Feminist Peer Production

This chapter examines some of the practices which have rendered visible the analytical category of gender – and at times other categories such as race, class, and caste, which are often absent from the analysis of mainstream peer-production scholarship and practice. Having examined some of the main criticisms of peer production projects from the standpoint of feminist perspectives, it presents three case studies of feminist peer production. This discussion is in an attempt to make visible feminist peer production practices and better understand how they are put in practice. The three case studies are the following: the building and maintaining of feminist spaces, collectives, and servers; projects that address gender-based violence through peer production; and the ways in which speculative thinking is being mobilized by feminists to rethink technologies and their imaginaries. Feminist peer production has been used to map instances of sexual harassment in the streets and to make lists of sexual harassers public.