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Media Artist Name

They were not a child genius. On the contrary... or not.

Moved into themselves.

Cyberfeminism is a sort of alliance that wants to defy any sort of boundaries of identity and definition and rather be truly postmodern in its potential for radical openness.^[1] This is seen with the 1997 Old Boys Network's100 anti-theses which lists the 100 ways "cyberfeminism is not."^[2]

Mia Consalvo defines cyberfeminism as: 1) a label for women—especially young women who might not even want to align with feminism's history—not just to consume new technologies but to actively participate in their making; 2) a critical engagement with new technologies and their entanglement with power structures and systemic oppression.^[3]

The dominant cyberfeminist perspective takes a utopian view of cyberspace and the Internet as a means of freedom from social constructs such as gender, sex difference and race. It also sees technology as a means to link the body with machines. VNS Matrix member, Julianne Pierce defines cyberfeminism: "In 1991, in a cozy Australian city called Adelaide, four bored girls decided to have some fun with art and French Feminist theory…with homage to Donna Haraway they began to play around with the idea of cyberfeminism.”^[4]

Cyberfeminism arose partly as a reaction to “the pessimism of the 1980s feminist approaches that stressed the inherently masculine nature of techno-science”, a counter movement against the ‘toys for boys’ perception of new Internet technologies. As cyberfeminist artist Faith Wilding argued: "If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberpotential then it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and techno science have on all our lives. It is up to cyberfeminists to use feminist theoretical insights and strategic tools and join them with cybertechniques to battle the very real sexism, racism, and militarism encoded in the software and hardware of the Net, thus politicizing this environment."

Donna Haraway is the inspiration and genesis for cyberfeminism with her 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" which was reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).^[5] Haraway's essay states that cyborgs are able to transcend the public and private spheres, but they do not have the ability to identify with their origins or with nature in order to develop a sense of understanding through differences between self and others. Haraway states that the cyborg "has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all powers of the parts into a higher unity." However, the book Feminist Essays (2017) by Nancy Quinn Collins states that in the opinion of its author this "is wrong because bisexuality is a sexual orientation, not something they try to have or do in order to create organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all powers of the parts into a higher unity. Therefore, I [the author] would say that cyborgs can be bisexual, and cyberfeminism can and should be accepting of bisexuality."

Cyberfeminism is considered a predecessor to networked feminism. Cyberfeminism also has a relationship to the field of feminist science and technology studies.

The term cyberfeminism first came about in 1992, according to Carolyn Guertin, "at a particular moment in time, 1992, simultaneously at three different points on the globe." In Canada, Nancy Paterson wrote an article entitled "Cyberfeminism" for EchoNYC.

In Adelaide, Australia, a four-person collective called VNS Matrix wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto and used the term to label their radical feminist acts "to insert women, bodily fluids and political consciousness into electronic spaces." That same year, British cultural theorist Sadie Plant used the term to describe definition of the feminizing influence of technology on western society. Guertin goes on to say that the first Cyberfeminist International, organized by the Old Boys Network in Germany, in 1997, refused to define the school of thought, but drafted the "100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism" instead. Guertin says that Cyberfeminism is a celebration of multiplicity.

In 1996, a special volume of Women & Performance was devoted to sexuality and cyberspace. It was a compendium of essays on cybersex, online stalking, fetal imaging, and going digital in New York.^[6]

In 2003 the feminist anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium was published; it includes the essay "Cyberfeminism: Networking the Net" by Amy Richards and Marianne Schnall.

Usage of the term cyberfeminism has faded away after the millennium, partly as a result of the dot.com bubble burst that bruised the utopian bent of much of digital culture. Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh’s Cyberfeminism 2.0 argues that cyberfeminism in the 21st century has taken many new forms and focuses on the different aspects of women’s participation online. They find cyberfeminists in women’s blogging networks and their conferences, in women’s gaming, in fandom, in social media, in online mothers’ groups performing pro-breastfeeding activism, and in online spaces developed and populated by marginal networks of women in non-Western countries.^[7]

Feminist action and activism online is prevalent, especially by women of colour, but has taken on different intersectional terms.^[8][1] While there are writing on black cyberfeminism which argue that not only is race not absent in our use of the internet, but race is a key component in how we interact with the internet,^[9]. However, women of colour generally do not associate with cyberfeminism^[10], and rather re-frame afrofuturism in feminist terms.

