Gender Sovereignty and Algorithms: Surveillance, Digital Erasure and Propaganda

Abstract

The panel explores feminism comparatively across authoritarian and postcolonial contexts in India and Iran. It examines how feminism becomes co-opted through the adoption of its language, while its political antagonism is neutralized by postcolonial nationalisms that articulate anti-women positions. The panel further investigates how digital technologies enable such ideological claims about marginalized women to become sedimented, producing gendered bodies that are rendered governable in non-agential ways. Additionally, it analyzes how digital infrastructures increasingly reproduce and multiply authoritarian modalities of governance through surveillance, erasure, and algorithmic colonialism. The panel further examines how the exposition of resistance as a cultural currency by artists, activists, and cultural producers in response to algorithmic surveillance and state power can itself become a modality through which imperial claims are extended rather than disrupted. Soma Negahdarinia's paper explore the disproportionality of algorithmic regulation and how it impacts Kurdish women's political activism. Shambhavi Siddhi's paper explores how Muslim women's legal rights are regulated through a hybridized imperialism. Similarly, Farzan Dar's paper explores how cultural and artistic agency is coopted to produce legitimay of hyper-imperialistic governance in Kashmir. Another paper elucidates how digital architectures become subservient to imperial ambitions and contribute to gender inequalities and divides and proposes a rethinking of gender. Inshah Malik's paper offers rethinking of gender as Sovereignty as an alternative conceptual notion.

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