Amir H. Payberah - 2025-09-25

What does it really mean to talk about "inclusion" or to "empower" women through technology? If digital inclusion happens under exploitative terms, can we still call it empowerment? And when development discourse borrows feminist words like care, inclusion, or empowerment, how can we distinguish between real support and co-optation?

These were some of the questions we discussed in our book club while reading In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle. The book lays out four key steps toward a feminist alternative to technology: (1) breaking down neoliberal "techno-fix" ideas, (2) mapping practices of solidarity, (3) understanding pleasure as political, and (4) examining uneasy alliances with funders.

It critiques the figure of the "Third World Technological Woman", entrepreneurial, caring, and endlessly resilient, who is expected to solve systemic problems while the deeper histories and structures of inequality remain untouched. Through fieldwork with feminist collectives in Latin America, Firuzeh shows how activists reclaim digital tools not just for inclusion, but for solidarity and pleasure: solidarity as building connections across differences, and pleasure as joy, imagination, intimacy, and desire reclaimed as political forces.

The book calls us to question the politics of "inclusion" when it comes at the expense of exploitation. While digitalization often turns bodies, data, and relationships into markets, grassroots feminist movements are experimenting with alternatives. Imperfect as they may be, they embody a discipline of hope and point toward futures rooted in care, dignity, and shared flourishing.