Feminist digital ecologies: Challenging birding's masculinity in the Self-Isolating Bird Club

Keywords: feminist digital geography, birding, birdwatching, gender, male gaze
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61

Abstract

Deploying the Self-Isolating Bird Club (SIBC) as a case study, this paper examines women’s experiences of online nature spaces during COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK and Ireland. The SIBC is an online birdwatching group operating across several social media platforms which, at the height of the pandemic, reached over fifty thousand members. It was launched by prominent British naturalists Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin at the beginning of lockdown as a digital space for beginner birdwatchers and wildlife enthusiasts to share their own photographs, videos, and stories about nature. The group quickly grew to become a supportive and welcoming community. This paper is based on a series of focus groups conducted with forty women who were active members of the group, as well as five semi-structured interviews with the group administrators and creators. In addition, dozens of hours were spent conducting ethnographic work on the SIBC’s social media pages and tuning into their live broadcasts. As scholars have argued, the bird watching community is heavily gendered and what counts as ‘proper birding’ relies on masculinist notions regarding ‘going out to the field’ to see rare species. As the birdwatching community moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the SIBC challenged masculinist legacies of ‘traditional birding’ through emphasising everyday and domestic spaces. Bridging literatures from digital geographies, more-than-human geographies, and feminist political ecology, we offer an affirmative critical account of how online spaces have the potential to enable wider participation in birding (and other naturalist) communities, as evidenced by the SIBC.