Adaption of ‘What Would A Feminist Open-source Investigation Look Like?’ for Militant Media

Preface, 2024

From Looks to Feeling

When my co-author, Gabriela Ivens, and I describe writing, “What would a feminist open source investigation look like?” we use expressions such as, “it wrote itself”, to communicate the ease, force, and urgency with which the words came out of us. For both Gabi and I, the text was written during a period of uncertainty between stable jobs. Cowriting is not therapy but when resonant it can be the collective reprocessing of experiences and reorganising of thoughts in order to keep moving, to arrive somewhere new.

The article did not write itself but it was co-written with a polyphony of voices: feminists who came before us, contemporary mentors, allies, friends. In it, we quote American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality as, “an experience, an approach, and a problem”. [1] The intersectional feminisms on which our text draws are approaches, practices, and projections. For me, as approaches, they articulate with clarity the harms that I had previously been unable to name, deconstruct or imagine otherwise. This feminist alchemy—turning hurt, anger, and disillusionment into propositions for doing work differently—was a joyful and meaning-making experience. The resulting article exists as an uneven map, a projection of the field of open source research in 2020. Like all maps, its design acts on and transforms the landscape it documents.

An early idea for this text was to rewrite the article completely. However, Gabriela and I concluded that, while new technologies continue to change open source research, the principles we discuss here remain relevant. [2] This is partly because they operate on a different register: that of pol- itics, values, and ethics. Frustratingly, too, these principles remain relevant because the pace of progress at this register is begrudgingly slow. Incumbent ways of working, even in emergent fields, seemingly have deep roots.

If I were to rewrite this article today, I would update its title to, “What would a feminist open source investigation feel like?” Look is faithful to the inspiration for the paper, “What would a feminist data visualisation look like?” by Catherine D’Ignazio and Laura Klein. However, investigations can too easily look one way while being another. Put differently, their optics can be progressive (equitable, anti-racist, anti-colonial, …) while, to their subjects and workers, they can feel unnecessarily fraught and unfair. [3] A feminist open source investigation would not feel like exhaustion and disappointment. It would be angry, but that anger would be directed outward at the injustices of this world, not inward at the failed structures, procedures and priorities of today’s workplaces.

I am writing from limited experience. After its publication, a group of nine women, queer and trans* workers in or adjacent to the field of open source research formed the Feminist Open Source Investigations Group, abbreviated to femOS.4 This group’s formation was unsolicited and temporary. We existed for each other as an informal alliance. We practised what Chicana tejana lesbian-feminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa calls “alliance work”, that is the labour of identifying and shifting our individual and collective positions, and so what is considered possible.5 We provided mutual support. The femOS met regularly online, and over the course of one year we, “shared our experiences of working on investigations and writing code; we […] discussed and defined our politics”.6 A core lesson in organising that I take with me from this experience, is how temporary alliances, be they cowriting or the formation of a collective, are no less valuable or transformative than those that endure.7 After all, feminism asks us to accept endings or “quitting” in recognition of our and others’ limits, and that all (alliance) work is sustainable only up to a point.

This article remains a pragmatic and feminist offering for how to do open source research otherwise. It was also always a tactical alliance.
In addition to its nine provocations—in particular “Care for yourself”—consider the alliances that you are in or may want to form, and how they might provide mutual support, multiply your power, make-meaning.

Sophie Dyer, 2023

Link to PDF

Footnotes

1. Kimberly Crenshaw quoted in Kathryn Norlock, ‘Feminist Ethics,’ Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, accessed 9 December 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-ethics/#Inte.
2. There was also the question of labour-time as non-academics, which I do not address here.
3. The roles “investigation subject” and “investigation worker” are not mutually exclusive.