Frontiers Forged and Colonized: Feminist Storytelling in Digital Narrative

Truly impactful innovations are developed by outsiders out of a sense of need; those that rise to mainstream recognition and acceptance, however, are colonized by dominant hegemonies. This paper traces cycles of innovation and colonization in literature, publishing, and computing as ancestral domains to electronic literature, which has been subject to the same gendered and othered frontier-colonization cycles that dominated its forebears. Elit was a new frontier for writing and publishing, a strong site of marginalized creativity, until it was codified and colonized into publishing and academia by the dominant class: women could create, but men had the actual and cultural capital to create and develop the structures to platform their work into the dominant discourse. This paper analyzes how feminist and marginalized digital writers resist colonization of their innovations and erasure of their innovations by hacking platforms, subverting narrative conventions, and amplifying hidden voices. The paper examines elements of innovation-colonization cycles in elit and adjacent practices (indie games, fanfic), showcases Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s algorithmically-generated epoetry as a site of subversion, and presents fanfic community Archive of Our own as a preliminary model of value-sensitive and inclusive community design. It argues for the development of feminist-first platforms—digital spaces that actively resist the structural colonization of marginalized storytelling.