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Where Is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?

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Where Is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism? Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism? Faith Wilding The First Cyberfeminist International took place in Kassel, Germany, September 20-28, l997, as part of the Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X. After eight days of intense daily life and work with over 30 participants at this event, Faith Wilding reflects on the significance of these discussions and their implications both for the attempts to define, and the arguments against defining, cyberfeminism. While these and subsequent on-line discussions, especially through the FACES list, provide a browser through which possible practices of a cyberfeminist movement become visible, what concerns her is how such politics might be translated into practice for an engaged (cyber)feminist politics on the Net. Against Definition The question of how to define cyberfeminism is at the This is an alliance of the goods against their masters, an heart of the often contradictory contemporary positions of alliance of women and machines.1 This utopian vision of women working with new technologies and feminist politics. revolt and merger between woman and machine is also Sadie Plant's position on cyberfeminism, for example, has evident in VNS Matrix's Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the been identified as an absolutely post-human insurrection - 21st Century: we are the virus of the new world disorder/ the revolt of an emergent system which includes women and rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big computers, against the world view and material reality of a daddy mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the patriarchy which still seeks to subdue them. matrix.2 Another position in this debate is offered by Rosi 6 n.paradoxa vol.2 1998 Braidotti: cyberfeminism needs to cultivate a culture of the baby with the bathwater and aligns itself uneasily with joy and affirmation....Nowadays, women have to popular fears, stereotypes, and misconceptions about undertake the dance through cyberspace, if only to make feminism. sure that the joy-sticks of cyberspace cowboys will not Why is it that so many younger women (and men) in reproduce univocal phallicity under the mask of the US (and Europe) know so little about even very recent multiplicity3 histories of women, not to speak of past feminist movements The press release issued at the cyberfeminist discussions and philosophies? It is tempting to point the finger at in Kassel declared that: The First CYBERFEMINIST educational systems and institutions that still treat the INTERNATIONAL slips through the traps of definition histories of women, and of racial ethnic, and marginalized with different attitudes towards art, culture, theory, populations, as ancillary to “regular” history, relegating politics, communication and technology--the terrain of them to specialized courses or departments. the Internet. What strangely emerged from these discussions But the problems lie deeper than this. The political work was the attempt to define cyberfeminism by refusal, evident of building a movement is expertise that must be relearned not only in the intensity of the arguments, but also in the l00 by every generation, and needs the help of experienced antitheses devised there - for example: practitioners. The struggle to keep practices and histories cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement/ of resistance alive today is harder in the face of a commodity sajbrfeminizm nije usamljen/cyberfeminism is not culture which thrives on novelty, speed, obsolescence, ideology, but browser/cyberfeminismus ist keine theorie/ evanescence, virtuality, simulation, and utopian promises cyber feminismo no es una frontera4 of technology. Commodity culture is forever young and Yet the reasons given by those who refused to define makes even the recent past appear remote and mythic. cyberfeminism - even though they called themselves While young women are just entering the technological cyberfeminists - indicate a profound ambivalence in many economy, many older feminists are unsure how to connect wired women's relationship to what they perceive to be a to the issues of women working with new technology, monumental past feminist history, theory, and practice. Three and how to go about adapting feminist strategies to the main manifestations of this ambivalence and their relevance conditions of the new information culture. The problem to contemporary conditions facing women immersed in for cyberfeminism, then, is how to incorporate the lessons technology bear closer examination. of history into an activist feminist politics which is adequate for addressing women¹s issues in technological Repudiation of “old style”(1970s) feminism culture. To be sure, the problem of losing historical knowledge According to this argument,“old style”(1970s) feminism and active connection to radical movements of the past is is characterized as monumental, often constricting (politically not limited to feminism--it is endemic to leftist movements correct), guilt inducing,essentialist, anti-technology, anti- in general. By arguing for the importance of knowing history sex, and not relevant to women's circumstances in the new I am not paying nostalgic homage to moments of past glory. technologies (judging from the Kassel discussions,this If cyberfeminists wish to avoid making the mistakes of past conception is common in the US and Western Europe). feminists, they must understand the history of feminist Ironically, in actual practice cyberfeminism has already struggle. And if they are to expand their influence on the adopted many of the strategies of avantgarde feminist Net and negotiate issues of difference across generational, movements, including strategic separatism (women only economic, educational, racial, national, and experiential lists, self-help groups, chat groups, networks, and woman boundaries, they must seek out coalitions and alliances with to woman technological training), feminist cultural, social, diverse groups of women involved in the integrated circuit and language theory and analysis, creation of new images of global technologies. At the same time, close familiarity of women on the Net to counter rampant sexist stereotyping with postcolonial studies, and with the histories of imperialist (feminist avatars, cyborgs, genderfusion), feminist net and colonialist domination--and resistance to them--are critique, strategic essentialism, and the like. The repudiation equally important for an informed practice of cyberfeminist of historical feminism is problematic because it throws out politics. n.paradoxa vol.2 1998 7 Web-Grrls, Amsterdam @ http://www.webgrrls.nl Corrine Petrus/Mathilde Mupe Vera Kuni Advert/Logo for CI Cybergrrl-ism Judging by a quick net browse, one of the most popular representations of women--and on the strategies and work feminist rebellions currently practiced by women on the Net of many feminist artists--they also often unthinkingly is cybergrrl-ism in all of its permutations: webgrrls, riot appropriate and recirculate sexist and stereotyped images of grrls, guerrilla girls, bad grrls,etc. women from popular media--the buxom gun moll, the As Rosi Braidotti5 and others have pointed out, the often supersexed cyborg femme, and the 50's tupperware cartoon ironic, parodic, humorous, passionate, angry, or aggressive women are favorites--without any analysis or critical work of many of these recent grrrl groups is an important recontextualization. Creating more positive and complex manifestation of new subjective and cultural feminine images of women that break the gendered codes prevailing representations in cyberspace. Currently there is quite a wide on the Net (and in the popular media) takes many smart variety of articulations of feminist and protofeminist practices heads, and there is richly suggestive feminist research in these various groups which range from:- anyone female available, ranging from Haraway's monstrous cyborgs, Judith can join chatty mailing lists, to sci-fi, cyberpunk, and femporn Butler's fluid gender performativity, to Octavia Butler's zines; antidiscrimination projects; sexual exhibitionism; recombinant genders. All manner of hybrid beings can transgender experimentation; lesbian separatism; medical unsettle the old masculine/feminine binaries. Cybergrrlish self-help; artistic self-promotion; job and dating services; lines of flight are important as vectors of investigation, and just plain mouthing off. Cybergrrl-ism generally seems research, invention, and affirmation. But these can't replace to subscribe to a certain amount of net utopianism--an the hard work that is needed to identify and change the “anything you wanna be and do in cyberspace is cool” gendered structures, content, and effects of the new attitude. Despite the gripings against men in general, which technologies on women worldwide. If it is true, as Sadie pervade some of the discussions and sites, most cybergrrls Plant argues that 'women have not merely had a minor don't seem interested in engaging in a political critique of part to play in the emergence of the digital women's position on the Net – instead they adopt the machines.....[that] women have been the simulators, somewhat anti-theory attitude which seems to prevail assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines6 currently; they'd rather forge ahead to express their ideas then why are there so few women in visible positions of directly in their art and interactive practices. leadership in the electronic world? Why are women a tiny While cybergrrls sometimes draw (whether consciously percentage of computer programmers, software
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