feminist hacking

diffraction

 

The question of method is far reaching the limits of this paper. To better understand and interact with the complexities of the contemporary world(s) around and within us, we inevitably have to deal with a multiplicity of non-linear and overcrossing disciplines, not least, with the sociology of knowledge.

Reflection and reflexivity have been fundamental to qualitative research since the cultural turn (Jenkins et al, 2020). French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed and advocated for the application of epistemic reflexivity, as an acknowledgement of the impact that the social positioning of the researcher has in knowledge-making practices and  the multiplicity of its effects onto the relationship to the research object. (Bourdieu 1993). The construction of an object is inseparable from the instruments  and the critique of the very construction (Wacquaint, 1992).The main approaches to reflexivity are 'informed by representational ways of knowing,' , which oversee the way that values entangled in scientific praxis shape "spectator epistemologies," which "define, approach, and negotiate the making of evidence, data, and narratives." (Dougcet, 2018).

According to Haraway,

Reflexivity is recommended as critical practice, but my suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up worries about copy and original and the search for authentic and really real. (Haraway, 1991, p. 16)

While metaphors of reflection have been effective in (re)contextualizing knowledge production processes, they also risk establishing 'geometries of sameness.' (Haraway, 1997)

In contrast to reflection, Haraway (1997) proposes diffraction as an alternative optical metaphor. Diffraction, according to classical physics, is a physical phenomenon that occurs when a large number of waves collide with an obstacle on their path and/or when these waves overlap and merge, resulting in a visible pattern of interference. In quantum mechanics, the diffractivity of sets of waves, single waves, and single particles can be explored under the correct (experimental) conditions.

Haraway sees this disruptive element as fundamental to the use of diffraction as a methodological metaphor in critical study.

[D]iffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness . . . one committed to making a difference and not to repeating the Sacred Image of the Same . . . diffraction is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential meanings. (Haraway, 1997, p. 16)

Within diffractive methods, the definition of objects, narratives and knowledge making depends on their sociocultural and relational connections. Diffractive methods suggest “politics of possibilities” (Barad, 2007, p. 46). Such approach suggests a shift from data or evidence collection and representation to “intervention” (Hacking, 2002) and, following particle physicist and new materialist philosopher Karen Barad, an “intra-action,” an “ethic-onto-epistemological” relation with data, research subjects and their world(s). (Barad, 2007, p. 381)

Diffraction is often used figuratively in contemporary feminist philosophy to denote a more objective and difference-aware mode of consciousness and thinking. The new materialist tradition views difference as making a difference. (Butler, 1993; Barad, 2007, Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016).

“We may understand diffraction patterns – as patterns of variation that make a difference – to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world.” (Barad, 2007, p.72).  This disruptive quality is essential to the use of diffraction as a methodological metaphor.

For Haraway, diffraction is a "more subtle vision" than conventional reflective scientific optics and cognition since it highlights "where the effects of difference appear.“ Thinking diffractively descends from the phallogocentric, reflective logics of generating the Same all over by recognizing the discrepancies that persist while also referring to the troublesome reductions and assimilations of difference that have occurred. (Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016)

Diffraction is more akin to “critical consciousness” than reflexivity because it allows one to become more attuned to how differences are produced in the world and what specific effects they have on subjects and their bodies. (Haraway, 1997, p. 273) As a result, seeing and thinking differently implies a self-accountable, vital, and responsible relationship with the environment.

Barad develops this perspective further, establishing how reading communicates in different ways a self-accountable feminist type of critical criticism and textual interaction. Diffractive communication with texts and philosophical practices means that they are read dialogically “through one another'' to produce imaginative and unpredictable results. (Barad, 2007, p. 30) Adhering to Haraway's concept of diffraction, this also means understanding and respecting the contextual and theoretical gaps between the readings – rather than dismissing previous theories outright, the old roots are re-used to think anew.

