Cyberfeminism

Cyberfeminism is a feminist 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 critique of the alleged erasure of women within discussions of technology.

Cyberfeminism is an alliance that seeks awareness to defy any sort of boundaries of identity and definition to be truly postmodern in its potential for radical openness. This is seen with the 1997 Old Boys Network's 100 anti-theses which lists the 100 ways "cyberfeminism is not." Cornelia Sollfrank from the Old Boys Network states that:

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 utopian 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. 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 ALife programming.