See me and hear me: black South African women using YouTube as a site of belonging and visibility

Abstract

Digital technologies have created opportunities and threats in African feminism and digital scholarship, requiring feminists across the continent to rethink and reimagine their position in the digital sphere. Pre-colonialism African women were respected members of society. However, during slavery, colonialism and apartheid women where marginalised, victimised, and dispossessed socially, politically, and economically, making it difficult for them to be seen or heard. It is for this reason that post-colonial African thought is at the epicentre of foregrounding and reclaiming African intelligentsia. Digital technologies privilege Eurocentric knowledge; inevitably this poses a threat to the African gender transformation movement. African women face challenges such as the digital gender divide, cyber bullying, online violence, harassment, and gender bias datasets. To mitigate this gap, African women are curating transnational, transregional and transdisciplinary content to respond to and prevent all forms of online violence and gender inequality. This study argues that digital technologies can be used as a form of resistance to patriarchal, sexist, racist, classist and misogynistic ideologies about African women by creating feminist-driven podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, websites and social media sites that work towards realising feminist futures free from violence and socio-political and economic injustices online and offline.