Michele White

Michele White is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. She teaches Internet and new media studies, film and television studies, visual culture studies, science fiction and technology literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies.

White’s current research also includes three book projects:

Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay is under contract with Duke University Press. In Buy It Now, White analyzes how eBay promises to fulfill all desires, deliver any object, and provide an equitable community but produces normative gender, racial, and sexuality positions and a setting in which people are expected to work without economic compensation. In a related manner, commercial producers, designers, and products often present technologies as unbiased tools while providing clear messages about the identity of individuals who are invited to engage. White provides detailed studies of how buyers, sellers, and viewers work within and subvert the English language site--eBay.com. By analyzing how they function on eBay, she conceptualizes and critiques some of the key structuring features of Internet settings, such as addresses to everyone, founding myths, conceptions of community, category systems, and brand and fan attachments. She also introduces a number of underutilized theories for engaging with Internet settings, including the critical concepts of configuring the user, brand communities, citizen-consumers, sexual citizenship, and gendered organizational logic. eBay therefore works as a theoretical model to think about and further advance Internet and new media studies.

With Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the Network and Information Technology Workers, White considers some of the standard ways academics, artists, popular writers, and other individuals represent Internet engagements. She considers how the Internet is rendered through visual and textual representations of entering, going, liveness, and space. The tendency to describe these concepts as inherent, necessary, and original is critiqued by comparing them to counter-narratives about the Internet and the similar conventions employed in such cultural forms as architecture and television. The use of spatial terms in conceptualizing the Internet is also resisted with a strategic vocabulary, which includes such concepts as reading, typing, sitting, and representations. These alternative terms emphasize the rendered aspects of Internet and computer engagements and indicate how technologies and depictions influence individuals’ embodied experiences. In proposing different models for understanding the Internet, White indicates the alternative functionality and strategic resources that the Internet can offer.

From these concerns, she is developing Producing Women: Representational Practices, Social Change, and Traditional Femininities in Internet Settings. Feminist and queer researchers often look to resistant and unconventional practices as ways of subverting normative identities, rigid cultural and corporate structures, and inequitable societies and governments. In Producing Women, White considers how women use traditional femininities as a means of negotiating the normative and organizational aspects of Internet settings, marketing themselves and products, and rendering more empowering roles. The term “producing” points to the ways women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures, and deploy technological processes. These women employ terms like “stay-at-home mother” and “wife” but their practices are often different than societal understandings of these terms. White indicates how social change is occurring through such reconfigurations and the means through which activists and academics might study and support such shifts.