Gender, Passion, and ‘Sticky’ Technology in a Voluntaristically-Organized Technology Makerspace

As ‘open’ and supposedly inclusive informal learning settings that participants visit out of interest and passion, there has been hope that makerspaces will democratize technology and challenge traditional gender patterns in engineering education. Passion for technology has, however, also been shown to be deeply intertwined with the masculinization of engineering. This article explores how this tension manifests among engineering students and other makers at an ‘open’ voluntaristically-organized technology makerspace located at the campus of a Swedish university of technology. It draws on a post-structural understanding of gender and Sara Ahmed’s queer-phenomenological conceptualization of emotions as ‘orienting devices’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with makers, we show how passion for technology is articulated as a particularly absorbing emotion that underpins a playful approach to technology and a framing of makers as single-minded and asocial. We demonstrate how passion for technology thereby becomes a homosocial ‘glue’ that makes technology ‘sticky’ for only a select group of techno-passionate men. We conclude that this undermines the potential for ‘making’ to democratize technology and puts into question the degree to which interest-driven, voluntaristic and ‘authentic’ settings for engaging with technology can contribute to pluralizing engineering.


Introduction
Makerspaces are a form of community workshops where makers share knowledge, resources, and tools that allow them to make things that they otherwise could not. 1 Having become increasingly popular during the last decades, making has been welcomed both as 'the new industrial revolution' 2 and 'one of the most exciting educational innovations in recent decades'. 3 As 'open learning environments' 4 makerspaces often adopt what Christina Dunbar-Hester calls a 'voluntaristic ethos', 5 capturing how they form selforganized do-it-yourself communities that makers visit more out of enthusiasm for technology than for earning educational credits or profit financially. As such, progressive educators have identified makerspaces as arenas for authentic, interest-driven, informal engagement with technology that carries empowering and democratizing potentialities. 6 In regard to gender equity, the hopes that makerspaces can provide 'equitable and enriching learning opportunities' 7 have translated into expectations that makerspaces can contribute to disrupting the strong male dominance of many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) related areas of study, and provide room for girls and women to form positive relations to STEM in general and technology and engineering in particular. 8 As Jennifer Eckhardt et al. formulate it, the maker movement is 'faced with high expectations regarding its potential to dismantle the gendered nature of "anything tech" because makerspaces are seen as places of empowerment as well as tech-related education'. 9 There are examples of makerspaces that succeed at being such democratizing and inclusive settings, where inclusive and progressive ambitions have often formed the raison d'être for establishing the makerspace. The California-based 'queer and trans people of color -centered, social justice -focused Maker Space' 10 Liberating Ourselves Locally (LOL) is one example. Héctor Beltrán and Sophie Toupin have also documented related initiatives founded with feminist aspirations. 11 The idea that open culture, makerspaces, hackerspaces and similarly voluntaristicallyorganized informal settings can challenge sedimented gender-technology relations can, however, be questioned. As Joseph Reagle 12 and Dunbar-Hester 13 show, 'open culture' such as free and open source software development display conventional patterns when it comes to gender. In contrast to the way such places usually understand themselves as solely meritocratic, where 'anyone' can participate, they are actually male-dominated domains. For example, studies show that whereas there are around 30% women in companies working in proprietary software development, only about 1.5% of those in open source development are women. 14 Resonating with these findings, gender and technology researchers have pointed out that passion for technology is deeply implicated in the masculinization of technology and engineering. 15 It is therefore an open question whether framing making around passion and a voluntaristic ethos challenges sedimented gender-technology relations and broadens participation in technology and engineering. The aim of this article is to investigate this question through exploring the relation between gender and passion for technology at a makerspace that we call MakerClub. This is a technology-oriented makerspace populated by engineering students and other makers, located on the campus of a Swedish university of technology. More specifically, the following research questions guide our study: Focusing on gender, what do the voluntaristic framing and corresponding passionate orientation towards technology do for . . .
• how makers make sense of the activities in MakerClub?
• how makers articulate what it means to be a maker?
• the inclusivity of the makerspace under study?
Admittedly, ambitions to diversify making and engineering go beyond gender, as do discriminatory practices. 16 Nonetheless, as Dunbar-Hester has pointed out, gender is often the primary focus when people articulate expectations that makerspaces and other voluntaristic settings can pluralize technology. 17 Our own emphasis on gender in this article mirrors this, because part of our ambition is to investigate the challenges and shortcomings inherent in such (gender) inclusive expectations. We do not deny that other categories of difference, such as race and class, are also operating in maker culture, and we will point to some instances in our analysis below.

