“I went to Noisebridge…. Once.”



A lot of Double Union applications say something like this. That makes me super sad. It means we miss out on a lot of mindblowing coolness. Women go to hackerspaces because they sound amazing — full of equipment and materials to make things, people, and idealism about knowledge-sharing, open source and free culture and tech, like a fabulous grownup playground for learning and making. You get there and it’s all that.

But maybe it’s also kind of dirty and cluttered and there’s no toilet paper, and there is some creepy guy who won’t stop talking to you about how he wants to teach you things that you already know, while he backs you into a corner. There’s that level of harassment. Then there’s a lot of behavior that’s at a more “e-textiles” level, that’s irritating, annoying, where we have pressure to prove ourselves or our authenticity, where our knowledge and capacities are undermined. The message is, there’s this cool culture of invention, making and learning, but we aren’t expected to be part of it. Not all women experience this but quite a lot of us do and it’s a well known pattern in general in science, tech, engineering and math. When we know something deeply technical about materials and invention, then it gets gendered as something women do and therefore as not “counting,” as trivial. When we demonstrate knowledge about domains that are male-dominated, we are treated as intruders or impostors.

Unfortunately, there’s also much more direct violence against women to worry about in our spaces. After several years as a member of Noisebridge, I started the Anarchafeminist Hacker Hive, a mailing list and series of meetings that met at Noisebridge and another Bay Area hackerspace, sudo room. That was in response to several incidents of harassment, and the presence in these spaces of known misogynist, racist serial harassers, as well as people convicted of violence against women. We discussed how “hacking” or hacker ethics might change in the context of feminism. But we also discussed what we could do about creeps in our hackerspaces. It’s a constant stress that women like me are treated as “the sexual harassment reporting system”. We’re always be fighting upstream just to be seen as human beings.

So part of our movement to make feminist spaces is because we’re annoyed. We’re pissed off. What if we weren’t always fighting bad behavior, having to justify our hacker-ness, feeling like unicorns, being tokenized, having to be armored up against harassment?
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-rise-of-feminist-hackerspaces-and-how-to-make-your-own