Naomi Wu is an interesting lady. She’s smart, opinionated and a talented maker. She is from Shenzhen, China and creates and documents a lot of interesting and unconventional hardware products. The video above is a perfect example, a self-made strobing light source that illuminates her breast implants. She has a ton of great content online but I picked this one because it sits at the intersection of sex and DIY technology which is one of the things which makes her unique. Her presentation is overtly sexualized in a way that traditionally is deployed in misogynistic and male dominated contexts, but she is subverting these tropes by juxtaposing them with open source hardware hacking and maker culture. And she is doing it in a very direct and even confrontational way, she is not trying to blend in with the guys, it’s front and center, in her name and the persona she portrays.
I understand that there will be people who will find this distasteful, which is of course their right. But I think that as members of nerd subcultures it is important for us to create an inclusive and welcoming space for people with every kind of presentation and mode of expression. There is a power differential in our world between those who can fluently use and edit technology, both hardware and software, and those who cannot. By culture-policing tech broadly as a space in which only people who look a certain way or are a certain gender, or are not too sexual, or don’t make people nervous, we enforce that dynamic. Naomi is aggressively asserting her femaleness, and an aspect of female influence and power through her sexuality, in a male dominated space. She’s not blending in or making herself small. I think it’s important that we make sure that we support and create space for people like her as we seek to transform the bro-space of tech.
Fat guys and girls stand up for me every. single. day. Same shit- look at the work, them being online is not permission to judge or give an unrequested opinion on how people look. https://t.co/hd7UXsGf1Z— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) January 31, 2019
This exchange occurred on Twitter where Naomi stood up to comment against someone mocking the stereotypically nerdy appearance of a famous Wikipedia contributor. One of the things I love about the tech space in contrast to the music world is that it is less superficial and image oriented. If you are smart and talented, the way you look matters less. That’s not to say it doesn’t matter at all, because if you show up as an outlier along some other vector, like Naomi, that prejudice can still exist. In my ideal nerd world we can all be judged on our skills and what we bring to the table in terms of ideas, not whether we wear a short skirt or have flashing boobs.
Bonus! This looks like a really fun recipe that I want to try from her channel:
