CHANAKYA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

Project Report

On

“CYBERFEMINISM”

“Cyber Law”

Submitted To-: Submitted By -:

Mr. Kumar Gaurav Priyeshaa Prabha Jha

Faculty of Cyber Law Roll No. 1420

Chanakya National Law University B.B.A. LL.B. (Hons.)

Patna. (9th Semester)

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The success of this final report is the outcome of Guidance and valuable suggestions provided by
all the concerned without whom the report could not fide on the right back. I would like to
express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Kumar Gaurav Sir for giving me an opportunity to do this
project work. I also express my sense of deep gratitude towards the other faculty members for
introducing a program which enables us to learn more. Finally, I will be failing in my duty, if I
do not thank my parents, friends and well-wishers for their enthusiastic support and who have
directly or indirectly helped in some way or the other in making this final report a success.
 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: Type of Research

The research includes different options. They are:

 Exploratory research:

It is usually a small-scale study undertaken to define the exact nature of a problem and to gain a
better understanding of the environment within which the problem has occurred. It is the initial
research, before more conclusive research is under taken.

 Descriptive research:

It is to provide an accurate picture of some aspects of market environment. Descriptive research

is used when the objective is to provide a systematic description that is as factual and accurate as
possible. It provides the number of times something occurs, or frequency, lends itself to satisfied
calculations such as determining average number of occurrences.

HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis which researcher has made is that a Cyberfeminism is a genre of

contemporary feminism which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace,
the Internet and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology 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.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction……………………………………..…………………………….05

2. Timeline……………………………..........................................................…...07

3. Radical Cyberfeminism..……….……...………………………..…………….10

4. Liberal Cyberfeminism……………………………..………………………....13

5. VNS Matrix……………………………………...……………………..……..17

6. Re-embodying Technology…………………………………………………...20

7. Conclusion………………………………………………………………..…...23

8. Bibliography………………………………………………………………..…25
 INTRODUCTION
Historically, technology has been a male dominated, and the new technologies are still
continuing this tradition. In the past 20 years, the world has seen an explosion in the field of
information and communication technology. In 1995, only 15 percent of internet users were
women, but by early 2000, women comprised of 50 percent of internet users. Yet patriarchy has
never been absent. Men controlled the content, men earned the profit. Similarly, a gender gap
emerged in how women and men accessed the internet: men surfed, hopping from site to site;
women went directly to certain sites or searched for information on specific topic.1

As technology becomes more advanced, and full societal access to information technology
becomes more widespread, women are becoming liberated from the traditional patriarchal power
structures that surround and engulf them. In the gender roles, gender identity are breaking down,
where our societal notions of being human, feminine, and masculine are in transition (Plant,
1996).

This technology gives women the power to express their ideas to develop new business models,
which has to be rational, visionary, and practical in order to get things done. In addition, the
information and communication technology allows women to escape boundaries and categories
that have in the past constrained their activities and their identities.

The e-media are completely new technologies which give women a chance to start afresh, create
new languages, programs, platforms, images, fluid identities and multi-subject definitions. This
e-media can be recoded, redesigned, reprogrammed to meet women’s need and desire to change
the feminine condition.2 Cyberfeminism takes feminism as its starting point, and turns its focus
upon contemporary technologies, exploring the intersection between gender identity, culture and
technology. Plant (1996) uses the term cyberfeminism to indicate an “alliance” or “connection”
between women and technology, where “women have always been the machine parts for a very
much male culture”.

There is the popular perception still that women are generally anti-tech and at best secondary
players in the high tech world. There are so few women in a visible position of leadership in the

1
Richard & Schnall, 2006.
2
Wilding, 2006.
electronic world, so few women programmers and hacker still a tiny minority, and often
considered anomalies. Cyberfeminism is also a struggle to be increasingly aware of the impact of
new technologies on the lives of women, and the insidious gendering of technoculture in
everyday life. The international cyberfeminist seeks to bring together women from many
different fields of knowledge and interest around the world to begin to work together on
strengthening women’s involvement and visibility in the developing policies and economies of
electronic communications technologies and networks. Finally, cyberfeminist must radically
expand the critique concerning the media hype about the “techno-world.”

