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Cyberfeminism is a feminism approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, art practices, methodologies or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general.
The first use of the term cyberfeminist has been attributed to Australian artists and art collectives. The inception of the cyberfeminist art movement is described by one of its pioneers Linda Dement, as one that "coagulated and sparked in the reject-outsider mutiny, trauma-jouissance and fast hard beat of queer punk. It found visible existence and a manifesto, through VNS Matrix in the (typical) Adelaide heat wave of 1991… Cyberfeminism, as blurred edge range, entangles carnality with code; machines, blood and bad language; poetry and disdain; executables, theft and creative fabrication. It incites and follows lines of flight powered by contradiction, relatedness, transgression, and misbehaviour. It simultaneously embraces logic and unreason, giving the finger to binaries as it ravishes them."
VNS Matrix's A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century was published online in 1991.
The foundational catalyst for the formation of cyberfeminist thought is often attributed by Europeans to Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", third wave feminism, post-structuralist feminism, riot grrrl culture and the Feminist theory critique of the alleged erasure of women within discussions of technology.
Cyberfeminism is a myth. A myth is a story of unidentifiable origin, or of different origins. A myth is based on one central story which is retold over and over in different variations. A myth denies one history as well as one truth, and implies a search for truth in the spaces, in the differences between the different stories. Speaking about Cyberfeminism as a myth, is not intended to mystify it, it simply indicates that Cyberfeminism only exists in plural.Mia Consalvo defines cyberfeminism as:
The early cyberfeminist perspective takes a view of cyberspace and the Internet as a means of freedom from social constructs such as gender, sex difference and race. For instance, a description of the concept described it as a struggle to be aware of the impact of new technologies on the lives of women as well as the so-called insidious gendering of technoculture in everyday life. It also sees technology as a means to link the body with machines. This is demonstrated in the way cyberfeminism—as maintained by theorists such as Barbara Kennedy—is said to define a specific cyborgian consciousness concept, which denotes a way of thinking that breaks down binary and oppositional discourses. (2025). 9780521852555, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521852555 There is also the case of the renegotiation of the artificial intelligence (AI), which is considered top-down masculinist, into bottom-up feminized version labeled as Artificial life programming.
In "Cyberfeminist Bed Sheet Flown as a Flag" (2018–19) Linda Dement and Nancy Mauro-Flude devised a performance of the bed-sheet-flag, unfurling ribbons of quotes from the stains of their sisterhood kin: "A genealogical record, it bears smears and stains from productive encounters, convergences and brush pasts. The sheet has been endlessly folded, scrunched, wrung out or smoothed flat in spawning, connecting and adulterating across feminist time and creative persuasions." Initially Dement mapped a non-linear terrain of punk, cyberfeminism, rebellious aberration and corporeal digital transgression as a rumpled unclean bedsheet.
Authors Hawthorne and Klein explain the different analyses of cyberfeminism in their book: "Just as there are liberal, socialist, radical and postmodern feminists, so too one finds these positions reflected in the interpretations of cyberfeminism." Preview.
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."
Cyberfeminism is not just the subject matter, but is the approach taken to examine subject matter. For example: Cyberfeminism can be a critique of equality in cyberspace, challenge the gender stereotype in cyberspace, examine the gender relationship in cyberspace, examine the collaboration between humans and technology, examine the relationship between women and technology and more.
Sadie Plant much more viewed Cyberfeminism as a project which sought to uncover the history linking femininity and technology and how traits which were feminine were both useful to technology while still being in the same historical position as technology, objectified and to serve the ends of men, but for Plant this is where the future leads, towards technology and the abandoning of man, while women and technology go hand in hand escaping "the meat" for Plant by making "the meat" and "the mind" the same.
British cultural theorist Sadie Plant chose cyberfeminism to describe her recipe for defining the feminizing influence of technology on western society and its inhabitants.
European's often cite Donna Haraway as the inspiration and genesis for cyberfeminism with her 1985 essay "" which was reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991). (1999). 9780748611171, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748611171 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. Shulamith Firestone and her book has been named as a precursor to Haraway's work in cyberfeminism. Firestone's work focuses reproductive technology and advancing it to eliminate the connection of the feminine identity being connected to childbirth. Firestone believed that gender inequality and oppression against women could be solved if the roles around reproduction did not exist. Both Firestone and Haraway had ideals based on making individuals androgynous, and both women wanted society to move beyond biology by improving technology.
