Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue No. 13: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking (January 2018)
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Issue edited by Sophie Toupin and spideralex
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Item Open Access [Issue no. 13 Cover](Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Figueroa, ConstanzaItem Open Access Cuerpoclickbait(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Chavez, JosueItem Open Access h0rd14r13z(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Hackers of ResistanceItem Open Access Ultrasonic Dreams of a Clinical Renderings(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Possible BodiesWhen specific intra-active technologies of ultrasound and echography violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark. The crystals. They read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency. Lively and clumsily smoking cigarettes, they cried as coyotes: The crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism! Through vibrations of feminist technoscience, through friends and lovers, they heard how sonographic images produced life and mattered “real bodies”. Convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh, and the cosmos, particular aclinical renderings evidence that “real bodies” do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated. Listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear. DIWO, recreational, abstract, referential and quantifying sonic practices are already profanating the image-life industrial continuum. Ultrasound is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or medical experts. These are your new devices, dim and glossy. In this partial imaginary, you’ll deep listen to their non-ocularity, following entanglements with images and imaginations; all the way into ultrasonic cosmo-dreaming, where poetic renderings and sonographies start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations. Let’s collectively resonate against technologies of ultrasound and echography and bet on practices that open up relational, semiotic-material, non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric notions of presence, that bring in transfeminist queer futures.Item Open Access Sutured Broken Mirrors of the Impossible(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Rojas, Lucía EgañaThis text seeks to contribute to the development of techniques for the emergence of speculative fictions around feminist imaginaries related to technology. It tries to search for mechanisms to intervene in traditional narratives framed within a patriarchal and capitalist vision of the technological. The usual visions and discourses around machines and machinations appear to us as a stitch punctured by violence (to the planet, the body, the voices). From the perspective of feminist ethics, which does not disdain the aesthetics and poetics of the word, it is possible to trace the grooves that open up to more liveable spaces and to suture the symbolic and imaginary tissues. Speculative, feminist writings in this way turn a problem into a potential solution, inverting the charge of violence through narrative agency to create exercises of healing re-appropriation.Item Open Access Aurat Raj: Hacking Masculinity & Reimagining Gender in South Asian Cinema(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Mokhtar, ShehramThis article interprets the 1979 Pakistani film Aurat Raj (Women’s Rule) as a work of feminist speculative fiction. The film presents a radically reimagined gendered world through its narrative of role reversal. Drawing on the concept of hacking as a practice of inspection and reconfiguration, I read women’s characters in Aurat Raj as entering and dissecting the leaky system of gender to salvage and reconstitute masculinity. The film highlights systemic problems of gender in electoral politics, social relations, and media representations through the phantasm of song, dance, and comedy. I argue that the fantastical scenarios, musical flights, and comedic twists in the film function as interventionist tools and techniques that help complicate and refashion the present by envisioning radical futures.Item Open Access Introduction: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating New Worlds by Re-Imagining Hacking(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Toupin, Sophie; SpideralexItem Open Access Feminist Hackerspace as a Place of Infrastructure Production(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Savić, Selena; Wuschitz, StefanieWork in a (feminist) hackerspace relies on the circulation of knowledge and availability of hardware. In contemporary maker scene, the majority of these resources is created in male-dominated circles and handed over to female identified makers to act upon and appropriate. Attempts to reconcile the disbalance in gender participation with pink-colored microcontrollers only reinforced existing gender and cultural stereotypes. Instead of adding to the growing voice of critique of exclusionist and inclusionist practices, we take a critical stand towards feminist hacking practice itself: we look at what is produced by feminist hackerspaces. Using standpoint theory to analyze the experience of working with one particular self-organized group of feminist artists and developers, this paper looks at practice in feminist hackerspaces as a way to create and share essential infrastructure with female or transgender identified makers. We analyze patterns of mutual self-help through sharing and learning, and their role in creating feminist infrastructure.Item Open Access The Weavers and Their Information Webs: Steganography in the Textile Arts(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Kuchera, SusanHistorical and literary sources suggest the possible application of fiber and textile arts for steganography. As both art and craft, the fiber arts—forms like knitting, crochet, embroidery, quilting, and others—are strongly associated with women and have played a critical role in women’s history, and so are both the fictional and historically documented use of these skills as a means of coding information. While the historical information available is sometimes anecdotal, this does not mean that these uses have not occurred; rather, it may be reflective of the devaluing of both women’s communication and women’s work. Steganography, the practice of hiding information in plain sight, is important to understand as both a forerunner of and a complement to practices associated with the information revolution. Steganographic textiles as a tool for women’s communication have interesting implications, tying together the fiber revolution and the information revolution and demanding a reevaluation of women’s role in the history of cryptography and the development of clandestine information practices.Item Open Access Suturar Los Espejos Rotos de lo Imposible (Sutured Broken Mirrors of the Impossible)(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Rojas, Lucía EgañaEste texto busca contribuir al desarrollo de técnicas para la emergencia de ficciones especulativas en torno a los imaginarios feministas relacionados con la tecnología. Se trata de buscar mecanismos de intervención de las narrativas tradicionales que se enmarcan en una visión patriarcal y capitalista de lo tecnológico. Las visiones y discursos habituales en torno a las máquinas y maquinaciones, se nos aparecen como una trama agujereada por la violencia (hacia la tierra, el cuerpo, las voces). Desde una ética feminista, que no desdeña la estética y poética de la palabra, es posible trazar surcos que abran espacios más vivibles y rellenar los agujeros del tejido simbólico e imaginario. Las escrituras feministas especulativas convierten de esta forma un problema en potencial solución, invirtiendo la carga de la violencia a través del agenciamiento narrativo, para crear ejercicios de reapropiación curativa.Item Open Access Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Bivens, RenaAfter researching 215 existing apps designed to prevent sexual violence (Bivens & Hasinoff, 2017), I propose a fictional app called ‘Ultimate Witness.’ Using ‘Protect 2 End’ software, this factory-installed app analyzes real-time data recorded within a 10 foot radius, with the help of an algorithmically curated rendering of attitudes, behaviours, and biomedical shifts that signal future perpetration of sexual violence. Importantly, this is not a desired, future prototype – it is a speculative design (Disalvo, 2012; Forlano & Mathew, 2014). Alongside the app description, I examine what became possible in the future setting – what infrastructures, discourses, and social dynamics emerged – and how that future connects to the present. Based on critical extensions of historical and present-day expert discourses surrounding sexual violence, I use Ultimate Witness to open up space to think and talk about the kind of future worlds we would like to see – and those we may wish to avoid.Item Open Access Beyond the Blackbox: Repurposing ROM Hacking for Feminist Hacking/Making Practices(Fembot Collective, 2018-01) Kirtz, Jaime LeeWhile much interest in feminist technology looks to future inventions, dead or obsolete communication media, such as older smartphones, offers spaces in which to hack into effaced gendered narratives, specifically through physical processes of deconstruction and circuit bending. Thus, this practice brings attention to the tasks and narratives of circuit inspection and soldering of female workers, such as dagongmei, i.e. Chinese female migrant workers. Through resoldering and reassembling a ROM chip in older telecommunication media, exposed is the ways in which women’s work in technology is blackboxed. Hacking the device in ways that make visible the work of women reconfigures this media as feminist technology. This hack draws from initiatives by scholars such as Lisa Parks and Lisa Nakamura, as well as DIY culture to trace, recover and discuss forms of female labor, inviting feminist technology to include affective, minority and domestic labor as critical production processes. This practice brings attention to the tasks and narratives of circuit inspection and soldering of female workers, such as dagongmei, i.e. Chinese female migrant workers (Pun and Chan 2013). Through resoldering and reassembling a ROM chip in older telecommunication media, exposed is the ways in which women’s work in technology is blackboxed. Bending the device in ways that make visible the work of women reconfigures this media as feminist technology. This hack draws from initiatives by scholars such as Lisa Parks and Lisa Nakamura, as well as DIY culture to trace, recover and discuss forms of female labor, inviting feminist technology to include affective, minority and domestic labor as critical production processes.