Black feminist cyberactivists in Brazil vs "women in tech"
Bárbara Paes on producing technology and not reproducing oppressions
Photo credit: Bárbara Paes
I’m going to introduce you to one of my favorite people and thought leaders. And this interview was so good that while it was originally intended just for this newsletter, I also pitched it a while back to GenderIT, a platform for critical feminist writing on internet policies, and one of my favorite places to both read and write about gender and tech issues. So here’s an excerpt from the full article, which I also recommend reading and have a little wander around GenderIT’s website (bilingual in Spanish and English). After this excerpt, there’s a behind-the-scenes part of the interview, which I reserved for New Wave. In it, I ask Bárbara lots of questions about how to decide whether a project is actually the right fit and the insecurity about starting new projects, what she’s reading, and more.
Part of this interview is excerpted from Bárbara Paes on Black Feminist Cyberactivists in Brazil and the Neoliberalism of Women in Tech for GenderIT.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Bárbara Paes, a young Brazilian feminist who works at the intersection of technology and social justice, the co-founder of Minas Programam, a collective project from São Paulo, Brazil led by mostly young women of color to learn programming skills and other abilities. She also works at The Engine Room. While it was many years ago that we met at APC’s Feminist Internet meeting in Malaysia, we’ve shared conversations over the years on the state of feminist funding, young feminist-led activism, and Black feminist activism in Brazil. For this conversation, we delved deeper into Paes’ formational experiences as a young feminist, her practices in terms of leadership and partnership, a Black feminist perspective on the co-optation of gender issues in technology spaces, and some of the projects that she’s been working on during the pandemic that has enormously affected Brazil.
Barbara Paes: Working for these organizations, sometimes we lose our own voices. I think that we end up losing a bit of our own opinions, what motivates us, besides the work (that we choose to do). I think it’s great that you’re doing this New Wave.
Ani Hao: That’s so nice to hear, thank you. The idea for New Wave, the newsletter about young feminists also cames from my experience in journalism, because I interview these people for these articles and these interviews never - I can never use all of them, like not even a fourth or fifth of what the person is saying to me. These last interviews for Teen Vogue, the interviews were incredible, and I was able to use one paragraph for Teen Vogue. [laughs] If young feminists are able to be in the media, if they are able to say like one or two paragraphs, [then that’s already a lot], I think that people need to see more articles written by them, more articles, and more. I was going to ask you about the themes that interest me in general, I always wanted to share more of young feminists’ personal context, like childhood, how you grew up, your formative experiences, how you began to identify as feminist, and more personal aspects.
I think that, well, I’ve already thought a lot about this. How I molded myself, and it’s a bit wild. There is a series of things, like how I was raised, that there was no way that I wouldn’t become feminist, but I am still thinking that the years that were very important for me were during high school. There was a shift [for me], going from private school and then at 14 years old, going to a public [high] school in São Paulo. That experience changed me a lot. I think at that time, I didn’t identify as feminist, but it was very important that I became politicized in other aspects. Before, I had thought of some things as being very individual, I didn’t necessarily think that they were part of political phenomenons. I went to a [new] school that was very diverse, that had a decades-long history of student activism. And then after university, I thought about these issues a lot, and I discovered feminism in a deeper way than I had before, especially because I began to organize with other feminist women, other Black women, who listened to me. I think that when I was younger, I had to learn how to listen to other experiences in order to begin to articulate [my own thoughts].
The evolution of how I see feminism comes from Black women’s thought and production. Some people that I met at university, part of this space that was just made up of women to discuss gender issues during undergraduate. This space was so important to me because I think - that there is a thing of moral superiority in Brazil. This thing of - who have you read? Who has been in certain spaces? Who has already read that text that’s considered part of the canon of that kind of literature? It was important to have a space where it wasn’t necessary to prove myself, to prove certain kinds of aspects. It was important to have a space where I felt safe, [especially] to create new projects.
I think you’re talking about spaces where you have autonomy and where you feel like you’re part of something.
Absolutely. I think that - well, it’s crazy, because I’m 27 years old, I have been working in some organizations for a while already. Minas Programam is a project that I founded, and I have a certain visibility. But Brazil is a very racist country. And still, until today, many people don’t see me, or people like me, as leaders. Yesterday, Minas Programam together with PretaLab, we talked about some skills that are necessary, since this is a formational course. You could look at it and say, ah, it’s a course. It’s a course just for Black women. I never thought that a space to talk about technology could be just to train Black women. It’s so important that we are also thought of as leaders in this area. I think it’s important for us to see ourselves as leaders, but to be trained in technology, for us to see ourselves as a person who is thinking about how to produce technology and not reproduce oppressions. Principally because - so that Black women can - there isn’t a worry, we think a lot about our people, how these forms of oppression, how to see spaces to think about these things, it’s really important for us.