Reading diffractively not only tends to exceed the degree of criticism, which is essentially based on a Self/Other identity politics, but it can also be viewed as a boundary-crossing, trans/disciplinary approach, as it results in "respectful engagements with various disciplinary practices."  (Barad 2007, p. 93).  

new materialist ethics

 

In new materialist thought, politics, philosophy, and various methodologies are inevitably linked, generating feminist materialist models of ethico-politics in which the conventional Western metaphysical dualistic self/Other paradigm, as well as debates on subjectivity, identity, and distinction, surpass towards a more-than-human becoming. (Geerts, 2016)

Karen Barad coined the term “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” to emphasize the inseparability of ethics, ontology, and epistemology while engaged in (scientific) knowledge creation, scientific activities, the universe itself and its inhabitants – human and non-human beings who intra-actively co-constitute the world (Barad, 2007, p. 90).  Barad's modern feminist materialist theory of agential realism places considerable emphasis on the idea that one cannot but interact with the world ethically. Such positionis grounded in the philosophical views of Derrida and Levinas, and the feminist science studies tradition pioneered by Haraway, that emphasizes the need for accountable and just knowledge production. (Barad, 1999, 2003, 2007; Geerts, 2016)

Barad's ethico-onto-epistem-ology can be viewed as a quantum entanglement demonstrating that, since we are part of the universe, we can no longer see ourselves as innocent observers viewing the world from a freestanding viewpoint, or, as feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway has called such pseudo-neutral point of view – a "god trick.“ (Haraway, 1988, p. 581).

Following Geerts (2016), Barad's model of an "ethics of entanglement" is influenced by the Levinasian idea that the subject who is in-the-world suddenly stands "face to face" with the Other, and thus becomes ethically obliged to respond to the Other's call. (Barad, 2011, p. 150; Levinas 2015/1961, p. 39; Geerts, 2016).

According to Barad, “[e]ntanglements are relations of responsibility,” and therefore our ethical debt to the Other is part of the fabric of the universe. Barad's ethical theory is radically posthumanist: the face of the Other, for Barad, should not be limited to the face of a human being, formerly symbolized by Levinas' Stranger, because our being-in-the-world is always already entangled with other beings' existence. (Barad, 2007, p. 392; Geerts, 2016)

Responsibility – the ability to respond to the other – cannot be restricted to human-human encounters when the very boundaries and the constitution of the ‘human’ are continually being reconfigured.

Furthermore, in Baradian ethics, Otherness – sometimes articulated as the self/Other cut in the Western metaphysical tradition – is never theoretical, which means that Otherness arises from within intra-actions between the universe and its beings (Barad, 2007, 2014; Geerts, 2016).

Responsibility, then, is  more relational, and not an obligation for all of our fellow beings. (Haraway, 2008, p. 88; Barad, 2012, p. 208)

The new materialis version of response-ability relates to an instant accountability that all beings share in their intra-actions with the universe, as we are all in and part of the world's becoming – a becoming that, in the end, is a matter of morality, according to Barad. This is essentially “an ethics of worlding,” demonstrating how ethics, being, and knowing can no longer be differentiated. (Barad, 2007, p. 392; Geerts, 2016).

political ecologies

 

Extending the cultural turn's political self-disclosure and opposing its moral impartiality, new materialists want to take a stand on topics such as climate change and biotechnological engineering, among others.  To do so, they must embrace and implement the intra-disciplinary approach, implementing  the nonhuman universe, which has historically been the domain of the natural sciences. (Van der Tuin & Dolphin, 2012; Braidotti, 2013; Coole & Frost, 2010)

According to Bruno Latour, there is a choice to be made between modernizing and ecologizing, and it must be done with the understanding that any new shift in our understanding of science puts the entire apparatus of modernization in jeopardy. (Latour, 2013, p. 8). There is a need to create a new coordinate system that serves the diversity of life and a richer value setting, as well as a more holistic worldview and a deeper relationship with the earth. (Latour, 2017). The fundamental contexts that give rise to new materialism are technoscience and climate change.  In that sense our project inhabits the zone in between Latour's binary of modernizing and ecologizing, in the sense that progress (modernisation) can also imply becoming more ecologically intelligent.

If new materialism is revealed as just instrumental rationality and a technology for the devaluation of human values, it will be a useless means to an end. A poetics of a living world, living nature, living universe, life force, science, and the creation of new organizations and networks is enabled by new materialist theory. It is a meeting ground for beings who pursue and convey global well-being dreams.  Philosophers who self-identify as Indiginous have been writing and talking about similar world views before new materialism. (Aleta Browns, e.g., Kumari Jayawardena)

It can be the root of relationships, dreams, and common behavior of kindred spirits generating new understanding and practices that will flow before the sudden arrival of a new system based on a higher level of consciousness and organization. (Ibid)

What feminist new materialisms and Object-oriented feminism have in common is that both are discussing the common condition as matter or object relations in an attempt to overcome the anthropocentric divisions between the human subject and nonhuman objects. OOF also looks into artistic and curatorial practices which generate ‘representational and nonrepresentational relationships between objects.’ (Behar, 2016. p. 4)

matter

 

Following Schouwenburg (2015) the term "matter" is used by new materialists in at least four different ways.

