Gender, Memory and Technologies

Abstract

The chapter examines the long genealogy of feminist work both in theory and through feminist activism concerned with the impact of technologies on gender and memory. It then discusses how gender and memory technologies are understood within the field of memory studies to suggest that this area is one which is less studied in relation to how the digital and the global are both impacting on memory. It argues that while there are reconceptualisations of memory that recognise the importance of flow and movement there is a gap in terms of research that provides an understanding of how unevenly globalised digital technologies and human digitality are transforming gendered memories and memories of gender. What is needed, argues Reading, is not only a new theory of memory from a feminist perspective in the light of digitisation and globalisation, but also new methods that can trace the trajectories of memories across hitherto bifurcated mnemonic domains of the organic and mechanic, the private and the public, the local and the global in new ways.