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Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures Book Review

Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures by Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember, and Kate O’Riordan is a work of feminist intervention amid a masculinized digital and cultural climate. Furious breaks down computational culture and the sexist politics within media consumption and how contemporary digital discourse does not always include feminist scholarship. Published by Pluto Press, London, Furious traverses digital domains in a playful and intimate writerly fashion that orients the reader into also thinking about acts of resistance within digital sites but ultimately raises questions of how digital methods and praxis can be more inclusive of women and feminist thought. In spite of its short length (130 pages), Furious appears to be exactly what the title hints at – a furious manual that challenges masculinized computational culture but one that reels in feminist genealogies, scientific traditions of writing, technological linguistics. Furious stands as a provocative piece that covers intersections of technology, digital humanities and feminist scholarship. In its own style and form, this book does not refrain from asking the hard questions; it unabashedly digs into the audience’s minds by setting aside its topics of futurism and asks: “Why are women’s dreams set aside, and why are men’s valourized?” (72). The writers succinctly explore the theoretical implications and technological forms that offer or are in need of feminist reevaluation across five chapters. The first chapter, “Feminist Futures: A Conditional Paeon for the Anything-Digital,” is a preface to digital writing and objects mixed with human subjectivity, particularly with how women see themselves; the second chapter, “Scale, Subject, and Stories: Unreal Objects,” sets up a scientific antecedent to explain digital health and genomic research; the third chapter, “Bland Ambition? Automation’s Missing Visions,” treads into automation, medium technology, and digital transformations of the private and public spheres of women; the fourth chapter uses mythology and dystopian narratives that subjected women to colonialism and absence; and for the last chapter, “Technological Feminism and Digital Futures,” the writers conclude with an analysis of intersectionality across digital spaces and how women and feminist scholars can feel estranged through technological inequalities. The first few chapters (1–3) of Furious address digital forms of writing and language. The writers argue in these sections that digital platforms and spaces do not always include feminist theory and language. They make points about “smartly controlled futures and spaces” (Bassett et al 13) that are unmediated and up to users to reevaluate how information and narratives are written. Through writing, one must take into account representation and voice and how they can be used as a form to refuse masculinism. Even in a “subjectless, extinct, object oriented world” (Bassett et al xii), text and data should demand feminist inquiry and challenge how knowledge production can often erase feminist voices. Deeper into the subsequent chapters, the writers discuss digital health and how access and participation should be more accessible but are still yet to be achieved. As the writers point out in this age of information, “access to information as a resource for making informed choices in relation to health care is assumed . . . access to information is not the same as knowledge about health” (Bassett et al 31). Women do not have the same access and autonomy when it comes to having bodies transfused into digital interpretations and data spectacles. Subsequent chapters move on to include WOMEN’S STUDIES 2022, VOL. 51, NO. 7, 844–845