More than ever, digital technologies are multiplying the oppressions that we face everyday. To be in this space yesterday with these Black Women, and discuss how these technologies are created, this has been extremely important for my feminist practice, because generally we are excluded from these processes. Even in spaces that are supposedly progressive spaces, like the Internet Forum here in Brazil - there aren’t any Black women. They have denied the participation of many Black women for some years now - one year, Blogueiras Negras (Black Bloggers) wrote an article about this. To bring younger women into these discussions, which sometimes seem very technical and restricted, is important.
…
There’s this logic behind the use all of these things like diversity, inclusion and representation - which all serves white supremacy, because they need these things for validation, right, and also for moral superiority. “We also practice human rights, we are also activists, because we have diversity and whatever else.” As if ‘women’ as a category was intersectional and really contemplated class, race, and many other realities.
BP: Right. And now there are several Black women in a large tech company. But it’s a racist technology, and it sells artificial intelligence technology which is racist. So it isn’t an easy choice. We have lost lots of funding because of this. Everyone [at Minas Programam] has a job , so we have somewhat of a financial stability on an individual level, which varies from person to person, but this allows us to make these kinds of decisions. But we also see that Brazil is going through an enormous recession right now. Formal work is disappearing, it’s ending. And so many people, many women, who were working on their projects in parallel - many people are losing their jobs and they’re losing the possibility to work on their projects in parallel. So, the sensation of a dispute for resources that people already felt before is going to increase.
And we are going to see groups of white women, who overall live in a very privileged context in Brazil, compete for funding with groups of Indigenous women, Black women, women who are at the base of the social pyramid in Brazil and who sustain Brazil, who don’t have other forms of funding. In the context of this recession, Black women’s work in Brazil is getting left behind. And if you look at who is working in the majority of the foundations in Brazil, they’re white. And this makes a difference when it comes to deciding who gets funding. Because the people who can write about their projects in a way that is more appealing to these foundations are white. More and more, non-White feminists in Brazil are going to have less access to funding. You and I have talked about this several times.
Read the rest of the interview here on GenderIT.
How have you felt about projects that don’t seem like they’re ever going to happen, and how do you feel about projects that you manage to pull off?
I think that I’m able to create projects that I don’t overthink, in the sense that I don’t question if they make sense, if it’s a valid project, if I’m the right person for this space, if these people are the right people. These are all important questions to ask and I think that for me, the projects that work out are the projects that I’m motivated to do independent of these questions - but of course considering the answers to these questions - I will do it. For Minas Programam, we thought that - “I want to do this independent of any other factors”. At the same time, I think that projects that haven’t come into fruition yet will at some point in time. I’m thinking about some things that have been “stationed” for years.
Do you really think so [that they will work out eventually?] I’m going through a period of reflection. And what about these people who actually really need to reflect more on if they’re the right people for a project?
I think that there are projects that haven’t happened yet, but they’re not going to happen because of me, but because of other people. I can give some support, I can help in some other ways. But I am not necessarily going to be the person who is very involved.
What criteria would you use, for example, to think about your place and role in a project? I think of this as very feminist [of a process], to be feminist should be to have this possibility and capacity to critically self-examine and question things like participation, inclusion, processes, and more. How do you do this in your projects, decide that you are the right person, how do you share leadership and more?
So, I’ve thought that the closer to my reality the project is, the more certainty that I have about the project. I know that I talk a lot about Minas Programam, but it’s because it’s influenced me so much. We are often invited to places outside of São Paulo. And we have always been pretty resistant - we prefer to indicate groups outside of the Rio-São Paulo circuit because… otherwise, we land like a parachute in a context that has nothing to do with us, that we don’t know at all. So one criteria is how close I am to this issue. When I’m invited, when people come to me with ideas that are very far from my reality, I tend to say, oh, talk to this other person! They have more to do with that. I think that to think about our positionality is to understand that sometimes, our contributions are limited. And sometimes, they’re not relevant at all! One time, I was invited to give a workshop in another state [of Brazil] that was thousands of kilometers away, with a reality that has nothing to do with my own. I’ve been thinking a lot less about how to scale up projects and much more in building with people who come from similar backgrounds and contexts. Another criteria that is really, really important is to see who is already doing this kind of work, and how to potencialize their work.
