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Omnia sunt communia! Support Minor Compositions / Purchasing Books The PDF you are reading is an electronic version of a physical book that can be purchased through booksellers (including online stores), through the normal book supply channels, or Minor Compositions directly. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university or local library purchase a physical printed copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions please contact the publisher: [email protected]. THE BEAUTIFUL WARRIORS Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Cornelia Sollfrank Te Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Cornelia Sollfrank ISBN 978-1-570-27-365-0 Cover design by Cornelia Sollfrank and Janine Sack, based on a visual from the performance À la recherche de l’information perdue (Sollfrank, 2018) Interior layout by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2020 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] CONTENTS Preface . 1 Cornelia Sollfrank Translated by Valentine A. Pakis Feminist Hacking. .................. 19 Resistance through Spaciality Sophie Toupin Creating New Worlds ............... 35 With Cyberfeminist Ideas and Practices Text compiled by Spideralex Translated by Cornelia Sollfrank Codes of Conduct.................. 57 Transforming Shared Values into Daily Practice Femke Snelting The Feminist Principles of the Internet . 73 or the personal_collective story of imagining and making #feministinternet Text by hvale vale Feminist Principles of the Internet – Version 2.0 ....................... 83 Author: Association for Progressive Communication APC Publication date: August 2016 Viral Performances of Gender . 89 Christina Grammatikopoulou Techno-Ecofeminism ............... 111 Nonhuman Sensations in Technoplanetary Layers Yvonne Volkart Translated by Rebecca van Dyck Stirring the Embers ............... 137 Preliminary Critical Notes on Xenofeminism Isabel de Sena Bios............................ 149 PREFACE Cornelia Sollfrank Translated by Valentine A. Pakis “We have to become practiced in warfare. Tat means nothing less than fghting for certain worlds and against others – for particular ways of living and being in the world, and not others. And this is exactly what it means to revolt. To be for certain things and against others is a sort of “war of the worlds,” but it is war as part of a proposition for peace, a proposition that is not without danger. […] We are still able to change things, but the time to act is short. And we will know all too soon whether there can be peace at all.” – Donna Haraway “Tere’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” – Gilles Deleuze 1 2 // The Beautiful Warriors “Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological projects their full savor.” –Bruno Latour “Te new planetary consciousness will have to rethink machinism.” – Félix Guattari “Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction. Perhaps this is the core of revolutionary process.” – Adrienne Rich What relation do technology and gender have with one an- other? How are they mutually produced in ever-new confgurations? Can they even be thought of as two separate categories? And is it not necessary to bring a series of additional agents into play in order to provide a more complete picture? Tis volume brings together a selection of current technofeminist positions from the felds of art and activism. Since the cyberfeminism of the 1990s, new ways of thinking and acting have proliferated, of- ten as a reaction to new forms and dimensions of exploitation and discrimination. Issues have expanded from a purely informational di- mension and its emancipatory potential into a material dimension. Questions of technology are now bound together with questions of ecology and the economy. Online and ofine are no longer separate spheres, but have rather become a single continuum. Art may func- tion symbolically with images, metaphors, and narratives, but it also crosses and partially obscures the limits of activism. For its part, activ- ism is an expression of protest against technocapitalist excess – it is an efort to pursue new tools, instruments, and places to enable common activity, common learning, and common unlearning. Despite the great variety of existing positions, there is nevertheless something that binds them together; they all negotiate gender politics with reference to technology, and they all understand their praxis as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to carry on, and never Preface // 3 give up. Tose involved are diverse: activists and collectives working under pseudonyms, but also artists and other producers of knowl- edge both within and outside of academic disciplines. Teir practices are networked, but often in the stratifed, parallel universes of inter- national art scenes, academic theory and research (primarily in the global North), political activism (primarily in the global South), and the techno-underground. To gather such diverse views into a single volume is to traverse many territories and cross many borders – all to pursue the possibility of thinking and acting in common. Te term technofeminism serves to designate these diverse practices but also – through their proximity in this book – to bring them into contact and encourage exchange. Coined in Judy Wajcman’s book of the same name,1 the concept denotes speculative and queer positions that – both in theory and in practice – question the coded relation between gender and technology. Wajcman locates technofeminism at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technology studies. In particular, technofeminism is interested in ex- amining how gender relations and the hierarchy of sexual diference infuence scientifc research and technological innovation and how the latter, in turn, infuence the constitution of gender. Translated into technofeminist practices in everyday life, this means no less than struggling for a more just and livable world for everyone in today’s technoscientifc culture. Troughout, Donna Haraway looms in the background. More than 30 years ago, we learned from her that there is hardly any chance of living outside of technologies – this was not something that she lamented but, on the contrary, always understood as an opportunity. Accordingly, her feminist critique of the technosciences did not lead to an anti-scientifc or technophobic attitude. Rather, it called for a more comprehensive, robust, and true science; a science with clear points of view; and a reconceptualization of science and technology to serve emancipatory ends. Haraway made essential contributions to the deconstruction of scientifc knowledge as historically patriar- chal, and she demonstrated that science and technology are close- ly linked to capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism. At the heart of her anti-essentialist approach is the critique of the alleged objectivity of scientifc knowledge. Instead of understanding science 1 Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). 4 // The Beautiful