ABSTRACT
What does empowerment mean in digital times? To a field short on theoretical interventions from the global South, this chapter introduces voices of feminist activists grappling with this question. ‘Empowerment’ understood as economic, legal and personal change for individual gains is critiqued as inadequate: Southern feminists have long stressed the need for feminist political communities as the basis for real empowerment. These are needed to promote critical consciousness, agency and radical meaning-making, and serve as training grounds for mobilising against patriarchy, capitalist globalism, race, caste and heterosexism. In our digital era, the political arena includes technological objects as well as human actors. In it, community can be built through loose trans-local networks in digitally augmented ‘places’ based on democratic values, offering new freedom, community, connectedness and simultaneity for some. Yet the internet is implicated in contemporary power structures, its promise tarnished by unaccountable digital corporations, data extractivism, the marketisation of democracy and network capitalism’s connivance with surveillance states. For narratives of resistance to gain currency they must be appetising and marketable. Whether real empowerment ensues depends on how democratically the digital space can be governed, and on the success of a radical politics of liberating empowerment in curbing excesses of power.
