Building Spaces of Exclusivity: An Ethnographic Approach to Indian and Colombian Women’s Role and Experience in Local Free Software Communities

Abstract

This paper aims to account for the ways women integrating the free software community in two countries from the global South negotiate with feminizing paradigms imposed to them by the collectives interested in popularizating free technologies. Through an ethnographic approach to vital experiences of women in the Indian collective Linux-Chix, and holding a dialog with the experiences of non-organized women in the free software community in Colombia, this paper suggests these negotiations are going to be materialized primarily in the constitution of survival strategies from which certain civilizing projects are particularly vindicated, some of which seem to promote a Western paradigm of female subjectivity.

Keywords

• Free Software
• women
• feminism