ABSTRACT
This chapter’s objective is to foreground the role of gender, feminism, and technology in Southeast Asia broadly through histories of nation-state making and technology projects and technology’s relevance in contemporary art and tech activism and organizing. This article studies paternalism, reproductive and care labor, and contemporary biohacking and tech practices from mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia. In particular, I draw from fieldwork with state-initiated women’s organization in Indonesia and their role in enabling the recognition of grassroots technological innovation and expertise in the Global South. The chapter argues that the roles of state-run women’s organizations in reproductive and care labor are both silenced and marginalized in Southeast Asia’s histories of computing, as well as histories of feminism, because the forms of resistance they articulate and perform are complicit to state ideologies of gender and femininity.
