A feminist hacklab's resilience towards anti-democratic forces

Special issue article: Feminist human–computer interaction: Working at the intersection of feminist theory and digital innovation A feminist hacklab’s resilience towards anti-democratic forces Feminist Theory 1–21 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/14647001221082298 journals.sagepub.com/home/fty Stefanie Wuschitz Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Berlin, Germany Abstract Makerspaces and hacklabs are believed to encourage a positive attitude towards gaining computer skills. Within these communities for peer production, citizens can apply cutting-edge technologies in DIY projects. In recent decades, mushrooming makerspaces and hacklabs were embraced by the tech industry and governments alike. Feminist makerspaces and hacklabs, however, as they are centred around a queer feminist agenda, have raised eyebrows. In order to foster diversity in tech development, they create safer spaces for self-expression. Here, feminist lay(wo)men* (To emphasise that the category ‘Woman’ is constructed and that more people than only those who identify as women are being included, one uses the sign * after the term ‘women’ ), makers, designers, artists and tinkerers experiment with open-source hardware and software. Art and design projects emerging from feminist hacklabs focus on issues of representation and democratic participation in digital media, as well as on ways of reclaiming one’s own body. This article tries to unpack how, after an exhibition on sexual health norms, a feminist hacklab was attacked by local right-wing and conservative politicians. The attack resulted in the defunding of the feminist hacklab. But it also started a transformation process within the collective, as members became aware of critical interferences of diffracting marginalisations. The crisis triggered a discussion on how each member was threatened to very different degrees; for example, there was more at stake for members depending on their legal status in the country. The right-wing and conservative campaign against the feminist hacklab damaged the initiative, but at the same time it pushed the collective to generate increased vehemence and resilience. Keywords Art, diversity, DIY, gender, hacklabs, politics Corresponding author: Stefanie Wuschitz, Faculty I - Humanities and Educational Sciences Institute of History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Literature, Hochschulprogramm DiGiTal, TU Berlin, Germany. Email: wuschitz@protonmail.com 2 Feminist Theory 0(0) Introduction During an anti-democratic shift in Austria, many Austrian feminist organisations lost funding. This article focuses on the persecution of feminist initiatives from the situated perspective of a feminist hacklab in Austria and the first-hand experience of its members. The author argues that setting up the feminist hacklab as commons has allowed its members to attend to this crisis and grow in the process, enabling new subjectivities to emerge (Ostrom, 1990: 88; Hardt and Negri, 2009: 187; Helfrich, 2012: 373; Mies, 2014: 196). Consequently, the resources maintained as commons by an art collective offered financial and political resilience during this time. The guiding research question tackles an ethico-onto-epistemological process of becoming response-able, in the sense of ‘cultivating collective knowing and doing’ as substantiated by Haraway (2016: 34), Barad (2007: 185), Geerts and Carstens (2019: 915–925), Sciannamblo (2020: 79–98) and Stetsenko (2020: 26) – entangled with the populist workings of right-wing polity on local and national levels. Participating in maker and open source culture, such as hacklabs, is believed to have an emancipatory quality (Stallman, 2002; Kera, 2012: 6; Maxigas, 2012: 11; Toombs et al., 2014: 1–8). The article introduces the case of this feminist hacklab with explicitly emancipatory intentions and unpacks how new subjectivities are co-created through the turmoil. The meaning of innovation is discussed through a diffractive reading of the development of an artifact such as a 3D-printed clitoris, the people and the environments that are involved in creating the artifact and the interaction with the artifact (Braidotti, 2019: 175; Dietze, 2020: 84). Women* in tech In the 20th century, technological innovation was used to demonstrate a nation’s progress and domination. In particular during the Cold War, socialist states were competing with capitalist countries in terms of technological affordance, e.g. sending the first human to space or landing on the moon (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020: 1). The military-funded tech industry claimed that through a trickle-down effect these technologies would eventually equally benefit all citizens (Suchman, 2018). Yet, this promise was not kept. Scholars like Walter Rodney (1972: 11) showed that in fact, technological progress accelerated exploitation. For example, the European tech industry actively underdeveloped Africa, because commodity chains were rooted in neo-colonialism (Rodney, 1972: 286; Storey, 2015: 34). Arturo Escobar expanded on how this created the so-called ‘Third World’, in which division of labour enforces poverty (Escobar, 2018: introduction). Maria Mies argued that within this global division of labour, women* are the cheapest producers, which is why ‘capitalist patriarchy’ operates through the sexual division of labour and housewifisation (Mies, 1986: 100; Federici, 2019: 17; Hyunanda et al., 2021: 3559). Framing technologies as embedded in structures of power (Luckman and Berger, 1966: 304; Munster, 1999: 119–131) revealed new socio-political entanglements and implications. Scholars now stressed