Xenofeminism is an offshoot of cyberfeminism that came into existence through a collective that calls themselves Laboria Cuboniks.^[11] In their manifesto, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, it argues against nature as natural and immutable for a future where all identities are non-binary and in which feminism destabilizes and uses the master's tools for their own rebuilding of life: "Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. 'Gender abolitionism' is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. 'Race abolitionism' expands into a similar formula -- that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than than the color of one's eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form: you're not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited."^[12]

The decline in volume of cyberfeminist literature in recent years would suggest that cyberfeminism has somewhat lost momentum as a movement, however, in terms of artists and artworks, not only cyberfeminism is still taking place, but its artistic and theoretical contribution has been of crucial importance to the development of posthuman aesthetics.

Many critiques of cyberfeminism have focused on its lack of intersectional focus, its utopian vision of cyberspace, especially cyberstalking and cyber-abuse^[13], its whiteness and elite community building.

One of the major critiques of cyberfeminism, especially as it was in its heyday in the 1990s, was that it required economic privilege to get online: “By all means let [poor women] have access to the Internet, just as all of us have it—like chocolate cake or AIDS,” writes activist Annapurna Mamidipudi. “Just let it not be pushed down their throats as ‘empowering.’ Otherwise this too will go the way of all imposed technology and achieve the exact opposite of what it purports to do.”^[14] Cyberfeminist artist and thinker Faith Wilding also critiques its utopian vision for not doing the tough work of technical, theoretical and political education.

The practice of cyberfeminist art is inextricably intertwined with cyberfeminist theory. The 100 anti-theses make clear that cyberfeminism is not just about theory, while theory is extremely important, cyberfeminism requires participation. As one member of the cyberfeminist collective the Old Boys Network^[15] writes, cyberfeminism is “linked to aesthetic and ironic strategies as intrinsic tools within the growing importance of design and aesthetics in the new world order of flowing pancapitalism”.^[16] Cyberfeminism also has strong connections with the DIY feminism movement, as noted in the seminal text DIY Feminism,^[17] a grass roots movement that encourages active participation, especially as a solo practitioner or a small collective.

Around the late nineties several cyberfeminist artists and theorists gained a measure of recognition for their works, including the above-mentioned VNS Matrix and their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st century,^[18] and Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble. Some of the better-known examples of cyberfeminist work include Auriea Harvey's work, Sandy Stone, Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster^[19] a hypertext CD-ROM that incorporates images of women’s body parts and remixes them to create new monstrous yet beautiful shapes; Melinda Rackham's Carrier, a work of web-based multimedia art that explores the relationship between humans and infectious agents;^[20], Shu Lea Cheang's 1998 work Brandon, which was the first Internet based artwork to be commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim.^[21] Dr. Caitlin Fisher’s online hypertext novella “‘These Waves of Girls“ is set in three time periods of the protagonist exploring polymorphous perversity enacted in her queer identity through memory. The story is written as a reflection diary of the interconnected memories of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It consists of an associated multi-modal collection of nodes includes linked text, still and moving images, manipulable images, animations, and sound clips. Recent artworks of note include Evelin Stermitz’s World of Female Avatars in which the artist has collected quotes and images from women over the world and displayed them in an interactive browser based format, and Regina Pinto’s Many Faces of Eve.^[22] O[rphan] D[frift>] (1994-2003) were a 4.5 person collective experimenting with writing, art, music and the internet's potential "treating information as matter and the image as a unit of contagion."^[23]

