Difference between revisions of "Manual introduction"
From Gender and Tech Resources
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This manual is the result of a global conversation between women, queer and trans persons about how to develop practices that enable us and our allies to include privacy and digital security into our lives, and how can we keep on learning meanwhile helping others to learn about those concepts, methods and tools? Recurrently our reduced amount of free time, fragmented and precarious lives and lack of individual and collective self care cultures are pointed at as major challenges. How can we include and pack those fast evolving privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives as human rights defenders and activists? How can we find collective mechanisms of support to keep advancing together and empower each other? | This manual is the result of a global conversation between women, queer and trans persons about how to develop practices that enable us and our allies to include privacy and digital security into our lives, and how can we keep on learning meanwhile helping others to learn about those concepts, methods and tools? Recurrently our reduced amount of free time, fragmented and precarious lives and lack of individual and collective self care cultures are pointed at as major challenges. How can we include and pack those fast evolving privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives as human rights defenders and activists? How can we find collective mechanisms of support to keep advancing together and empower each other? | ||
Revision as of 17:23, 25 May 2015
Motivations behind this manual + Oriented at - target audience =
This manual is the result of a global conversation between women, queer and trans persons about how to develop practices that enable us and our allies to include privacy and digital security into our lives, and how can we keep on learning meanwhile helping others to learn about those concepts, methods and tools? Recurrently our reduced amount of free time, fragmented and precarious lives and lack of individual and collective self care cultures are pointed at as major challenges. How can we include and pack those fast evolving privacy and digital security practices into our already very busy lives as human rights defenders and activists? How can we find collective mechanisms of support to keep advancing together and empower each other?
Why those sub chapters?
Safe Spaces as Feminist Practices
Safe spaces have been used by groups marginalized in societies and communities for many decades now. Safe spaces have been a way to care for one-self and for a collective, to design and craft strategies and tactics of resistance and to create an oasis of peace in what sometimes can be a tiring struggle for resistance. Safe spaces have taken different meanings and bear different names depending on a variety of factors be it geographical, temporal, spatial, cultural and social, among others. The British author Virginia Woolf's has talked about a Room of One’s Own, a term often used by feminists to describe safe spaces.
What is the Relationship between Offline and Online?
The relationship between the online and offline worlds were addressed early on by cyberfeminist scholars and activists. In her book Zeroes + ones: digital women + the new technoculture, Sady Plant suggests that cyberspace has a feminist essence, and is therefore a natural space for women to inhabit. Rosi Braidotti, in her book Nomadic Subject, focuses on the fluidity and mobility aspects of online spaces that allows, she suggests, the creation of collective bonds among women. In other words, cyberspace makes global feminism possible in one's offline world as it is linked to the intimate, the immediate, the personal and the collective. Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, framed the internet as a force that might help shift forms of gender power on the Internet in turn enabling feminists to somewhat escape patriarchal structures online. This utopian view of cyberspace has since then been tone down as escaping gender, race or other intersectional forms of oppression has been much harder than first thought. But safe spaces are one way to experience and enable forms of collective and individual empowerment both online and offline.
What are Feminist Principles on the Internet?
What is closer to today's feminist practice on the internet, which goes beyond simple politeness, are the Feminist Principles on the Internet. Those principles were developed in 2014, almost 20 years after the drafting of the above netiquette principles. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) gathered a group of feminists to a Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet with the mandate to come up with a first list of principles. Their principles are about the ways in which the internet can be a transformative public and political space for feminists. It situates online violence and tech-related violence on the continuum of gender-based violence making clear the structural aspect of gender violence online and offline. The principles also highlight surveillance as a patriarchal tool whether it is used by the state, private individuals or corporation.
Why are these principles important?
The Feminist Principles on the Internet are a good way to address the relationship between the online and offline world making for instance the link clear between online and offline violence. The goal behind these principles are two-fold. First, it is a tool for feminists to guide them in understanding the internet as a new public space and how this space can be informed by feminist principles. In other words, it is about reframing the conversation around gender, sexuality, sexual rights and the internet. Second, it is a way to reclaim the Internet in creating spaces for feminists. In other words: safe spaces. If you want to contribute to the discussion join the hashtag #ImagineaFeministInternet.