Feminist Infrastructure: The Creation of What Sustains Us

The term 'infrastructure' combines the word "structure" with the prefix "infra", meaning "under". Another definition of the term is surprisingly vague: "The facilities that form the basis of any operation or system" (Harper, n.d.). Infrastructures can exist in dimensions as diverse as architecture, bridges and roads, energy management systems, national sovereignty, social habits and practices, support and solidarity networks, or IT infrastructures.

In this article, we report on initiatives building technologies to inform, communicate, document, connect, relate, explore identities and invent subversive and radical narratives and imaginaries about the other possible and desirable worlds we are building. We are talking here about the 'other' technologies, those developed by and for civil society, focusing on those created by feminists and anti-racists, by women and dissident bodies, by indigenous communities and racialised people. All of them are building everyday feminist infrastructures of (more) safe, diverse and inclusive technologies, where privacy, protection and affirmative and enthusiastic consent are the norm rather than the exception.

This text explores some vocabularies for discussing these other possible technologies by outlining their links to feminist infrastructure [1]. We then present a number of initiatives that exemplify them, showing what they construct and how they support a range of desires and needs of feminist collectives and struggles.

What Is Not Named Does Not Exist

As cyberfeminists, feminist hacktivists, transhackfeminists, and transfeminist hackers keep reminding us [2], the social and cultural characteristics of the people behind the development of technologies, as well as their motivations, matter a great deal for what kind of impact they will have. To invoke [3] a technology in an attempt to solve a social or political need and not to do so by harming other social groups or species requires diverse and varied efforts and contributions. Supposedly apolitical and neutral technologies do not exist; they are just myths that allow engineers and developers to sleep at night. 

Digital colonialism [4] extracts the resources of the earth, subjugates entire body-territories, extracts the data from our devices, affects our digital bodies, and further colonises our minds about what are technologies and what are not, who are the legitimate people and profiles to make and maintain them, and who are not. So building technology sovereignty and feminist infrastructure begins with the following:

• Clearing the mind of what technologies are and broadening the view of them;
• Remembering the diverse contributions of women, gender dissidents, indigenous cultures and other anonymous people to the development and maintenance of technologies;
• Understand that there is a long tradition of collectives and networks developing the technologies they need for social and political agency and transformation.

And because what is not named cannot exist, we continue to name new vocabularies to speak of other possible technologies. Women and feminists have always been there, underneath and on the sidelines, sharing techniques for living and making appropriate technologies [5] (from an idiosyncrasy that does not contaminate or subtract), slow technologies, ancestral technologies, minor technologies and free technologies in pursuit of the sovereignty and autonomy of the communities that develop them. We have been the bearers and guarantors that knowledge of this diversity of techniques developed within communities would be shared because, as Margarita Padilla reminds us: "the struggle for sovereignty is about communities. No one invents, builds or programs alone, simply because the complexity of the task is such that it would be impossible."

To invoke a technology in an attempt to solve a social or political need and not to do so by harming other social groups or species requires diverse and varied efforts and contributions. Supposedly apolitical and neutral technologies do not exist; they are just myths that allow engineers and developers to sleep at night.

For example, regarding "technologies for liberation and building abolitionist futures", we must speak of the US, where people of colour, queer, trans, and indigenous people are leading powerful anti-racist and de-penalisation movements. These communities are confronting a sophisticated surveillance machine and data capitalism that perpetuates old structures of oppression and structural racism inherited from slavery. All this generates strategies of resistance and deep reflections on how to imagine liberating technologies for their communities.

In relation to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, we find a technology of consent in the Consentful Tech Project and the Consentful Tech Curriculum. Both initiatives explore how values of affirmative consent can be applied to the design and development of technologies, asking that the consent to use and inhabit technologies be free, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific.

In this mutual understanding and consent between communities and their appropriate technologies lies the key to a feminist infrastructure that supports the regeneration of ecosystems and places at its centre the value and affection that people, machines and their component ecosystems offer each other.

Having identified these other vocabularies for naming technologies that can be part of the feminist infrastructure, we would like to present some projects that allow us to exemplify them.

Feminist Online Resources and HerStory

The creation and maintenance of online resources by feminists is perhaps the most visible and well-known part of the feminist infrastructure. 

Often, one of their motivations is to make visible content of interest to women and LGBTQIA+ people in relation to their struggles and concerns. Other times it is about making HerStory, i.e. finding, documenting and making visible their contributions to various fields of action that have been undocumented, barely visible or have been directly silenced and erased from official and institutional narratives. 

Finally, it is essential to underline that most of these resources are produced and maintained voluntarily and rarely have an economic model to sustain them in a stable way. Hence, their existence and sustainability over time generally depend on the motivation and means of their developers. Some examples are the Cyberfeminism Index, MAMI Museum, Pussypedia, Wikifemia, the Feminist Peer License (F2F) [6], and La Creatura.

Feminist Helplines for Self-Defence

Helplines are a self-organised civil society response to a range of violence caused by the patriarchal, capitalist and colonialist systems. Of particular interest in this regard are helplines set up by women for women seeking information about their sexual and reproductive rights or how to obtain a safe abortion in countries where these rights are persecuted and/or criminalised. 