Avital Ronell

Sadie Plant

N. Katherine Hayles

Theresa Senft

Radhika Gajjala

• "Reading room". obn.org. Old Boys' Network.
• "Cyberfeminist Manifesto". sysx.org. VNS Matrix. 1991. Archived from the original on 29 May 2009.
• Various authors (July 1998). "VARIOUS ARTICLES". N.paradoxa International Feminist Art Journal, Special Issue: Women and New Media. 2. KT Press.
• Everett, Anna (Autumn 2004). "On cyberfeminism and cyberwomanism: high‐tech mediations of feminism's discontents". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Special Issue: Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms. 30 (1). University of Chicago Press: 1278–1285. doi:10.1086/422235. S2CID 144615884.
• Daniels, Jessie (Spring 2009). "Rethinking cyberfeminism(s): race, gender, and embodiment". WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly. 37 (1–2). The Feminist Press: 101–124. doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0158. JSTOR 27655141. S2CID 54534317.
• Al Nimr, Dalia. Cyberfeminism in the Arab World: Analysis of gender stereotypes in Arab women’s Web sites. VDM Verlag, 2009. Print.

• Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Print.

• Blair, Kristine, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley. Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action. Hampton Press, 2008. Print.

• Elm , Malin Sveningsson, and Jenny Sunden. Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

• Fernandez, Maria, Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright. Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices!. New York: Autonomedia, 2002. Print.

• Gajjala, Radhika, and Yeon Ju Oh. Cyberfeminism 2.0. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2012. Print.

• Gajjala, Radhika. Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Altamira, 2004. Print.

• Hawthorne, Susan, Renate Klein. CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique, and Creativity. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1999. Print.

• Kember, Sarah. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
• Plant, Sadie. Zeroes Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Print.

• Reiche, Claudia, and Verena Kuni. Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols. Autonomedia, 2004. Print.

• Spender, Dale. Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1995. Print.
• Women Hackers, Cornelia Sollfrank

• Liquid Nation, Doll Yoko

• Doll Space 99, Doll Yoko

• Ghost Manifesto, Doll Yoko

• Spiderfeminism, Helene von Oldenburg

• From Spider – to Cyberfeminism and back, Helene von Oldenburg

• Stolen Rhetoric: The appropriation of choice by ART industries, subRosa

• Vulvas with a difference, Faith Wilding

• Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?, Faith Wilding

• Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism, Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble

• Feminism is Digital, Claudia Reiche

• The art of performing Cyberfeminism, Verena Kuni

• The future is femail, Verena Kuni

• Connective Identities, Yvonne Volkart

• Infobiobodies: Art & Esthetic Strategies in the New World Order, Yvonne Volkart

• The Cyberfeminist Fantasy of the Pleasure of the Cyborg, Yvonne Volkart

• Technics of Cyberfeminism: Strategic Sexualisations. Between Method and Fantasy, Yvonne Volkart

• Survival and Exploraterraterrism. Re-mapping the posthuman space, Yvonne Volkart

• Tamed Girls Running Wild. Figurations of Unruliness in Contemporary Video Art, Yvonne Volkart

• Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information – and Biotechnology, Yvonne Volkart

• Technologies of Identity, Yvonne Volkart

• Cyberfeminism with a Difference, Rosi Bradotti

• Surfing the Waves of Feminism: Cyberfeminism and its others, Susanna Paasonen

• From cybernetic socialism to feminisation: feminist dreams of cyberrevolution, Susanna Paasonen

• Is Cyberfeminism Colorblind?, Maria Fernandez

• Charred Edges: Grrrl Power and teh Structures of Feminism, Christine Laffer

• A Report on Cyberfeminism, Alex Galloway

• Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet, Lisa Nakamura

• Backlack in Cyberspace and Why Girls Need Modems, Jane Kenway

• Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender and Embodiment,  Jessie Daniels
• 100 anti-theses, First Cyberfeminist International, Kassel 1997

• Bitch Mutant Manifesto, VNS Matrix, 1996

• Irony, Eroticism and techno-politics: Cyber feminism as a virus in the new world order?  Jutta Weber

• The Truth About Cyberfeminism, Cornelia Sollfrank

• Not Every Hacker is a Woman, Cornelia Sollfrank
• ^[24]