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In our technologically “enhanced” times, when the global “sex machine” (e.g., how globalization processes rework our bounded ideas of sex and gender) recasts Asian women as hyperfeminine but also hypermasculine through the gender realignments of capitalist modernity (Ling 1999), digital penetration these days is characterized by the embedding of Asian women’s soft and “hardened” laboring bodies within high-tech scientific industries controlled by wealthy governments, multinational corporations, and savvy business gurus. Despite this muddling of private and public space, the masculine and the feminine, the local and the global—the social engineering of gender still follows the traditional binary logic of women as mere “servers” responding to others’ desires and requests by a global roster of “clients.” Thinking of women as major players and actors “creating affective and visceral responses as theater between the codes of the utilitarian-effective” spaces of late capitalism works to raise “questions of poetry, ethics and justice” (Nadir 2012). Hacking as a kind of social performance offers a performative anti-model of capitalist commodification and a queer model of sexual/gender disidentification (Munoz 1999), inspiring small-scale forms of action that defy the globally “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) of racism, sexism, and capitalism. Sexist assumptions about women’s networking abilities can prove deadly. In actor network theory, the nonhuman object participates in the network, and given the ways Asian women have been rendered as objects of Western fantasy and the playthings of men, one can imagine how they have not only been objectified by technoculture but turned that objectification into an advantage. Xiao Tian is the new general of China’s “hacker babes” smashing patriarchal systems of control and wanted by many security agencies for her online defacements (Figure 1). Posing in coy doll-like positions on her online blog, the teenager’s flirty self-portraits or “selfies” are disarming in their dual connotations of Oriental submissiveness and feminine treachery.

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With a salacious moniker translated from Chinese into English as “a little bit of heaven,” the always fashionable Tian leads a legion of female hackers called the Cn Girl Security Team, a group with over 2,000 members in a country where hackers are accorded rock star status as the sometimes “proxy army” for the communist party (Vembu 2008). The team replaced the Six Golden Flowers group, China’s first female hacker group, an ensemble blamed for several telecommunication attacks. Despite their cute innocent demeanor, these hackers are believed to be always “on the prowl” for any opportunity for personal financial gain. Yet, their buying and selling of computer secrets exposes more than the selfishness of individuals but indicates the decentralized power and crowdsourcing of the present-day “hivemind,” the collective consciousness engendered by dispersed individuals working together in cyberspace (ibid). The women’s desire to sell to the highest bidder and still label themselves as (s)heroes of the information age suggests not an exclusive investment in individualism or nationalism or even communitarianism, but something more amorphous because no one knows what ultimate authority, if any, these hackers serve. This example of Chinese “hacker babes” recognizes that sex and hacking are not mutually exclusive, but mutually constitutive. To hack as a Chinese woman is to be deeply wired into issues of race/gender/sex as well as politics, nation, economics, and technology. This wiring then gives rise to a range of possibilities for infiltration and betrayal linked to female seduction and racial difference. Through the coupling of the female sex and hacking, Chinese hacker babe is able to interrupt the homosocial bonding of men and how men see women (Bow 2001). Sex hackers are material girls living in an (im)material world, the classification of their sexed racialized bodies still “matter” in a post-millennial “posthuman” culture that appears to “banish biology and corporeal substance” (Kirby 1998, 98). Sex hackers are not above exploiting their sexualized corporal imagery by online publics (web searches for “Asian women” mostly call up pornography sites). They recode and puncture globally trafficked sex codes, mobilizing new technologies and digital discourses toward a nonpositivist “girl power” movement that undermines the “old boys’ club” as well as the dogma of Western feminism focused on male-female relations (without attention to race). A specific instance in which male hackers record and replicate “brogrammer” sex codes can be found in online chat rooms where women and girls are attacked simply for trying to enter. Such spaces trade in ideas of “hackers and hookers” that enables sexual harassment of all kinds because male hackers see women as “hacker groupies” or “cyberwhores” (Segan 2000). If a woman wants to find a place in elite hacker circles, she is often compelled to take on these inferior sex roles. The other binarism established through the hacker sex code is the perception that “the female hacker’s nemesis is the ‘scene whore’” [women who hang around and onto male hackers], and the perceived irreconcilable conflict between “feminism” and “fun” (Helga 2013). The problem is compounded by the fact that it is hard for female hackers to network with one another due to the lack of institutional support and mentorship. At international hacker conferences, women often dress more masculine to get respect. As one female hacker writes on an online forum, “If you can match men’s skill level and ‘better it,’ they’ll give you every ounce of respect.…it’s when a female comes in and tries to play on her being feminine, that doesn’t get you anything” (Segan 2000). Playing ‘feminine’ in traditional fashion does not get respect from men in real-life; however, the online hacker skills of women does not strictly follow embodied standards of femininity (or even masculinity), even though the computing field seems to approximate gender structures that equate weakness with women and strength with men. According to technology scholar Caroline Clarke Hayes (2010), there are more and more women attaining degrees in computer science, but due to gender/sex codes that promote a masculine image of the field, there is ironically what she calls a “shrinking women” crisis or the sense that women are being crowded out from a field that simultaneously demands their increasing participation, especially as most women are not employed as high-level systems analysts and technicians but found in low-level jobs like data entry and word processing (266). Their lowly status prevents them from assuming the public stature of computer prodigies but also the celebrated anti-hero status of the “hacker.” While not all hackers are sexist, Jordan and Taylor (2004) recognize the basic misogynistic nature of the hacking community with an organizing mentality that excludes women (of color), but one that gives rise to a culture of anti-conformist rebellion that allows for a potential reordering of gender (117). In the infantilizing eyes of some white male hackers, Chinese girl hackers are “average script kiddies,” more prone to wage a “cyberwar of the sexes” rather than sparking “legitimate” hacktivist movements with higher political motivations or aspirations (Danchez 2008). Such comments are repudiated by online commentators who find such comments as entrenching bigotry and divorcing women from the lucrative nature of hacking taken simply as “men’s work.” Given the lack of female public role models, Ying Cracker has assigned to herself the status of “professor” or “educator” for the masses, finding notoriety as one of the top five women hackers in the world. The Shanghai resident considers hacking a skill easily learned by anyone and has released publications about cracking software, offering free courses for youth on how to change IP addresses or wipe passwords [efytimesnews 2014]. Amassing a huge fan base on online message boards initially for her stunning looks, Ying Cracker has set out to convince the world that an Asian female hacker can dominate her field without sacrificing the pleasure of being a physically attractive female. Ying Cracker has multiple Facebook accounts with the same user name and ingénue-like modeling photos, all of which reveal nothing about her life other than her preference for promoting humanitarian causes and cute pictures. Ying Cracker’s fondness for spreading “freedom” writ large accords with Alison Adam’s (2003) assessment that as we need to “hack into hacking” to grasp the special “hacker ethics” of women and expose fault lines in the chauvinism and racism of hacker subculture—which facilely celebrates open frontiers, freedom of information, and egalitarianism—but fails to directly address social politics and material inequities, especially with regard to women of color. To reiterate, the idea that anyone can be a hacker reinforces and obfuscates the implicit sex codes that disregard the exceptional status of women within male-driven digital economies. Unlike the “black hat” hacker Xiao Tian, Ying Cracker legally sells her expertise and computer secrets to companies, retaining independence as a free-lance agent, one that stirs the passions of everyday individuals to swarm around information capital in ways that “play” or toy with the market strategies of capitalists without ever buying completely into the patriarchal corporate business model. Ying Cracker is everywhere and nowhere. Not much is really known about this enigmatic celebrity. A feminist perhaps, a bot potentially, but the possibilities are open when discussing such a mysterious person as a sex hacker, whose technical manipulations and shadow work trouble the global humanmachine interface, one bound up to gender gaps and sexual divisions in society.