the importance of studying the very content of science and technology as a social domain (Sciannamblo, 2020: 79– 98). Technofeminism emerged in the 1980s to address these issues from a feminist Wuschitz 3 standpoint. It helped to differentiate how technology co-produces subjectivities (Sørensen et al., 2011: 20) and in doing so co-constructs a masculinist culture (Plant, 1998: 35) that replicates biased gender roles (Butler, 1991: 32, 1993: 4; Wajcman, 2004: 40). Lucy Suchman showed that human relationships are central to tech development (Woolgar, 1989: 414–415; Suchman, 2019) and need to be studied as such. Influential theorists invited marginalised technologists into the tech field to not trust ‘the god trick’ (gazing top down) but instead draw from their own situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988: 590–596). When Crenshaw (1991: 1241–1299; 2010: 1241–1299) and later bell hooks (1989: 36; 1992: 177–187; 2000: 12, 15, 33, 164) described how ‘politics of domination operate along interlocking axes of race, class and gender oppression’ (Lemert, 2016: 416), they introduced the important term ‘intersectionality’. None of these agents entering the tech sphere were welcomed; most of them nevertheless could make a mark, partly due to the grassroots structure they had established. Revealing new ways of knowing allowed subordinate groups to define their own reality (Hill Collins, 1990: 413–421). Young activists started to create commons-based tech environments, cultivating their own ways of learning and applying technology. The Dutch network Gender Changers (Derieg, 2007: 4) or the Indonesian collective HONF (Wuschitz, 2014: 188) can be thought of as primary examples. A group of people shares a lab as commons, allowing each other to access crucial technology. There are no commons without a community (Mies, 2020: 219), so this concept demands commitment. Sharing technologies, for example for video editing, involves caring for the community that shares these devices (Lazzarato, 2019: 169). To provide a new technological interface not only means sharing tools for problem-solving, or media for self-expression. Caring here includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40). The feminist hacklab described in this article was inspired by these changes. Knowing through hacking Feminist hackers Feminist hackers extend the term hacking towards a broader social-political meaning (Toupin and Bardzell et al., 2016: introduction; Toupin, 2013, 2014: 1–9). This way, hacking is understood as a process of knowledge production generated by disrupting and disassembling the ‘blackboxes’ (Latour, 1999: 304): making visible the mystified, closed apparatus that is concealed by a device’s box. This practice is first of all seen as the basis for liberating, emancipatory tactics (Toupin, 2019: 19–35; Dunbar-Hester, 2020: 96). The term hacking is therefore not only applied to actual blackboxes (taking apart or fixing a computer), code or electric circuits, but also to more abstract closed systems such as opaque cultures, hurtful language, communities with unwritten rules and discriminatory structures, hence as a selfreferential practice of ‘hacking the very ontology of hacking’ (Rosner and Fox, 2016: 558–580; Toupin, 2019: 19–21; Dunbar-Hester, 2020: 49). It is the attitude of not consuming and taking the given for granted (Blikstein and Krannich, 2013: 613–616; 4 Feminist Theory 0(0) Groten et al., 2019: 239) and is tightly intertwined with the feminist practices and ethics of repair, care and socially reproductive labour (Toombs, 2017: 45–57; Toombs et al., 2015: 629–638), a form of worlding (Spivak, 1985: 247–272; Barad, 2007: 152), resistant to alienated labour (Ramsay, 2015: 74). In this broader sense, hacking can be explicated as a direct intervention into the capitalist economy with its exchange versus use value, infrastructures and division of work and property relations. It affects relation with the feminist hackers’ broader environment, and could be seen as a diffractive practice of transforming organisational systems and institutional habits, to think with Valeria Graziano and Kim Trogal (2019: 205–207). At the same time, hacking does not have to have any immediate value; it can be seen as a conduit of personal self-expression or an act of free speech (Stallman, 2001; Coleman, 2013: 120, 162). Feminist hacklabs Most feminist hacklabs that were established around 2010 are influenced by third-wave feminism, the LGBTQIA + movement and queer and critical race theories, more specifically thinkers including but not limited to Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, bell hooks and Audre Lorde (Wittig, 1981: 47–54; Butler, 1991: 20, 1993: 183; hooks, 2000: xi; Butler, 2005: 83–120; Lorde, 2007: 110–113; Butler, 2009: 97–122; Lorde, 2018; Sollfrank, 2020: 7). They generally contradict the traditional binary view on gender as being either masculine or feminine (Oldenziel, 1999: 182). They ‘reimagined computing, denying any sharp separation of the technical and the social and exposing neutral modes of interaction as masculine norms that might be worth changing’ (Abbate, 2012: 175). Accordingly, feminist hacklabs accuse traditional hacklabs of cultivating masculine norms in their communities through the practice of ‘making’ technology (Nguyen et al., 2016: 1–16; Toupin, 2020: 33–57). In feminist hacklabs, on the contrary, making technology is seen more as a way of ‘self-crafting’ (Butler, 2005: 18), becoming non-binary and tinkering with new subjectivities (Toombs, 2016: 99). By enabling tech development from a non-binary and feminist perspective and advocating for fearless design by and for all genders, members can inhabit nomadic and