Intersectionality and the Internet: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, and the Digital

Over the past 20 years, the broad field of digital media and technology studies has been influenced by theories of power that include intersectionality as a key organizing theory and method. In this article, we review the major contributions across multiple fields of study, particularly critical race and digital studies, to the examinations of the Internet and technology that use intersectionality as an organizing logic. Applying intersectionality as a conceptual lens into digital technology design, dissemination, and use has aided in findings that the computing industries are ill-equipped to map the world, its conditions, or its inhabitants. In reframing this sociocultural complexity as solvable by mathematics, statistics, code, and data, these industries make dehumanizing political and ethical decisions through reduction—from people and culture to content and abstracting the world to data. In the process, they intentionally reify long-standing inequities in the name of efficiency, progress, and profit and fail to capture what is necessary to improve life in socially, politically, and environmentally just ways. While intersectionality theory is complex, its intricacies afford critical culture digital scholars the epistemological tools and methodological insights needed to highlight that people, communities, and the environment must be considered prior to, in the midst of, and downstream of technoculture's mechanistic, rationalist, extractive desires or capitalism's desires for profit through exploitation.