Hacking Culture, Not Devices: Access and Recognition in Feminist Hackerspaces

This paper examines the motivations, activities, and ideals of people organizing feminist hackerspaces: collaborative workspaces developed to support women's creative and professional pursuits. Drawing on interviews, participant observation and archival data collected across the Pacific Northwest over nine months, we show how members of these spaces use small-scale collaborative design and acts of making to work out their place in society in ways that contest widely accepted understandings of hacking, technology, and collaboration. In designing how the space should look, feel, and run, members reframe activities seldom associated with technical work (e.g., weaving, identity workshops) as forms of hacking. In so doing, they shift concerns for women in technology from questions of access (who is included) to questions of recognition (who is visible) while grappling with productive ambiguities in between. We describe lessons these tension present for examining women's relations with technology in CSCW.