First, materiality is viewed as a complex, self-organizing process. Matter is a positive and agentive force, a term deriving from the natural sciences into the humanities.

‘Matter is neither fixed nor given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things’  (Barad, 2007, p. 137)

The second, and connected, idea is that nonhuman agents co-shape social environments. If materiality is agentive, things have a life of their own, consciously interacting with, resisting, and co-shaping other beings, including humans. Drawing on STS theorists such as Bruno Latour, new materialists argue that objects are ‘actors,' that is, they are part of networks of connections and actively participate in the establishment, maintenance, or dissolution of these networks. (Kirby, 2013)

Third, new materialists are concerned with ‘material realism.' (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 6) The cultural constructivist and deconstructionist methods of the cultural turn reduced the material world to discursive representations. New materialist scholars, on the other hand, attempt to engage with and theorize about life's non-discursive aspects through taking into account lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance.

Finally, new materialists define matter in the sense that certain things ‘matter' because they are a major source of concern. This last idea denotes a shift toward ethics and emphasizes the movement's political agenda – not least the vital agency of movement as such (Ingold, 2011) and its connection to technology and the machines.

feminist new materialisms

(RE)TURN TO MATTER

“Butler takes the linguistic turn, I go nomadically the way of all flesh” (Braidotti 2002, 47)

In recent decades, new analyses and ways of thinking about matter and investigating material reality have emerged throughout sciences, arts and technologies. They can be explained by recent interest in material culture, political ecologies, critical realism, and the materialist feminist and queer theory or postcolonial studies.  

The term "new materialism“ was introduced in the early 1990s by Rosi Braidotti in the field of Gender Studies. Braidotti and other feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Vicki Kirby began to critically challenge the cultural turn's one-sided emphasis on history, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Spinoza – thinkers who sought to transgress the dualisms that had constituted Western thinking since Descartes.

New materialism suggests a re(new)ed way of giving an account of our coexistence and its consequences in the twenty-first century,   we need to rethink the ideas of objectivity and material reality, material causality and the importance of corporeality, and the very understanding of what matter is. (Coole & Frost, 2010)

It is built on the metaphor of "reading" through matter and the agency of objects. (Barad, 2003; Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2016, 2020; Hinton, 2014; Hood & Kraehe, 2017; Monforte, 2018; Scott et al, 2014).  

New materialism aims to create ‘transversal cartographies,' that is, affirmative connections between seemingly opposing theoretical traditions that are ‘structured by positivity rather than negativity.’ (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012)

Its primary method for achieving this monumental task is the conceptualization of reading as 're-reading.' New materialists reread classic and marginal texts from various paradigms and (inter)disciplines through each other.  In doing so, they seek ‘shared characteristics' and ‘unexpected theorizations' between, say, 1970s structuralism and Marxist materialism and recent ideas from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), such as Latour's Actor-Network Theory. (Hekman, 2008)

‘New materialism says “yes, and” to all philosophical practices, traversing them all, generating strings of vital thinking (Schouwenburg, 2015; van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012)

Karen Barad, a theoretical particle physicist and feminist theorist, who is one of the leading new materialists, converges perspectives and approaches from physics, including recent research in quantum mechanics and cultural and social theories of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler or Bruno Latour. For example, he is one of the leading theorists in feminist and queer theory. (Barad, 2007)

The consequence is a 'posthumanist, performative account,' which breaks down existing dualisms and shows the co-constitution of human and non-human beings and matter and meaning. The statement that people and society are not outside nature lies at the heart of Barad's argument. Instead, humankind is nature; it is 'the world.' According to Barad, nature and culture are both performative. Nature is not a passive ground where people perform. Natures shape cultures shape natures.

Similarly, Donna Haraway, trained as a biologist and informed by the natural world's self-regulation power, coined the word "naturecultures," which refers to the notion that "bodies and meanings co-shape one another.“ (Haraway, 2013)

One of the fundamental insights of new materialism is that nature and culture are two sides of the same coin that have only been separated by the academic world's internal dynamics, which have divided labor into separate science and humanities. (Creager et al, 2001)

These new materialist rereadings, as well as their "unforeseen theorizations" about the co-constitution of nature and culture, give rise to new notions of matter and object agency that differ dramatically from cultural history's passive objects.

