TecnoLovers: Luchadoras new web series

This weekend, Womanity Award recipients Luchadoras, a feminist organisation in Mexico, are launching a web series to highlight the role of women in technology. Luchadoras together with La Sandía Digital and Association for Progressive Communications (APC) have been working in partnership for the last three years to adapt the global campaign Take Back the Tech!, which inspires women and girls to take control of technology to end violence against women. 

#TecnoLovers
The online series, which has been developed with the support and funding of the Womanity Award, is called #TecnoLovers and uses short films to tell the story of women’s relationship with technology, allowing us to learn more about our ancestral knowledge surrounding it and explore our ability to transform and adapt it.
The three part series will be available online from August 3rd and highlight different forms of women in technology including textile and weaving, bicycle engineering and cyber feminism to name a few. 
The series critiques closed understanding of technologies which have excluded women’s experiences and practices. All episodes are protagonised by women opening black boxes of knowledge. 

Launch event
To launch the campaign, Luchadoras are hosting an event this Saturday in Mexico City at “Fábrica Digital El Rule”, a  tech-cultural centre dedicated to the role of technologies in human life today.
During the event, Luchadoras will host workshops and discussions about women in technology, showcase 3 of the series’ episodes, and host a celebration to mark the launch of the campaign.

Feminist technologies
Not only is women’s role and relationship with technology often overlooked in modern society, but also women still don’t have an equal share when creating new technologies and their needs are not taken into consideration when new technologies are developed. 
They also face the same issues online and offline: harassment, discrimination and other types of violence. Online VAW silences women, which prevents them from exercising a wide array of rights, such as freedom of expression and access to information. It blocks their right to shape the internet and reinforces views of Information and Communication Technology as unmanageable and unintelligible, feeding the gender gap.
On the #TecnoLovers campaign, Luchadoras Founder Lulú Barrera says:

“Women have always been creators, we are today, and tech has been both a tool for autonomy and liberation. We wanted to celebrate women taking back technologies for our own sake.”

Support from The Womanity Award
The campaign has come about as a result of  support Luchadoras received from The Womanity Award. Luchadoras, La Sandía Digital, and APC – organisations that work to fight for an internet free of violence against women and for feminist technologies – were recipients of the Womanity Award in 2016 and have been working closely ever since. 
The Womanity Award, launched in 2014, is a unique programme that unsurfaces innovative solutions that address the root causes of violence against women and fosters partnership between organisations around the world to scale those solutions. Award recipients are given funding, mentoring and technical expertise so that their ground-breaking projects that are successful in one or more locations, can be adapted to a new geography.
Womanity Award programme Manager Laura Somoggi said:

“It’s fantastic to see such important  work coming from the partnership we’ve formed through the Womanity Award. It is critical to support women’s movements that lead initiatives that give more and more space to women’s voices. As well as more space for women  to share their experiences and to shape the reality in an equal way.”

To find out more about #TecnoLovers please visit https://luchadoras.mx/tecnolovers/ 
Find out more about The Womanity Award
Find out more about Luchadoas 
Find out more about Association for Progressive Communications
Find out more about Take Back the Tech!