Old style (70’s) feminism is characterized as antitechnology, and not relevant to women’s
circumstances in the new technologies. This is ironic because in actual practice cyberfeminism
has already adopted many of the strategies of feminist movements, feminist social and cultural,
and language theory and analysis, creation of new images of women on the Net to counter sexist
stereotyping.

Cyberfeminism can link the philosophical practices of feminism to contemporary feminist

projects and networks both on and off the Net, and to the material lives and experiences of
women in the new world order, however differently they are manifested in different countries,
among different classes and races. If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberfeminism then it
must mutate to keep up with the sifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they
are changed by the impact communications technologies on all our lives.3

3
Adam, A. (1997). What should we do with cyberfeminism? In R. Lander & A. Adam (Eds.), Women in computing
(pp. 1727). Exeter: Intellect Books.
 TIMELINE

1990s

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.4

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. 5

2000s

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, cyberfeminist theorists and artists incorporated insights
from postcolonial and subaltern studies about the intersection of gender and race, inspired by
thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Gayatri Spivak. Artists such as Coco Fusco, Shu Lea
Cheang, and Prema Murthy, explored the ways that gender and race by combining performance
art, video art, and with the then-emerging technologies of interactive websites, digital graphics,
and streaming media.

4
Adam, A. (1998). Artificial knowing: Gender and the thinking machine. London: Routledge.
5
Barlow, J. P. (1996). A declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Electronic document at
http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.htm.
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.6

2010s

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.

Feminist action and activism online is prevalent, especially by women of colour, but has taken
on different intersectional terms. 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 afrofuturism in feminist terms.

Xenofeminism is an offshoot of cyberfeminism that came into existence through a collective that
calls themselves Laboria Cuboniks. 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. 7

'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.
6
Benedikt, M. (1991). Introduction. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), Cyberspace: The first steps (pp. 125). Cambridge: MIT
Press
7
Blair, K., Gajjala, R., & Tulley, C. (Eds.) (2008). Webbing cyberfeminist practice: Communities, pedagogies, and
social action. Cresskill: Hampton Press
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."

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.8

RADICAL CYBERFEMINISM

In response to this cybermasculinity, increasing numbers of women have organized their own
lists and bulletin board systems, creating women-only spaces where participants can
8
Braidotti, R. (1996). Cyberfeminism with a difference. Electronic document at http://
www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm
collaboratively construct an oppositional gender. One of the largest such spaces is SAPPHO, a
women-only list dedicated primarily to the discussion of lesbian and bisexual issues. This
electronic discussion group, according to a recent survey conducted by one of its subscribers,
associated with three major professional groups: university students and professors; women
working in computer related fields and women employed by universities in non-academic
positions. The e-mail postings reproduced in this portion of the study are drawn from exchanges
which occurred on SAPPHO between January and June 1993.

Despite feminist criticisms about the formation of a canon and historical periodization, it is not
possible to revisit cyberfeminism without referencing its originary texts. Donna
Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, must be mentioned as a central piece of
techno-feminist thinking. Although Haraway herself has never used the term cyberfeminism, the
cyborg metaphor as well as her critique of techno-science have provided important references for
the numerous cyberfeminist experiments to come. Considered to be one of the most influential
feminist commentators on techno-science, Haraway inspired not only feminist theory, but
equally feminist art and activism. Though referring to Haraway does not deny the existence of a
variety of other key approaches on gender and technology issues, her fundamental critique seems
to be of value for techno-feminist thinking like no other.9
It is Haraway’s achievement to have significantly contributed to the deconstruction of scientific
knowledge as historically patriarchal and of science and technology as closely related to
capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism. As opposed to liberal feminist efforts demanding
equal access, she instead points to the possibilities of a wide-ranging reconceptualization of
science and technology for emancipatory purposes. Central to her anti-essentialist approach is
the critique of “objective knowledge.” Rather than understanding science as disembodied truth,
Haraway emphasizes its social property, including its potential to create narratives.