transformative subject positions (Braidotti, 2019: 52). Ideally, it enables one to apply technology in autonomous ways, to enhance one’s independence; for example, by creating a menstruation mobile app like ‘Drip’, which protects the user’s data privacy (Dietze, 2020: 57– 82). Demystifying technology in non-formal learning events, in Do-It-Yourself (DIY), Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) and Do-It-Anyway (DIA) (Ashcroft, 2019: 12) workshops, becomes a strategy of liberation from biased traditional gender norms (Dunbar-Hester, 2020: 70). Learning new skills in non-hierarchical, intersectional peer groups turns into a potentially liberating practice (Freire, [1970] 2005: 71–86; hooks, 1994: 21; Maxigas, 2012: 11; Toupin, 2019: 23). This way, feminists in hacklabs hope to be active in art, technology and design without being limited by gender scripts (Wuschitz, 2015: 12). The insecurity and vulnerability that comes with taking the risk of learning new skills, exploring new ground and performing gender fluidity is compensated through a shared and consistent physical space: the lab – a social space regulated by a shared code of conduct (Snelting, 2020: 57), an intimate space intended as a safer Wuschitz 5 space (Toupin, 2013: 5–7; Dietze, 2020: 6, 107). The intention behind creating such a space of your own is to protect yourself when making yourself vulnerable as an artist, feminist and activist (Woolf, [1929] 1935: 7; Savic and Wuschitz, 2018: 3). Thinking with Braidotti, the assemblage of shared space, caring practice and subjectivity is diffracted by the attack that will be described in the following part, and raises questions of intersectional difference (Braidotti, 2020: 26–31). The attack While feminist hacklabs in general have received a lot of positive attention from international HCI scholars in recent years (Toupin, 2013; Toombs et al., 2014: 1–8; Toupin, 2014: 7; Fox et al., 2015: 56–68; Holbert, 2016: 79–88; Lindtner et al., 2016: 1390–1402; Toupin, 2019: 35), this particular feminist hacklab in Austria has simultaneously attracted negative attention for its cultural activities. This article expands on the practical dimension of feminist hacking in an increasingly intense anti-feminist misogynistic climate. After an exhibition on female pleasure and sexuality, local right-wing and conservative politicians accused the collective of humiliating women and mobilised against it on different media channels. Consequently, the feminist hacklab lost essential financial funding. The author draws from long-term experience in the feminist hacking scene and uses material feminism as a departure point to search for new response-abilities (Barad, 2007: 379; Haraway, 2016: 104) to right-wing misogyny. She investigates the subsequent reactions from both sides and tries to make sense of individual members’ crises, while a trans-individual subject was formatted (Braidotti, 2020: 26–31). Situated voice The author conducted this research as an active chair member of the feminist hacklab and is therefore strongly informed by her experiences as practitioner on the intersection of feminist art, activism and research. Writing from this standpoint, she is paying tribute to the workings of feminist methodologies, in particular the one highlighting the intersectional role of race, age and class. This article is therefore informed by standpoint theory (Harding, 1987: 1–14, 2004: 35), situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988: 575–599) and nomadic subjectivity (Braidotti, 1994, 2011: 5). The research was conducted from a realist critique yet reluctant situatedness of a Eurocentric perspective. It is based on involvement in this particular community, analysed from an inevitably privileged, white, middle-class, leftist-leaning political viewpoint. It draws upon ten interview transcripts with different actors, politicians, activists, non-governmental organisation (NGO) coordinators, feminist hackers and intellectuals, but also field notes of informal conversations with lab members, autoethnographic notes, experience and self-reflection. For all interlocutors, pseudonyms are used. 6 Feminist Theory 0(0) The affected persons The following section will introduce the experience of four community members of the feminist hacklab. Due to different privileges and intersectional forms of oppression at work, some felt there was more at stake for them than for others (Crenshaw, 1991: 1241–1299; Puar, 2011). The aforementioned persons are strongly bounded by their commitment to art, tech and feminism and directly linked through their collaboration in a feminist hacklab in Vienna. Individually, none of the four interviewed affected persons felt that they had reacted adequately, yet as a collective they had found several forms of strengthening their position and healing from the incident, as will be described later. Informant 1 was publicly shamed and inhibited for her art, but her usage of an artist renommé, passing as white and ‘belonging’ to an Austrian autochthonic part of society allowed her to speak about her experience and continue to articulate her perspective on sexual health norms. Informant 2, also privileged as an autochthon Austrian person, was surprised to be treated unfairly by the city government but felt in a position to negotiate and explain herself in a democratic framework that allowed her to speak. Since her family lived nearby for three generations, her last name was associated not only with the collective but also with her family in this particular neighbourhood. Informants 3 and 4 perceived the attack as more threatening than the first two. Their discretion to counter the offensive was limited due to their status as foreigners in the