<chapter>
<title>Cyberfeminism</title>
<desc>...</desc>
<mails>
<mail>
<nbr>0.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Anne de Haan</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Mon, 16 Jun 1997 00:59:00 +0200</date>
<content>The vagina is the boss on internet

New media female artists inspired by erotics, identity and social interaction

Surfing on the internet I find the 'Virtual Themepark' from the most
interesting cyberfeminist artist group VNS Matrix. It all sounds very
promising and as a hetero woman I click on the Viral Pleasureworld. I am
dissappointed, because I do not find any beautiful naked men on the screen,
but a universe with purple planets and the text 'Viral Pleasure World'. As
soon as I want to continue I always come back on the first page. Only at
"The end of the World"  I finally get to the "Filthy Genderworld" where I
see a group of tiny little people who are licking eachother. Furtheron I
step on Gashgirl's homepage, who's real name is Francesca da Rimini. This is
one of the ladies from VNS Matrix. On this page I finally find some more
'information' about their work: wordmixture of textfragments from
SM-stories, filmtitles and computerterminology that are connected to
eachother. The title above this page says enough: "GenderFuckMebacy's palace
of Unparalleled Cynicism", oldfashioned artistic enigmas that are larded
with sensual quotes, to which's meaning you can quest for hours and hours
being an outsider.

Cyberslut

VNS (VeNuS) Matrix wants to create confusion. The four Australian ladies
want to make chaos in the standards and values from today's society, because
they do not agree with the woman's status within. They make electronic art
that questions the computer mass culture and her products in a playfull but
brutal feministic way. VNS matrix acts on a humorous way against men's
women-unfriendly and sexistic outbursts on the internet. These
cyberfeminists are not afraid to use any means to achieve their aim. So they
are not agianst sex, porno or even against men. They think that it is only
just about time that women take control on the internet from men, because
men behave badly. Still too many women suffer from obscene remarks. 

The Corpus FantasticaMOO, an internet game, illustrates clearly how obscene
creeps should be punished. VNS Matrix, virtually pierced, masked, harnesed
and weaponed with the most horrible torturestuff, enters dark
internetsurroundings by psuedonyms like Psybapussy and Cyberslut. There they
terrorize everything male as soon as it logs in in this Tartaros-like
domain. Someone who entered as Quentin Tarrantino, for example, was almost
sent to the virtual heaven by Psybapussy's dangerous C46-weapon. The girls
are the boss and their feminity is sacred. The core of their realm, the
Matrix, can only be reached by the virtual clitoris. The vagina is the
symbol of the female power. In their "Bitch Mo Manifesto" the ladies swank
about making art with their cunt. Their pussy is also capable of fighting
against "Big daddy mainframe". "Big Daddy Mainframe" is the symbol of the
male society, that is still dominating both the real and the virtual world.
The "Mainframe" is also a widespread product of computertycoon IBM.

The art of these cybervamps is at it's most beautiful in their fantastic
projects, that are based on internet- and CD-rom games like Quest and Doom.
In 1995 they made in cooperation with the artist Leon Cmielewski an project
named "The user unfriendly interface", where as many as possible people
should be insulted. On these beautiful pages it was not allowed to click
anything. When someone was naughty and clicked anyway, the computer yelled
angry at this person and the buttons changed into insects that walked away
from the screen. People also had to fill in their dreams and desires, so
that the program could curse and jeer at them. This program was not meant to
be an attack to the male society, but to the dominating commercials and the
standard mass products, that always have to be userfriendly.

The game of communication

VNS Matrix is also trying to investigate in what way the game is a symbol of
social interaction in cultural life. Is pleasure an important condition to
experience art? Interactivity gives one the power to interfere in a work of
art. The non feminist artist Agnes Heged&#252;s sees the new media as an
interesting territorium for investigation in the field of social
interaction. In the new media raises a new culture of games, that is both
interactive and telematic. She thinks it is special that everyone can pick a
different identity. The result is that communication via internet is more
playful than in real life. The internet is a game of seduction. Not the
seduction of being connected on a distance is addicting, but the mysterious
rendez-vouses of people gives a sexy kick. On internet people can meet
eachoter without being seen, they can pretend to be anyone in any way.

Heged&#252;s' "Televirtual Fruitmachine" from 1994 is based on this playful
interactive aspect. De instalation is a big screen on which three puzzle
pieces of a fruit machine are projected. In front of the screen are three
tables with a joystick. Three different people can join into this game at
the same time. The fruit is refering to the forbidden fruit from Paradise
and seduction. In contrast with VNS Matrix, who wants to see the new digital
world dominated by women, Heged&#252;s does not think that is necessary. When the
man and woman identity can be swapped in the virtual space, the
genderidentity will be less important. The idea of genderswap with the help
of the media was allready being issued by Marcel Duchamp, who let himself
been photographed as Rrose Selavy (Eros c'est la vie): travesty as sexual
pleasure.

Metamorphosis

The body will be less relevant accoring to the Australian artist Jill Scott:
by means of technique we will be nomads in both the body and the soul. She
thinks technique is very fascinating and she illustrates that very
brilliantly in her gorgeous interactive film-installation "Frontiers of
Utopia" from 1995. The ill Zira does not live in the real world: everything
she does is via the computer: working communicating and living, for this is
the only way to forget that her body is soon going to die. In this
installation the visitors can "setup a dialogue" with women who are in this
film. These women come from different areas of the 20th century and tell
things about their ideal society. Emma from 1900 hopes for freedom for
public opinion, Pearl from 1930 is dreaming of  equality of race, Gillian
from 1960 thinks of technical advance in socialist society and Zira from the
90ties believes that the technique can solve all problems. 

Thanks to technique the body can be improved. This theme is very popular
among feminist artists. Even when a woman is not ill, her body needs to be
improved by technique. The dutch artist Inez van Lamsweerde is hackling
artificial bodily changes from healthy females, by making beautiful
ridiculous computerpictures on which she used photomodels and
window-figures. The female figures on her photo's have something unreal: in
the series "Thank you Tighmaster" from the early nineties Van Lamsweerde
stuck doll's eyes on a woman's face. She thinks too many woman cannot be
themselves anymore, but have to look like Barbie.   

Bitter Herb Menu/Brutal Myths

'The cosmedical industry is a form of keeping women surpressed" claim the
american artists Sonya Rapoport and Marie Jos&#233; Sat. The reason why men
dominate women is because they are scared of them. That is why women were
called witch. "The firsts woman Eve was allready called bad and even the
most evil woman that has ever lived" is one of the ancient myths that was
going around in the middle ages according to Sat and Rapoport. They say,
that this myth is still going on in the arabic countries and that's why the
women do not get any political chance over there, and that is why woman in
some countries are being circumcised. This is a primitive form of cosmedical
surgery. In the western world women are forced upon strict diets and
cosmedical surgery.  
The Bitter Herb Menu is a metapher for the so called badness of women. In
Genesis, Sat and Rapoport continue, God condemned mankind to work at the
fields and to eat the harvest. That iss why these artists choose for the
herbal witchcraft as a symbol for the wholesome harvest of women, because in
early times women were seen as spiritual curers in ancient times. This has
changed later in the middle ages, when spiritual curers were seen as
dangerous witches.  The first part of the website "Brutal Myths" describes
which bitter herb poisons the mind of the man, so he will believe that women
are bad. In the second part of the digital work of art is the healthy herbal
garden with wholesome herbs.

