Atlas of Feminist Awakening 女权初醒

#Class Project: Atlas of Feminist Awakening 女权初醒

At the end of 2022, northern_square@, a radical & revolutionary platform for Chinese people on Instagram asked: “你的女权主义启蒙是什么？“ (what’s your story of feminist awakening?) Hundreds of replies were collected and shared.

I want to translate, archive, and categorize the answers, and host the result on a local server.

#Inspiration

Cyberfeminism Index's website by Mindy Seu

Chinese homophone search by Qianqian Ye

Women in Chinese Characters, a project by Accent Sisters

The Unsustainable Web

#Why host on local server?

• Building an online archive with the spirit of decentralization; anti-surveillance and anti-censorship. To follow the steps that many Chinese people worldwide have already taken to protect their privacy and freedom of speech (i.e. migrating to Mastodon for critical discourse).

• The amount of data + information for the project is relatively small. The website will be built with system defaults and vanilla HTML/CSS, per Mindy Seu’s approach with Cyberfeminism Index. It can become an exercise in measuring the longevity of a low-energy, low-storage local server practice. Also see The Unsustainable Web.

• Experimenting with privacy control and access restrictions: who get to visit? how is access given out? Also starting a study group for thesis at my program and would be interesting to host our shared learnings online this way.

#Quotes, Learnings, etc

I am currently investigating elemental computing and infrastructural ecology for my thesis. Naturally, any resource / reading that is related to our environment, meteorology, and the elements stood out to me:

• feral.earth

• Damaged Earth Catalog

• Alice’s performance at CULTUREHUB Open Garden

• Solar Protocol

I took a class called Energy this semester, during which we investigated different forms of energy and how processes convert one energy into another. We actually discussed Solar Protocol in class, around the same time where we were building a solar project.

My friend Oliver created a wind whim livestream cam, where 2 5W 5V solar panels attached at the top of the camera is powering both a Raspberry Pi 4 and a camera underneath, streaming whatever the wind sees to the Internet. I might also experiment with the feasibility of hosting my own server with solar panels, especially now that summer is here and it’s getting very hot. (Harnessing global warming?)

Whind whim cam in action!

Giant Elfbar -- related to Sammie's project!

I also found the readings that framed server-building, infrastructure-building within a feminist framework particularly interesting and pertinent to what I want to do:

• Underneath and On the Sidelines: Sustaining Feminist Infrastructures Using Speculative Fiction

  • “By feminist infrastructures we mean feminist struggles – everything that is sustained and shored up by more or less stable resources so they can develop and move forward. By resources we mean techniques, technologies and processes (analogue, digital, social) including safe spaces, shelters, libraries, trustworthy sisterhood networks, servers, yellow pages, repositories, bots, documentation and memory tools, encyclopaedias, HerStories, techniques for life, spells, rituals and exorcisms. They also include the mobile, ephemeral and transitional that can be found in the temporary infrastructure of meetings, workshops and parties that nurture the trust, affection and well-being of our fellow feminists.”

• Feminist Server Manifesto

  • “Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps”

  • “Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can”