country. To be accused in public meant for them to take on a big risk. As they both do not pass as autochthon Austrians and do not speak German, they were not allowed to counter the insult on a democratic platform. Inside the feminist hacklab all meetings took place in English. The five members of the feminist hacklab’s chair were socialised in the art scene, where even more so than in the hacker and maker scene, internationality is the default setting, not an exception. The bilingual culture of this hacklab was instrumentalised to raise xenophobic sentiments in the population. Informant 1 (anonymous) It wasn’t an easy process I went through, working on my thesis art project focused on the pleasure organ, the clitoris and the Vulva at the Art University in 2017. My male professors didn’t know how to advise me on the topic – they literally had no knowledge of it and even made sexist remarks. This was devastating, but also encouraging as it showed how important it still is in the 21st century to talk about our bodies without fear or shame. I decided to go on with the project and found advice and encouragement from female professors in other departments of the University as well as my family and friends. (Momo, 2021: interview) From previous experiences as a youth worker on gender identity and sexuality at an international youth organisation and for the Council of Europe, Momo knew that young people are uninformed about the clitoris, its shape and its importance. Working around that topic of gender equality and sexuality in a political environment was tolerated and yet pleasure and body positivity were not a major political issue) ‘I was very happy to Wuschitz 7 get invited to solo-exhibit at this welcoming place – which was a feminist hacker space – and bring my project that aims to educate with joy and humour on sexuality and the pleasure organ – the clitoris’ (Momo, 2021: interview). Momo exhibited a chandelier made of anatomically correct, 3D-printed clitorises. The clitoris’ actual shape had just recently been ‘discovered’ in the medical scientific context (O’Connell and Ol DeLancey, 2005: 2060–2063). Momo also built a large wooden box, with fabric curtains on one side and a soft vulva on the inside (see Figure 1). This installation was named after Baubo, a figure from Greek mythology. Visitors could put their head through the curtains and see their heads coming out of a vulva in a mirror. Momo’s aim was to create art installations that would communicate the anatomy of the clitoris and make the audience experience a fun, joyful and above all positive representation of the vulva and the bodies that own them. A chandelier was on display in the large window facing the street, Baubo was positioned in the centre of the space, while the derogatory English argot word ‘cunt’ was written in large bright letters in the middle of the room. Feminist artists have been reclaiming this slur since the beginning of second-wave feminism, most prominently VALIE EXPORTS’s Genital Panik 1969 Figure 1. Outside and inside view of installation Glitoris, Vulvarines, and Others. All photo credits with the artist. 8 Feminist Theory 0(0) (Tate, 2021), The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago in 1978 (Chicago, 2021) or recently the installation Joystick by Sofie Lüftinger (Kunstuniversität Linz, 2020). A few weeks after the vernissage, a friend showed Momo an article in a right-populist newspaper published by one of the local right-wing parties. It described and discredited their exhibition. Momo was considering suing the journal for using their photo without a copyright licence, but then decided not to ‘As a political activist and anti-fascist I do feel affirmed when some right-wing people are against my ideas. It’s scary, but you also know that you did something right’ (Momo, 2021). Informant 2 (anonymous). This informant had enjoyed a privileged position in the hacklab, as she was the oldest member, had grown up in the neighbourhood and was familiar with the local dialect. The experience of the attack expanded her political critique towards the workings of the district realpolitik. She considered entirely giving up on the ‘funding chase’ to increase stability for the organisation’s future (Burrowes et al., 2017: 227–234): I had visited the municipality and applied for funding, so that we could give free tech workshops for women* and non-binary people in the district. The head of the district said that he could not see the need for funding tech workshops to female participants. His electrician was female, which would be clear evidence that there are obviously already plenty of female technicians out there. Still we received a small amount of money for our annual workshop programme. We hosted a couple of workshops as we had proposed in our application. In the next year I got pregnant and after giving birth I was not as involved in organising the feminist hacklab for a while. One day my neighbour, a local politician of the environmentalist party, brought to my attention that our feminist hackspace was accused of misusing the funding we had received and that the right-wing politicians at the municipality now want us to pay this money back, due to the seemingly vulgar exhibition we hosted. They also complained about the fact that our website was mainly in English and our events had not been announced in an analogue way, only digitally. My neighbour advised me to quickly change our website to German and put an analogue poster on our window shop when we announce the next public event. We complied and eventually did not have to pay back the funding. Our lab had – like so many others in that year – become the target of negative campaigning by neoliberal, rightpopulist and