Vagina Dentata

On the Bitter Herb Menu one can find the bitter herb "cleavers", which lets
a vagina eat a penis. The principle of the Vagina Dentata, the mighty and
male-swallowing vagina is to be found in different cultures. Because men are
afraid of this Vagina Dentata, women are being circumcised, so that they
cannot urinate in a normal way or enjoy sex. The liberation of women is to
take revenge of them by castration, says the Bitter Herb website. The herb
that is punishing men so severely is called Heartsease. The Vagina Dentata
is a beloved subject among cyberfeminist artist, because it is the ultimate
symbol of destroying male power. Women can be in charge then. The Bitter
Herb menu sees the Vagina Dentata in a mystique and occult context. But VNS
Matrix sees the vagina Dentata in a playful way as a vampire like tart, who
is called Dentata. Dentata has to shoot men in the 'Cybersquat', a virtual
game surroundings from VNS Matrix.

	Interactive rituals in the Bitter herb Menu, that are made by the visitors,
contribute to the destruction of the myth of women being evil and calm the
phobias of men. Sat and Rapoport think that in this way they are
contributing to the development of the World Wide Web as a new artistic
technological medium, that is free from sexual prejudices and differences,
so that the reputation of women can be purified.

Common Ground

The internet is a free space and that is why women can take advantage of
that. Sonya Rapoport sees the web as free and easy to give a presentation
from feministic art. She hopes to reach also people who would otherwise
never go to an exhibition. She is striving to a kind of common ground: a
virtual space linked to different female artists. The dutch artist Mathilde
Mup&#233; has allready made links on her homepage to different feminists in
cyberspace. The german video artist Ulrike Rosenbach and the american art
critic Lucy Lippard have allready set up feministic art institutes in the
seventies where female artists could cooperate. 

Much female artists see the internet as a possibility to communicate in a
role playing game, where people can change their gender. Some feminist
artists want to gain power over men on the inernet. For them the game of
sexuality is a form of power instead of romance. The sexual organ is not
only capable of enjoying sex, but also of urinating, multiplying and
dividing the human race into the suppressed and the dominating species.
These feminist artists see the internet as an opportunity to be the boss on
internet. They do not want to lose their gender, but they want to gain
dominance over the male in their female glory. The gender identity should
therefore be emphasized according to them. The question is whether this is
still relevant in an age of androgyny and transsexuality, because the body
can also be changed in today's society. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check mijn nieuwe artikel over "De Vagina is de baas op internet"

http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sigorney/vagi.htm
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Anne de Haan</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 09:11:38 +0200</date>
<content>At 16:06 16-06-97 +0200, you wrote:
&gt;Aloha!
&gt;
&gt;Good explanation of the thing I'm more and more calling sick. More of it
&gt;I don't understand, but usually feminists are transplanting their personal
&gt;accidents, their personal experiences, i.e. misunderstandings with their
&gt;partners into common market. So their goal is make war not love (I'm not
&gt;hippy, so don't worry), if it's not another woman, of course. So is this a
&gt;form of solidarity or just a way of expressing their sexual behavior.
&gt;Plain gender, pure sex and nothing else. I don't think relationships
&gt;should be built or focused on that. It's very animalic. And even less, I
&gt;don't think excusses on political or social engagements should be raised
&gt;from plain personal - intimate thing. It takes (at least) two for any kind
&gt;of relation, communication. And here goes Internet, interactivity, etc.
&gt;There's never just one who takes the blame, even when it's man.
&gt;And I'm ignorant to all 'women only' projects. It sounds like 'white
&gt;only'. Sometimes I'm mad, sometimes I'm laughing at it. When women are
&gt;pointing out just their vagina (like feminists do) they make a very bad
&gt;reputation of themselves, and all women of course. This is plain racism
&gt;and pure agression. Make them read Camille Paglia.
&gt;Where are there heads, their brains, their feelings, their emotions, if
&gt;just vagina or penis is all that matters? So feminists are making animals
&gt;out of women, even if I think that animals are more intelligent than some
&gt;of them. Yes, I like Duchamp, I like Gertrude Stein, I like Orlan, 
&gt;I like Stelarc, I like Beatles, I like Spice Girls, I like ninties, the
&gt;age of transsexuality and androginity and nature, that made genders. I'm
&gt;heterosexual and I'm not pointing it out whenever I'm talking to audience
&gt;I'm not making my political state out of it. It's ridiculous to be based
&gt;just on sexual orientation or even sexual needs, on something between our
&gt;legs. There are many 'hot lines' for that. Let's be civilised and maybe
&gt;intelectual.     
&gt;
&gt;Best,
&gt;Peter
&gt;     
&gt;++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
&gt;Multimedia center KiberSRCeLab - KIBLA
&gt;Kneza Koclja 9
&gt;2000 Maribor
&gt;Slovenia
&gt;tel: +386 62 2294012, 2294013
&gt;fax: +386 62 225376
&gt;http://www.kibla.org
&gt;++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
&gt;

Peter,

I think you are very right about this and I think that other people should
know this too. That's why I am sending this to the nettime list.

I wrote this article because I wanted to write something about feministic
art on the internet and not because I am an feminist. Althought I think that
the ideas behind the feminist arts are very interesting, I do not agree with
them. I also think that men and women should be equal.
I left my opinion out of the article, because I wanted to give a kind of
objective prescription, maybe I should have given more of my own opinion in it.

Kind regards,

Anne
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check mijn nieuwe artikel over "De Vagina is de baas op internet"

http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sigorney/vagi.htm
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Peter Tomaz Dobrila</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 11:09:17 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>Give it back...

&gt; Peter,
&gt; 
&gt; I think you are very right about this and I think that other people should
&gt; know this too. That's why I am sending this to the nettime list.
I agree, but on the other hand may mail box is quite full with all nettime
discusions, so how can the others cope with that. It's imposible to read
all the things, while some mails are very (too) long. The thing about new
media is that text informations should be short and precise, the long
stories should be printed. I just can't use computer as a book, my eyes
get sore. It's a multimedia machine. 

&gt; I wrote this article because I wanted to write something about feministic
&gt; art on the internet and not because I am an feminist. Althought I think that
&gt; the ideas behind the feminist arts are very interesting, I do not agree with
&gt; them. I also think that men and women should be equal.
What is feminist art? It's a kind of statement. But on the other hand, if
you look global, there are about 51% of women and 49% of men on the world.
So women are majority (tipical in racism is dictatorship of majority on
minority). I'm O.K. with that, but I think a lot of feminist artist don't
get it. It was funny when a guy on the LEAF meeting in Liverpool this year
pointed out, when there was 'women-only' meeting, that it would be maybe
more relevant to have 'shy-only' meeting, because somebody said that one
of the women attributes is shyness. Are men not shy? Don't you think I can
make feminist art as you can do the macho one? Specialy on the net. Art
is trans-... Everything else is and excuse and pure activism. Sexism is
far out. And the worst is that personal shit is then abstracted to whole
population. Aren't we individuals? There are differences between people,
everyone is different person. And of course there are shitty women and
shitty men. 
   