Art hacking as method and practice, seeks a (re)definition in respect to the ‘revival’ of the materiality of its practices, including the consideration of organic matter or inorganic hardware not merely as a tool, but also an object of an aesthetic, ethical and political interest. Art hacking has been asserted at different times as ‘communication guerrilla’ or ‘guerilla art’ with the defining features being ‘the availability of the medium, the deep impact of technology on life, the cultural and economic surplus in society, and the politicisation of art in general’ (Jaschko, 1999). It has also been located within the wider practice of hacktivism, , including ’culture jamming’ (Carducci, 2006), media hacking, tactical media and reality hacking. The latter is a term used to define the peaceful application of legally dubious digital tools in pursuit of politically, socially, or culturally subversive ends, including website defacements, URL redirections, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web-site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage. The practice of reality hacking was born out of concerns of the emerging collectives and net.art groups with the fluid interchange of technology and real life (often from an environmental concern). Such tactics could be traced back to Fluxus and the Happenings of the 1970s.

The disruptions and hacks of artists and collectives like subRosa, Ubermorgen, Geert Lovink, The Yes Men, Critical Art Ensemble, DoEAT Group and Institute for Applied Autonomy would vary from virtual sit-ins, electronic civil disobedience, denial-of-service attacks,  to mass protests in relation to groups like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.’

Abigail Susik draws a genealogy of art hacking practice, which she defines as ‘intra-garde’ (Susik, 2019). The author claims that ‘art hack practice is founded in Avantgarde aesthetics and tactics but is ultimately distinct from them.’ Art hacking engenders the intimacy human subjects share with not just technology, but also its consumption in a broader commodity network. ‘ (Susik, 2019, p. 17).

Susik outlines the five traits of contemporary art hack practice and makes comparisons with Avantgarde precedents;

1. technology as content and practice/medium,
2. the appropriation and/or use of industrially produced commodities in image, material and/or process;
3. the work of art as a constructed and/or deconstructed functional or dysfunctional tool;
4. production means and/or location, often beyond the strict confines of what is usually considered the domain of fine art (extra-aesthetic), in materials or place, and often made with shared, collective tools, knowledge or space and
5. the work of art as a commodity designed with commercial industrial tools and components, which may closely resemble a general marketplace commodity, but ultimately remains a rarified art commodity.

(Susik, 2019, p.  17)

Pechblenda, Mary Maggic, Paula Pin are feminist hackers and artists who have focuses on bodies as sites of colonisation, as matter of measurement and categorisation, instrumentalising and starting point for empowerment. Sophie Toupin has shown how a space such as a feminist hackerspace can provide a fertile ground for these effective and daunting projects and how feminist hackerspaces are rooted in a culture of feminist resistance and activism.

Hanna Perner-Wilson is another artist who has nourished and enlarged a tool set to create soft, ubiquitous hardware for feminists to own and make use of, with an extensive online archive on soft and sustainable materials available to create electric circuits of a new kind.

Similarily trans feminist hackers around the world have in artistic ways approached hardware as an organism.

The hand made gold-thread computer by Ebru Kurbak and Irene Posch remind us that embroidery is a gendered technique suitable for appropriation and cutting edge technology.

Similar to Kurbak and Posch,  the fluid, water-glass and air-computer by artist Ioana Vreme Moser called Fluid Memory is a computer element to story memory.

Slime is an example of another material used to store information. Sarah Grant has collaborated with Selena Savic in order to research the project entitled Thinking Toys for Commoning and developing a slime mould, which would build patterns and memorise them after destruction.

Efe Franca Blange has created a large feminist network with her collaborators/colleagues to supply women* in Ghana with sexual harassment education, an aim she shares with the Indonesian "Needle and Bitch" collective, that provide a safer space to talk about sexual health during sewing workshops. In these workshops women* make menstruation pads.

All these representative collectives and people mentioned in connection to feminist hacking and art are focused on doing something different. For these agents, "doing", the process, the relation to the context we are in through sharing, self-education and community-building, is part and parcel of our research. It is the starting point, it defines our research field and simultaneously causes our trouble (Braidotti, 2019; Buttler, 1990; Haraway, 2016; Lépinard, 2020).  Because by performing ourselves, by performing in the world, we shift how we are tied to all entities on this planet. Are we caring? Are we stigmatising? Do we give an account of ourselves? (Butler, 2005) Are we acknowledging the fluid character of formally as binarily declared things, such as nature/cultures, life/matter, organic/inorganic, human/animal, organic/inorganic, human/nonhuman, to mention but a few?