Research context: the pluralizing potentialities of making
Educational researchers have identified 'informal learning contexts' such as makerspaces as carrying a potential for pluralizing STEM. 18 Such research describes the informality and 'authenticity' of these settings as providing room for 'challenging stereotyped power relations' and as carrying a 'potential for students to engage in science/technology -specifically those who otherwise show disinterest in, or are limited by gendered and classed discourses of, these subjects'. 19 Highlighting the potential of its informal framing, Jen Lewis has argued that makerspaces can 'serve as a non-traditional route [...] to STEM fields for adult women'. 20 Likewise, research on 'open culture' and making often argues that makerspaces and similar settings can provide an opportunity for 'democratising' engagement with science and technology more broadly. 21 Such hopes are often connected to the loose definition of making, which facilitates the inclusion of activities beyond traditional engineering. 22 They also stem from the voluntaristic, personally purposeful, 'hobbyist' orientation towards technology that characterizes making. 23 As Joshua Tanenbaum et al. discuss, playfulness and a self-understanding that you engage with making 'for fun' is widespread among makers, and personal interest, passion, and even 'hedonistic pleasure' hence emerge as important 'drivers' for them. 24 Based on a study of university-affiliated computer science clubs in Singapore, Samantha Breslin discusses how such 'promotion of passion' in voluntaristically-organized technology settings 'represents the cultivation of a particular kind of affective personhood', where passion is always 'singularly and narrowly focused on technological knowledge and technological engagement' 25 at the expense of other aspects of life. She also shows how displaying such passion operates as a condition for being recognized as an entrepreneurial subject. This echoes Erin Cech's broader work on 'the trouble with passion', and how demands on employees to be passionate about their field of work can be exploitative. 26 For this study, however, we align more with how Wendy Faulkner has highlighted the importance of focusing on passion and pleasure for understanding what she calls 'the technology-masculinity nexus'. 27 For example, based on a study at Carnegie Mellon University, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher discuss the gendered character of a 'geek mythology' that assumes computer science students are in love with their computers, privileging a 'singular and obsessive interest in computing'. 28 They demonstrate how this is particularly off-putting to many female students, but also to groups of men who do not consider themselves to be as 'glued to their computers' as others. 29 More directly related to making and open culture, Dunbar-Hester has also discussed how voluntaristically-organized settings like hackerlabs are usually strongly male dominated. 30 She further describes how when women do participate, this is not always in line with the dominant voluntaristic framing. For example, she accounts for a situation where a male project manager deliberately tries to recruit more women to one such setting that he is responsible for, explaining that 'we do actually have a few women involved, but they're all Red Hat [company] employees; on the volunteer side, it's all men so far'. 31 More broadly, Silvia Lindtner and Cyndi Lin have critiqued the idea that 'making is an ideal avenue to implement societal and political change', based on its 'supposedly inherent logic of democratisation'. 32 They argue that this is a Euro-American-centric idea and they instead demonstrate how globally, the political projects aligned with making vary, and that 'making's utopian ideals are culturally and historically situated'. 33 Further, both Daniel Frank et al. 34 and Emmanuel Nti-Asante 35 have recently argued that in parallel to the celebration of its democratizing possibilities, the maker movement has consistently been criticized for not recognizing and including existing making practices among diverse cultural and ethnic groups under its umbrella. Emily Dawson has noted that 'participation in out-of-school science learning is far from equitable and is marked by advantage, not least the social axes of age, social class, and ethnicity'. 36

Theory: post-structuralism, orienting emotions and 'stickiness'
This article's theoretical point of departure is a post-structural understanding of discourse, gender, and the subject. The notion of articulation is important, capturing the non-necessary but possible connecting of signs in discourse. 39 When we say, for instance, that a playful approach to technology is articulated with a particular form of masculinity, it is this non-necessary act of connecting the two 'signs' that we want to highlight. Further, the performative aspect of every articulation means that there are no 'neutral' or 'innocent' articulations without consequences in the world. 40 Or to be concrete: repeating an understanding that 'making' is something you do 'just for fun' is not a neutral description of how things are, because it also carries a prescriptive dimension.
Such repetition is also important to the concept of 'stickiness' that we borrow from Sara Ahmed's work on the cultural politics of emotion. For Ahmed, 'stickiness' captures how some emotions tend to stick to some subjects and objects while they 'slide over others'. 41 Such stickiness is largely established through repetition and must hence be understood as historically established. As can be seen, there is a certain affinity with the notion of articulation here, and this is not surprising given the general post-structural orientation of Ahmed's work. Her combined post-structural and (queer) phenomenological approach also frames the general understanding of emotions and affectivity that we adhere to in this article. This is a framework that is not interested in who 'harbours' what feelings, but rather understands emotions relationally as a 'doing' that happens between objects, subjects and signs. 42 The notion of 'orientation' is also important here. With Ahmed, we can understand emotions as 'orienting devices' that direct our attention and align us towards certain objects. So, to repeat, in this article, we adhere to an understanding of emotions not as 'inner feelings', but rather as orienting devices that align subjects and direct them in particular ways towards particular objects. We focus particularly on the role of passion for technology in the gendering of making, aligning with research by Faulkner and others as described above. 43 We use passion as an analytical term for capturing an orientation towards technology described by our informants as characterized by pleasure, personal interest, enjoyment, and 'having fun'. In this, we follow a tradition of gender-technology research that contrasts such motives for engaging with technology with more instrumental or rational motives. 44 We combine this with a post-structural, performative understanding of gender as formulated by Judith Butler. 45 This means that we see masculinity and femininity as discursive effects of articulatory practices, patterned in line with what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix. 46 Hence, we understand gender and sexuality as constitutively intertwined, and as effects of citations of norms that orient desire. Following Eve Sedgwick, 47 we also recognize that the organization of desire is important to attend to even when investigating all (or almost all) male settings. Sedgwick has discussed how homosocial bonds between men are often triangularly mediated by women understood as objects of male heterosexual desire. Further, desire functions as an 'affective or social force, the glue [...] that shapes an important relationship', 48 an understanding of desire in line with how Ahmed theorizes 'stickiness'. 49 This post-structural point of departure also underpins our view that neither gender nor technology has fixed universal meaning. Instead, gender-technology relations are culturally embedded. We therefore share Ulf Mellström's view that studies of gender-technology relations should be 'culturally situated'. 50 As such, we acknowledge that MakerClub is part of a global maker network, but also rooted in a Swedish context where an 'engineering mentality' is sometimes considered a national characteristic and where the link between engineering and white male middle-class masculinity is historically strong. 51 Simultaneously, there is strong societal consensus that gender equality is important, while a language to discuss race is largely absent. 52 The 'collision' we trace between inclusive making ideals and a male-dominated technology domain is shaped by this context, and the analysis we offer must therefore also be understood as culturally situated and not universally applicable.

