ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the discourses and activities around women in blockchain meetups through a technofeminist lens. This reflexive “social shaping of technology” perspective highlights how gender and technology coevolve in a seamless web of technical artifacts, social relations, and cultural meanings. This position challenges the prevailing notion of technology as neutral and value-free. In the 1990s, feminist scholars celebrated the emancipatory potential of the Internet to close the gap of gender inequalities (Haraway, 1991; Plant, 1997; Turkle, 1995). Yet these claims in many ways fell short, leaving the corporeal realm behind. Technofeminism builds on Haraway’s vision, conceiving of technology as both a source and a consequence of gender relations (Wajcman, 2004). Within this framework, both gender and blockchain are viewed as part of the texture that constitutes contemporary life, rather than as separate from society.
