The Myth of the Fake Geek Girl

It’s not surprising, then, that being a woman in geek culture was for a long time a profoundly gender-deviant act. “Girl” and “geek” were a zero-sum dichotomy: to claim space in one, you had to relinquish equivalent claim to the other. Recently, though, there’s been a dramatic change: a sudden surge not only in the visibility of women in geek culture, but of the visibility and popularity of more traditionally feminine avenues of engagement with that culture—stuff like cosplay and crafting, both overwhelmingly female-dominated areas. At the same time, women are finding ways to reconcile geekery with femininity, which means that geek identity is no longer unimpeachably male. For the first time, there are visible swathes of geek culture that aren’t only female-majority, but unabashedly girly—in a culture where feminization is very directly equated to deprecation of value. —i09.