&gt; I left my opinion out of the article, because I wanted to give a kind of
&gt; objective prescription, maybe I should have given more of my own opinion
But I got your opinion and I'm supporting it. 

Best,
Peter
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>rebecca l. eisenberg</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 02:27:32 -0700</date>
<content>I just wanted to note briefly, that there is hardly any statement that I
find more insidious and offensive, when not outright simplistic and
apologist, to insist that "usually feminists are transplanting their
personal
&gt;&gt;accidents, their personal experiences, i.e. misunderstandings with their
&gt;&gt;partners into common market."

Feminists are reponding to *institutional* sexism, and fighting against
sexism constitutes neither the airing of dirty laundry nor the promotion of
sexism itself.   Many people are feminist before they even have any
"partners" to be "angry" about -- for example, my first feminist awakening
involved the way that *teachers* treated me in math and science classes in
my pre-teen years.  There's no bitterness over boyfriends there; rather, it
is justified anger at a world that assigns females a presumption of
incompetence while assigning males, at the same time, a presumption of
competence.   The goal is to break down barriers and promote equality, and
I think that you badly misrepresent feminism as it is known to the great
majority of people, both male and female, who identify as feminist, by
insisting otherwise.

That said, I did actually have an objection to the circulated "Vagina"
post.  In my opinion, as well as my best understanding of the nature of
biology and human sexuality, the female body part that is most analagous to
the penis is the *clitoris* rather than the vagina.  It is a fairly common
complaint among feminist scholars (and has been for a while, in particular
in reaction to Freud's terrifyingly absurd assumptions about female
sexuality) that a focus on the vagina, rather than on the clitoris or the
vulva in general, looks at female sexuality from the point of view of a
penis in search of a hole.  This is not to insist that the vagina is
irrelevant to sexuality for all women, but rather, it is to make the
argument that, if you are going to reclaim space for women, and then
identify women with the sexual organ where their sexual response is
generally considered to be located, the clear choice would have been
clitoris rather than vagina.

regards,
rebecca

rebecca.lynn.eisenberg
mars {AT} bossanova.com, mars {AT} well.com
http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Peter Tomaz Dobrila</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 12:00:02 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>Hi there!

&gt; I just wanted to note briefly, that there is hardly any statement that I
&gt; find more insidious and offensive, when not outright simplistic and
At the end I wrote i.e. - in example. So I didn't mean just that, there
is others personal shit as well. But you can't blame it on the whole world
populations.  

&gt; Feminists are reponding to *institutional* sexism, and fighting against
&gt; sexism constitutes neither the airing of dirty laundry nor the promotion of
&gt; sexism itself.   Many people are feminist before they even have any
&gt; "partners" to be "angry" about -- for example, my first feminist awakening
&gt; involved the way that *teachers* treated me in math and science classes in
&gt; my pre-teen years.  There's no bitterness over boyfriends there; rather, it
&gt; is justified anger at a world that assigns females a presumption of
&gt; incompetence while assigning males, at the same time, a presumption of
&gt; competence.   The goal is to break down barriers and promote equality, and
&gt; I think that you badly misrepresent feminism as it is known to the great
&gt; majority of people, both male and female, who identify as feminist, by
&gt; insisting otherwise.
Alright. You don't like *teachers*. I don't like some of them either. You
can identify as you like. Feminist is O.K. I'm Marsian, two heads and
wings, little green creature. But on the other hand I'm Peter Tomaz
Dobrila and nothing else. Please to meet you Rebecca. Give those teachers
names. Some car drivers are even worse. So what to do?
 
&gt; That said, I did actually have an objection to the circulated "Vagina"
&gt; post.  In my opinion, as well as my best understanding of the nature of
&gt; biology and human sexuality, the female body part that is most analagous to
&gt; the penis is the *clitoris* rather than the vagina.  It is a fairly common
&gt; complaint among feminist scholars (and has been for a while, in particular
&gt; in reaction to Freud's terrifyingly absurd assumptions about female
&gt; sexuality) that a focus on the vagina, rather than on the clitoris or the
&gt; vulva in general, looks at female sexuality from the point of view of a
&gt; penis in search of a hole.  This is not to insist that the vagina is
&gt; irrelevant to sexuality for all women, but rather, it is to make the
&gt; argument that, if you are going to reclaim space for women, and then
&gt; identify women with the sexual organ where their sexual response is
&gt; generally considered to be located, the clear choice would have been
&gt; clitoris rather than vagina.
Great! Sigmund Freud was a wanker. But debate about penis, vagina and
clito is unfamiliar to me. Don't we have more in our bodies? Toes, liver,
heart, brain, arms, legs, feet, head, kindeys, eyes, ears, smell,
voice, touch, etc. Isn't it all involved in our whole behaviour, work,
sex, etc.? 

Best,
Peter
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>rebecca l. eisenberg</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 03:38:06 -0700</date>
<content>At 12:00 PM +0200 6/17/97, Peter Tomaz Dobrila wrote:
&gt;Hi there!
&gt;
&gt;&gt; I just wanted to note briefly, that there is hardly any statement that I
&gt;&gt; find more insidious and offensive, when not outright simplistic and
&gt;At the end I wrote i.e. - in example. So I didn't mean just that, there
&gt;is others personal shit as well. But you can't blame it on the whole world
&gt;populations.
In the United States, the accepted meaning of i.e. is "that is."  This is
very different from "for example," which is signified by "e.g.".

Regardless, the point stands that feminism is not about revenge against bad
men.  It is about a social movement that promotes equality of the sexes,
and that actively fights against sexist stereotyping.  Period.  If I read
correctly, you yourself insisted that you were "not a feminist" (a
conclusion that could have been inferred from context had it not been
stated explicitly).  Given that, how can you justify trying to define my
social movement?    It is offensive.

Who is blaming sexism on "the thole world populations &lt;sic&gt;"?  What I
stated clearly, and what I repeat again, is that feminism is about
promoting equality of the sexes, and striving to acheive a world where
opportunity is not restricted on the basis of sex and/or gender.   The fact
that the majority of the people who live in this world take part in a
sexist culture of some sort does not change the goals of the movement,
which are to enact change and promote equality.