As an interdisciplinary field of investigation, cybernetics is most commonly defined as the

science of control and communication in animal and machine systems. Its principles were
mapped out in the 1943 “cybernetic manifesto” co-authored by Julian Bigelow, Arturo
Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener (Hayles, 1999, pp. 9394), debated in the Macy conferences in
the 1940s and 50s and further defined in Wiener’s writings (Wiener, 1988; 1999). As a broad
9
Brophy, J. E. (2010). Developing a corporeal cyberfeminism: beyond cyberutopia. New media & society, 12(6),
929945
discursive field, cybernetics has enabled the conceptualization of humans, animals and machines
as cybernetic systems (characterized by self-organization, performance built on feedback
mechanisms, the storage and processing of data) that are analogous to one another in their
functions (if not structure).10

LIBERAL CYBERFEMINISM

A general definition of liberal feminism is the belief that women are suppressed in contemporary
society because they suffer unjust discrimination. Liberal feminists seek no special privileges for
women and simply demand that everyone receive equal consideration without discrimination on
the basis of sex.
10
Couey, A., Collins, T, Malloy, J. & Truck, F. (1996). A conversation with Nancy Paterson. Electronic document at
http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/ npaterson.html.
Workforce11

When it comes to information technology jobs, most engineers and others involved with
information technology take a liberal feminist stance and assume that the focus should be on
employment, access, and discrimination issues. Social scientists studying the gender distribution
of the technology workforce point out that historically and today, the technology workforce
represents a vertically and horizontally gender-stratified labor market, with women concentrated
in the lowest-paid positions, closest to the most tedious, hands-on making of the products and
furthest from the creative design of technology. Most women working in the IT industry engage
in the tedious, eye-straining work of electronic assembly. Men predominate in the decision-
making, creative design sectors as venture capitalists, computer scientists, and engineers
producing startups, new software, and hardware design.

Design

Liberal feminists would seek to remove barriers that prevent equal access for women to
information technology jobs not only to provide economic equality but to provide access to
higher-paying jobs for women. Unequal access has implications that go well beyond the
composition of the workforce. Two decades ago, biologists revealed that a predominance of male
scientists tended to introduce bias by excluding females as experimental subjects, focusing on
problems of primary interest to males, employing faulty experimental designs, and interpreting
data based in language or ideas constricted by patriarchal parameters. This exclusion bias
resulted in under-diagnosis, inappropriate treatment, and higher death rates for cardiovascular
and other diseases in women. Male dominance in engineering and the creative decision-making
sectors of the IT workforce may result in similar bias, particularly design and user bias.

Use

Having large numbers of male engineers and creators of technologies also often results in
technologies that are useful from a male perspective (that is, these technologies fail to address
important issues for women users). Many studies have explored the overt and covert links
11
Gillis, S. (2004). Neither Cyborg Nor Goddess: The (Im)Possibilities of Cyberfeminism. In S. Gillis, G. Howie &
R. Munford (Eds.), Third wave feminism: A Critical Exploration (pp. 185196). London: Palgrave.
between the military, engineering and masculinity, and design and use of technology. For
example, Janet Abbate studied the origins of the Internet in ARPANET. The unique
improvement of the Internet was that it was a network, overcoming the vulnerability to nuclear
attack of the previous star configuration computer network.12

VNS MATRIX

VNS Matrix’s projects (such as All New Gen and Corpusfantastica MOO) attracted considerable
attention within the digital arts in the early- and mid-1990s. The strategies of the VNS Matrix
included critical appropriation, ironic commentary and playful exploration: their version of
cyberfeminism was a matter of cyberpunk fiction, the virtual spaces of MUDS and MOOS

