Co-creators’ Biographies.......................................6

Inevitably, we also talked a lot about what it’s like to try to keep living during a global pandemic. Because of the way capitalism is set up, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed our labour, including and especially the work we do for money, further into the spaces we eat and sleep and settle for some kind of rest. It’s not that we were not already working at home — but working from home was much less about the place in which we eat and sleep and sometimes even fi nd some kind of rest and even more about the internet. As quarantine and lockdown periods forced so many of us to stay indoors and in one place as much as possible — and for many others, we also know that this was impossible — it became that much more urgent to be online, but, as Nosipho and other sex worker activists pointed out, not that much easier. Similarly indicting systems of inaccessibility, Makgosi remembers highlights how the pandemic compounded the ableist violence that has always rendered disabled people disposable.

Of course, our precarious use of the internet reaches far beyond our fi nancial and professional commitments, even before this particular pandemic. For so many of us, the ability to create a life, or lives, online, where the parameters of our existence seem more fl exible and malleable, has been a dope experience. Many of the things we were prohibited from doing when we were younger, and the resources to which we had no access, have become more possible, more reachable. But this visibility also means that we are more vulnerable to the cultures of violence that have long shaped our lives. Aisha, who has been online since some of the earliest days of social media in Kenya, remembered watching how misogyny changed the freedom with which many women related with each other; here, she refl ects on how this volatile online environment shaped her relationship with her body, on and off screen. Mamello and Nosipho, who work to change the terms of how we think about kink and pleasure, considers the violent connections between pleasure, femicide and re/productive economies under capitalism through a photo essay, while Makgosi shares how her experiences of experimenting with the sex toys she reviews online. And Nyambura, an archivist who loves lists, compiled a caring and useful how-to for people in Kenya who need mental health support.

Another thing we talked about, prompted by the Tweetchat we hosted for the fi rst zine, was our shared curiosity and uncertainty on how to share what we know about sex and gender with the children in the scope of our care, and how to listen to what we do not. We recalled our own childhood curiosities, vulnerabilities and wishes for our younger selves. In this edition, Mamello writes some pointers for her younger self, and Ann shares experiences with working with children who have varying levels of access to the internet.

With the support of the kind, fi erce, welcoming feminist aunties at APC-WRP and in community with feminists from different parts of the world, different generations and different perspectives, here is just one of the afterlives of the Making a Feminist Internet: Africa convening. Read, circulate, and maybe even make a few of these yourself, too — No Sweetness Here Collective