&gt;
&gt;&gt; Feminists are reponding to *institutional* sexism, and fighting against
&gt;&gt; sexism constitutes neither the airing of dirty laundry nor the promotion of
&gt;&gt; sexism itself.   Many people are feminist before they even have any
&gt;&gt; "partners" to be "angry" about -- for example, my first feminist awakening
&gt;&gt; involved the way that *teachers* treated me in math and science classes in
&gt;&gt; my pre-teen years.  There's no bitterness over boyfriends there; rather, it
&gt;&gt; is justified anger at a world that assigns females a presumption of
&gt;&gt; incompetence while assigning males, at the same time, a presumption of
&gt;&gt; competence.   The goal is to break down barriers and promote equality, and
&gt;&gt; I think that you badly misrepresent feminism as it is known to the great
&gt;&gt; majority of people, both male and female, who identify as feminist, by
&gt;&gt; insisting otherwise.
&gt;Alright. You don't like *teachers*. I don't like some of them either. You
&gt;can identify as you like. Feminist is O.K. I'm Marsian, two heads and
&gt;wings, little green creature. But on the other hand I'm Peter Tomaz
&gt;Dobrila and nothing else. Please to meet you Rebecca. Give those teachers
&gt;names. Some car drivers are even worse. So what to do?

That is patently absurd.  Feminism is not a fight against "teachers."  Many
teachers were *not* that way.  Feminism is a battle to break down sexist
stereotyping, and what I gave an example of was the stereotype that insists
that women are not competent in math and science, and that succeeds, to
this day, to keep unjustly  many highly qualified women out of lucrative
and challenging occupations.  To the extent that individuals are hired
and/or promoted based on their sex rather than based on the quality of
their work (and to deny that this happens is to look blindly upon the
world) helps no one because it promotes an inefficient marketplace and
inhibits the full range of human and technological progress.

You are Peter, but you are also male, and you have benefitted from being a
male, in some way or other in your life, whether you admit that or not.
Perhaps you have benefitted only from the fact that you need not actively
fear rape as you walk down a city street at night; or perhaps you have
benefitted from that fact because you have a much better real opportunity
to become an elected member of the government (at least if you were a US
citizen) than your female colleagues.  But you have benefitted.
Personally, I strive for a world where gender, the social contruct, does
not exist at all, and in which we can all be viewed as individuals first,
and male or female (or hermaphrodite) as one of our many other individual
traits.  But we are not there yet, Peter, and denying the existence of
institutionalized sexism brings us no closer to that final goal.

&gt;
&gt;&gt; That said, I did actually have an objection to the circulated "Vagina"
&gt;&gt; post.  In my opinion, as well as my best understanding of the nature of
&gt;&gt; biology and human sexuality, the female body part that is most analagous to
&gt;&gt; the penis is the *clitoris* rather than the vagina.  It is a fairly common
&gt;&gt; complaint among feminist scholars (and has been for a while, in particular
&gt;&gt; in reaction to Freud's terrifyingly absurd assumptions about female
&gt;&gt; sexuality) that a focus on the vagina, rather than on the clitoris or the
&gt;&gt; vulva in general, looks at female sexuality from the point of view of a
&gt;&gt; penis in search of a hole.  This is not to insist that the vagina is
&gt;&gt; irrelevant to sexuality for all women, but rather, it is to make the
&gt;&gt; argument that, if you are going to reclaim space for women, and then
&gt;&gt; identify women with the sexual organ where their sexual response is
&gt;&gt; generally considered to be located, the clear choice would have been
&gt;&gt; clitoris rather than vagina.
&gt;Great! Sigmund Freud was a wanker. But debate about penis, vagina and
&gt;clito is unfamiliar to me. Don't we have more in our bodies? Toes, liver,
&gt;heart, brain, arms, legs, feet, head, kindeys, eyes, ears, smell,
&gt;voice, touch, etc. Isn't it all involved in our whole behaviour, work,
&gt;sex, etc.?
&gt;
There are many errogenous zones in the human body, both male and female,
and NOTHING I wrote suggested otherwise.  But a focus on the vagina is
clearly phallocentric, and a decision not to even mention the clitoris --
which, I repeat, is where female sexuality is said to be "centered" in a
way analogous to the male centering of sexuality on the penis -- is not
trivial.    No act of sexism is trivial, and I must repeat that I find
hardly any action more pernicious than the denial that sexism exists.
Sexism exists.    The fact that you, personally, have perhaps never felt
the direct harms of sexism only provides evidence of the fact that sexism
divides the world by gender, and assigns the burdens and benefits
inequally.  The fact that many women (most of them much younger than I am)
and perhaps most men may disagree with this perspective does not mean that
sexism does not exist.

I believe that your intentions are genuine.  So if you want truly to create
the egalitarian world that you would like to think exists today, do
something about it.  Join the movement.  Read the literature.  Talk about
it.  Get involved.  Don't just sit there.

rle

rebecca.lynn.eisenberg
mars {AT} bossanova.com, mars {AT} well.com
http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Peter Tomaz Dobrila</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 14:17:29 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>Hi again dear...
 
&gt; In the United States, the accepted meaning of i.e. is "that is."  This is
&gt; very different from "for example," which is signified by "e.g.".

Sorry. So e.g. But maybe is English i.e.? I'm not sure. It is not my
first language.
 
&gt; Regardless, the point stands that feminism is not about revenge against bad
&gt; men.  It is about a social movement that promotes equality of the sexes,
&gt; and that actively fights against sexist stereotyping.  Period.  If I read
&gt; correctly, you yourself insisted that you were "not a feminist" (a
&gt; conclusion that could have been inferred from context had it not been
&gt; stated explicitly).  Given that, how can you justify trying to define my
&gt; social movement?    It is offensive.

What equality, if there are 'women only' things? Don't you think this is
xenophobic, chovinistic and even rasistic? Isn't it just stereotyping?
It's is the same as with your *teachers*. Most of my teachers were women,
so I should go macho, while I didn't like all of them... I'm not a
feminist and I'm not macho. I'm human, I suppose I'm not a dog. Social or
sex movement? Be precise. Society involves ALL (human) beings. And no, I'm
not offensive. I like you and it's O.K., if you are feminist. Just I don't
agree with it, making social movements with the thing between your legs.
 
&gt; Who is blaming sexism on "the thole world populations &lt;sic&gt;"?  What I
&gt; stated clearly, and what I repeat again, is that feminism is about
&gt; promoting equality of the sexes, and striving to acheive a world where
&gt; opportunity is not restricted on the basis of sex and/or gender.   The fact
&gt; that the majority of the people who live in this world take part in a
&gt; sexist culture of some sort does not change the goals of the movement,
&gt; which are to enact change and promote equality.

No, as long as there are 'women-only' things, you can't talk about 
equality. All different all equal. With other statements I'm supporting
you. I have a better word: humanism - it doesn't include gender, while
feminism does. 
 
&gt; That is patently absurd.  Feminism is not a fight against "teachers."  Many
&gt; teachers were *not* that way.  Feminism is a battle to break down sexist
&gt; stereotyping, and what I gave an example of was the stereotype that insists
&gt; that women are not competent in math and science, and that succeeds, to
&gt; this day, to keep unjustly  many highly qualified women out of lucrative
&gt; and challenging occupations.  To the extent that individuals are hired
&gt; and/or promoted based on their sex rather than based on the quality of
&gt; their work (and to deny that this happens is to look blindly upon the
&gt; world) helps no one because it promotes an inefficient marketplace and
&gt; inhibits the full range of human and technological progress.