12
Guertin, C. (2003). Gliding bodies: Cyberfeminism, interactivity and Slattery’s collabyrinth. Art Women.
Electronic document at http://www.artwomen.org/cyberfems/ guertin/guertin1.htm.
(multi-user domains and dungeons), game cultures and creative writing and, obviously, that of
media art. British cultural theorist Sadie Plant has been equally credited with coining the term.13

Plant used VNS Matrix’s line “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” as motto for her own
cyberfeminist manifesto, “Feminisations: Reflections on Women and Virtual Reality” (Plant,
1996a). In her writings published in 19951997, Plant outlined a broad narrative of women,
technology and networks spanning from prehistory to the era of early computing, networked
communications and the rise of cybernetic self-organizing systems. This metaphorical narrative
ties women and machines together as tools (and others) of masculine culture and promises
complicated and intertwining webs that will eventually overturn the phallogocentric hegemony.

According to Plant, the digitalization of culture equals its feminisation while the rise of
intelligent machines parallels female emancipation. Revisiting the cyberculture literature of the
1990s, it is quite easy to see that Plant quite quickly became the best known of cyberfeminist
authors. Her essays were widely published, while her narrative of feminisation remained
optimistic in its premises of automated emancipation through complex systems. Due to Plant’s
visibility, cyberfeminism became associated with her work and, consequently, critiques
concerning it be those ones of de-politicization or techno-utopianism became extended to
cyberfeminism as a whole. At the same time, Plant was extensively critiqued by her fellow
cyberfeminists (Hawthorne and Klein, 1999; also Squires, 2000; Paasonen, 2005). The Toronto-
based media artist Nancy Paterson is the third main figure associated with the term due to her
1992 essay, “Cyberfeminism”, emphasizing gender diversity and cultural subversion (Sunde´n,
2001, pp. 221222). Paterson defined her version of cyberfeminism as “very much an emerging
philosophy” characterized “by a focus on cultural diversity, trans-gender politics and recognition
of the ubiquity of technology” (Couey et al., 1996). Paterson (1992) was interested in mapping
out new departures for feminism through critical engagements with electronic media, the internet
and virtual reality applications and the political and artistic discourses in which these are
embedded.14

13
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association
Books.
14
Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan”Meets_ OncoMouse‘: Feminism and
Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Paterson’s essay was distributed via Gopher and the Web, yet neither it nor her artistic work has
been as widely referenced or reprinted as that of Plant or VNS Matrix it can even be argued that
her role in articulating cyberfeminism has been forgotten to a degree. Carolyn Guertin (2003)
sees cyberfeminism as emerging simultaneously in three different parts of the world: Australia
(VNS Matrix), the UK (Plant) and Canada (Paterson). Such spontaneous co-emergence would
certainly be in line with the cybernetic principles of autonomous systems and self-organization.15

These cyberfeminist articulations differed from one another in terms of both politics and
theoretical argumentation. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of multiple, more or less
interconnected articulations of cyberfeminism that did not, however, organize into a clearly
definable movement. It is also important to note that cyberfeminist activity and networking has
not been limited to the Anglophone world but has taken place in different continents and in a
range of languages and not least in Eastern Europe: the Cyber-Femin Club of St. Petersburg, for
example, started operating as early as 1994 (Mitrofanova, 1999, p. 12).

In this context, cyberfeminism became a discursive arena for investigating gender and
technology that was detached from the “state feminism” of the Soviet era and which facilitated
diverse takes on feminism and politics. In this historical conjuncture, the attraction of
cyberfeminism seemed be found in its openness and diversity, as much as in the potentiality and
novelty of digital media technologies. In this historical conjuncture, the attraction of
cyberfeminism seemed to be found in its openness and diversity, as much as in the potentiality
and novelty of digital media technologies.

