Spoken Word Videos and the Automodern Femme: Subversive Agency and Technologizing Safe Spaces
Oluwadamilare I. Bello
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 3
Abstract
The emergence of digital media and the world-wide-web altered the texture of agency, and digitally-mediated performance poetry like the spoken word became pivots to women agency. But how do preprogrammed technologies like new media—as social forces—permit human autonomy without hedging it? What concessions are made or limits excised when women wrestle repression through automated units? To what extent do women exercise agency through technologized forms like spoken word, considering the inherent contradiction? Engaging these questions, this paper argues that the paradox is resolved in the automodern femme, a female who is automation/technology-reliant yet autonomous. Formulating its theoretical base within feminist thought in combination with Robert Samuels’s automodernity, and using selected works of Eva Alordiah, the study reflects on how spoken word provides safe avenues to thread female experiences. It identifies new media’s automated infrastructures as exploitable tools against repression. Tropes of self-retrieval, selfimaging, and self-therapy in the selected performances challenging notions of what is permissible and taboo for the woman are engaged. The paper also explores how female autonomy is achievable and enhanced via new-media’s automation by isolating technologies of performance and performative techniques that aid creation of safe spaces for agentive and therapeutic purposes.
Keywords: Spoken Word Videos, Automodern Femme, Performance poetry, New-Media, Automodernity, Technology, Robert Samuels, Eva Alordiah
Oluwadamilare I. Bello (damilare68@gmail.com) recently concluded his Masters program at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he teaches literature and writing at the Center for General Studies. His field of specialization intersects Oral Literature, Popular Literature and Culture, (New) Media and Performance Studies, Digital Humanities, and Creative Writing. He is fascinated by the interconnections between ‘form’ as organizing principle, and indigenous epistemic practices as well as how they create new literary and cultural directions/praxes when shaped by digital technologies.