Queen discusses the digital circulations of representations, tracing “how women’s self-representations are transformed through their circulation within global field of rhetorical action in ways that often ‘fix’ these women within neoliberal frameworks of ‘democracy’ and ‘women’s rights,’ thus erasing the multiple ways in which women across the globe use Internet technology to create and claim identities, agency, and political activism outside of the circulation of one-third world rhetorics of power.”
- In other words, the internet is not an unbounded infinte space of possibilities where people can enact “fragmented, multiple, liberated identies” (see Brooke). Rather, cyberspace is neither “disembodied” or “disconnected” from the material realities of composers and their reproduced (remediated?) identities. In short, the internet is not a transparent medium disconnected from material realities (Delagrange’s theory addresses digital media’s opacity and its connection to material reality)
- the internet is not a positive agent for change — real or potential; “Internet technology is profoundly implicated in globalized capitalist practices and integral to the resistance of local, regional, and transnational social movements” (see: Banks)
- to understand the effects of circulation, Queen discusses a view of internet activism and digital circulation through the concept of fields
- fields: a demarcated area filled with forces that have effects on objects
- electronic texts link fields, and the “historical, cultural, geopolitical, and ideological forces within these fields reshape the meaning of texts as they circulate” across fields
- prompted by this view of circulation Queen notes that a rhetorical analysis of digital texts must account for these circulations and the shifts in meaning that result from these circulations. To conduct this analysis, Queen coins the term rhetorical geneology: a process of examining digital texts not as artifacts of rhetorical productions, but, rather, as continually evolving rheotrical actions that are materially bound, actions whose transformation can be traced through the links embedded within multiple fields of circulation