"Knowers," Not Victims: Repositioning a Discourse Beyond the Digital Divide

It seems very appropriate that I would close this class with an examination of possibly the most subjugated knowledges we have encountered this semester being unearthed and disseminated through the use of digital media. As you may have noticed, my primary qualm regarding the content of this class has been that girls seem to be lost within a discourse of adults commenting on and theorizing about the content of their lives and experiences. This particular chapter is the obverse of that idea in that while it is still adults summarizing the actions of girls, girls as cultural resistors in themselves, especially the South African girls with HIV, create a discourse that transcends the need for an overriding force which can speak for them. Rather than forming insular communities for identity construction, like the message boards on gURL.com or the fan-fiction forums examined earlier in the semester, this is a transgressive discourse that was created to reach across artificial boundaries created by place and put a human face to a global problem, retooling the previous images to enact substantive change.

Recognizing that Western girls see a huge gap between themselves and girls in impoverished parts of the world who are continually subject to gender violence and the possibility of life-changing diseases, blogging about one's experiences, becoming "knowers" through demonstrating experience, democratizes both parties by allowing them to reflect on sameness rather than difference. HIV/AIDS seems like a very monolithic, faraway problem when a person is young, economically and socially privileged, and living in a part of the world that does not count the disease among its foremost problems anymore. It has been managed and contained, thusly becoming much less threatening than it once was, yet continues to be in other parts of the world. In offering human voices, especially young voices, this problem goes beyond its location to become profoundly relatable. These girls want others to learn from them, and if we can transcend difference, they have a lot to teach us.

I find it especially promising that the researchers were just as concerned with how the girls would construct themselves if given the opportunity to reflect on their lives through these mediums outside of a structured setting. In this case, they would have the opportunity to present themselves in an unmitigated, and more importantly, unmediated fashion, and they are clearly excited for this opportunity. Furthermore, the chat transcripts included reveal their desire to be a voice for their community. This article is probably one of my favorites because the majority is reflection from the girls themselves. So little of this book has engaged active participants in reflection on their circumstances and their willingness to learn and capacity for involvement says so much about the potential of this curriculum. Their concerns are universal (health, employment, community, family) and in reading about how they are able to use blogging to articulate their more abstract problems, it becomes apparent that new media truly can bring about important, macro-level change in our increasingly fragmented world.