Method: ethnographic setting, interviewing and analytic approach
Methodologically, the study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing at Maker-Club, located on the campus of a Swedish university of technology. It is dually positioned as accessible to anyone interested but also as part of the technical university that hosts it, resulting in it being populated by many engineering students. As such, it constitutes an open, voluntaristically-organized informal learning setting. We do not study MakerClub as representing a 'counter-story', i.e. a deliberately inclusive intervention into maker culture that, for instance, promotes 'alternate conceptions of what making is'. 53 We mentioned examples of such makerspaces above. Significant to them is that they often orient away from conventional understandings of technology and instead focus on areas assumed to be of interest to women or other underrepresented groups, such as e-textiles, handicraft, or pottery. These can also set boundaries on participation, for instance, by being open only to people identifying as women, non-binary, or living in economically-deprived areas. As evidenced below, MakerClub also has inclusive ambitions, but these are more in line with what Frank et al. call 'the normative understanding of making', 54 suggesting that making is inherently inclusive and open to anyone. As such, we investigate MakerClub as a 'conventional' technology-oriented makerspace, which provides insights into the logics underpinning exclusionary patterns in making and engineering as normatively understood (even when the makerspace is 'open' and wants to be 'inclusive').
The white, male first author, who has a computer engineering background but no previous experience with making, conducted all the fieldwork, interviews, and primary analysis. Findings and analytical points, however, were discussed between all four co-authors, three of whom are white women with backgrounds in engineering physics, math, and science education. To reflect the collective character of the research project, we use the pronoun 'we' for the authoring research group throughout the text.
During a little more than three months, we followed the weekly 'builder nights' at Mak-erClub. These are evenings open to both members and people who might want to join, and several members attend regularly. Usually, there were between five and 15 members present. During fieldwork, all makers were informed by the first author about the study and why he was present, and consent was sought for his stay. Fieldwork did not start before having spoken to the board and getting their consent. Through informal conversations with members, we asked for examples of what they were building, why they visited MakerClub, if they had experience in other makerspaces and, when appropriate, if they had reflected on the gender distribution at MakerClub and potential causes of that distribution. We also observed the setting as such, noting the posters on the walls, what tools were around, and members' interactions. We were particularly observant every time a potential new member arrived, because we considered these events 'initial encounters' 55 where themes, norms, and assumptions otherwise unarticulated at MakerClub could be made explicit. Such conversations and observations were written down during fieldwork visits and written out more fully the following day.
In all, we attended eleven such weekly 'builder nights', before the fieldwork was somewhat abruptly ended because of the outbreak of Covid-19. After that, we contacted ten members with whom we had interacted during fieldwork about conducting complementary, formal Zoom interviews. We chose these interviewees because we had seen them at MakerClub several times, except for one female member that we saw only once but included in the hope of increasing diversity in our sample. Four male makers between the ages of 20 and 40 agreed to be interviewed. None of these were students at the technical university where MakerClub is located. This was fortunate in the sense that it allowed us to pay attention to 'completely voluntary' participation in the interviewing, but it was not a choice but a consequence of trouble recruiting a more diverse set of participants after Covid-19 broke out. While we consider it a limitation that we were not able to interview any of the female makers we met during the fieldwork, the male bias in our selection (almost) reflects the male overrepresentation of makers at MakerClub. In this sense, the selection of informants does not undermine our ambition to further the understanding of what it is with making as 'normatively' practiced that might undermine its progressive ambitions.
We consider the interviews ethnographic in the sense that the interview guide was strongly informed by our fieldwork. 56 During the interviews, we were able to return to topics that we had already discussed with members during fieldwork. Informed by previous research, we discussed notions of passion, geekiness, and masculinity. More concretely, the interview guide covered informants' views on: their engagement at MakerClub, the people present, gender and the gender distribution at MakerClub, geekiness, interest in technology, and interest in studying technology. Interviews lasted around one hour, were transcribed verbatim professionally, and then checked by the first author, who also translated relevant quotes to English. All interviewees provided informed consent to participate in the study. For confidentiality, all the names of interviewees in this article are pseudonyms (Ben, Klas, Anders, George) and the informants we talked to 'publicly' during fieldwork are not named.