implicitly anti-democratic forces. (Informant 2, 2019) Informant 3 (anonymous). Ines came to Vienna from Portugal while she was researching for her PhD. A Portuguese politician had advised all young academics to go abroad to escape the increasing unemployment in Portugal at that time. She started to teach at a university in Austria, successfully exhibited her artwork internationally and became a very active member within the feminist collective that runs the feminist hacklab. Recently, and through Ines’ efforts and excellent network, the feminist hacklab had become widely known as an off-space for emerging female and non-binary art. After Momo’s solo show ended, Ines helped to disassemble the interactive installation and repaint the walls. While she painted, she realised that some people on the street were peering in, Wuschitz 9 walking up and down in front of the lab’s windows, taking photos and pointing at her with an indignant facial expression. As Ines was not sure what was going on she finished the work as fast as she could and closed the hacklab’s doors. Soon after, the article was published in a right-populist newspaper, which went on a full offensive against the feminist collective. In consequence, their workshop series were defunded. Ines found it hard to simultaneously fight on all three fronts: to keep addressing the lack of tech literacy among women*, to contest gender bias in digitalisation and to struggle against the growing precarity of education and research staff. Informant 4 (anonymous) They basically enforced their power upon us and we did not really fight against it, and this is the problem. I think in our structure we really lack … we lack activism, that is able to respond to this thing. None of us – maybe you and Nisa would be able to react, with more experience as activists, I do not write in German, it immediately puts myself into this position like ‘This is a war that I cannot win’. […]. I mean I’m so much in the minority in this country, you know, when it comes to language. How can I react towards this without getting a lawyer? And if I do, it takes ages. I cannot defend myself, you know? (Informant 4, 2019) Relational ethics Momo’s exposition of 3D-printed clitorises made these technologically fabricated parts of sex anatomy a co-creator of knowledge. Extending beyond the intention of the artist Momo, to share knowledge on the female body and its organs, a situated, site- and context-specific embodied knowledge on human and non-human constellations consisting of artifacts, a self-organised tech lab, the collective, the conservative neighbours and right populist politicians was created. The process of reclaiming high-tech fabrication tools as 3D printers for feminist purposes was effective, and the 3D-printed clitoris became transformative media. It has the role of a technological mediator between masculinist Eurocentric perspectives on what technology should be a solution for and the perspectives of feminine peripheral subject positions which were deemed ‘offensive’. These new formations of knowledge served as a ‘powerful catalyst’ (Braidotti, 2020: 26–31) for revealing forces in place. Through the attack and the encounter with rightpopulists, informants gained an understanding of how intersectional oppression works differently on and through each of the members’ lives and experiences. The trans-individual subject formation concerning the whole community was informed through the attack and structures had to shift their form. It was politicising the members in the process to different degrees, bringing about awareness of each other’s precarity and vulnerability, fears and challenges. It sparked new expectations and speculations of what the future can bring or hold individually but also collectively. This new understanding condensed into affirmative relational ethics (Braidotti, 2020: 26– 31), and helped crystallise and clarify the positions of the involved parties. The 10 Feminist Theory 0(0) informants’ own rights and entitlements became more apparent. On a personal level, it became increasingly evident how different each member’s rights and entitlements are presently acknowledged within a techno-political dispositif. It made the group more accountable for their nomadic position within that assemblage. The intent for affirmative action and the exercise of their potential to make a difference was paralleled with the demystification of the idea of increased liberation. It revealed limits of safety in this so-called ‘safer space’. Defunding the lab The article on Momo’s show in the right-populist newspaper had claimed that the lab was not giving tech education as announced, but instead ‘was generating trash that humiliated women and was running the completely desolated shop with tax money’ (Kopschar, 2017: 4). The photos that the mostly female members of the district right-wing party had collected were published online and provoked negative remarks. A positive online newspaper article on the lab received hundreds of hateful comments. The lab was located in an increasingly hostile environment. The majority of district representatives agreed to set an ultimatum to the collective: they would have to additionally renovate their shop facade and pay a tax for their street sign (FPÖ Anfrage, 2017). The district government’s demands were met. As documented in the minutes of the district government assembly (Protokoll, 2017), two right-wing representatives further demanded that the feminist hacklab pay back the full amount of funding they had received from the district for their annual programme and workshop series (in total €1500). The representatives of all other parties decided to delegate the problem to the culture commission. The