Making a Feminist Internet

the word "begin" written on a mug which stands on a table

At APC we believe a feminist internet empowers more women and people of diverse sexualities and gender expressions to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy.

At the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) we believe a feminist internet empowers more women and people of diverse sexualities and gender expressions to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy. How can we achieve this goal? Through the following critical principles:

  • Access and technology usage. A feminist internet starts with enabling more women and people of diverse genders and sexualities to enjoy universal, acceptable, affordable, open, meaningful and equal access to the internet, and have the right to create, design, adapt and critically and sustainably use ICTs.
  • Internet as a political space. The internet is a transformative political space. A feminist internet facilitates new forms of citizenship that enable individuals to claim, construct and express selves, genders, and sexualities.
  • Governance and the economy. A feminist internet also implies challenging the patriarchal spaces and processes that control its governance. The capitalist logic that drives technology towards further privatisation, profit, and corporate control should also be interrogated. We should work towards alternative forms of economic power grounded in principles of cooperation, solidarity, commons, environmental sustainability, and openness.
  • Freedom of expression, agency, and consent. We defend the right to sexual expression as a freedom of expression issue of no less importance than political or religious expression. We support reclaiming and creating alternative erotic content that resists the mainstream patriarchal gaze and locates women and queer persons’ desires at the center.
  • Privacy, data, anonymity, and memory. We support the right to privacy and to full control over our personal data, information and personal history and memory on the internet. We also defend the right to be anonymous and reject all claims to restrict anonymity online.
  • Children and youth. The voices and experiences of young people must be included in the decisions about safety and security online, and the promotion of their safety, privacy, and access to information.
  • Online gender-based violence. Policymakers and the private sector need to address online gender-based violence (GBV) against women and people of diverse genders and sexualities. Individual internet users also have a role to play, by calling out and not spreading online gender-based violence. The attacks, threats, intimidation and policing experienced are real, harmful and alarming, and are part of the broader issue of GBV. Realizing a feminist internet implies ending this.

This article was first published (12th November 2019) online via hiig.de and is part of the publication "Critical Voices, Visions and Vectors for Internet Governance".