Feminist hacking owes much of its strategies, tactics, grammar and tools to technofeminism (Wajcman, 2004, 2006a) and the cyberfeminist approach (Braidotti, 1996; Hall, 1996), shaped and manifested by Donna Haraway, VNS Matrix, Linda Dement, Jill Scott, mez breeze, Melinda Rackham, Francesca Da Rimini, Cornelia Sollfrank and the Old Boys Network (including Sollfrank herself,  Susanne Ackers, Julianne Pierce, Helene von Oldenburg, Claudia Reiche, Faith Wilding, Yvonne Volkart  and Verena Kuni), among others.

Rooted in the idea of situated knowledges, feminist technoscientific theory and action sought to challenge the nature/culture, subject/object, man/woman and other binaries, intersecting computer technology with subversive feminist counterculture.

Feminist standpoint theory prioretized the subjected knowers over the mode of production. Situated knowledge is based on embodied vision, where neither experience nor nature shape straightforward, pre-theoretical beings. Haraway believed that romanticizing, and thus homogenizing and objectifying, the ideal subject position is not helpful to deal with the violence inherent in dominant ways of knowing. This perspective also resonated in Chandra Mohanty’s viewpoint, who believes there is no innocent, perfectly subjugated feminist subject position granting privilege through knowing; all positions are open to critical re-examination. (Mohanty 1984/1991) Subjectivity is understood as performed in and through various types of knowledge and practice. (Butler 1990, pp. 1–34).

This mode of performing subjectivity, referred to commonly as "cyberfeminism," was shaped by two opposing perspectives. The first, labeled as liberal cyberfeminism (Hall, 1996), was influenced by feminist and queer theorists' postmodern discussions on gender fluidity, and imagined the computer as a liberating utopia that did not recognize the male/female and heterosexual/homosexual binaries. The opposing viewpoint, based on the reality of male-initiated Internet harassment, had resulted in the separatist development of numerous lists and bulletin board systems that self-identified as „women-only.“ This tactic, was defined as online radical cyberfeminism.. The mutual incompatibility of the two cyberfeminisms, according to Kira Hall, reflected the often irreconcilable differences between theory-based and practice-based feminisms in the non-virtual world. Bodiless pragmatics – the body-free interaction was assumed to promote the kind of gender neutrality advocated by liberal cyberfeminists.  In fact, it resulted in radical gender forms that exaggerated cultural ideas of femininity and masculinity. Gender was not erased, but rather intensified in the virtual world. That gendered interaction was often disturbing for its female participants.

The interest in spatial and material dimensions of resistance through technologies were gradually revived, through hardware and spaces to tinker it together.

The term „intersectional“ was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) who argued that overlapping  („intersecting“) factors create advantages and disadvantages for people, for example religion, caste, gender, race, class, sexuality, disability or age. This way she was able to describe and analyze discriminations that take complex forms, for example how female black US American workers   get marginalized through multiple oppressions and how this marginalization operates through privileges granted to „white“ people while people not passing as „white“ are systematically excluded.

Standpoint theory acknowledges that everyone who speaks, speaks from a very specific standpoint, with privileges and marginalizations, advantages and disadvantages that first need to be made transparent, so that an audience can understand the specific position the author speaks from. Yet, this focus on „difference“ among feminists became an issue that divided and weakened  some of their efforts, making it difficult to track central sources of oppression. Difference, therefore, turned into a central issue - difference in anatomy, income, education, health, sexual orientation, ethical background, economic oppression. A person’s agency depends on all these factors and how a society hierarchically categorizes these labels. We are all exposed to hierarchies that shape who we are and we are replicating hierarchies shaping who others seem to become. During one lifetime these labels and categorizations change. Depending on my privilege I either enjoy relative independence or I live on the margins in precarity.