Analytically, we approached all our empirical sources as equally important, and read through both fieldnotes and interview transcripts repeatedly without giving preference to any source. Working iteratively, we noted that our material could be usefully approached in line with the analytical framework proposed by Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan, which suggests that studies of making should be attentive to 'three components of the maker movement,' namely 'the relationship among activities, communities, and identities'. 57 We combined this analytical framework with our theoretical interest in passion and conceptualization of emotions as orienting devices. We therefore consider the study 'theoretically informed' in Paul Willis and Mats Trondman's sense. 58 First, we were particularly attentive to how informants articulated their own and fellow makers' motivations and drives for making at MakerClub. This allowed us to analyze how making as an activity was conceived, and what made it 'desirable' and attractive to makers (i.e. what established its 'stickiness'). Second, in line with a performative understanding of gender and the subject as effects of articulatory practices, we concerned ourselves with what this stickiness meant for how maker subjectivity was constituted (i.e. how makers 'are'/identity). Third, given our interest in gender inclusivity and the progressive potentials of making, we focused on what these understandings of making and makers meant for who could be seen to 'fit in' at MakerClub (i.e. focusing on MakerClub as a gendered place/community in Halverson and Sheridan's triad 59 ).

Makerclub: setting the scene
The interior of MakerClub looks more like an electronics workshop in a garage than a regular classroom. There is a dedicated mechanics workshop corner with heavier machinery, but most of the two rooms making up the main area are furnished with desks with welding equipment, computers, oscilloscopes, and other tools, surrounded by component bars and shelves where builders stash their ongoing projects. There is a kitchen section with a refrigerator filled with soda and candy bars, and a corner with well-worn sofas where you can relax or have informal meetings.
On its homepage, MakerClub markets itself as a non-profit, member-driven makerspace that provides tools, components, machines, and a sharing environment, and encourages a do-it-yourself attitude integral to making culture. The website also explicitly states that the club has inclusive ambitions and values diversity, openness, and respect. Its inclusive ambitions were also reflected in the fieldwork, during which one board member explained that a reason that MakerClub was branded a makerspace in the first place was that it wanted to be more 'open' than some other technology clubs at campus. A previous board member also described how MakerClub had been involved in a major recruitment initiative by the host university, aiming to attract more high school girls to the university. MakerClub took part in this work and used the opportunity to try to recruit more young women to MakerClub. Such ambitions were also found in MakerClub's meeting protocols, where MakerClub's strong male dominance is brought up as problematic and where ways to tackle this are requested. In one, it is stated that 'the newly elected board will address this [problem], in order to make [MakerClub] more accessible to girls!' During our visits, it was not easy to see how such ambitions had impacted MakerClub. Almost all makers we encountered were male, and, talking to board members, we learned that around 10% of those on the members list are female, but that many never show up. Instead, the members 'who are really here, who sit long nights, that is only guys', according to a previous board member. Most members we met were in their twenties, although a few were younger and a few well above 30. Most could also be identified as white and ethnically Swedish, but reflecting the global reach of maker culture, we also met members who resided only temporarily in Sweden and who had sought out MakerClub based on previous experiences of enjoying makerspaces in other countries. There were also a few South Asian international Master's students that visited frequently.
During fieldwork, we noted that a lot of work was conducted individually, and there could be long periods when no one spoke to each other. On the other hand, the atmosphere was very helpful in the sense that as soon as someone had a question or ran into difficulties, other members were eager to help, sometimes almost to the degree that people competed in giving good advice. More traditional forms of 'competition-as-masculinity' 60 often associated with engineering education were however not present. Instead, the atmosphere was calm and inviting, although at the same time somewhat anonymous. Several of the members did not know the name of other makers and when arriving to the makerspace, there was no obligation to 'mingle' or socialize with other members before starting work on your own project.

Techno-passion at MakerClub
On its website, MakerClub signals that it wants to be a 'hub for people with a passion for technology and building things'. This centrality of passion and interest in technology was also reflected when we asked members why people choose to come to MakerClub. A response from one member reflected a more general pattern: 'Well, most people who study here share a genuine interest in technology and then it is only natural that one is interested in coming to places like this'. Many of the members we talked to also strongly self-identified as 'interested in technology'. In the following, we take this centrality of interest and passion for technology as our starting point, joining Ahmed in asking 'What do emotions do?' 61 As such, the ambition is to push beyond demonstrating that notions of passion are central for participants at MakerClub, in favor of investigating how they operate as 'orienting devices' in Ahmed's sense. During the analysis, we identified three aspects of this 'orienting' process, capturing, in turn, how passion for technology (1) renders engagement with technology a playful hobby, (2) positions makers as single-minded and asocial, and (3) makes technology 'sticky' only for passionate men.

Engagement with technology as a playful hobby (activity)
One aspect of rendering engagement with technology an expression of passion and interest is that it positions such engagement in opposition to more instrumental reasons for engaging with technology. At MakerClub, this is manifested in an orientation towards making things that are not really useful for anything beyond themselves. For example, George, in a discussion on the degree to which MakerClub can be considered a 'geeky' setting, explained: If you want examples: they put up small machines for everything. If there is a problem, they put up a small diode or a small sign: 'Press this button and this will happen.' They find problems and they solve it in fun ways. And that's geeky. But it gets more geeky when you realize that such projects do not take five minutes [...]. Everything takes a very long time. It probably took them two days to set this up, have you seen it? In the coffee machine, so that you can check if there is a coffee filter in it or not. If there is a wet coffee filter in it, you know you must take it out, then there is a red diode. And when it is empty, it is a green diode. So that they do not have to get up and check. And it must have taken a while to program. That's it, it's like a good example of what kind of people they are.
We would suggest that while there is 'use' for a device that warns you if there are used coffee filters in the coffee machine, George understood this more as manifesting an interest in finding technical problems to solve 'in fun ways', rather than the device being useful in a more conventional sense.