Germany was one of the hubs of cyberfeminist activity due to the activities of the Old Boys
Network the core group consisting of Verena Kuni, Helene von Oldenburg, Claudia Reiche and
Cornelia Sollfrank, but the network encompassing a far larger group of artists, theorists and
activists. The First (1997), Next (1999) and Very (2001) Cyberfeminist Internationals, organized
by OBN, provided platforms for people drawn to cyberfeminism to meet, explore and critique
digital technologies as well as the discourses in which they have been embedded.16

15
Hawthorne, S. & Klein, R. (1999). CyberFeminism: An Introduction. In S. Hawthorne & R. Klein (Eds.),
CyberFeminism: Connectivity, critique creativity (pp. 116). Melbourne: Spinifex.
16
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
While the participation in the internationals was indeed international, the context of the events
was largely European and there were fewer North American participants. With their emphasis on
the interconnections of digital arts and activism, the internationals provided multiple articulations
of cyberfeminism that were generally different from those proposed by Sadie Plant. In addition
to the internationals, Listservs such as the womenonly FACES (est. 1997) and OBN (est. 1997)
provided networked fo- rums for the exchange of thoughts and resources (Wilding, 1998).17

These networks were centrally about creative practices: media art projects, provocations,
interventions and (often considerably poetic) manifestos. Media studies scholar Jenny Sunde´n
(2001) sees cyberfeminism as divided into theoretical and practice-based variations: while the
former are characterized by philosophical sophistication, the latter stand for handson and activist
initiatives, and the two come together in cyberfeminist art projects (also Sunde´n and
Sveningsson-Elm, 2007, pp. 38).

When further considering the definitions of both “cyber” and “feminism” within these theoretical
and practice-based activities, it is possible to divide them roughly into three categories and,
consequently, to outline three different meanings for cyberfeminism. In the first instance,
cyberfeminism stands for feminist analyses of human-machine relations, embodiment, gender
and agency in a culture saturated with technology. As machines have become increasingly
prosthetic, both literally and metaphorically, it has become necessary to rethink the categories of
the organic and the machine, as well as the implications of conceptualizing human embodiment
in terms of genetic data. Such uses of “cyberfeminism” as a broad tactical term can be identified
in Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, Plant’s (1996a; 1996b; 1997) and Rosi Braidotti’s (1996) work,
the projects of the VNS Matrix and the Old Boys Network.18

RE-EMBODYING TECHNIQUE

The prefix “cyber” draws from both scientific and popular investigations into cybernetics which
regard the body as a system of feedback loops and autonomous responses less as a material

17
Hutcheon, L. (1994). Irony’s edge: The theory and politics of irony. London: Routledge. Kember, S. (2002).
Cyberfeminism and artificial life. London: Routledge
18
Ladendorf, M. (2002). Cyberzines: Irony and parody as strategies in a feminist sphere. In J. Fornäs, K. Klein, M.
Ladendorf, J. Sunde´n & M. Sveningsson (Eds.), Digital borderlands: Cultural studies of identity and interactivity on
the internet (pp. 112 145). New York: Peter Lang.
object than an informational pattern (Hayles, 1999, p. 100), whose operations can be explained
and modelled, often through machine analogies.

Although cybernetics has contributed to the critique of the autonomous, liberal subject, it can
also be associated with the Cartesian paradigm separating the mind from the body (Penny, 1995).
As a critical discourse both academic and artistic, cyberfeminism has been centrally about re-
embodying technology and emphasizing the importance of the embodied and the carnal in
cyberculture which was, throughout the 1990s, defined by Cartesian articulations of leaving the
body behind, abandoning flesh in virtual reality and separating wetware (as meat) from software
and hardware (cf. Brophy, 2010).Ṅ19