Judith Butler introduced a new term in the 1990s that again shifted the perspective on what constitutes the human as a „subject". In her view, the way we are passing as „female“ or passing as „male“ has to do with our performance of known gender roles. She calls this „gender performance.” She argues that we are enacting gender through certain gestures, behaviors, and desires. There is no essential female or essential male sex, she claims, but we embody the gender identity according to the sex we assigned to at birth through repeating what we believe is the apt performance. Judith Butler claims that we are performing ourselves according to who we give account to. The people around us who encourage or discourage a certain behavior, interest and gender identity co-determine how we experience our „self“, who we believe we are and are able to become. This notion of gender as an ongoing performance makes the „self“ a fluid and active practice, ever changing and interactive with people around us. Butler thinks that we are crafting our own subjectivities in collaboration with people who surround us. Consequently there is no solid, essential „me“ that can get categorized as such, but who we seem to be is all learned, trained and therefore can be unlearned. There is no subject in this sense, but merely fluid subjectivities that are embodied in the current moment. We are never solid, always in transformation and in a state of constant „becoming“.

The feminist hacking and making both emphasize the importance of understanding how practices inform world-views, carving out spaces for people to call a common room of their own. Another important pillar of this movement are the free/libre open source technologies. It entails FLOSS is free to use and/or modify, develop and copy. The approach is deeply rooted in the call for democratic citizenship and participation and in the  understanding of where the products, technologies and goods come from, how they are developed, shipped, used, how they inform every fibre of the socio-political fabric that nation-states and international trade agreements are made of. Open source technologies are being built by the commons with the intention to facilitate interventions in  each of these stages by subverting copyright restrictions with an alternative open source licence. People serving as the lowest element in the food chain in capitalist value generation have experienced within their own bodies how essential it is to invest time and effort into collective knowledge - accessible to them through these open licences. This is a type of knowledge that does not lurk as communities grow across class, race and gender binaries, while their members migrate or age.

Meanwhile, open source technologies are often slow to develop. Using them requires certain technical knowledge and skills which might not be widely and evenly distributed within the hacking community, and without the transfer of knowledge and know-how associated with the open source, it often remains more impenetrable than the proprietary version for some members of the community. Another challenge is the usability issue and adaptability of the open source technologies to other frameworks, which doesn’t always work out as intended, since it is dependent on the voluntary labor contributions of the community members. Considering the two circumstances, more often than not the open source technologies remain politically desirable and frequently manifested, yet often discarded tools.

Rituals of care are acts of commoning in feminist hacking, where care is definied as  ‘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, 1993, p.103).

Care for each other and the community – the „care-full commoning“ practice  is our resort from and an alternative to precarious, ‘bare’ life. Resiliently organized around the generation of open-access, shared resources, it orients us towards the ‘shared horizon of reclaiming the commons. It is relational and situated practice (Deville et al, 2018, p. 23)

It is a method that focuses on the relationships involved in different modes of production rather than the resource itself. It is a struggle that recognizes the micro-political situations of each commons, as well as the need for experimentation with alternatives and methods of resistance.  

A commoner is a subjectivity-in-process which is entangled in affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans.  

Within traditional patriarchy, women have historically built “breathing spaces“ or "feminist counterspaces“ for themselves (Coyle, 2004; Dempsey et al, 2011) Exaggerated and subversive gender performances are permitted in these feminist counterspaces in order to extract personal agency within patriarchy. The strategies of these daily and indigenous feminisms have been co-opted into numerous feminist resistances and are now being used in public spaces and broader causes. (Datta, 2020)

As a resistance mode, it has intersected with the production of feminist transnational networks of solidarity and support in response to physical and psychological and economic exploitation, intimidation, silencing, erasure, displacement and alienation of trans feminist bodies, subjectivities and labor.  

DIY as a tool represents one of punk's main principles – to create and consume (within) its own distinct community (Raboud, n.d.) by building, changing, or repairing objects without the direct assistance of experts and practitioners, rejecting the consumption through purchase of industrially produced objects and commodities. It creates and engenders certain subjectivities and social identities, while aiming to be open to difference and including indigenous, POC and black counter publics, their discourses and material practices, within the movement.

In the domain of the so-called “Global South,” in the absence of technical and other resources, hacking is a common practice consisting of an education process experienced by all community participants. The expansion of DIY ethic into DIT (do-it together) / DIWO (do-it-with-others) discourses and practices has become more or less commonplace in the design/maker scene and HCI scholarship, since the technologically abundant capitalist market benefits from the involvement and inventiveness of the potentially disruptive and dissident subjects and communities in the production processes. Critical of such cultural logic, practices like DAIWO (decentralised autonomous organization with others) are emerging as an open invitation to return to the roots of the DIY movement.