Another male maker similarly emphasized the importance of this 'hobby' orientation towards technology. He spent a few years in China and was involved in setting up makerspaces there. However, in his opinion, the maker scene did not really seem to take off in China, precisely because of the limited opportunity for people to engage with technology as a hobby and as play based in passion rather than usefulness: The maker scene boomed there perhaps two to three years ago, but it doesn't work so well there. The Chinese don't have the same willingness and opportunity to take risks and just sit around and play with technology. They must work. They have really long hours so there is no time to just sit and play around like we Westerners do. This playful orientation of MakerClub was also appreciated by other makers. For instance, one male maker explained that in comparison to a few more commercially oriented makerspaces that he had visited, he enjoyed how MakerClub was 'a bit more geeky', in the sense that it appeared to be a place where 'you find some old piece of equipment and decide to do something with it, perhaps together with a friend, just for fun'.
That this playful orientation is all but mandated also becomes clear when this norm is challenged. One evening, a potential female maker who appeared to be in her 40's showed up with her son. Interrupting both the male dominance and the notion that you come to MakerClub 'for fun', she arrived with a very specific task she wanted to solve. First, like all new members, she was introduced to the place by one of the male board members. A little later in the evening, she stopped attending to that task and instead began soldering components to a circuit board shaped as a Christmas tree (an 'introductory kit' sold at MakerClub). In our fieldnotes, we paraphrased our informal conversation with her: She is here for the first time. She works as a surgeon on a nearby hospital and is really here because she has ideas that she wants to try in relation to her surgical research, she wants to print some components on the 3D-printers. She has seen that this place has 3D-printers and says that she is looking for people to help her out. She also needs help from someone that is experienced in programming, and she mentions that her professor at the hospital has contacts at [school] so he might be able to connect her to the right people.
Having failed in getting the help she needed that evening, she instead reverted to soldering together a blinking LED Christmas tree.
Later asking Klas about this incident, and whether this woman ever returned to Maker-Club, he explained that she did come back for a 3D printing course, but that it was hard to identify other makers that could help her. To his knowledge, after that, she never returned to MakerClub. So, while existing members may have made efforts to help this potential new female maker and 'include' her, these efforts failed. There are particular challenges related to the specific task that this potential member turned up to solve. Nonetheless, our interpretation is that she did not find a way into the community because she appeared to not be motivated by a general passion for technology that allowed her to just 'stick around' at MakerClub. Again, this was likely not because she was actively discouraged or intentionally made to feel unwelcome by other members, but rather because she did not align with the dominant notion at MakerClub that technology is something you engage with for fun, and that this 'joy' in fiddling with technology is what sustains your participation.
This 'mandated' playfulness was further manifested in the things we saw members build. For instance, one male maker showed us how he was working on a thermometer that he was connecting to Wi-Fi circuitry in order to be able to monitor the temperature in an aquarium over the internet. He also brought up a personal homepage on Hackaday.io, where he proudly presented a miniature vending machine that he had previously constructed, along with some other gadgets. Other examples included MakerClub members constructing a full size humanoid robot (fulfilling, he said, 'something that I have dreamt of building since I was little'), an automatic waffle making machine, a decorative gadget to be used in a role playing board game, first-person video controlled drones, Wi-Fi controlled Christmas string lights, and autonomous cars for the yearly robotic competition. As such, the projects resembled what Paulo Blikstein and Marcelo Worsley describe as characteristically 'frivolous' design projects geared towards solving 'first-world' (as opposed to real-world) problems. 62 Our point is not that none of these objects can be useful, but rather that they jointly manifest how a passionate and playful orientation towards technology structures MakerClub and positions the male makers as a form of puer aeternus, that is, as eternal boys who never really give up their playful relation to technology. 63 This is a figure with a well-established genealogy in Western gender-technology relations. It can be traced from early 'hacker' play at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1950s back to the 'boy inventor-hero' playing with wireless technology at the beginning of the twentieth century, as described by Susan Douglas. 64 'He' has also been described by Ruth Oldenziel in her mapping of how technology was made a male domain through the historical socialization of boys into 'technophiles' and the establishing of technology play as part of 'boy culture'. 65 Further, both Oldenziel and Douglas point out that this has historically been a white middle-class position inaccessible to not only 'women, immigrants, blacks' but also 'working-class boys with neither the time nor the money to tinker'. 66 This resonates with the description of the Chinese maker scene provided by one MakerClub member above, where it was precisely the unproductive character of making-as-play that was brought up as inaccessible in China. Dunbar-Hester similarly discusses how one of her male South Asian-American informants described the 'fiddling', tinkering and self-guided approach to technology typical of many geeks in voluntaristic technology settings as alien to his cultural background. 67 That the opportunity to playfully occupy a 'boy' position and engage with technology 'just for fun' is largely a privilege of white middle and upper class men can also be understood as reflecting how such an 'immature' position is more threatening to adopt for Black people, because of the historical association between Blackness, immaturity and being not-fully-human, discussed by Toby Rollo as central to colonial history and racist discourse. 68 That it indeed has gendered consequences for makerspaces has been discussed by Lewis, who argues that the centrality of such self-driven '"tinkering" for its own sake' 69 in makerspaces is particularly discouraging for women.

