Bugging Women

[c5]

It's frustrating chasing Feminists -- to do tech-related things. Frustrating because I know the reason why they're not responding is not a lack of interest or knack for tech-related matters. The reason is that Feminists already have too much on their plates.

I've spent the past week and a half trying to get women to participate in this open

Comments

[binsoup]

I think I'm going to add to your frustration. Feminists do know that technology is a political issue. The literature says so, and practice says so.

The weariness that activists sometimes experience is something I've observed with many many activists in many different movements, and also something I am familiar with having lived through several cycles of spiritual or psychical boom and busts since I learned to write political propaganda, and something which I am sure I will again experience until the day I decide to un-pitch the tent.

It's impatience of a kind. We get so involved in our own themes and movements, and we have a hard time understanding how other people don't get it. How can they not appreciate the strategic importance of technology to women? How can they not seize the opportunities before them to get more women trained in technology?

Activists will always experience the tension between the now and the tomorrow. Too much looking into the strategic and we get impatient. Too much being in the now, and we risk drowning in details. I may be oversimplifying, of course. But can you imagine how a feminist activists working in a crisis center must feel. I'm sure she's also frustrated about the slow uptake of the rest of the progressive political movement on the issue of violence against women.

Conjunctural possibilities within the limits of strategic structures. Nice coinage there, by the fellow who founded the political institute I use to work for. It basically means that when engage in a long march, one must know how to recognise a conflagration when it erupts along the road, and act on it. Name the moment, claim the present. That was our tag line. The really crucial part for me is undertanding that we don't do what we do because we want conflagrations to erupt. Conjunctures are really not caused directly by one single force or group or individual. It's the socio-political equivalent of a geophysical earthquake.

Closer to our reality. Take back the tech is what I can consider as actions we take to shape or influence the shaping of the far-off future. It is not a conjunctural moment. Beijing plus 5 though, and the two years hence, that was I suspect a conjuncture for the women's movement particularly the ICT section.