Between Storytelling and Sisterhood: A Feminist Human–Computer Interaction Transmedia Framework for Women-in-Technology Digital Communities

Feminist histories of computing establish that women’s exclusion from technical work was administratively produced, and inclusion initiatives rarely redistribute technical power. Neither strand theorizes the communicative infrastructure through which inclusion work is conducted. This article addresses that gap by proposing the feminist human-computer interaction transmedia storytelling framework for analyzing and designing transmedia communication strategies in feminist technology communities. Using mixed-method fieldwork—digital ethnography, expert interviews, focus groups, a transmedia campaign, and a browser-based storytelling curation prototype—across 247 women-in-technology communities in Brazil and Portugal, the study identifies a structural tension between pragmatic orientation and untapped activist potential. Findings reveal that cross-media content redundancy, absent feminist design values in platform architecture, and communication illiteracy constrain collective impact. An analysis of the two national settings shows these constraints are shared, while the political vocabularies for naming them diverge. The framework advances interdisciplinary communication theory, articulating how storytelling functions as a metric of impact and a vector of feminist mobilization in digitally mediated communities.