Proposal for a TransHackFeminist Manifesto!
The TransH@ckFeminist (THF!) convergence, organised in collaboration with Calafou & /etc (eclectic tech carnival), will be held in Calafou (Spain) from From August 4-11. THF! is a gathering of intersectional feminists, queer and trans people of all genders interested in better understanding, using and ultimately developing free and liberating technologies for social dissent, as an alternative to the corporatisation of technologies and the digital world. As part of the THF!, we will organise a session on writing a TransHackFeminist Manifesto.
Manifestos are a signal of their time, place, space and affect they create (Colman 2010). It is a form of narrative that can be produced by and for a broad spectrum of people in attempt to converge and inspire action. The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Hengels in 1848 inspired activists, researchers and citizens alike for centuries and decades to come! Adbuster’s* call for 20,000 people to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and Occupy Wall Street for a few months” (Adbusters, 2011) closely ressembles the form of a Manifesto.
In the technological world particularly, Manifestos have been written by feminists and hackers. Donna Haraway ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century‘ is such a well-known example. Cyberfeminists inspired by Haraway took up the manifesto format to come up with the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991). More recently engineers who crafted the Critical Engineering Manifesto a manifesto presented at 30C3 (the 30th edition of the Computer Chaos Congress) to reimagine engineering.
What is proposed in this workshop is to draft a TransHackFeminist Manifesto!. We will collectively think about the content of our TransHackFeminist manifesto. What does it mean to be or act in a TransHackFeminist way? What are the principles that support TransHackFeminism? What do we understand when we use the words Trans, Hack and Feminism together? Trans as a noun: being a transgendered person, being in a trans, Trans as a verb meaning interrogating, crossing, fusing. Hack, hacker or hacking can be imagined as limiting and/or controversial depending on the cultural forces at play. The verb to Hack is about curiosity, it’s about re-purposing gender, technology, life. And where does feminism fits into this constellation. The TransHackFeminist manifesto will try to shed light on the relationship between feminism, trans and hack.
The goal of the workshop is to come up with a manifesto that embodies TransHackFeminism to inspire and ignite more gathering like the THF! and to position oneself on the spectrum.
The workshop will be held 1 hour per day from August 4 until August 10th.
—
*It’s important to realise that Adbuster’s call was reinforcing a momentum for occupying spaces that was already happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, the USA, among others.