Moxie Munroe

What does it mean to be a geek? I don’t know, what do you think?
Think about it.
Really hard.
Really really hard.
Super hard.
Hella mad crazy hard.
Do you have an idea?

Now throw it out.

The rules are…there are no rules. Now, let’s work from there.

I’d like to think I’ve been a geek from the jump-off. I mean, I didn’t barrel roll out of the womb speaking Romulan, or anything, but I have always loved stories, fiction is one of my favorite things. Pop culture is my oxygen.

Moxie Munroe

• 1 cup sci-fi (preferred brands: Star Trek, Firefly)
• 1/2 cup Harry Potter
• 2 tablespoons Buffy (BBC Being Human can be used as a substitute)
• 1 bag comics (Marvel and DC)
• 1 teaspoon Doctor Who
• 1/4 cup Animorphs
• 1 litre Misfits
• 3 teaspoons Steampunk
• 3oz. Mythology
• and a dash of dystopia

Lather, rinse repeat. And then you have one of me!

I can’t remember a life before geekdom. Sure, there was a good 13 years before I became aware of the wonders of the world wide web (as far as fandom, anyway) but it was a natural fit. My imaginary friends were characters from books. I made short stories about roller waitresses fighting crime. The geek has always been strong in this one.

The older I got, the more I found myself drawn to Geeks Like Me, people who immersed themselves in fiction the same way I had, people who loved to be transported across worlds with the turn of a page, or the click of a remote control. It was amazing. Women, it was always women (well not always, but for the sake of poetry let’s hyperbolize), women “got it” the way I “got it”, and “it” was not always the cut of Han Solo’s vest, how fabulous Uhura’s hair was, or the almost creepily rippling pecs Wolverine always seem to be sporting on comic book pages. It was something else, something I never could quite put my finger on, but I knew I loved. Something that fit so well into my life; talking about comics was just as interesting as talking about Sassy mag, or playing Mall Madness, it was just something that we did, I never thought about being anything other than normal.

But the more I got into it, the more I felt like an odd woman out, the more I realized geekdom as a whole didn’t respect us as women (and especially not as women of color), that the characters I grew up holding so close to my heart (Uhura, Storm, Jubilee, Cassie, and others) and those I had grown to love along the way (Zoe Washburn, Misty Knight, Martha Jones, etc.) were anomalies, they were small handfuls of representation inside whole silos of status-quo. I realized that geekdom didn’t really respect people like me, or the people I loved, and we had just been creatively filling in the spaces with what we were given all along. But fortunately we were resilient enough to not let it bring us down, we became stronger, more creative, more eager to learn, and more driven to change the playing field. We have created our own fiction, and have allied ourselves with likeminded folks, we have published several books on the subject, we tweet, we blog and we con. Geek Girls, and Geeks of Color are not going anywhere, and I, for one, have never been more excited.

~ Moxie