So you're battling one sexist stereotype with another. Not very sensible.
I agree with other (mostly). You pointed out *teachers*, not me. Isn't
that your personal thing? I was prosecuted by communist government and
was thrown out of University. So what? Should I fight all communists? No,
I like them. I like communism.
 
&gt; You are Peter, but you are also male, and you have benefitted from being a
&gt; male, in some way or other in your life, whether you admit that or not.
For my benefits look above. But it's not my trauma.I just don't have Ph.D.
I admit everything else.  

&gt; Perhaps you have benefitted only from the fact that you need not actively
&gt; fear rape as you walk down a city street at night; or perhaps you have
&gt; benefitted from that fact because you have a much better real opportunity
&gt; to become an elected member of the government (at least if you were a US
&gt; citizen) than your female colleagues.  But you have benefitted.

O.K. You think not? Why? Fuck the government. I have a much better real
opportunity to die (better: change my agregate state) earlier than you
would. And I have a much better real opportunity to be beaten by a gang.
And I had a much better real opportunity to go to prison. And I've got
a much better real opportunity to be shot. Welcome to my benefits. US is
not the whole world. So what do you know about ex-socialism? It was
great.

&gt; Personally, I strive for a world where gender, the social contruct, does
&gt; not exist at all, and in which we can all be viewed as individuals first,
&gt; and male or female (or hermaphrodite) as one of our many other individual
&gt; traits.  But we are not there yet, Peter, and denying the existence of
&gt; institutionalized sexism brings us no closer to that final goal.
I'm not denying 'institutional sexism'. But it exists for male as well.

Look for your opportunities and don't believe everything Rosa Luxemburg
and Klara Zetkin wrote. 
 
&gt; There are many errogenous zones in the human body, both male and female,
&gt; and NOTHING I wrote suggested otherwise.  But a focus on the vagina is
&gt; clearly phallocentric, and a decision not to even mention the clitoris --
&gt; which, I repeat, is where female sexuality is said to be "centered" in a
&gt; way analogous to the male centering of sexuality on the penis -- is not
&gt; trivial.    No act of sexism is trivial, and I must repeat that I find
&gt; hardly any action more pernicious than the denial that sexism exists.
&gt; Sexism exists.    The fact that you, personally, have perhaps never felt
&gt; the direct harms of sexism only provides evidence of the fact that sexism
&gt; divides the world by gender, and assigns the burdens and benefits
&gt; inequally.  The fact that many women (most of them much younger than I am)
&gt; and perhaps most men may disagree with this perspective does not mean that
&gt; sexism does not exist.

I see that sexism exists, even through you explanations. But you can't
fight sexism with other sexism. Is penis vulvacentric? What male? Who?
I mentioned clitoris. CLITORIS. VAGINA. PENIS. BREAST. I'm proud of
clitoris, even though I don't have one. This is getting ridiculous. Better
name all sexists and we can E-mail them. I'll help you with that.
  
&gt; I believe that your intentions are genuine.  So if you want truly to create
&gt; the egalitarian world that you would like to think exists today, do
&gt; something about it.  Join the movement.  Read the literature.  Talk about
&gt; it.  Get involved.  Don't just sit there.

Join the party. Join the army. Your country needs you. I'm sitting here
talking to you. Just had a coffee. Have one and be yourself. 

Love,
Peter 
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Doris Weichselbaumer</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 15:42:34 +0000</date>
<content>Hi,

&gt; What equality, if there are 'women only' things?

Come on, get real! 

maybe you come from a different planet than me, but i grew up  
surrounded with *men only* things, and still i am often enough the 
*_one_ woman only* amongst males (whether it's in the rock biz, 
*industrial* art, university...)

so excuse me, if women want to have their own things for a change, 
bad enough if they're having a minority status in society when in 
fact they are the majority in population. (ever heard that woman do 
about 60 % of all work but possess 3 % of property?)

would you dare to get mad about if a ethnic minority wants to do 
their own thing? i don't think so. so be consistent. it's the right 
of every *minority* to gather and do their *own thing*.

as long as *the thing between your legs* as you call it is considered 
to be an indicator for your abilities and interests - it very well 
_is_ still  an issue.

not to talk about how female sexual body parts got degraded by men in 
the past, so talking about the CLITORIS and the VAGINA, SLUTS and 
CUNTS is about regaining what belongs to us, giving it new meaning 
and pride.

GOT TO PUT THE CLIT BACK ON THE MAP!

&gt; Better name all sexists and we can E-mail them. I'll help you with that.
It's not just people - it's a system that's sexist. _nobody_ can 
really claim not to be racist or sexist. but we can try.

cheers,
dozza

p.s. for some more provocation: 
there is the idea, that men alone should carry the burden of paying 
taxes for all the costs involved with crime that to the highest 
degree are committed by men! 
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.8</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Josephine Bosma</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 14:38:30 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>please continue this nonsens in private mails

some general information about the original mail:

The User Unfriendly interface was NOT developed by VNS Matrix
I pointed this out to the writer of this article
before it was translated.
It was a seperate art piece by Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs.

another big point of anatomical difference:
women do not urinate with their sex organs
there is another hole, connected to a seperate organ, the bladder

take it easy other subscribers

J

*
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Translation: The vagina is the boss on intern</subject>
<from>Will French</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 10:18:55 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>Peter Tomaz Dobrila wrote:

&gt;   The thing about new media is that text informations should
&gt; be short and precise, the long stories should be printed.

  I disagree.  I'm a heavy reader, and it costs me much more to
buy printed matter than to read stuff on my computer.  In any
case, you can always print it out yourself, or just skip it.

&gt;   I just can't use computer as a book, my eyes get sore. It's
&gt; a multimedia machine.

  This happens to many people, but not everyone!  I spend 2-3
hours a day reading text on my computer, and almost never have
that problem.  Here are some hints:

  Use text (DOS) mode, not graphic (Windows) mode.

  Increase the resolution.  Most PCs come set for 400 lines in
text mode, but they can do much better.  600 lines is about
right for a 15-inch monitor.

  Find a better color combo than black and white.  I use
lemon-yellow text on a dark blue background.

  I use a free program called SVGATextMode to accomplish the
above adjustments.  I run it under the Linux operating system,
but a DOS version is available also -- here's the URL:

ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/console/SVGATextMode-1.5-dos.tar.gz
Will French  &lt;wfrench {AT} interport.net&gt;
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] cyberfems 'then' no. 2</subject>
<from>Anna Munster</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Sep 19 21:28:28 AEST 2016</date>
<content>Just wondering how many people are aware of the cyberfeminist  origins of this list: Melinda Rackham who started empyre was a contemporary of the whole VNS Matrix, cyberfeminist and netizens crowd. Check out this early work from 1996 (she actually cared enough to switch the java to html in 2014 - that is dedication to preserving history!):
Tunnel, http://www.subtle.net/tunnel/lindex.html

It&#8217;s amazing how current or at least &#8216;revived'  the graphic feel is! 
cheers
Anna
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>2.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] from finance to...feminism</subject>
<from>Anna Munster</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Sep 18 08:04:43 AEST 2016</date>
<content>I&#8217;ve really been enjoying the discussion on net art and finance but I did say I was going to use a three-way prism to think about &#8216;then&#8217; and &#8216;now&#8217;. I thought I&#8217;d start another thread to pick up a discussion on feminism and net art.