Makers positioned as single-minded and asocial (identity)
Beyond framing engagement with technology as play and makers as a form of puer aeternus, passion for technology was also framed as particularly 'absorbing' at MakerClub. Articulated as an emotion that completely occupies a person, passion leaves little room for other interests. 70 In particular, interest in technology was articulated with disinterestedness and incapacity to relate to other people. For instance, in a discussion that touched upon both his experience with programmers and MakerClub, Klas first described how settings like these can attract a lot of 'introverted people' and people 'who may not really know how to deal well in social contexts'. He then described how this related to passion in these areas: I think that there may be some who become very extremely passionate about a subject and just talk for half an hour about their hobby, without leaving room for those who listen to ask questions or have a discussion. But most often it is because they do not really think or notice it. I sometimes find myself also ending up in such . . . so that I just talk.
That there was a relation at MakerClub between being passionate about technology and not being so attentive to or concerned with what other people think was also something hinted at by Anders, who suggested that: 'If you are interested in something and interested enough, you do not care much about the others, what they think'.
Our informants thus drew upon a well-documented dichotomy between being interested in either things or people. The gendered character of this dichotomy and its role in masculinizing engineering has been discussed thoroughly in the research literature. 71 We do not draw attention to a potential gendering of the thing/social dichotomy per se, but rather to how this 'asocial' orientation towards technology paradoxically underpins the homosocial formation of masculinity at MakerClub. Such a 'sociality of asociality' was touched upon by George. He described how the geekiness he associated with MakerClub was closely tied up to being strongly interested in a topic, and then continued: But it's not asocial in any way. [...] These are the most social people you can find, as long as you find a topic to talk about. It is about focusing more on things than on people. I do not know the people there. You do not know what they do during the day, beyond what they work with. But still you have talked to them for several hours about something, and that is not so common.
George first nuanced the position that being passionate about technology meant that you are asocial, but the form of sociality he described is a highly conditional one. In this sense, George both challenged and reaffirmed the idea that passion for technology is mutually exclusive with interest in people. This became even more evident as the interview continued and George explained that in his experience, if you are really interested in technology, 'you are not as interested in other people's lives'. This was also in line with how George described his experiences at MakerClub. When asked about who attended MakerClub and whether participation related to class or other categories of difference, he first clarified that these were themes he did not think about too much before explaining that he really did not know the people at MakerClub: You never talk about the person behind, either. [. . . ] I barely remember the names of the people there. Still, you think you know them very well. You get happy if you see them on the bus and wave and so on.
As mentioned above, this disinterestedness in one another also manifested in a somewhat anonymous and silent atmosphere at MakerClub during fieldwork, where several members did not know the name of other members and where there was no obligation to mingle or socialize when arriving. We would thus suggest that it was a characteristic aspect of Mak-erClub that members directed their interest not towards each other, but rather oriented socially around a shared interest in technology. This does not mean that they all understood themselves as asocial (although some did), but that they formed bonds primarily through orienting towards technology rather than by orienting towards each other and each other's needs. As such, their practices exemplify the way Ahmed describes emotions as orienting devices that direct attention and align some people towards particular objects more than others. 72 We would further argue that the structure of this 'affective economy' can be understood as homologous with how Sedgwick 73 describes masculinity as structured by a homosocial desire triangle. For Sedgwick, male homosociality is defined by a 'triangular structure, in which men have bonds with other men and women serve as the conduits through which these bonds are expressed'. 74 Replace women with technology here, and our empirical data gives evidence of a very similar triangular structure of desire. Sometimes, this is made quite explicit, as when Anders speculated on the reasons for the almost complete male dominance he experienced at MakerClub: In part, it is about interest. Ignorance from the opposite sex. Then I do not know, but it may be that guys are more attracted to guys when it comes to technical things.
As we can see, Anders explicitly drew attention to the role of passion for technology and, echoing Sedgwick, suggested that 'guys are more attracted to guys when it comes to technical things'.
To conclude this section, we can thus say that passion for technology discursively underpins male makers' homosocial formation of masculinity in ways that resemble how Sedgwick describes the homosocial desire triangle. At the same time, there are notable differences. For Sedgwick, women are positioned as a conduit for mediating men's interest in each other. While this is echoed in statements such as Anders' above, it is also important to notice that while interest in technology works as a social glue that underpins homosocial masculine forms of community building, it does so through articulating members as solely interested in technology. Because such interest is positioned as mutually exclusive with being interested in people, the relation to technology does not fully mediate a relation between male makers but rather replaces it. Consequently, in the words of George, one could spend hours together oriented in line with a shared interest but not 'know the people there', or sometimes even their names.

Technology as 'sticky' only for passionate men (community)
In this section we discuss how the passionate orientation towards technology discussed above undermined the inclusive ambitions of MakerClub through making it a 'sticky' setting only for passionate men.
We have already seen how Anders positioned 'ignorance' or lack of interest in technology 'from the opposite sex' as one explanation for the male dominance of MakerClub. That women are not really interested in technology was also a notion manifested during fieldwork, where one male maker we spoke with explicitly stated: Do you want to know what explains it [the gender difference]? It's the passion, the interest, it is unnatural for girls to have that. If a guy comes across a piece of technology, he can be completely caught up with it, pick it up, start to play with it and be genuinely fascinated about it. Girls don't react like that. They might pick it up and be more like 'Oh, OK', and then put it down again.
