ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 discusses various practices that are changing the field of cybersecurity as a science. It reviews alternatives, internal conflicts and the individual impact that cybersecurity research has on those who conduct it. The overall goal is to complicate the reconstruction from Chapter 4, showing that cybersecurity research is more than just an instrument of the power elite but also a space for gender, minority and queer attempts to infiltrate, challenge or subvert.
The first section notes the importance of a clubhouse sociological mechanism that discriminates for ethnic, gender, class or other types of differences. The goal is not to subsume or surpass research on the issues of specific discrimination but to show what may be a social mechanism for intersectionality.
The second section discusses queer cybersecurity, discussing research by maia arson crimew, subsequent efforts to criminalise her, and how this effort inspired new generations of researchers. This will serve as an example and a closer examination of the importance of public performative as elements of understanding stabilised instability introduced in the previous chapter. In this section, I also show how feminism inspires cybersecurity research and queer hacktivism.
The third section discusses one selected fragment from an interview with an anonymous woman who works as cybersecurity researcher to show how cybersecurity knowledge can provide a space for individual meaning, respite and emotional support.
The fourth section discusses a feminist cyberlaw project by Amanda Levendowski to show how feminist security research practice and law scholarship may help to shape cybersecurity as science for the people.
Chapter 5 ends with a short reflection on the impact of feminism scholarship and cybersecurity on the ethnography that was the inspiration for this book.
