For All Feminist Cyborgs: An Exploratory Research on Feminist Organizing Online WD 221 Feminist Perspectives and Strategies in Organizing Professor Rowena Laguilles Student Anna Belle Sanchez This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction A Gendered Internet A Brief Herstory of Women Who Made the Internet Ctrl + F: Women in Technology Statistics showing the non-representation of women in the field of information and communications technology (ICT). Ctrl + F: “Women in Technology” Industrialization and the unjust situation of women in electronics factories. Cyberaggressions on Women Examples of cyberaggressions committed on women online. Awesomesauce List of feminist organizations and examples of feminist activism online. #Cyberactivism Data and analysis of feminist activism online. AFK (Away From Keyboard) Offline efforts that affect feminist activists and activism online. What Makes Online Activism Feminist? Feminist critique and analysis of online activism. Thank You Internet Index of references INTRODUCTION Before this research paper, my Internet was into the rabbit hole, the part where there is waiting for the next translated chapter of Saint avatar rape and video game non-consent porn. Oniisan, a manga about the (mis)adventures of Where there are games that simulate (even Jesus and Buddha living together in modern day romanticize) abduction, violence, and rape of Japan. Or getting my adrenaline on playing Five women and young girls. Where there are trolls Minutes to Kill Yourself, of course, Wedding harassing women online until they start to fear Day edition. Sometimes, I'll just go link hopping for their safety offline. The part that can only be for hours, convinced that it's productive explained by: Because Internet. procrastination to know useless information like the proper plural form of octopus. But it was also the part where feminist cyberactivists are fighting violence against Now, it feels like I've taken the red pill and women with mapping technology. Where seeing how far the rabbit hole goes in the mobile apps guided by feminist values of Matrix. sisterhood and solidarity are created to combat sexual assault. Where mobile phones do more This research paper started to be about feminist than send emojis but actually empower women organizing in the competitive gaming sector. through education. Where herstory can exist Post-binge watching Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes with a few Wikipedia edits. Where tweets and vs Women in Video Games YouTube series and hashtags can end years of riot s and civil wars. right just when Gamergate was starting to flood The part that can only be explained by: Because my Facebook feed, I believed a research paper Internet. was possible. The feels was strong and only a quote from Even though I only had one documentary that Hellboy will do. barely mentioned female gamers (Free to Play: The Movie), one article on sexist local In the absence of light, darkness competitive gaming rules (Pro-gaming prevails. There are things that go tournament attempts to limit gay and bump in the night, Agent Myers. transgender players), one short blog post by a Make no mistake about that. And we local female gamer (I'm No Myth: The Girl are the ones who bump back. Gamer Experience in the Philippines) and all my faith in Google and the power of search Professor Trevor 'Broom' keyword variations. Bruttenholm But after being considered too niche a topic at initial consultations, I decided, for no other reason than to sound smart, to make a comparative analysis on the non-representation And this research paper is how I bump back. of women in the field of technology vis-a-vis the dominance of female labor in factories manufacturing electronics through a feminist critique on the ways the two divisions of “women in tech” organize. Annabs Sanchez May 2015 However, with each click I found myself deeper A GENDERED INTERNET A Brief Herstory of Women Who Made the Internet Far from the gender-neutral cyber-playground advancement of her career as a mathematician. that we imagine it to be, the Internet largely remains a male domain. When she met Charles Babbage who was then working on the Analytical Engine, she was only Gender stereotyping has greatly contributed to supposed to translate Luigi Menabrea's paper the masculinization of technology and the for him, but he was so impressed with her Internet. For example, “most people associate understanding of the machine, that he asked her science and math fields with 'male' and to expand the original. humanities and arts fields with 'female'”i, which creates implicit bias towards women in the field The two eventually ended up working together of science and technology. on the Analytical Engine. Although the machine was never built, Lovelace's pioneering the idea These societal beliefs that men are naturally that it can do more than calculate numbers, better than women when it comes to inspired Alan Turing with his work at Bletchley technologies such as the Internet, has Park during World War II. discouraged women's participation online. As noted in a report by No Ceilingsii, there is “an Her visionary legacy is perfectly summed up by estimated 200 million fewer women than men Walter Isaacson: “Her appreciation for poetical are online in developing countries.” science led her to celebrate a proposed calculating machine that was dismissed by the This lack of female voices online, in turn scientific establishment of her day, and she invisibilize the Internet's herstory “even though perceived how the processing power of such a women throughout history have been active in device could be used on any form of developing new technologies, feminists have information. Thus did Ada, Countess of argued that technology has still been looked Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age upon as a masculine creation.”iii that would blossom a hundred years later.”vi Ada Lovelace: First Computer Programmer After she wrote and published “a full set of instructions that a computing device could use All of Ada Lovelace's life has been about gender to reach an end result that had not been stereotyping and how she broke all of them. calculated in advance,”vii Lovelace became known as the first computer programmer. Daughter to the turbulent marriage of Anne Isabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron, her Until now, there are still a lot of contentions mother “fearing that Ada would inherit her regarding Lovelace's work and contribution in father's volatile 'poetic' temperament...raised her modern computing. “It is something that many under a strict regimen of science, logic, and women working in tech are only too familiar mathematics.”iv with. We can look at Ada and recognize that our own challenges are similar to hers, and her She impressed one of her earliest tutors, achievements are the sorts of things that we Augustus de Morgan, with her maths skills, who strive towards,”viii says Suw Charman- said that she had the potential to become “an Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace Day. original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.”v But, was also quick to recognize that her gender is an obstacle to the Hedy Lamarr: Paved the Way for WiFi frequency would only hear a blip, and would be unable to intercept the message.xiv” Hailed as the most beautiful girl in film, Hedy Lamarr's life is like the plot of a Hollywood The spread spectrum technology used in the blockbuster come to life. Secret Communications System is regarded as the “technical backbone that makes cellular She made headlines for the film Ecstasy, which phones, fax machines and other wireless came into much criticism for its passionate operationsxv” as well as the precursor to wireless portrayal of female sexuality. It was the first communication technology such as WiFi and non-pornograhic film that featured full frontal LTE. nudes as well as the first onscreen female orgasmix. Although Lamarr and Antheil turned over their invention to the US Navy, it was never put to More than the critics, it was her husband, use. Author Stephen Michael Shearer speculates armaments manufacturer Friedric Mandl that that “the invention was shelved because Lamarr was enraged by the movie. Often described as was considered the most beautiful girl in the possessive and extremely controlling, he world and we must keep in mind that, at the reportedly bought all copies of Ecstasy to time, nobody took a beautiful woman seriously prevent other people from seeing his wife's regarding intellectual matters.xvi” controversial scene. Mandl also allegedly “forbade her from pursuing her film career and kept her a virtual prisoner in their home.x” As Mandl insisted that she accompany him during his meetings, Lamar became privy to matters of military technology during World War II. Among those that were discussed in one of these meetings was the “research was indicating that radio waves were better than wire for controlling weapons such as torpedoesxi.” After escaping from her husband – some reports say she disguisedxii herself as her maid, while others say she druggedxiii her maid to make her escape – Lamarr moved to Hollywood to continue her acting career. It was during this time that she met pianist and composer George Antheil. Both shared a deep sense of patriotism and an interest in inventing which led them to collaborate on the Secret Communications System. It has the ability to “guide torpedoes to their target without being intercepted by the enemy, by sending messages between transmitter and receiver over multiple radio frequencies in a random pattern” and “the message would move so quickly across the radio waves that anyone tuning in to a particular Grace Hopper: Queen of Code about Grace Hopper still highlights the inequality experienced by women in tech fields.