Cyberfeminism is considered a predecessor to networked feminism, fourth wave feminism. Cyberfeminism also has a relationship to the field of feminist science and technology studies, Feminist Internet Theory
In Canada, Nancy Paterson wrote an article entitled "Cyberfeminism" for EchoNYC in 1991.
In Adelaide, Australia, a four-person collective called VNS Matrix wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto in 1991; they used the term cyberfeminist 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 world.
In Russia in 1995, the Cyber-Femin Club was founded in the Pushkinskaya 10 art centre in St. Petersburg to bring together ‘women working with new media’, the most prominent of whom were curator Irina Aktuganova, philosopher and cultural critic Alla Mitrofanova, and St. Petersburg artists Olga Kisseleva, Gluklya and Tsaplya.
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.
According to Carolyn Guertin, 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 2003 the feminist anthology was published; it includes the essay "Cyberfeminism: Networking the Net" by Amy Richards and Marianne Schnall.
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. However, women of colour generally do not associate with cyberfeminism, and rather re-frame africanfuturism, afrofuturism in feminist terms.
The decline in the volume of cyberfeminist literature in early 2010s would suggest that cyberfeminism has somewhat lost momentum as a movement; however, it's explosion in terms of artists and artworks, not only is cyberfeminism still taking place, but its artistic and theoretical contribution has been of crucial importance to the development of Feminist Internet Theory And the many handed shiva of posthuman aesthetics.
Additionally, this distancing from white-centered cyberfeminism also acknowledges many of the non-white cultures that the ideals of cyberfeminism were inspired by. For example, the Japanese cyberpunk genre often utilizes themes such as the connection between gender and technology in anime such as Ghost in the Shell. In this particular case, the distancing from cyberfeminism especially felt necessary due to the "obsession with rapid modernization and robotization of Japan at the current level of development of social and humanitarian knowledge that criticized by many as techno-orientalism."
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 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.
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 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." Such economic privilege often exists in Colonialism states, and is built upon technologies that profit from the colonization of native land. In such cases, "we must take a particular stance grounded in de/anticolonial relations when examining technology against the backdrop of discrete though globally linked colonialisms."Flores, Wilfredo A. Toward a Virulent Community Literacy: Constellating the Science, Technology, and Medicine of Queer Sexual Health, Michigan State University, United States -- Michigan, 2022. GenderWatch, http://proxy.libraries.smu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/toward-virulent-community-literacy-constellating/docview/2666625063/se-2.
Around the late 1990s several cyberfeminist artists and theorists gained a measure of recognition for their works, including Linda Dement and the above-mentioned VNS Matrix their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st century, and Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble. Some of the better-known examples of cyberfeminist work include Auriea Harvey's work, Sandy Stone, Nancy Paterson, Linda Dement's Cyberflesh Girlmonster a hypertext CD-ROM that incorporates images of women's body parts and remixes them to create new monstrous yet beautiful shapes; Olga Kisseleva's How Are You? and Red Flag Factory; Melinda Rackham's Carrier, a work of web-based multimedia art that explores the relationship between humans and infectious agents; Prema Murthy's 1998 work Bindigirl, Bindigirl (Archived at Rhizome Artbase). a satirical Asian porn website that examines the intersection of racialized gender, sexuality, and religion online; Murthy's 2000 project Mythic Hybrid,A video document of the project is hosted by Turbulence.org. based on reports of mass hysteria among microchip factory workers in India; Shu Lea Cheang's 1998 work Brandon, which was the first Internet based artwork to be commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim. A later work of Cheang's, I.K.U. (2001), is a sci-fi pornographic film that imagines a cybersexual post- Blade Runner universe, where sexual encounters with feminine, shapeshifting Replicant are distilled and collected for resale, and ultimately reuse. I.K.U. was the first pornographic film to screen at Sundance. 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. Orphan Drift (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."
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