COMMUNITY-BASED DIGITAL LITERACIES: A CYBERFEMINIST ANALYSIS OF LITERACY PRACTICES IN BIRTH WITHOUT FEAR

Lori Beth De Hertogh

This dissertation develops the concept of community-based digital literacies, a term that refers to the rhetorical, civic, and technological knowledge and literacy practices communities sponsor and employ for civic action. This concept builds off of, yet departs from, other literacy scholars’ work in that it pays special attention to the relationship between online communities and the digital literacies they sponsor and employ for civic action. As this project illustrates, literacy studies, feminist theory, and medical rhetorics lack scholarship that examines how and why communities sponsor and employ digital literacies and how this process can empower groups and individuals. Community-based digital literacies addresses this gap and offers a new lens for analyzing this complex relationship. Highlighting these connections helps illustrate how and why communities sponsor digital literacies that can change social and technological systems, thereby empowering individuals and their communities. To demonstrate this process, I argue that the online natural birthing community, Birth Without Fear, sponsors and employs community-based digital literacies to engage in cyberfeminist activism that empowers women within technical and medical systems and to rewrite rhetorics regarding women’s experiences with pregnancy and childbirth. I draw on literacy, feminist, and medical rhetorical theories and methodologies to investigate the diverse ways in which Birth Without Fear sponsors and employs community-based digital literacies for cyberfeminist activism. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Birth Without Fear’s sponsorship of community-based digital literacies helps women engage in cyberfeminist activism that increases women’s health literacy and helps them create rhetorical agency within healthcare systems. Understanding this process is important as medical systems physically and discursively construct and mediate women’s bodies. It is therefore essential that women have access to and sponsor literacy practices that allow them to critically analyze, resist, and reform medical and cultural infrastructures that shape women’s experiences with pregnancy and childbirth.

COMMUNITY-BASED DIGITAL LITERACIES: A CYBERFEMINIST ANALYSIS OF LITERACY PRACTICES IN BIRTH WITHOUT FEAR

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