Geek Girls Interview Series

If you’ve read my “About the Blog” page or know the origin of the G33K Out Podcast, you know that it came about as an offshoot of my master’s thesis I completed back in 2014. I set out to cover the world of geek culture from every perspective.

But as I also wrote in my thesis, identifying as a woman in the geek / nerd world can sometimes have its negatives. Cries of ‘fake geek girl’ were rampant when geek media first started becoming mainstream, and issues like GamerGate and the attacks on Anita Sarkeesian showed that if you identified as a woman and wanted to cover geek culture, you pretty much had to expect doxing, rape threats, and trolling beyond the pale.

So, since I had also started getting into audio (and podcasts) in 2014, I decided I wanted to start a series of interviews with women in the community to discuss what it was like.

For the most part, I wanted to treat this as a research project, and use as many of the same questions as I could for every interview.

Questions

Here’s the list of questions I worked from:

• How do you define what a geek is?
• How long would you say you’ve been a geek?
• Age?
• Education?
• Do you have a specific focus of geekiness?
• What geek communities do you participate in (online or in real life)?
• Why participate in a fan community?
• What would you say is the best part of being in the geek community or being a geek?
• What would you say is the worst? Have you had any negative experiences?
• Have you had any instances of being called out as being a fake geek girl? (summarized)
• Pick one ‘geek out’ moment of your life and talk about it.
• What advice would you give a newbie entering geek world?
• Tell me about your family. Are any of them geeky?
• Where do you think the geek world is headed?

Interviews

Here’s a list of the interview subjects in episode order (oldest on the bottom):

	Episode 45: Grace (aka Cerberusia) Interviewed May 19, 2019; published June 21, 2019. Running time: 38 minutes, 17 seconds. Cerberusia is one of the women I had originally interviewed back in 2014, when I was visiting London. I had been working on an article on fan fiction for the company I was interning at, and had reached out to Tumblr to find people outside of my fandom areas to quote. Obviously, time has passed since that interview, and she agreed to redo the interview. We have a great discussion about what it means to be a geek, how she fangirls, and the future of geek culture.
	Episode 38: Sora Reyes Interviewed December 8, 2018; published December 30, 2018. Running time: 49 minutes, 55 seconds. Sora has lived in both London and Los Angeles, among other locations. She’s a Baker Street Babe, and we talk Sherlock, Martin Freeman’s beard, and being a geek.
	Episode 31: Supriya Limaye interviewed April 30, 2014; published May 15, 2018. Running time: 29 minutes, 10 seconds. Supriya and I met, as mentioned in the interview, thanks to a Facebook Sherlock fan group for those in Southern California. At the time, she worked for Geek and Sundry, although now she works for DeviantArt. Originally from the Silicon Valley area, she moved to Los Angeles to look for work. We talk Harry Potter, Reddit, and other topics.