culture commission is a sub-entity of the district administration) ‘Within the district administration there is generally little interest in feminist culture, therefore government’s cuttings were neither discussed nor compensated’ (opposition politician, 2019). No future funding from the district After it was decided that the culture commission was to be responsible for the case, the same right-wing politicians took care to reject every application from the feminist hacklab for basic funding for the workshop programme. By delaying the decision on funding until an unknown date, instead of rejecting it officially, the applications just never went through. Currently, the feminist hacklab has not received any official rejection or acceptance of their last four years’ funding applications. As the opposition politician claims, they were simply not processed: It was obvious and it was also communicated this way outside of the commission, that the programme of [this lab] did not please the district representatives of the FPÖ. This fact was not put on the table, but instead they found all kinds of reasons to postpone the small funding, to stop it or later to demand it be paid back. It never happened to an applicant with this intensity before. (Opposition politician, 2019) Wuschitz 11 The larger conflict Momo did not know about any of this. She was happily working at an NGO for digital literacy for girls in a different region of Austria. Shortly after, in 2018, defunding hit that NGO even harder. Ever since, it has only been able to plan from one month to the next. At the same time, all over Austria, many culture and civic initiatives became the target of state-level governmental cuts. Momo’s small and defunded non-profit now had to look out for two ally non-profits that would have otherwise been forced to close their doors for good. Those ally NGOs are committed to supporting (migrant) women* and/or artists in precarious situations, a service that after the defunding was in even higher demand. In early 2017, around twenty of the most established feminist infrastructures lost their funding (Hausbichler, 2018). Toxic atmosphere With these organisations missing, a lot of intellectual labour disappeared (Hausbichler, 2018). The minds that had been on the forefront, that had generated new role models, a new relation between genders or new family constellations, thinkable and real, were silenced (Hausbichler, 2018). In the eyes of the public, matters of concern had shifted. It was not only feminist institutions that experienced severe cuts, but the culture sector was also strongly affected. As the official art and culture report of fiscal year 2018 showed, the government had spent half a million euros less on cultural institutions than the year before (Kunst- und Kulturbericht des Bundesministeriums für Kunst and Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport, 2019: 24). Although the total amount saved by defunding all these feminist groups was only around €400,000, the damage was devastating (Hausbichler, 2018). Feminist groups were harmed not only through direct withdrawal of public financial funding, but also through online attacks on platforms close to anti-democratic forces, such as the Identitären, a group similar to the French Génération identitaire or the German Sarazin movement. In an interview conducted with the editor of a feminist journal, she noted that the way the right-wing government was dealing with feminist institutions had a completely new quality, charged with hate speech, disrespect and animosity (Lerner et al., 2020: 1–13). She observed that today the right is openly fighting against them, condemning gender awareness as a hegemonic ideology that harms boys and discriminates against men. She explained that this narrative portrays the victim as an offender (editor of a feminist journal, 2019: interview). The feminist hacker’s response Vulnerability After the first attack, the chair of the feminist hacklab discussed how to react. Some suggested seeking a face-to-face conversation with politicians. They were convinced that a misunderstanding must have been the reason for the ultimatum. In an interview, 12 Feminist Theory 0(0) one of the chair members revealed that she had felt quite vulnerable and unable to react due to the fact that she could not speak German well enough to defend herself in a political setting and found herself directly attacked (interview 7). In fact, the new funding requirement for German translations on our website was a crude hint of their disapproval. This is why a new member suggested that in the future the hacklab should find different models of doing its work without public funding to prevent it from being co-opted again. Others called for action on the streets, solidarity with similar feminist groups, public statements. One statement about the current situation was then, indeed, written collectively by a number of off-spaces in Vienna. They were creating new alliances in reaction to defunding. In an interview, the chair of a feminist journal stated that to articulate dissent would just give ‘them’ another reason to replicate their own perspective in public, and would offer a stage to their populism. Next, the pressure from outside was sparking disagreement inside the lab: members could not come to a mutual agreement about a suitable way to react. Many activists experienced huge difficulties in contacting ministers or responsible ministries. The new government representatives did not reply to letters or respond to journalists. The editor of a renowned feminist magazine reported that it was the first time since the start of the journal that the new Minister of Women’s Affairs did not give her an interview. A nationwide