Playing Speculative Cat’s Cradle: Reckoning with the Feminist Potentialities of Twine

Abstract

Inspired by the feminist possibilities within digital technologies and acknowledging their limitations, the authors examine the collaborative process of creating Twine workshops for three conferences, the International Communications Association, the Canadian Communications Association, and the Open Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association. The workshops engaged with Twine as an interactive tool for reckoning with narratives of Empire through feminist, nonlinear, non-normative, creative expression and explored how embracing the ethos of Twine might enable collaborative analog ideation. In Twine, we see ways to bifurcate from libertarian normalizations of individualism and instead posit “playing with speculative cat’s cradle” as a prompt from Donna Haraway to collectively reckon with, re-imagine, and co-experiment with burgeoning forms of digital expression to shape otherwise thinking and future possibilities. Drawing from our respective fields of expertise (digital cultures; communications; history; gender, feminist, and women’s studies; environmental studies; writing and rhetoric; game studies), we examine the opportunities and limitations of Twine and reflect on the process of forming a feminist collaboration. We highlight processes and relationships rather than solely focusing on outcomes as a deliberate feminist intervention against neo-liberal results-oriented approaches to research and suggest that a component of feminist collaboration is being open to nonlinear, ongoing, and iterative work together.