While speaking, this maker impersonated a fascinated guy picking up a gadget and being enchanted by it, hanging on to it, playing with it. He then shifted into embodying a more reserved, disinterested girl picking up the same object, saying 'Oh, OK,' and then immediately putting it down. For this maker, only men are oriented towards technology through passion. Or, drawing on Ahmed, passion for technology was enacted as something that imbued technology with a certain 'stickiness', that made only men hang on to it. Since this was a passion that was believed to be 'unnatural for girls to have', technology did not stick to them in the same way it did to fascinated men: the maker imitated a girl setting the gadget down.
Recognizing that male dominance was almost total in MakerClub, we asked members to speculate about potential explanations. In the interview with Anders, we asked him if there were things that also discouraged men from coming to MakerClub and he responded: A pre-established interest in technology was here articulated as a prerequisite and as a dividing line between men who go to places like MakerClub and those who do not. What is important to note here is that passion for technology was not conceived as something that you develop through engaging with technology at MakerClub, but rather was viewed as an aspect of subjectivity that constituted the very reason for showing up in the first place. This was also manifested in the everyday practices of MakerClub. For instance, at one build evening, a father showed up with his two young sons. After getting an introduction to the place by two MakerClub board members, and having been shown where to find the necessary tools and components and how to pay for what he needed, this dad explained that he had somewhat misunderstood what kind of a place MakerClub was and excused himself to the two board members: Dad: 'OK, well then we will have to go home and figure out what we want to build! . . . I thought it was a place where you could get a little more help and "pep", but you really have to decide on what to build yourself and you build it mostly individually?' Board member: 'Well, yes, but we are here to help so if you run into any kind of problems, just ask!' Dad: 'OK, well, we'll go home and figure out what to build and come back!' This father seemed surprised to find that MakerClub was not a place to come if one was more of a beginner, needing a little 'pep' to be inspired and become interested and competent in engaging with technology. Rather, MakerClub appeared to him and his children as a place to go if you are already involved with technology, know how to 'build,' and have a pre-established interest in technology. Following our analysis of 'play' and 'fun' above, that interest also included knowing how to translate into 'playing' with technology.
Having encountered incidents similar to this one several times during the fieldwork, we decided to ask interviewees about pre-requisites for coming to MakerClub, and whether it was possible to become interested in technology at MakerClub. Ben explained: I don't think this is a good place, of course if you have a basic idea, you know somebody, and you're not shy to ask questions, people will be very happy to teach you [...] but for a complete outsider to go there might be a barrier, I think.
Similarly, Klas said: Yes, most I would think are already interested in technology and have done such things before. They simply do not have access to the tools at home. But then we have some who come as complete beginners, even those who have never worked with technology before but want to 3D print something. They also come in sometimes and want to learn how to do it.
Neither Ben nor Klas thought of MakerClub as a place to come for 'pep' and to become interested in technology. This did not mean, though, that MakerClub was not a place to come to learn and to nurture interest in technology -quite the opposite. But MakerClub differed from makerspaces with ambitions to 'lower the threshold' for engaging with technology and provide room for taking first steps in making and designing technology. As Klas described it, it was still a place that you could visit to learn, for instance about 3D-printing, even if you were a complete beginner. We did not see this happening during the fieldwork, but more importantly, Klas described this as a somewhat marginal group that attends to get a specific task done and then leaves without really engaging with MakerClub. Using Ahmed's term, MakerClub did not constitute a 'sticky' setting for them.
Even people with an established interest in technology could be 'turned off' by the emphasis put on being passionate about technology at MakerClub. In an interview with George, we asked him, as we did Anders above, if there were things that discouraged men from participating in activities at MakerClub and he replied: It might be good to ask me, because I invite a lot of my friends here. Because I'm both very interested in it, but I'm also happy to have a lot of friends and be with my friends. So I like to take them there and try to get them interested in it. No one has ever been deterred by it, instead they have found it quite interesting that I take them to such a strange place, as MakerClub. You can go there and be very interested. But then they become more discouraged, I think, once they are there and realize that they are not as interested in it as everyone else. There are no instructions. You do not get there and someone says 'do this, try to put this together'. You have to do it yourself [...]. And MakerClub is not meant to be for everyone. It is really just a tool.
In George's eyes, being 'moderately' interested in technology was not a guarantee that one would find inspiration and belonging in MakerClub. Or, to use Ahmed's terminology again, MakerClub did not become 'sticky' for even men who seemed only moderately interested.

Conclusions
Analytically structured by Halverson and Sheridan's framework, 75 our argument proceeded through four steps. First, we demonstrated that passion for technology was discursively established as central at MakerClub, making MakerClub a suitable setting for exploring the role of passion in relation to the inclusive potentialities of making. Second, we demonstrated how such passion oriented makers towards technology in a particularly playful way. Significantly, engaging with technology at MakerClub was understood as a hobby and something that you do just-for-fun. This manifested in a deliberately 'unproductive' orientation towards technology, somewhat in conflict with more 'instrumental' framings of engineering. Our analysis suggests that this went hand in hand with the centrality of passion, because producing non-useful 'gadgets' manifested how one engaged with technology out of joy and desire rather than need or external demand. Third, we showed that defining makers through 'interest in technology' left little room for understanding makers as interested in other people (even other makers). Paradoxically, this asociality also underpinned the homosocial formation of masculinity at MakerClub, oriented around desire for technology. We suggested that this affective economy was structured homologically with how Sedgwick describes the triangular structure of desire shaping the homosocial formation of heterosexual masculinity. Fourth, we discussed how all of the above contributed to configuring a form of techno-passionate masculinity that excluded not only women but also men who were not considered 'sufficiently' passionate about technology. Ultimately, this meant that MakerClub became a 'sticky' setting only for the small share of men who identified as passionate about technology before going to MakerClub, and who could self-sustain their engagement with technology by drawing on this passion in their making activity.