What I&#8217;m really interested in here is the &#8216;return&#8217; of feminism in the last couple of years, generally, accompanied by a younger generation of artists and poets&#8217; interest in feminist digital/net.art from the &#8216;90s. I&#8217;m not sure how generalisable this is - perhaps it&#8217;s a bit more specific to Australia. But here&#8217;s an example:

Then: VNS Matrix: http://vnsmatrix.net/
Now: Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation: Laboria Cuboniks,http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#firstPage  

I am taking liberties with the term &#8216;net art&#8217; here. VNSMatrix were not strictly &#8216;net.artists&#8217;. Nonetheless, their presence with net culture in the &#8216;90s &#8211; they inhabited Lambdamoo, were active participants around discussions on net art and net critique on &#8216;nettle&#8217;, set up &#8216;recode&#8217;, a list that discussed net critique and net art in an Australian context, and were individually involved in net art projects such as &#8216;doll yoko&#8217;:http://dollyoko.thing.net/

Interestingly, the recently reformed for their 25 year anniversary to do a live one-off performance in 2015. 

Likewise &#8216;Xenofemism&#8217; is not a net.art project as one might traditionally think net.art. BUT it consciously traces a lineage to VNSMatrix and the &#8216;performance&#8217; of online and cyber identities. In some ways, we could call it contemporary networked anti-performance art (ooo even I am gagging at that mouthful of a moniker!).

Why I find it interesting is that it continues to push and explore the important relation that so much cyberfeminist and net feminist (art)practice of the &#8216;90s brought to light: the network and identity.

Whereas VNS Matrix located a network culture &#8216;erected&#8217; on the exclusion and subjugation of the female body, Laboria Cuboniks radically engage with the re-formation of identity itself under the conditions of contemporary networks:

'If &#8216;cyberspace&#8217; once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed&#8217; (from the Xenofemism manifesto)

Perhaps what both the &#8216;then&#8217; and the &#8216;now&#8217; of feminist &#8216;net' art have in common is a desire to &#8216;un-perform&#8217; the network?

Thoughts? Misgivings?
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.0</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Maria Fernandez</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Sat, 1 Sep 2001 01:52:12 -0400</date>
<content>Thank you to Pauline for sending my piece to the list and for your
comments. They were right on target. I regret to have missed the beginning
of this exchange. The exigencies of relocating transatlantically and moving
two households have kept me off line for the last two weeks. I'm currently
living among boxes so my communication may remain intermittent for some
time...

Connie: I was intrigued by your reactions as my brief comments do not
deviate significantly from previous, more extensive critiques of
cyberfeminism, including the paper by Faith Wilding "Where is the Feminism
in Cyberfeminism", a version which is posted in the OBN web site. Wilding
also questioned cyberfeminism's lack of definition and goals yet to my
knowledge you have not responded (publically) with similar zeal. 
 
As Pauline observes, I do not think cyberfeminism is over. Quite the
opposite, it has hardly begun! I believe that critique is constructive.
Rather than deeming it a futile exercise (as you suggest), it can help one
to reflect on and refine/define one's position.

Connie, you wrote: 
"there is a tradition within obn discussing the understanding of politics.
(see also mute #13) and the main question is if something (like cf) can
have a political concern if there is not clearly formulated goals; if there
can by a different understanding of politics than an intentional, which
clearly was the feminism of the 70s." 

I'm not clear of what you are arguing here. Are you saying that in the
deliberate formulation of politics it is not necessary to have an
intention? Just how can one hold a committed political position or sustain
political activities without any goals?

"for me it makes much more sense to rethink strategies and tools than just
replacing one goal by another and using the same strategies to try to reach
them."

Here I agree with you. This is precisely where critique, reflection and
discussion can help. 

"that feminists accuse each other for only being feminist of career reasons
is an old tradition, as old as the fact that proclaiming to be a feminist
/cyberfeminist does harm to your career. it doesn't lead anyone anywhere
and mostly shows personal envy. to make a serious topic out of it you have
to be honest about female competition which is a complete taboo ..."

To my mind, that women excel in their chosen careers is entirely consistent
with feminism. I'm in favor of healthy competition and/or careerism (as
long as it is not exploitative or denigrative of others). In the case of
political movements, I believe that political considerations and vision are
central and professional and career motives should be guided by and
complementary to a political vision.

"but there will also be a section at the conference talking about what the
hell is it that ties obn together?" 

Perhaps such a discussion will clarify obn's positions.

Best of luck!

Maria 

**  distributed via &lt;oldboys list&gt;: no commercial use without permission
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**  www.obn.org</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Clara Ursitti</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Sat, 01 Sep 2001 10:41:56 +0100</date>
<content>re: critique of Haraway

Dear Maria and Connie,

I too was intrigued by Connie's comments.  

I think that is quite telling when it is OK to heavily critique Sadie Plant
but not Ok to critique Haraway.  I actually see the merits of both writers,
as well as their weak points, but within their respective disciplines (
Haraway a science historian and Sadie Plant a philosopher, both from
different parts of the world with completely different contexts, and
different generations,)  Is it not a bit contradictory to refute a critique
on Haraway's ironic manifesto, its promises and what has happened over 20
years on?  Or is this the  " dissonance" that OBN is supposed to be based
on?  

As for the following comment

    that is why i have never accepted a critique like the one from maria,
saying cyberfeminism is not political or critical or radical or whatever
nice adverbs there are around. why doesn't she [simply] formulate her idea
of a political cyberfeminism and contributes it? why is it the better
political gesture to blame others for not doing what i think has to be done?
i am happy that this very comfortable gesture doesn't work any longer with
cyberfeminism.

Isn't what Maria wrote a contribution?  

It will be really interesting to read about the conference as I hope it will
clarify some of my thoughts at the moment re: OBN.  I hope that it will show
me that there is more of a sense of community than this bickering I receive
in my e-mails. I am really trying to get a grasp of what it is all about.  
 
All the Best,

Clara 
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Susanna Paasonen</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Sat, 01 Sep 2001 15:02:36 +0300</date>
<content>Dear all,

Just a few notes on the debate on criticism &amp; cyberfeminism --

As someone working on writing and reading, I've found past OBN postings on 
what to criticise and how somehow, well, confusing. As I understand it, 
feminist theory is centrally self-reflexive, meaning that writers situate 
themselves in relation to other authors, past or present (Braidotti's 
feminist footnoting) and engage in different kinds of critical dialogues 
with them. Criticism is not about dissing people's work or not seeing what 
they are arguing or where from... since debate without any attempt to 
listen/read/grasp the other's arguments does not really qualify as critical 
practice.

