#FeministTechJoy: Initiatives rekindling expression and creativity on the internet and beyond

Illustration: Jananie Chandrarao from Canai and Char Kuey Teow

#FeministTechJoy is a series of annual small grants from APC’s Women’s Rights Programme, designed to spark the exploration of alternative infrastructures and strategies. These grants aim to build capacity, nurture networks of safety and trust, bring communities together to learn and reflect, and generate alternative knowledge and archives in meaningful, relevant ways.

Here you can find a summary of the wonderful initiatives supported in the latest cycle. Implemented in the second half of 2024, the projects celebrate feminist expression, including sexual expression, as well as play and pleasure on the internet. While diverse in terms of regions, people involved and areas of focus, they share a common characteristic: each seeks to revive joy and creativity online by supporting women and gender-diverse people to imagine and weave alternative digital futures. Find out more and be inspired.

A feminist helpline

MariaLab is a feminist organisation that promotes care in digital spaces, working to diversify tech-related discussions and environments by engaging more women and trans and non-binary people. It fosters thinking that incorporates race, social class, gender identity and sexuality in the design of technologies. Their #FeministTechJoy project aimed to strengthen the helpline Maria d’Ajuda, Brazil’s first digital security service run by feminists, dedicated to women, non-binary people, LGBTQIAP+ individuals and organisations across Latin America. Their focus was on consolidating a robust and efficient infrastructure for Maria d’Ajuda, while training the team and optimising awareness campaigns.

Maria d’Ajuda has provided both technical and emotional support to individuals and organisations, actively listening to those affected by digital incidents such as harassment, stalking, sexual and financial extortion and cyberbullying. “These situations hinder the enjoyment of positive online experiences, but the team continues to defend a safer and more pleasant internet,” they highlighted in the final project report, adding: “A feminist internet is the one that is safe for everyone.”

Feminist science fiction

In October 2024, a group of artists and activists, many of whom had never before written science fiction, gathered in an online workshop to create stories that reimagined the future: Una Bolsa de Semillas ("A Bag of Seeds"). In a matter of a few weeks, these writers from different parts of Latin America shaped a collection of stories that aimed to disrupt the traditional forms of science fiction.

The Una Bolsa de Semillas workshop was an experiment organised by digital rights organisation Coding Rights and feminist art collective Musea M.A.M.I. and facilitated by Lucía Egaña Rojas and Joana Varon to nourish new feminist sci-fi narratives, with support from our grant.

You can find out more about the project in this Seeding Change column.

Sex Work Tales

“SexWorkTale of Internet Pleasure” is a documentary film that unpacks conversations around the pleasure of the internet and related technologies and their intersection with sex work and sex workers rights movements in Nepal. It is based on the intersectional feminist perspective to navigate conversations on internet freedom and digital rights while focusing on the sex workers’ narrative of pleasure, joy, care and co-existence. It was conceived and directed by Kabita Bahing, an Indigenous feminist storyteller, writer, poet and lawyer. Watch it below.

Mapping Joy, Pleasure and Community

The "Mapping Joy, Pleasure and Community: Voices of Peoples in Malaysia and the Philippines on the Feminist Internet" project was a collaboration between the Foundation for Media Alternatives in the Philippines and Canai and Char Kuey Teow of Malaysia, exploring the intersectionality of disability, gender and sexuality. It examines how persons with disabilities (PWDs) navigate digital platforms, and how technological innovations empower them to challenge stigma, reclaim agency and express joy. Central to this exploration is the recognition of pleasure as a fundamental human right, one often denied to PWDs due to societal narratives rooted in ableism and patriarchy.

The project highlights how PWDs navigate and redefine these mainstream narratives by using digital spaces as tools for advocacy and empowerment. You can find a great article reflecting on the joint project here.

Research writing

Hopes and Actions Foundation is a tech policy organisation dedicated to promoting and defending digital rights. They developed the "Breaking the Silence: Research Writing and OGBV Monitoring Training" project, aimed at building the capacity of four young feminist writers in digital security and academic research, while deepening their understanding of online gender-based violence (OGBV) in Sudan. Participants were trained to document OGBV cases using the foundation’s monitoring tool and received technical and financial support to carry out this work and draft research papers. The project also sought to publish these papers and share content on social media to raise awareness and advocate against OGBV. You can read them below:

A queer anthology

HOLAAfrica is a Pan-Africanist digital platform that focuses on sex and sexuality on the continent through archiving stories, knowledge production and edutainment, digital community building and creating spaces that deal with safe sex and pleasure and other aspects of the politics and presence of sexuality. The GALA Queer Archive (GALA) is a catalyst for the production, preservation and dissemination of information about the history, culture and contemporary experiences of LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa.

Their joint project brought together voices from across a dynamic and wide range of contexts and to tell a myriad of stories from queer people from countries such as Mozambique, Eswatini, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and even the diaspora. This project involved a wide array of people due to the content creation part of it and in total involved 39 individuals (in the creation of the two audio anthologies, from art work to the audio recordings and mixing and mastering of the final work), of which 37 were queer and a good portion of those (15) identified as trans or non-binary. A total of 29 pieces were selected for the audio anthology, and The Afrodisiacs Collection is now available on Spotify and Apple Music, gathering stories from across the continent.

Building feminist tech joy together

Amidst increasing online gender-based violence, tech's horrifying connection to the environmental crisis, and the overwhelming role of technologies in wars, surveillance and control of human movement, the APC Women Rights Programme (WRP) believes that feminist tech joy is necessary to create spaces for collective sense making around these matters. But resilience goes beyond understanding and preparedness; it is also about nurturing care in our communities and ensuring our movements' work is not erased from history or the internet.

Reflecting APC WRP’s commitment to spread its core funding among its partners, and as part of its donor advocacy in favour of feminist tech, it has already supported nine inspiring initiatives in the 2023 and 2024 rounds, and in 2025 offered a third #FeministTechJoy cycle under the theme “Resistance and Resilience”. The grants are exclusively open to APC members, partners and allies, as part of a closed call to strengthen movement building in feminist tech.

If you are an APC member or APC WRP partner who wants to receive notification of these calls, please register here. If you want to find out more about initiatives like this, subscribe to our APCNews newsletter, sent out every two weeks with updates on APC’s feminist work and beyond. And If you support a feminist internet, please share this piece with others within your own network who might be interested as well.