feminist petition (demanding equal pay, prevention of violence against women, distributed power and labour, reduced poverty) reached a very high number of supporters, but was neither signed nor acknowledged by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. At the same time, the number of online postings intended to shame journalists increased. To protect themselves from sexist comments on their website, the feminist journal deleted all the forums and the comment sections. Learning from these new allies, the feminist hacklab collective developed four main strategies to react to the new hostile environment. Coping strategies and finding a shared matter of concern Grow bigger. In debates spiralling around defunding and precarity, a member declared that this situation actually indicated that the hacklab had done something right: ‘We threatened the right-populists at least enough to make them want to fight us’. She now thinks of feminist hacking through autonomist politics and as a possible postcapitalist practice (Maxigas, 2012). Another member stated that the hacklab would need to meet this attack by doing exactly what they did: continuing to organise exhibitions and workshops and creating a safer space for feminist artists and hackers. This suggestion found consent: the collective searched for a larger place that would provide more room for a lab and an exhibition space for larger events. A larger but more affordable shop could be found in a social housing complex built during the Red Vienna era, Das rote Wien (Schwarz et al., 2019: 234). With joint forces, the walls were painted, a kitchen was added and a sink and a second floor for additional desks were installed. To finance this expansion, the collective started a crowdfunding campaign. Now members who want to support the feminist hacklab can acquire a membership. These newly established Wuschitz 13 commons built a stronger base for future trans-individual subject formations (Mies, 2014: xviii; Braidotti, 2020: 26–31). Widen the network. In the eyes of the collective, the district government ceased to appear as a respectful institution. Instead, they saw it as it was – an assembly of reactionary people, ethics and belongings that they now needed to relate to and position themselves against. The collective was not the first to experience defunding, but it had happened to this collective for the first time, pushing it to learn about the virtual history of feminist organisations losing public support: ‘We pay attention to the care that enables not just surviving but thriving within techno-empires’ (Jack and Seyram, 2021: 1). Members became more aware of similar collectives, their relations and nomadic subject positions, and agreed to foster collaborations to activate future alliances and take better care of each other. Care has turned into a key concept and goes beyond reproductive labour: it turns into a form of ‘world-making and production of meaning, counting for engagement with other knowledge politics’ (De la Bellacasa, 2017: 29). Through care, a collective can inhabit a destabilised position, sustain nomadic becoming (Braidotti, 2006: 44, 2011: introduction, 2019: 40) and ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016: 216). Solidarity in the form of provided time, effort and emotional stability can balance out unequal distribution of privilege to a certain extent. As part of this new positioning, relating and caring, the hacklab created a website that portrays all local artists who have collaborated with it up to this day. With this platform of people whom the collective trusts and believes in, a social environment becomes visible. The collective also became a member of a dignified female artists’ union which has represented this struggle for decades and supports female artists to not surrender in the art world – although small and self-organised, it is a living memorial of all feminist artists before us. Become more assertive. The third strategy was to give a stage to even more provocative hackers, artists and feminists. One artist allowed the exhibition visitors to sit in a gynaecological chair and examine the distance between their anus and genitals. Another gave a diffractive performance in which she took on the role of a small animal to talk about trans-disciplinary research on radical social experiences (Van der Tuin, 2019: 17–39). A young designer held a workshop on how to transform a mobile phone’s lens into a microscope to observe changing hormone levels in magnified spit. An ally invited ten extremely experienced feminists and artists to a public debate inside the tiny lab to mark one hundred years since women* gained the right to vote in Austria. Furthermore, the collective has formed a team to install online bots that collect names and images of otherwise forgotten female and non-binary artists. The database was used for three different media installations that amplified the artists’ voices. On two separate occasions, the lab accommodated a radical young group of feminist IT experts. The feminist hacker community started to support a singular, queer, feminist and anarchist NGO in Indonesia that provides workshops on sexual health and DIY technology to women* on Java island. These activities were not prevented by right-wing politics. Only the permission to celebrate in front of the window shop was rejected – but the collective found the creative solution to rent a truck, park it in front of the lab and celebrate from the truck platform, as it was legally parked in front of the lab. 14 Feminist Theory 0(0) Practice informed by theory. Next, a lot of time and effort were invested into setting up collaborations with different universities and research groups for shared