And another fantastic new book from Duke University Press that we have indexed at Southwest Humanities is also being published today, 21 April 2026. Sarah Sharma’s Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech is a sharp and provocative critique of the gendered power structures underpinning contemporary digital technologies. Challenging the common assumption that platforms and devices are neutral “tools,” Sharma argues that major technology companies actively design and manage environments—both online and increasingly offline—in ways that position users themselves as the real instruments of value creation. In this framework, people are are being shaped, organized, and exploited by technology—not simply using it.
A central target of the book is what Sharma calls “Big Tech Feminism,” a mode of corporate inclusion that seeks to diversify the tech sector without fundamentally altering its underlying power dynamics. Rather than dismantling inequality, such initiatives often incorporate marginalized groups into existing systems that continue to treat them as “useful” components within a patriarchal technological order. By exposing how media theory and technological design are mobilized to sustain these hierarchies, Sharma develops a countervailing feminist techno-politics—one that emphasizes resistance, refusal, and the creation of alternative futures beyond the logic of Big Tech.
The book makes an important contribution across multiple fields, including feminist science and technology studies, media studies, and critical data/AI scholarship. By reframing technology as a site where gender, power, and subjectivity are co-constructed, Insufferable Tools pushes beyond surface-level critiques of bias or representation to interrogate the deeper structures of digital capitalism. In doing so, it offers scholars and practitioners a conceptual vocabulary for understanding and contesting the pervasive influence of Big Tech in shaping social life.
For more information about this important new title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 