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Re-Understanding Media

Re-Understanding Media

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The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan’s theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan’s discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes.
Contributors. Nasma Ahmed, Morehshin Allahyari, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brooke Erin Duffy, Ganaele Langlois, Sara Martel, Shannon Mattern, Cait McKinney, Jeremy Packer, Craig Robertson, Sarah Sharma, Ladan Siad, Rianka Singh, Nicholas Taylor, Armond R. Towns, and Jennifer Wemigwans The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends. Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She was the director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology from 2017 to 2022. Sharma is author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, also published by Duke University Press.
Rianka Singh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University, Toronto. Preface: The Centre on the Margins / Sarah Sharma  vii
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction: A Feminist Media Is the Message / Sarah Sharma  1
Part I. Retrieving McLuhan's Media
1. Transporting Blackness: Black Materialist Media Theory / Armond R. Towns  23
2. Sidewalks of Concrete and Code / Shannon Mattern  36
3. Hardwired / Nicholas Taylor  51
4. Textile, the Uneasy Medium / Ganaele Langlois  68
Part II. Thinking with McLuhan: An Invitation
5. Dear Incubator / Sara Martel  87
6. Wifesaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment / Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer  98
7. “Will Miss File Misfile?” The Filing Cabinet, Automatic Memory, and Gender / Craig Robertson  119
8. Computers Made of Paper, Genders Made of Cards / Cait McKinney  142
9. Sky High: Platforms and the Feminist Politics of Visibility / Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser  163
Part III. Media after McLuhan
10. Scanning for Black Data: A Conversation with Nasma Ahmed and Ladan Siad / Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh  179
11. 3D Printing and Digital Colonialism: A Conversation with Moreshin Allahyari / Sarah Sharam and Rianka Singh  192
12. Toward a Media Theory of the Digital Bundle: A Conversation with Jennifer Wemigwans / Sarah Sharma  208
Afterword: After McLuhan / Wendy Hui Kyong Chun  225
Bibliography  233
Contributors  255
Index  259

“This brilliant collection thrillingly updates and interrogates Marshall McLuhan’s work, with abundant insights from feminist and critical race studies. Starting from the insight that ‘the medium is the message,’ Re-Understanding Media refuses the idea of technology as a mere tool, instead showing how it is a structuring form of power—from incubators to platform heels to facial recognition scanners. A challenging and important book.”
“From wires, sidewalks, platforms, and records of Black escape to technologies of containment, fabrication, and incubation, the essays and conversations in this innovative collection bring new insight and crucial analysis to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. Re-Understanding Media is rich with feminist methods of extending, troubling, and undoing disciplinary modes of knowledge production at the McLuhan Coach House, within media studies, or elsewhere.”

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