activities. This led to encountering more feminist and new materialist literature, hosting lectures online and debating new publications concerning similar issues. The hacklab got involved in several research projects and was invited to join interdisciplinary conferences, festivals and symposiums. Feminist hacking, as a theory-in-practice, helps members to put care work into perspective, to reduce frustration, to make sense of experiences and to contextualise them in a larger and ongoing socio-political discussion. Reconnecting to the open-source movement and understanding code as free speech helped to diffract the struggle for equal rights in open-source technology and fine arts. The collective’s experience made them known and they were requested to collaborate with male-centred makerspaces who sought to increase their diversity index (Coleman, 2013: 120). Makerspaces and fablabs revealed their sympathy with the collective’s causes. From them, the collective learned about multiplicities, collectivities and assemblages that at the next incident will provide fertile ground for strong resistance. Discussion The initial shock caused a deeper conversation on how to avoid future precarity and develop into a more independent organisation. It made it necessary to sharpen the profile and agenda of the collective. This process reshaped timidity into affirmation and set in motion an ongoing transformation of the collective (Braidotti, 2008: 4). Feminist hacklabs pose a contradiction to the general master narratives that regulate norms and expectations towards free speech in technology development (Open Source tools), free speech in fine arts production (hacking as artistic method) and free speech in the political sphere (feminist activism). It is not surprising that this triple provocation attracts attacks, yet the collective was not prepared to make this kind of difference (Haraway, 1988: 575–599). Braidotti contends that when we experience ourselves as vulnerable, this generates a kind of ‘melancholia [that] expresses a form of loyalty through identification with the wound of others’ and hence it ‘promotes an ecology of belonging by upholding the collective memory of trauma or pain’ (2008: 4). This way, the collectively experienced attack, as it forced the collective to explain itself and give an account of itself, contributed to the becoming of its new subjectivities (Butler, 2005: 111–115). This did not happen straight away. Two chair members left the collective in the course of the process, but eventually the crisis had an emancipatory effect. Posthuman subjects, like feminist hackers, advocate for an intimate relation to the world (Braidotti, 2006: 112) and egalitarianism. They are inherently in conflict with the white supremacist and capitalist polity, which guides the right-wing populist political agenda. But the influence is not one-directional: non-binary subject positions were passionately discussed within the district administration meetings, providing a potential fruitful setting for future alliances. This still begs the question of how to reduce the enormous struggle that precarious inhabitants share in many European countries. How to value and celebrate a state structure Wuschitz 15 that serves and benefits all, that is held accountable for diversity, education and tech literacy? Answering these questions lies beyond the scope of this article. Conclusion In recent years, gender-related policies in Austria have shifted towards defunding and silencing feminist and feminist STEAM initiatives. It may seem as if there would have been no effective resistance against the radical and sudden defunding. This article describes the case of a feminist hacklab in Vienna, run by a collective that perceives gender norms and technology as being co-produced (Sørensen et al., 2011: 101). This collective not only organises open-source technology workshops, but also curates exhibitions that negotiate issues of binary gender, sexuality and nomadic subject positions. It hosted an exhibition by artist Momo, who through artwork tried to encourage women* to discover, take ownership of and enjoy their bodies. The article foregrounds the authorities’ accusation that the artist and hacklab members were humiliating women and their defunding of the hacklab as a result. This assault discouraged them from continuing their artistic practice. Yet, those real challenges that despite their intersectional differences affected all members of the collective altered their relations of care (De la Bellacasa, 2017: 3; Eleuterio and Van Amstel, 2020: 4). To weave new alliances became a collective endeavour. The collective tried to unpack how these entanglements shaped feminist hackers’ subjectivities in the course of the conflict. By thinking diffractively, interpreting the threat as a pattern that can resonate in the collective’s practice and world-making, it tried to make sense of the tense situation. By re-positioning itself towards the aggressor and gaining insight into the power dynamics that led to the disadvantaged situation, the feminist hacklab became a shapeshifter, testing a variety of tactics and roles, making differences and unlearning patterns of victimisation. In this way, the hacklab members could – against all odds – stand and expand their ground. Tech literacy, therefore, means gaining skills to express controversial, artistic and personal issues (hooks, 1994: 14; Ahmed, 2017: 5). It means practising democracy (Asad and Le Dantec, 2015: 1694– 1703). The collective became sensitised towards differences and differing degrees of precarity among the members. To be exposed to risk in public demands increased self- and community care. 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