G33K Out: Geek Girls Part 1 — Supriya Limaye

Episode 31: Geek Girls Part 1 — Supriya Limaye

If you’ve read my “About the Blog” page or know the origin of this podcast, you know that the G33K Out podcast 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.

I did three interviews back in 2014. Unfortunately, life hit me pretty hard then, and I never got around to editing those podcasts.

Thankfully, life started to smooth out a bit earlier this year, and now that I started focusing on the G33K Out podcast more, I realized I still wanted to do this series. So I emailed my three interview subjects from 2014: I asked if they were still willing to be used for this project, and whether they wanted to re-do the interview since it’s been a few years. One wanted a complete redo, one wanted to do one where we used some of the audio from 2014 but did an ‘updated’ segment as well, and one was fine using the audio from 2014.

That third interview was with Supriya Limaye.

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.

Basic show notes:

• Running time is 29 minutes, 10 seconds.
• The interview was recorded on April 30, 2014.
• Here’s my new page about the Geek Girls interview series. To be updated as needed.
• Items referenced in the interview:
  • the LA Redditor group
  • the SoCal Sherlock Facebook Group (of which I’m now an admin of)
  • my ‘Why I Hesitate to Call Myself a Fangirl‘ essay
  • Henry Jenkins
  • I acknowledge I have written slash – here’s a link to my AO3 account, under my pseudonym Kylara Ingress
  • I talk about my love/hate relationship with Harry Potter – I also wrote an essay on that
  • The Doubleclicks “Nothing to Prove” song and video
• The mid-show plug is from Haneen Khalaf, the Community Engagement Coordinator for the XPRIZE Adult Education project, who I had interviewed in episode 24 at the LA Times Festival of Books.
• In this episode, “Angie Geeks Out” about the documentary Muppet Guys Talking.
  • I mentioned the interview with Frank Oz and Victoria Labalme on KCRW’s The Business
• Theme music is “Schoolyard Haze”, by JariPitkanen, available via the Free Music Archive.
• This podcast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License.
• Interested in hearing other episodes of G33K Out? Check them out here.

And now, it’s time to geek out.