I really do not understand why for example Plant's or Haraway's work should 
not be revisited critically. I think the opposite, as both authors have in 
different ways been highly influential for cyberfem practices, textual or 
other, and remain to be so. Without critical encounters we would be left 
with either silence or celebration, neither of which seems too great an 
option. Without criticism the limits of thinking and blind spots of 
argumentation remain untouched and unquestioned, and without linking one's 
argumentation to the work of others there is no productive dialogue.

Criticism is central and productive in marking differences and 
continuities. As attractive as the idea of each formulating their own 
version of cyberfeminism is, it is of little use unless these individual 
formulations engage in debate with each other, provocations included, and 
come to terms with criticism.

Now this is kind of obvious but I'm typing it anyway -- there really is no 
need to agree on the merits of individual authors' work, or what 
cyberfeminism possibly stands for, for finding some common ground to speak 
on. This kind of forced concensus would be ever so dull!

But, again, I don't think there's danger of this happening. If OBN is a 
community, I do hope it's a critical one.

my best,
Susanna
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Faith Wilding</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Fri,  7 Sep 2001 09:51:30 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>Hi Connie, Maria, Clara and Susanna and all: I just came back from Ars
Electronica where I was on the Female Takeover panels with Connie, Nina
Budde, Lynne (sorry don't remember last name at the moment), and
snergurutschka (a group of 3 young women artists from Linz). Our main
objective was to talk about strategies of feminist or cyberfeminist art.
There are so many things to say about this panel and I am still so upset
and jet-lagged that I can't think straight. But one thing stands out
which relates to the current discussion about critical and theoretical
cyberfeminism. Snergurutschka collective presented a taped statement
(even though they were there in person) that they refused to speak about
their work and that they refused theory--specifically it seems, feminist
theory. To me that was really disturbing and a real regression, a
silencing of women, and a silencing of history. Is this what feminist
struggle has won for some fortunate women? that they can do whatever
they want without any feeling of responsibility to communicate with
women from other fields and practices and countries,with differences of
access and economic placement in the world?
I know that we can't save the world, but I do feel that if we have a
platform from which to speak then we are responsible to speak not only
for and to and about ourselves, but to a much broader constituency that
does not yet have a platform. We know women's history only because some
women (and men) have made it their life-long work to explore it and
teach it and write about it and show it and fight to have it represented
as part of world history. It can so easily be lost. As a feminist and
cyberfeminist I value immeasurably the theory that women are producing
and the generative and critical conversations which that theory allows
me. My work would be nothing without it. 

I hope to write more about Female takeover etc. after I have calmed down
a little. 
cheers, faith wilding 
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.0</nbr>
<subject>[oldboys] maria fernandez on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Cornelia Sollfrank</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:10:07 +0100</date>
<content>pls. see at 'mute' issue 20 full version
or maybe maria can send it to the list!?

--&gt;shortcuts page 10

whatever happened to the cyborg manifesto?

...
...But in contrast to Haraway's feminist, socialist and antiracist politics, cyberfeminism eschewed definitions, political affiliations (including feminism) and even goals.*

The political effectiveness of so undirected a movement is still to be dertemined. Issues of race and racism, primary in Haraway's formulation of the cyborg, have been avoided in cyberfeminism. This silence could prove as destructive here as it was to second wave US feminism. One can only hope that cyberfeminism is still open to transformations.

...

...Cyberfeminists followed Haraway's lead to associate on the basis of affinities, but at present, with some exceptions, these affinities tend to be career-oriented rather than political.

* see 100 anti-theses www.obn.org/cfunder/100antitheses.html
and
faith wilding "where is feminism in cyberfeminism"
www.art.cfa.cmu.edu/wilding/wherfem.html
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] maria fernandez on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Pauline van Mourik Broekman</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:38:41 +0100</date>
<content>Hiya old  boys,

Sorry to butt in after never doing so, but I could do that if Maria doesn't 
mind. I co-edit Mute &amp; have got the final version + the opposing viewpoint 
(from Suhail Malik) somewhere here, as they've just been extracted from the 
page layouts to go on the Web. They were both part of a regular double 
pager we do sort of juxtaposing opposite points of view on a topical issue. 
They'll also both go up when our next issue (21) comes out.

Two seconds......

Best,

Pauline.

&gt;pls. see at 'mute' issue 20 full version
&gt;or maybe maria can send it to the list!?
&gt;
&gt;--&gt;shortcuts page 10
&gt;
&gt;whatever happened to the cyborg manifesto?
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Mute/Metamute/Mutella
2nd Floor East, Universal House,
88-94 Wentworth Street, London, E1 7SA.
T: +44 (0)20 7377 6949 // F: +44 (0)20 7377 9520
E: pauline@metamute.com // W: [www.metamute.com]
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.2</nbr>
<subject>[oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Pauline van Mourik Broekman</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:06:01 +0100</date>
<content>Hi,

This re: yesterday's promise to send over a so-called 'head-to-head' we
published about the mysterious wane and wane of cyborg figures... as well
as the question mark hovering over their material impact. The very brief
history to this is that we asked both authors, whose opinions we
suspected would differ significantly, to crystallise their feelings into
a kind of top 5.

(Oddly enough, the pretty much simultaneous revisitation of the subject
by Mute and Adbusters - which admittedly were very different - kind of
disproved our own premise about the strange fading of the Manifesto's
influence. I've since heard from Debbie Shaw, who wrote a letter to Mute
in reply to Suhail Malik's statement, that Donna Haraway is very
mystified by this resurgence in interest ;) ).

Anyway, here it is. 

Bests, Pauline

----from Mute20---

In 1985, Donna Haraway unveiled "The Cyborg Manifesto",
thrilling cultural studies bods, new agers, feminists, and cyberpunks
alike with its mix of military, political, laboratory and hippy flavours.
Consigning the boundaries between the born and the built and the
subject's oedipal development to the rubbish dump of history, Haraway's
politics of the information age created waves. But ten years on, has the
radical promise of her manifesto been borne out by history? Maria
Fernandez and Suhail Malik both think it hasn't. But fear not,
their reasons for agreeing are completely opposed

The Cyborg (sweet sixteen and never been cloned) 

In an era when nearly everything, from small seeds to large computer
networks, entails practical or metaphorical organic and machinic fusions,
the &#8216;cyborg&#8217;, that product of early Cold War cybernetic theory, and
detourned by Haraway a generation later, has lost its political
clout. Haraway&#8217;s cyborg, &#8216;not of woman born&#8217;, the illegitimate offspring
of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, was modeled upon the
meztisaje (racial mixing) of Mexican Americans. Acknowledging that
she wrote the piece at a particular historical moment and primarily
for women, Haraway's cyborg was an inconstant figure able to
incorporate spiral dancers, electronic factory workers, poets, and
engineers; a figure who allied diverse oppositional strategies, from
writing to biotechnology. Given this radical theoretical openness, what
did the Cyborg Manifesto (CM) really manage to achieve?

