Gendered Uprisings: Desire, Revolution, and the Internet’s “Unintended Consequences”

Abstract

The unregulated speech acts enabled by the Internet create powerful new forms of resistance to, and powerful new forms of complicity with, Western Enlightenment structures of capitalism and power. Following Marcus Breen’s text, Uprising, this article examines two sites/cites where the Internet’s unregulated speech resounds simultaneously in these seemingly opposing registers: “Public Disgrace: Women Bound, Stripped and Punished in Public” – the same Internet pornography site discussed by Breen – and, the viral video created by twenty six year old Egyptian civil rights activist, Asmaa Mahfouz. I argue that, while these certainly may serve as examples of the disparate nature of unregulated Internet speech, they may also be understood as strategic responses to the Internet as globalizing sign system and to the highly gendered and racialised nature of contemporary post-colonial geopolitics.