She Geek: Women and Self-Labeling in Online Geek Communities

Courtney is an MA student studying Victorian science fiction at Texas A&M University. She blogs about feminism, geekery, and academia at From Austin to A&M.

This post originally appeared at ‘Cause I’m Nerdcore Like That: Toward a Subversive Geek Identity,

Writing our own comics, and blogs and forming our own communities gives us strength. When confronted with the cultural purity police, the ones who swoop in to Geeksplain to us, we can answer from a position of solidarity. We can create safe spaces of our own. Spaces where we can debate and discuss the ways Science Fiction comments on society’s treatment of The Other, spaces where our voices aren’t drowned out by simplistic fanaticism. A place where, for instance, a group of people can watch one of the X-Men movies and someone can, during one of the many scenes where Cyclops and Wolverine are having tense arguments about who is better for Jean Gray [...] simply scream out GAWWWWD JUST KISS ALREADY! BROKEBACK THAT SHIT! and not have people get all middle school about it.

Garland argues that by creating separate discursive spaces, like queer-oriented or female-oriented forums, subversive geeks can create their own authority, one strong enough to stand up to the mainstream, white, male, cisgendered geek authority. His example, in which fans can “scream out” a reference to queer subtext, indicates that what non-mainstream geeks need is a space to speak without worrying about hegemonic gender and sexuality standards. Unlike the highly-policed Quake server, then, geek women (and geeks of color, disabled geeks, queer geeks, trans geeks) need a space of free discourse, in order to change the larger geek culture.

So, what does the labeling of these communities do for this potentially subversive discursive project? Let’s move on to my data collection and results.

Methodology

My data came from Livejournal, which I chose because it is an online community with a reputation for being more female-friendly than other places online, and thus attracts more women-oriented communities and female geeks to join them.

I used a series of search words intended to bring up mainstream groups that self-identify as geeky or nerdy. This series was as follows: geek, nerd, science fiction/sci fi,Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, comic book/graphic novel, fantasy, Lord of the Rings, gaming/gamer, World of Warcraft. To collect my data, I went systematically through each the search results for each search term and identified the groups meant for women. Each group then needed to fulfill a number of criteria to be included.

Criteria

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