Such articulations were rather recurring in cyberpunk, from Gibson’s fictitious protagonists
leaving the “meat” behind when “jacking in” the computer terminal to John Perry Barlow’s
(1996) “Declaration of the independence of cyberspace” outlining a new “home of Mind” “that is
both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live”. In contrast, cyberfeminist
interventions were from the start very much focused on cybernetic spaces as ones inhabited by
bodies from VNS Matrix’s clitorises connected to the matrix to Plant’s (1997, p. 181)
descriptions of disks being “sucked into the dark recess of welcoming vagina slits”.20

As Yvonne Volkart (2002) points out, by “bluntly sexualising cyberspace and digital
technology”, early cyberfeminists pointed out the gendered underpinnings of the discourses of
computing and network society. These commentaries were part poetic, part ironic, yet, in
Volkart’s view, they also bordered on mimicry in the sense of reiterating familiar connotations
concerning sexuality and the female body. Australian media artist Linda Dement described her
projects as driven by a desire “to put some guts into the machine” (Sofia, 2003, p. 516). Her
1995 CD-Rom, Cyberflesh Girlmonster, illustrates the point with its ample landscape of mouths,
eyes, ears, clitorises and nipples morphing into each other and giving rise to monstrous kinds of
carnalities.

19
McNeil, M. (2000). Techno-triumphalism, techno-tourism, American dreams and feminism. In S. Ahmed, J.
Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil & B. Skeggs (Eds.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 221234).
London: Routledge
20
Mitrofanova, A. (1999). How to become a cyberfeminist? In C. Sollfrank & Old Boys Network (Eds.), Next
cyberfeminist international (p. 12). Hamburg: OBN.
VNS Matrix’s “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” involves a similar fusing of the fleshy with the
cybernetic: “Your fingers probe my neural network. The tingling sensation in the tips of your
fingers are my synapses responding to your touch. It’s not chemistry, it’s electric” (VNS Matrix,
1995). Another line from the manifesto, “Suck my code”, was reproduced in stickers at the first
cyberfeminist international that was organized as part of the Hybrid Workspace, a temporary
100-day media lab at Documenta X exhibition for contemporary art at Kassel.

The stickers (e. g. “Suck my code”, “(.) (.)”, “xyberfeminists do it on the net”), the 100 anti-
theses, the manifestos of VNS Matrix and Sadie Plant all gave rise to a considerable cloud of
snappy sound bytes. Sound bytes are catchy and easy to circulate for, easy as they are to
remember, they stick. At the same time, their stickiness and accumulation meant that
catchphrases gained much more visibility than conceptual critical cyberfeminist work in less-
easily digestible format.21

The hybrid workspace of 1997 also hosted workshops on tactical media, migration and digital
media, divisions of East/West Europe and technoscience. The Next Cyberfeminist International
of 1999 was organized as part of the Next 5 Minutes tactical media event in Rotterdam. In other
words, cyberfeminism was in its European incarnations part and parcel of the critical artistic and
activist/hacktivist networks addressing the technological hype, Western dominance and the
operations of late capitalism involved in 1990s cybercultures, and the people attending the
internationals also attended the other workshops and festivals.22

Cyberfeminism was coined as a feminist point of entrance into these debates, as well as an
umbrella term for women working on tactical media and hacktivism who might not otherwise
identify with feminism: as a network, cyberfeminism was made of both similarities and
differences. While scholars bent towards carefully defining the concepts they use have been
troubled by the ephemeral and elastic nature of the “cyberfeminism”, for others this elasticity,
combined with snappiness, has contributed greatly to its attractiveness.

