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Document Type
Book Chapter
Department/Program
English
Publication Date
2018
Book Title
The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities
Publisher
Routledge
Editor
Jentery Sayers
City
New York, NY
Series
Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions
First Page
97
Last Page
107
Abstract
Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, the FemTechNet initiative (a feminist collective of which we are both a part) argues that such history is often hidden and that feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. At the same time, initiatives to promote critical making, acts of “shared construction” in which makers work to understand both the technologies and their social environments, often exclude women and girls from hacker/makerspaces that require both explicit permissions and access to implicit reserves of tacit knowledge. Even attempts to provide superficial hospitality can inflict microagressions on those who feel excluded from the sites of technology. When these bastions for tinkering under the hood promote “pinkification” with hyper-feminized projects and materials empha - sizing servility, consumerism, or beauty culture, the results are often counterproductive. Take, for example, Google’s recent “Made with Code” effort, which emphasized accessories and selfies as projects appropriate for girls. Even the otherwise admirable “Girls Who Code” site tends to rely on the default design schemes of stereotypical gender typing, including a curling cursive script for section heads, a color palette dominated by a rose-pink, and the iconography of sisterhood and empowerment in the graphics and scrolling images.
ISBN
9781315730479
Recommended Citation
Wernimont, J., & Losh, E. M. (2018). Wear and Care Feminisms at a Long Maker Table. Jentery Sayers (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (pp. 97-107). New York, NY: Routledge. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/5
