Anarcha section
...because there is nothing more ephemeral than the digital culture...
Who was Anarcha?
Anarcha was an African American slave woman. She was one of the seventy-five slaves who worked the Wescott plantation, just on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.
Anarcha went into labor one day. Three days later, she was still in labor. Dr Marion Sims was called in to assist the delivery. He writes in his autobiography that he used forceps on the fetus’s head but that he really didn’t know what he was doing since he’d had so little experience with the device. We don’t know whether the baby survived the ordeal. We do know that the mother experienced several vaginal tears from the birthing. She became incontinent afterwards due to the damage.
A few days later, the master of the plantation sent Anarcha to Dr Sims hoping he could repair the damage to his slave, as she could not hold her bowls or bladder. As her master’s chattel, her condition reduced her value considerably.
Sims took in the patient reluctantly. He put her up on his examination table, on her hands and knees and, using a modified pewter spoon to expand the walls of her vagina, he accidentally released the pressure that held her uterus in an awkward position. Anarcha felt immediate relief as the change in air pressure helped her uterus to relocate back into its proper position.
Through an agreement with her master, Anarcha became Dr Sims's guinea pig. She regularly underwent surgical experiments, while positioned on Sims’s table, squatting on all fours, and fully awake without the comfort of any anesthesia. It was commonly accepted that African Americans had a higher tolerance for pain than their white counterparts. Commonly accepted but utterly wrong.
Anarcha’s fistula (from her vaginal tears) was repaired by Sims. Sims thus became the leading expert in repairing this damage that seemed to occur in a good number of births by slave women. Though Sims was sent many slave women with fistulas, we know from his biography that he experimented repeatedly on Anarcha, as well as two other slaves, Betsy and Lucy.
Anarcha was experimented upon, and drugged up later, not to ease her pain as much as to stifle her moans. It has been calculated that she had been operated on, perhaps, 34 times. She, Betsy, Lucy, and countless others helped Dr Sims hone his techniques and create his gynecological tools. Though on display in museums, many of Dr Sims’s tools have modern counterparts that are used today.
Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy left no written legacy. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, a crime punishable by death.
And though science today looks back on Sims’s work ambiguously, truly unsure as to his level of success, or whether he should be credited as the father of gynecology, we now know who the mothers of modern gynecology were: they were the nameless and faceless slave women upon whom Dr Sims experimented.
Today we have just three names: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. It is our hope that these names will never be.
Wellness directory of Minnesota
Why a feminist server?
Feminist servers have been a topic of discussion, a partially-achieved aim and a set of slow-political practices among an informal group of transfeminists interested in creating a more autonomous infrastructure to ensure that data, projects and memory of feminist groups are properly accessible, preserved and managed. The need for feminist servers is a response to: the unethical practices of multinational ICT companies acting as moral and hypocrite censors; gender based online violence in the form of trolling and hateful machoists harassing feminist or women activists online and offline; the centralization of the internet and its transformation into a consumption sanctuary and a space of surveillance, control and tracking of dissent voices by government agencies among others. All these factors have led to a situation where the internet is not a safe space and where it is common to see feminist and activist work being deleted, censored, and/or prevented from being seen, heard or read. Freedom of expression is part of the feminist struggle and TransFeminists can contribute by providing collectively the knowledge and means to ensure their right to speak up remains accessible online, offline and wherever and under any format expression emerges. There will be no feminist internet without properly managed autonomous feminist servers. This is about regaining control and gaining autonomy in the access and management of our data and collective memories. It is also about being able to have feminist mailing lists, pads, wikis, content management systems, social networks and any other online services managed by feminist tech collectives. It is also of course about continuing to argue that social justice in technologically driven environments needs a more gender and culturally diverse presence in general. To achieve those objectives, many sessions during the THF discussed questions such as: what are the purposes of a Feminist Server? What makes a server autonomous and feminist? Where are possible (socially sustainable) models for those servers? How do we create trust among us to develop cooperative approaches to the management of those spaces of resistance and transformation?
Two feminist servers projects were rebooted during the THF!: the Systerserver [1] project which was originally launched by Genderchangers and the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc) and which will focus on hosting online services; and this Anarchaserver which was launched by Calafou inhabitants and people involved in the organisation of the THF! and will focus on hosting data.
Anarchaserver currently hosts a mediawiki for the documentation of the THF! and a WordPress farm. Anarchaserver is an open project, even though moderated, and we are using the THF mailing lists and an IRC channel to coordinate the several tasks that need to be achieved.
Get involved
Join the [2] mailing list which is used also for the organisation of the next THF. Present yourself to the admins and then to the list. The list is in spanglish, which means that all messages should be sent including a translation to spanish or english.
Meet us on [3] the IRC chat on the channel #anarchaserver. We still have to figure out the regularity of our meetings but are leaning towards IRC chat sessions once a month and a distribution of tasks managed through the mailing list.
Have a look at foreseen milestones below and decide what you would like to learn, contribute to.
Future is now: Milestones
- Documentation
What has happened in anarchaserver Aug14/Jan15? + (Stuff installed, who is admin) basically things that happened at 2013 Constant "Are you being Served" conference, during the THF2014, ESC in Graz had the Ministry of Hacking exhibitionin octiber 2014 and ?
- Prepare Terms of Service and Privacy documentation
- Prepare NekroFeministCementry (purpose, howto, zombi sites)
- Prepare WP farm (purpose, howto, living sites)
- Accessing
- How to access server
- How to reset paswords for mediawiki
- How to use screen
- Installing/Testing hardware +distribution
- Service testing
- Mediagoblin for hosting/sharing files
- Tracktracker for follow up of activities in the server and creating tickets for bugs, requests etc
- Communicating
- setup mailinglist :anarchaserver sysadmins&sympathies
- Diffusion
Logo, images, video design about anarchaserver