21
McNeil, M. (2000). Techno-triumphalism, techno-tourism, American dreams and feminism. In S. Ahmed, J.
Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil & B. Skeggs (Eds.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 221234).
London: Routledge
22
Old Boys Network (1997). 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism. Electronic document at
http://www.obn.org/reading_room/manifestos/html/anti.html.
Shift in discourse So why have cyberfeminist workshops, panels and initiatives become more
rare within European media arts? And why is the term currently mainly deployed in academic
discourses? In the case of OBN, the explanations have to do with the lack of resources, the
burden that the active group members experienced when organizing the internationals (Sollfrank,
2002) and disagreements and conflicts among the group members on the uneven credit and
acknowledgement related to collective projects (Reiche, 2002; Oldenburg, 2002).23

Moving beyond this one particular albeit highly influential network, I suggest that the fading of
the attraction of cyberfeminism has centrally to do with shifts in the discursive environments that
gave rise to these initiatives in the first place. All in all, the prefix “cyber” has much less
currency than it did in the early 1990s. The term “cyberspace” is used by some academics but by
far fewer journalists or internet users to describe the media used or the experiences that they
entail and this is especially the case in other than Anglophone countries.

While the prefix “cyber” has been used to address a range of human-technology relations, future
forms of media and computing since the early 1990s, the set of meanings that it is most
commonly associated with has gradually narrowed down to computing and the internet-based.
Artists, activists and authors addressing a broader set of technologies may have chosen other
terms than “cyber” to describe their activities and focus for example those of “tactical media” or
“bio art”. Those addressing online cultures, again, may find the indeterminate qualities of the
term “cyberfeminism” (combined with what is already almost a vintage nuance of the “cyber”
prefix) equally awkward when describing their work.24

CONCLUSION

23
Paasonen, S. (2005). Figures of fantasy: Internet, women and cyberdiscourse. New York: Peter Lang
24
Penny, S. (1995). Consumer culture and the technological imperative: The artist in dataspace. In S. Penny (Ed.),
Critical essays in electronic media (pp. 4774). New York: SUNY Press
In this project, I have identified two varieties of cyberfeminism--0ne inspired by the utopian
imaginings of Haraway' s cyborg feminism, the other by the reality of maie harassment on the
Internet. Rosi Braidotti, a pioneer in virtual studies, recently made the observation:" One of the
great contradictions of cyber-images is that they titillate the imagination. promising marvels and
wonders of a gender-free world or a multi-gender world; and yet. such images not only
reproduce some of the most banal, flat images of gender behavior imaginable, they intensify the
differences between the sexes. The same is true of computer-mediated communication; rather
than neutralizing gender, the electronic medium encourages its intensification. In the absence of
the physical, network users exaggerate societal notions of femininity and masculinity in an
attempt to gender themselves. Gender may well be an unfortunate dichotomy, as postmodern
virtual theorists argue, but cyberspace is generating goddesses and ogres, not cyborgs.

Cyberfeminism is currently drawing upon social and cultural strategies from past waves of
feminism. It is meant to overcome the isolation of cyberculture, to get women connected to each
other, and to help them begin to learn and use information technologies in producing their own
work. It is important for cyber feminist to make opportunities to meet together bodily and form
affinity groups to facilitate building a transnational and trans-cultural movement.

Cyber feminist need to make their voices heard much more strongly in the discussion of Net
development. There are more women online now than 5 years ago, yet the Internet still caters to
a male gaze. Increasing number of internet user among women means as narrowing gender gap
on information technologies. However, overall women users are still the main sufferers of
information disparity, especially in the most developed countries.

Another branch of cyberfeminism argues that the idea of women gaining power and authority
merely through greater use of new-media technologies is overly simplistic or reductive.
Australian feminist scholars, such as Susan Luckman of the University of Queensland and Anna
Munster of the University of New South Wales, believe that this approach reduces complex
technological systems into mere tools and ignores their historical contexts of production and use.

They believe that technologies are embedded in structures of power, which are not always
positive. In their opinion, calls for women and girls to uncritically take up and advance the use of
these new technologies does nothing to critically assess technology's larger role in culture, and
how we wish to see technology develop—or not. Women must be part of this future, not by
simply advocating for more women to engage in using technology, but by becoming more
critically aware of the perils as well as promises that new technologies offer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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3. Gove, P.B. (1981) Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Springfield, MA:
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4. Handy, L. M. (2001). “Cyberfeminism: Virtual, Activism, Real, Change”. Honours.
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