feminist principles of the internet

"Welcome to the Feminist Internet eXchange Hub! Make sure you come back tonight for some group sexting - public, autonomous, anonymous, group sexting!" we called to women as they stumbled in to explore our feminist internet exchange space at AWID Feminist Futures Forum, 2016. Sometimes they grinned and asked "what time!?", sometimes their cheeks reddened and they looked away abruptly. Most were…

Not being able to connect online has geopolitical and infrastructural dimensions. On the one hand, we face the challenge to defend internet as a common good, beyond the claws of Capitalism and Patriarchy; on the other hand, we encounter the possibility of creating and engaging in other landscapes. Bringing to life places (though sometimes ephemeral) like the Feminist Internet Exchange FixHub in…

Whose Knowledge? works with individuals, communities, organisations and movements worldwide to create, collect and curate knowledge from and with marginalised communities, particularly women, people of colour, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global South. Essentially, Whose Knowledge? is a radical re-imagining and reconstruction of the internet, so that the internet…

Interview with Coraline Ada Ehmke, best known for her exemplary work in setting up the Contributor Covenant - a code of conduct for open source projects. Coraline's life story is an inspiration for all those working for the rights of those marginalized, and their experience in free and open source software cultures. In this interview she describes the ways in which her transition has affected her…

The word Impostor keeps coming up every time a trans woman writes about herself. It is there, just below the surface, despite all the estrogen and progesterone, under all the skin-colour foundation and pink lipstick and shiny earrings. It is behind the pads on our breast, cushioning the tender nipples. The feeling, and the word - impostor. We are impostors when we try to be us, and when we try to…

Pluses were the 32nd session of HRC acknowledging that women face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, online violence got a mention and so did indigenous women human rights defenders. Negatives were how far is all this from the realities of sexuality and gender based discrimination and violence.

Informed by resistance, dissident identities, intersectional approaches, issues of sexuality and universal access to the internet, we seek a collective answer to the question: Is a feminist internet possible? This reflection is a joint undertaking with Latin American women activists advocating freer and more equitable technologies and working to saturate the net with feminist content and…

No one person rules the internet and internet governance is constantly changing. Therefore one can assume we need to dictate what we allow and what we do not. Just as greatly as we fight to protect our physical realities, why not do the same for our virtual worlds?

Tiffany Kagure Mugo and Nyx McLean recently published an article in The IDS Bulletin, The Digital Age: A Feminist Future for the Queer African Woman. The article draws attention to digital communities and how they afford the queer African woman the space to express her lived experience.

An important connection between women's rights activism and building
movements of solidarity and resistance, is communication. The internet is a fundamental and potentially transformative public space which can enable and facilitate communication at speed, across borders and through time and space. It is a stage for violences that are familiar to feminists living and resisting in spaces…