Recently, I started a project with two friends. We started this project to share information with people from the periphery, Black people, Indigenous people, and people who are traditionally not in university or doing a Master’s degree. For them to be able to enter these administrations if they wanted to go there. We thought a lot about: what would be the best way to do this? Our worry was that - well, in my case it was: my family came from poverty. We lived through a significant socioeconomic ascension. So we thought, is it possible that this is going to end up being something that’s completely outside of the reality of the people that we’re talking with? The way that we decided to deal with this was to invite other people who came from backgrounds closer to [our target audience for this project]. That was the way that we found to minimize “our voice” in this project, whose purpose is really just for this information to arrive to these people.
I really loved these criteria, I think that many people ask themselves the same questions, but it’s not always a clear process when you’re thinking about your place and role in an action. I also wanted to ask you how you see your own growth and individual development leading these projects with other women. I understand that you don’t want to found projects by yourself, and you always want to divide leadership, structures, and more.
I think that in different moments of my life, I’ve realized that things are better when they’re made by more hands. Everybody has their way of doing things, and I know that I’m this way, I have my own way of doing things. But to work collectively really is better in the end, in my opinion. And one of the reasons why I think it turns out better is because our experiences are multi-faceted. Women in Brazil - you see completely different experiences, even here just in São Paulo. You’ll see completely different experiences in all sorts of projects. I wanted these projects to be welcoming spaces for different experiences, for experiences outside of the “norm” that you see on TV or in university. To build and organize collectively is what defines whether or not these projects make sense [for me to work on them]. Besides being collective, it’s about who is organizing and who is proposing these things.
Recently, I was invited into a mentoring project for people with the same scholarships that I had. But all of the people coordinating this project were from very privileged places, very well-intentioned, but this caused great discomfort for me. I think that it’s not going to be a great experience for the people who are participating. We are not going to be able to reach their realities. In addition to building projects collectively, I try to think about participating in projects thinking about who these other co-organizers are. Because I think that things reverberate slowly, the ways that you work, so not only thinking always in the collective sense, but how this collective makes decisions. In Minas Programam, the majority of our decisions are made collectively. We do have some general agreements about some things, our way of working and other things. For example, before beginning our courses, we do a full day of training in gender, race, and class for all of the professors. We want everyone to be kind of starting off from the same general agreements and then other agreements that we decide upon collectively together. I think that besides building collectively, it’s about being very intentional about what you’re building and with whom.
What are you reading these days? Do you have any book recommendations?
I’ve been taking refuge in fiction for the past months. Just as much to escape and think about new things as to imagine new realities for our world. Of all of the books that I’ve read in 2020, I really liked Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo and Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. From Brazilian literature, I really recommend Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Junior. The book is about the story of two sisters who are living in the sertão of Bahia. And also Olhos d’Água, by Conceição Evaristo. Recently, I’ve also been adventuring into science fiction (something that’s not common for me!) and I read the trilogy Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. It was really invigorating and I will definitely read more from Okorafor soon.
How are you practicing pleasure these days? Besides reading, is there something else that’s giving you energy, helping your creative process, or simply helping you to enjoy life more?
It’s been difficult to maintain a pleasure routine these days. But I really believe in Brittney Cooper when she says that there isn’t any justice for Black women without pleasure, so I have trained to maintain small little pleasurable moments. I’ve cooked and eaten a lot of delicious things that nurture both my mind and my body. I’ve looked for ways to take care of my health with this perspective that I deserve to live well; it’s what we all deserve. Another thing that I’m trying is to guarantee that the spaces that I live in have lots of plants and art <3
Thank you so much Bárbara Paes for this interview! You can follow Bárbara and Minas Programam both on Twitter. The full interview will be translated into Spanish on GenderIT’s website soon, with a link to the original transcript in Portuguese. Translation from Portuguese to English: Ani Hao.
Sign up for the first New Wave Writers’ Group call on November 26th at 10 am-11:30 am EST/ 4-5:30 pm CET/ 10-11:30 pm HKT. This idea came out of the responses to the first-ever New Wave survey, which I am definitely going to replicate because all of the responses were really helpful and will shape a lot of things going forward. We will introduce ourselves on the call, but the purpose of the call is mainly creation, and we will mostly work in 20 minute intervals of silence (creative spurts, anyone?). If you want to come to the call and not write, but instead illustrate, design something on Adobe, work on music, feel free. Let’s keep each other accountable to feminist art and creation (and help me work on the next edition of this newsletter)!
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