture. Racebending is the reimagining of traditionally white characters as a marginalized race. This is something that is beginning to be more documented, with people of marginalized groups speaking out about people treating their cultural markers and identities as cosplay (Nilsson, 2022).

I found out about these issues through people on Tumblr spreading awareness, which led to me connecting with information groups on Facebook, specifically one focused on cultural appropriation. There are many groups that have that focus, but in this particular Facebook group, which I found via a similar group with a Tumblr page, they draw a hard line around understanding gatekeeping of information when it comes to spirituality. Why? Because they do not feel that it makes sense to culturally appropriate and be able to benefit from that ethically.

For instance, a group named Witches Without Cultural Appropriation has some documentation on closed practices, but focuses on sharing open practices, intended to help people seeking their ancestral practices as a starting place. The administrator of the group, Sayas-Díaz de Escalona (2020) has actively worked to curate a safe and well moderated space for learning. People are able to seek and share information about their practices and be able to find support in solo spiritual practices. Many groups on Facebook do not have this same stance, which mimics Tumblr behavior. This group is not explicitly acting as a “virtual library”, namely, a collection of digital resources, but the information provided from the community sharing on reconnecting with ancestral practices is invaluable. It’s given me a lot of food for thought in regards to how people subvert traditional academia methodologies in order to express otherwise suppressed experiences, and the role of social media in that process.

This comes into play as well with Women of Color Feminist Tumblr, which collects and distributes information that supports education via feminist studies from an intersectional lens as originally discussed by Crenshaw (1991). Women of Color Feminist Tumblr was analyzed by Alzate (2020) as a source that suggests the potential for Tumblr (and potentially other social media), as a pedagogical forum that utilizes counterstorytelling, and other methodologies to disseminate knowledge. The community that has formed around this Tumblr to challenge colonial mindsets around feminism that centers yt women and ignores the fact that women who live racialized experience navigate that as well as womanhood (Women of Color, in Solidarity, 2018). The resistant knowledges created as a result of the work that went into this Tumblr cannot be overstated in potential significance. This and more are reason enough to consider Tumblr a valuable source of knowledge that has the ability to be a tool, a community forum, and a resource center simultaneously, ultimately challenging hegemonic knowledge spaces as they currently operate.

4.1Lessons from Zines

The inclusive nature of zines challenges traditional media hierarchies and provides a voice for marginalized groups simultaneously. Zines allow greater diversity that subverts the traditional publishing industry by sidestepping it entirely (Bold, 2017). Zines are able to be disseminated in person or virtually, on a wide variety of platforms.

They create an avenue for marginalized groups to subvert traditional publishing and put out their own stories, utilizing counter storytelling to release the pressure caused by daily microaggressions (Trazo & Kim, 2019).

One example of this playing out is the creation of the POC Zines Project, a community-building project that promotes zines by racially marginalized people, as analyzed by Bold (2017). Zines facilitate creative and social collaboration both online and offline.

Zine librarianship has become its own subfield as well. Zine librarianship focuses on elevating the voices of marginalized people who have made zines to share information. Fox et al. (2017) note that zine librarianship as a field is not gatekept, and “no credentials are required to be a part of the action”. This means that ANY librarian could potentially develop a zine library relevant to a community (Code of Ethics, 2015). Zine librarianship could be a means for librarians to find ways to fill representation gaps in their collection regarding marginalized groups by finding new ways to showcase zines as part of the public record. Zines are additionally accessible to all ages, and can be made virtual, which means the possibilities are endless.

5.1Limitations and concerns

Christian et al. (2020b) studied the way mainstream social media platforms and their potential for connection are challenged by the needs of people experiencing multiple forms of marginalization. There are also concerns in the execution of cataloging and metadata for things like zines and Tumblr posts. While there are styles of citation determined for Tumblr posts, Tumblr is still not a permanent repository and if someone chooses to deactivate their page, whatever resources shared would only be able to be found as a secondary source, from another’s Tumblr page or via a meme. This creates a barrier in regards to academic rigor. Meanwhile, zines still stump many archivists due to their anti-institutional nature. This additionally comes into play because zines are often made by and for underrepresented groups who may not have a voice at their local institutions as studied by Fife (2019).

Due to the lack of academic rigor, and the nature of the microblogging format, it can be difficult to determine an author. Despite Tumblr being a site where many who have multi-marginalized identities find support, there are still issues around racism of users and racial bias on the site itself. This means while Tumblr is an inclusive space, it’s not necessarily a utopic space where racial, ableist, queermisic harms are not present (Noble & Tynes, 2016). People still have to navigate the issues of the kyriarchy playing out in all circumstances where humans interact, including on Tumblr (Agarwal & Sureka, 2016).

This then creates considerations around ethics of using these sites as academic research sources, around marginalized identities because there is less oversight around consent to be included in research (Korn, 2019). Another limitation is the lack of funding and time and staffing that these resources often have. Women of Color Tumblr went on hiatus in 2018 as a result of the lack of institutional support and has not been updated since (Women of Color, in Solidarity, 2018).

5.2The future of information sources

Attu and Terras (2017) have done extensive work to figure out how research on Tumblr had slowly grown since the launch of the popular website in 2007. They created a classification scheme to study Tumblr as an information source, and to determine ways people are navigating the website’s lack of metadata in social media research. Despite the fact that popularity of the site fluctuates, many people in and out of academia are already treating Tumblr as a source of information. Piper (2016) provides an example of how Tumblr can be used as an archive for sharing the experiences of those outside of the majority.

There is a deep necessity to allow people to tell their own stories, and Tumblr, zines, and other methodologies easily facilitate this process of developing cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). Tumblrs like Women of Color (2017) have already connected many people with additional Tumblrs on POC experience.

Zines allow for a mimicking of this organic information sharing IRL, but many zines that start offline in paper format end up scanned and shared in many places, including Tumblr, creating this really beautiful mutual cycle.

If people are able to wholeheartedly develop an understanding of intersectionality as a critical theory, information sciences would immediately have more options in regards to understanding better ways of cataloging and archiving (Vaden, 2022). This is something that should be done thoughtfully, because in a majority yt field, there is unfortunately potential for this work to be co-opted by those who do not need it, according to Reddy (2023) who studied the utility of how to inform people who navigate human rights education and the law.

Intersectionality as a critical race theory tenet as defined by Crenshaw will not go away as a means to understand and combat disparity in information services (Grauel, 2022). This is also explored in CRT focused edited work Knowledge Justice (2021), which has an immense amount of resources from people doing the work towards decolonizing the information sciences. This book was made open access because the information included is invaluable to those in the information sciences who want to understand CRT in regards to their library work, and want to change and expand the field in ways that matter to those who experience barriers to information access as a result of marginalized lived experiences. This access was made possible via funding, that many marginalized writers and voices usually do not have access to. I envision the expansion of zine programs to help people gain entry to decolonial methods of information sharing, in and out of institutions.