Sonic Activism in the Integrated Circuit

Abstract

Feminist and activist efforts in electronic music and sonic arts often have focused on empowerment through the acquisition of technical skills such as circuit design, hacking, instrument-building and interactive audio coding. Many of these efforts seek to ‘close the gender gap’, operating under the premise that electronics engineering and computation are white, masculine domains that leave women and people of colour at the margins. While it is true that power and profit are unequally distributed in technical fields, and that spaces of technical learning carry an air of masculinity, feminist activism that focuses solely on upsetting the archetypical white, masculine coder and electronics engineer forecloses reckoning with the gendered and racialised conditions of high-tech’s global underclass.