INTRODUCTION
This webtext starts with the cultural, legal, and economic reasons Autumn Stanley (1995) documented in her book Mothers and Daughters of Invention regarding why women have, historically, been absent from the system of intellectual property protection in the United States.
I first draw four themes from across the work on women and technology published in the past forty or so years. Using Stanley’s work as a launching point, I then migrate to exploring the ways in which women (and, in some cases, their intellectual property) are at risk in digital public spaces and the ways in which women are taking hold of these spaces to craft new products, make new knowledge, and contribute to a robust new media landscape.
I collage these artifacts—Stanley’s book, a set of historical themes, examples of women’s work in new media, and copyright troubles faced by two specific women—to create an initial constellation of implications. What I hope to offer here is a map of research territory and some signposts toward some of the potentialities this research has on how we understand contemporary feminist work, digital media, and intellectual property.
The implications of this constellation point toward the ways in which digital networks potentially provide a space where women make new knowledge; identify and craft affiliations with other producers; and anchor themselves as creators, writers, and artists.
index | introduction | history | stanley | digital(creation) |
digital(dangers) | ip resistance | conclusions | bibliography
dànielle nicole devoss | devossda@msu.edu