Our argument should not be equated to a reproduction of the idea that the male dominance of tech-oriented makerspaces, or even of engineering more broadly, is simply the consequence of women not being interested or passionate enough. Studying informal STEM learning settings, Spela Godec et al. have demonstrated that there are many women who consider themselves interested in STEM but who nonetheless find STEM settings exclusionary. 76 There are also men who participate without reporting high levels of interest. Considering more formal STEM higher education, Maya Beasley and Mary Fischer have similarly demonstrated that 'the lack of graduating majors in these fields is not due solely to a lack of initial interest in STEM majors'. 77 In our reading, their research and our own demonstrate that the question of participation in making and engineering is not rooted in interest levels per se, but rather in the meanings that are articulated with being passionate about technology. Articulating passion for technology in ways that stipulate a playful, puer aeternus approach that conflicts with being interested in other people, and invites participation on condition that this interest is pre-existent and self-sustaining, means that technology becomes 'sticky' only for a select group of men. We acknowledge that although the main focus of this article has been gender, our data as well as other literature indicate that the form of masculinity being enacted is largely a Western, white, middle-class one.
Our conclusions call into question judgements of making as potentially valuable for democratizing and pluralizing STEM. We suggest that the 'authenticity' and non-alienating character of making is a double-edged sword in relation to gender inclusivity. To the degree that makerspaces form communities 'in which their [makers'] passions and interest thrive', 78 this is problematic insofar as such passions are simultaneously articulated as characteristic only of asocial, puer aeternus men who identify as such. Further, while passion and interest are undeniably educationally valuable, assuming these things undermines the potential for places like MakerClub to foster the development of such interests among diverse potential participants. Instead, it normalizes a particular form of subjectivity in ways that preclude the participation of the not-already passionate.
These limitations, we believe, are important to consider not only when trying to pluralize making, but also in understanding gender patterns in engineering education more broadly, where the emphasis on being passionate about technology is often strong. 79 Our study echoes early findings by Sheila Tobias that many scientists and engineers report 'intrinsic interest' rather than good teachers, prestige, or potential for good pay and promotion as reasons for their career choice. 80 Predictably, one physics professor in Tobias' study clarified that 'he fully expected his introductory physics students to be already committed to the subject' before coming to class. 81 More recently, Amy Slaton has documented how notions of rigor underpin the racializaon of US engineering, equating eligibility for engineering studies with already displaying technical expertise, rather than an ability to develop such interests and competences. 82 It should be restated here that MakerClub was not instituted, and has not been studied in this article, as a deliberately and primarily inclusive intervention into maker culture or STEM education. Organizers at MakerClub wanted MakerClub to be open and inclusive, but beyond some dedicated recruitment activities, this ambition did not structure the day-today activities at MakerClub. This means that we see no reason to make the general claim that making cannot (for some inherent reason) be inclusive. Instead, we seek to contribute to the literature that challenges what Frank et al. call 'the normative understanding of making', 83 which suggests that there are characteristics inherent to making (e.g. its informality, doit-yourself mentality, democratic organization or voluntaristic ethos) that render making inclusive as such. Again, our study does not deny that making can be educationally progressive or that making can contribute to transforming gender-technology relations and pluralizing engineering. In comparison to other male-dominated manifestations of 'open culture', like hackerlabs and open source development communities, there is reason to be more hopeful about making and makerspaces. As touched on above, there is research that indicates that the more 'pluralistic' framing of makerspaces as places not only for engagement with technology but also with design, arts, crafts, and aesthetics gives them potential to be more inclusive. 84 At the same time, we believe that there is reason to be cautious about connecting the inclusive ambitions of makerspaces with broadening of what making means. As Andrea Marshall and Jennifer Rode have pointed out, it is problematic if research continues 'to construct feminine sociotechnical gender identities as nontechnical' and only recognizes 'opportunities for multiple and playful sociotechnical identities to emerge' on the condition that one redefines what technology and making are about. 85 Ultimately, they warn, this contributes to constructing 'technological competence [...] solely as a masculinist trait' 86 while undermining women's engagement with STEM. In regard to making as a model for pluralizing engineering education specifically, we would similarly argue that tying pluralization ambitions to redefining what making and engineering is about, comes at the risk of sidestepping rather than critically addressing and analytically deconstructing links between masculinity and technology, even as conventionally understood.
It is against this background that we have chosen to focus on a relatively 'conventional' technology makerspace in this article. Although our findings do not foreground the potentialities for maker culture to transform gender-technology relations and pluralize engineering, it is our hope that the analysis presented can contribute to an understanding of why such potentialities are not realized at MakerClub, despite its inclusive ambitions. As such, we also hope that our analysis contributes to both identifying challenges that need to be overcome if we want 'making' to play a role in pluralizing STEM and to enriching understandings of gender patterns in more formal engineering education settings where passion for technology is also central. 86. Ibid.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2018-03401].