Legacies of craft and the centrality of failure in a mother-operated hackerspace

Abstract

Popular portraits of hacking have often relied on histories of hobbyist engineering culture rooted in tales of middle-class, college-educated, and often male technologists. Since 2012, members of a mother-operated hackerspace in the East Bay of San Francisco, California, have countered these narratives, revealing hackerspaces as sites with which to refigure masculine claims to innovation and progress. Drawing on critical craft studies and studies of therapeutic culture, this article examines the workings of Mothership HackerMoms and its series of workshops called Failure Club, a project motivated by a desire to support women’s creative pursuits with the onset of motherhood. By integrating feminist legacies of craftwork with the centrality of failure — exposing personal failures and failures to transform hacker cultures — members not only energize new modes of hacking activity but also hack the very ontology of hacking.