This work, set within a project for a doctoral thesis, results from a controversy (Latour,
2008) that emerged along with the cyberfeminist movement during the 80s (Zafra, 2019), in which participation in digital environments and gender subjectivation intersect. With the boom of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2018) and the transition towards the society of control (Deleuze, 2014), the participation – as social practice (Reckwitz, 2002; Shatzki et al., 2001) – of women and gender dissidents is simultaneously impaired and favoured in digital environments. It is impaired because digital environments operate as discursive machines subjected to gender power technologies (de Lauretis, 1989) that represent, propose and encourage these or those practices (Sibilia, 2008). And it is favoured because lines of flight are identified in the capitalist machinery (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) when opportunities are created in these spaces to transform the mainstream discourse (Walker & Laughter, 2019), for associationism and to develop support and vindication networks (McInroy et al., 2019), or for the popularisation of debates around gender and feminism.
This is a controversy that simultaneously permeates two political and educational
challenges that are reflected in the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2020): (a) women’s relationship
with digital technologies, and (b) citizens’ participation based on values of sustainability and equity.
Along this line, it is pressing to decipher the controversy, which implies identifying and
understanding the gender marks (Connell & Pearse, 2018) developed in the social
practices of participation in digital environments, young girls and boys’ competences for critical participation, and who acts as educational reference, and how, in this literacy process.
To that end, this study has its foundations in three central theoretical themes:
(a) The interpretation of digital environments based on rhizome theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980). From this perspective, digital environments are constituted as a map or cartography formed by a heterogeneous, changing multiplicity of discourses, languages, devices, artefacts, subjectivities, etc., connected in nodes (Mackness et al., 2016) in which different forms of production and interaction (posts, likes, RTs, etc.) can be identified. Using this approach, actants’ experimentation (Latour, 2008), the forms of communication and participation that emerge, as well as their relationship constituted and constituent tensions of power and knowledge (Foucault, 1980), manifest rhizomatically (Walker & Laughter, 2019), according to the principles of connexion and heterogeneity, multiplicity, cartography-decal and allocating rupture (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).
(b) Participation based on the practice paradigm. The act of participation is interpreted as a social practice, defined as forms of action repeated over time, in a space, which are identifiable as a unit and involve activities of the body and the mind, objects,
usages and other forms of knowledge that are at their basis, such as meanings, practical knowledge, emotions and motivations (Reckwitz, 2002). In the framework of social order, practices are connected with each other and form complex links, maps, in which social phenomena take root (Schatzki, 2017). And (c) gender as a regulatory fiction (de Lauretis, 1989), of a colonial nature (Connell & Pearse, 2018), operating as a device that links technologies of the self (Amigot & Pujal, 2009) that operate in the processes of power and knowledge of the becoming of a woman subject. It alludes to the subjectivity policy in a double sense: the construction of identities and the acquisition of subjectivities, which qualify or entitle one to exercise certain practices. It is seen in four dimensions: power, discourse, cathexis and production, consumption and accumulation (Connell & Pearse, 2018).