Gender-based violence online (GBVO) is increasing considerably and, at the same time, remains somehow invisibilised. Fembloc [7], Navegando Libres, and Marialab are three projects supporting people facing GBVO in Catalonia, Ecuador and Brazil [8]. These projects are part of the global landscape of feminist helplines that form a learning and knowledge community facilitated by the digital advocates' programme. Feminists are creating infrastructures to systematise support and solidarity for people facing GBVO, filling the gap left by the market and platforms on the one hand and public institutions and care circuits on the other.

Feminist Servers

Feminist servers bring together processes of research, experimentation and a set of technopolitical practices developed by cyberfeminist and transfeminist collectives interested in creating a more autonomous communication infrastructure. Feminist servers are interested in creating the conditions for the data, content and memory of feminist groups to be accessed, consulted, preserved and adequately managed. It is about gaining autonomy in building and managing our platforms, ensuring that we can exist in more secure networked spaces and have access to a variety of tools such as mailing lists, blogs, wikis, content management systems, social networks and any other services, software and content needed for feminist struggles.

There are currently a dozen feminist servers in operation, mainly in Latin America and Europe [9]. As for feminist servers focused on self-hosting services and content at home or within local low-consumption networks, we find examples such as la_bekka and Momentánea. Both propose to share and host knowledge at a local level, challenging the production model of digital technologies and their energy consumption and exploitation of people, resources and bodily territories.

Other relevant examples of feminist infrastructure within the field of feminist servers can be found in the Cl4ndestina and Vedetas projects, both initiatives developed in Brazil, which offer a space for experimentation and learning in the management of services, as well as hosting websites of feminist collectives, organisations and social movements based in Latin America. On the other hand, we find Maadix, a feminist server aimed at collectives and human rights defenders, which allows them to move to a more secure infrastructure by enabling them to run open-source applications on their server through a graphical interface without the need for technical knowledge or significant investments.

Feminist servers are interested in creating the conditions for the data, content and memory of feminist groups to be accessed, consulted, preserved and adequately managed. It is about gaining autonomy in building and managing our platforms, ensuring that we can exist in more secure networked spaces and have access to a variety of tools [...] needed for feminist struggles.

Anarchaserver focuses on building spaces to document the herstory of cyberfeminism. It offers spaces for experimentation, such as its nekrocementery, where the memory of feminist websites can be archived by making a static copy so that they remain accessible. Finally, SysterServer maintains Fediverse instances such as Mastodon and PeerTube that allow its inhabitants to have a Mastodon account on their feminist server, as well as a streaming and archiving service for videos about techno-feminist technologies and events. 

Sustainability and the ideal economic model for these projects remain ongoing challenges, as do the conditions of access and inclusion, as learning how to run a server is still quite out of reach for most feminists.

Feminist Bots and Software

In this final section, we present feminist infrastructure projects that are rethinking their software, including algorithms and bots, those little agents that automate many tasks on the Internet. 

We have taken up Juliana Guerra's and Mallory Knodel's proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [10] to include Feminist Internet Principles in the core RFC 8280, which deals with human rights, to propose recommendations on the impact of internet protocols on traditionally marginalised groups. 

The field of experimentation around feminist bot programming [11] is quite rich, and initiatives have multiplied in recent years. These include bots that serve as a helpline for people who are victims of the distribution of intimate sexual content without their consent, bots that create and spread feminist content or data on Facebook or Twitter, and bots that work as oracles.

TogetherNet is an open-source software that invites groups of 10 or fewer participants to build community archives. It is designed around data transparency and consent ethics and aims to actively implement digital rights policies, such as the right to be forgotten.

Create your Abya Yala packages is a colour library inspired by Latin American visual artists or those who have developed their work in Latin America. It was created for R[^2] as part of Rspatial_es, a community of Spanish-speaking users dedicated to spatial analysis. R is a free/libre software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Our perspectives and conditions for accessing, using and developing technologies are deeply influenced by the ways in which patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism are embedded in our daily lives and in the societies in which we live. Creating and maintaining our feminist infrastructure gives us answers and courage.

Read The Feminist Manual is a fanzine and a Mozilla Firefox add-on that replaces the pronouns "she" and "he" in technical manuals with the gender-neutral pronoun "they", allowing for technical manuals to be less discriminatory towards those who are supposed to develop and maintain technology.

Our perspectives and conditions for accessing, using and developing technologies are deeply influenced by the ways in which patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism are embedded in our daily lives and in the societies in which we live. Creating and maintaining our feminist infrastructure gives us answers and courage. Reflecting on the diversity of our contributions and actions allows us to open up new horizons of political action and redress processes and create different possibilities for all of us.

To rethink our collective histories and memories with technologies, to be able to tell and see them, we need to examine the collective movements of communities involved in creating their own liberatory techniques and technologies. We need to write the history of feminist infrastructure in all its diversity, from helplines and sorority networks in all their many forms to the creation of valuable resources for feminists, to the creation of safer spaces, events in non-mixed environments, feminist hacklabs, fab labs and biolabs, and the development of systems to host our data, internet protocols, bots and AI.
 

Note
* This text is a short version of an article about feminist infrastructure included in the book edited by Calleja-López, A., Gabrielidis, A., Navarro, T. (eds.) (2024). Vectores Tecnopolíticos. Ed. Tecnos.