RightsCon Toronto 2018

In the past few years, feminist autonomous infrastructures and feminist technologies such as servers, lists and bots, among others have emerged. These infrastructures have been initiated, crafted, and maintained by feminist technologists, hacktivists and researchers, among others. Feminist autonomous infrastructures and technologies are a way to challege dominant narratives, assumptions and myths about technology; It is also a response to violence, a means to (re)imagine new practices of resistance for social transformation, and a way to embed feminist values and codes in infrastructures and technologies.

Experimenting with technologies of many different sorts, from information technology to biohacking, these feminist collectives have created physical, logical, and human resources for providing mutual help and support, sharing knowledge ranging from system administration to self-defense against digital and physical harassment alike, and creating spaces for feminist, anti-patriarchal, and queer groups and individuals to store their memory and voice their opinions.

The aim of the session is twofold. First, it is about sharing among existing feminist tech and feminist autonomous infrastructure projects. Second, it aims to make an intervention at the level of discourse and of the imaginary. The session will take the form of a roundtable where feminist autonomous projects will be presented. The presented projects will include: feminist servers Vedetas (Brazil, https://vedetas.org/), Systerserver (Europe and North America, https://systerserver.net/), Anarchaserver (Europe and Latin America, http://anarchaserver.org/), and hackerspaces Heart of Code (Berlin, http://heartofcode.org/), MariaLab (Brazil, http://marialab.org/), FemHack (Montreal, https://femhack.noblogs.org/)... and, we hope, many more.