1. CM was an early recognition of the fundamental and irreversible
changes brought about by digital technologies. Pre-dating Dolly, the
Visible Man, the Visible Woman, and the (purported) completion of the
Genome Project, Haraway discerned society's transformation into a
"polymorphous information system" and "the translation of
the world into a problem of coding", both phenomena with specific
effects for women worldwide. In the 1980s, Haraway was one of a handful
of cultural critics to write about the double-edged possibilities of
biotechnology, a major focus of cultural work today. Her prediction that
control strategies applied to women to give birth to new human beings
would be developed using the language "of goal achievement for
individual decision-makers" had, by the 1990s, become painfully
clear.
&#160;
2. CM urged feminists to embrace new technologies as tools for feminist
ends. This was a pressing antidote to the pernicious notion, popular at
the time, that women belonged exclusively to &#8216;nature&#8217;. The manifesto
proposed that feminists definitely could and should use the master&#8217;s
tools to destroy (or at least disrupt) the master&#8217;s house.
&#160;
3. CM contributed to the growth of a pan-global labor consciousness,
acknowledging the key role of women as workers in the global economy. It
also inspired the development of cyberfeminism in various parts of the
world. But in contrast to Haraway's feminist, socialist and antiracist
politics, Cyberfeminism eschewed definitions, political affiliations
(including feminism) and even goals.* The political effectiveness of so
undirected a movement is still to be determined. Issues of race and
racism, primary in Haraway's formulation of the cyborg have been avoided
in cyberfeminism. This silence could prove as destructive here as it was
to Second Wave US feminism. One can only hope that cyberfeminism is still
open to transformations.

4. CM proposed feminist associations based on affinities, not identity.
Haraway wrote the manifesto in response to endless fragmentation of the
US Second Wave feminist movement along the lines of ethnic, racial and
sexual identity. The manifesto called for the crossing of boundaries and
for a re-organisation of women on the basis of affinities of political
kinship. Cyberfeminists followed Haraway&#8217;s lead to associate on the basis
of affinities but at present, with some exceptions, these affinities tend
to be career-oriented rather than political. 
&#160;
5. CM reinforced and popularised earlier utopian feminist imaginings
of a world rendered gender free by technology. Effectively, what this
really meant was that those who could afford medical services and
technology would be able to 're-generate' themselves at will. For a small
segment of the world&#8217;s population this has indeed been liberating and
empowering. Previously &#8216;monstrous&#8217; prosthesis became beautiful.&#160;
If the original radicality of Haraway&#8217;s cyborg lay in its illegitimacy,
the ubiquity of digital, ex-military, and genetic technologies suggest
that the cyborg is now a recognised legal citizen, much more a creature
of social reality than of fiction. The utilisation of the cyborg as an
image of edgy radicalism was, and still is, the territory of electronics
and the fashion industry. As cyberfeminism emphasises the cyber and
backpedals the feminism, the most radical politics of the manifesto have
been largely ignored.

*See '100 anti-theses'
&lt;http://www.obn.org/cfunder/100antitheses.html&gt;
and Faith Wilding, "Where is the feminism in Cyberfeminism"
&lt;http://www.art.cfa.cmu.edu/wilding/wherfem.html&gt;
originally published in nparadoxa 33, London, 1998.

Maria Fernandez

-----

The Cyborg Fifteen Years On, Five Complaints

We know what a cyborg is: the hybrid transfiguration of the human and the
machinic into one continuous, prosthetically extended, technically or
organically enhanced and integrated body, mind and generalised culture.

The hope of this integration is for a transorganic or transhuman future,
something like an entirely new evolutionary stage of life which will
surpass the organic limitations of brain and body in favour of new,
unlimited potentialities. A new sort of future that undermines the
divisions and boundaries between the human and its others; a
cross-disciplinary movement that, as Donna Haraway asserts in her
foundational text, "The Cyborg Manifesto", has characterised
liberal societies in (post)modernity.
The cyborg is yet another manifestation of the collapse of the
traditional bounded stability of the human and its anthropocentric
beliefs. But this notion of the cyborg is a lazy reconfiguration of
already well-established political and moral sensibilities&#160;
why?

1.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;It
duplicitously welcomes the technoscientific hybridisation of the organic
and the technical while maintaining and perpetuating the critique of
technological rationality which has characterised left-liberal activism
and humanities. Neither aspect is transformed by what is in fact a
confrontation but comes to exist side-by-side in a typically vague
optimism in which all transgressions of boundaries are welcomed, without
adequate consideration of content or the difficulties involved. In this
way, the theory of the cyborg perpetuates the standard assumptions of
leftist (and proto-hippie) critique.

2. This hypocritical determination only serves to reinforce equally naive
notions of an extended freedom and responsibility which, rather, the
cyborg is in the service of. There is something disgustingly, liberally
'communitarian' about the cyborg in its current appreciation, which could
be readily taken as a covert if naively assumed parochialism or, better,
Americanism. No surprise that this should come from those on the nice
left where 'contestation' always involves 'respect' and 'creativity'
rather than war and destruction (see Hardt &amp; Negri's approbation of
Haraway in Empire).

3. Cyborg theory is mostly a self-serving sexying-up of critical
liberalism through great gadgetry and concept-busting movements in the
technoscientific organisation of living material and extended systems.
Tie-dye T-shirts are swapped for leather deathpants and ethnic beads for
prosthetic hardware in a desperate bid for contemporaneity.

4. But the errors and dogmatism of the now common notion of the cyborg
also extend to the understanding of what is actually happening in the
technosciences. The cyborg is a theoretical fiction since how the
machinic and the organic in fact materially interact and combine is not
and cannot be accounted for by a theory ultimately based on
abstractions.

5. This tendentious, primarily phantasmatic appropriation of
technoscientific development as 'cyborgian' precludes a technically
precise and fully inventive understanding of organico-machinic
integration in favour of asserting what has been going on in well-meaning
left-liberal circles for some time anyway. It is a complacent reduction
of the actuality of the organico-machinic nexus, dulling it into
politically comprehensible and polite terms.

Suhail Malik

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Mute/Metamute/Mutella
2nd Floor East, Universal House, 
88-94 Wentworth Street, London, E1 7SA.
T: +44 (0)20 7377 6949 // F: +44 (0)20 7377 9520
E: pauline@metamute.com // W:
[www.metamute.com]</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Mary Jo Aagerstoun</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:39:17 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>Could we have bio/professional background info on Fernandez and Malik,
please?
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Pauline van Mourik Broekman</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:20:11 +0100</date>
<content>&gt;Hiiya,

&gt; &gt;Donna Haraway is very mystified by this resurgence in interest ;) ).
&gt;
&gt;reg. this i'd say that it just reflects a general need for 'prophecy', and 
&gt;if a thinker manages to condense a complex construct of ideas into a handy 
&gt;formula like a manifesto, a star is born.

Yes, which explains the first and perhaps lasting impact... but what I 
think is occurring now, or at least with things like the totally mistakenly 
entitled 'Cyborg Manisto' associated with Adbusters 
([www.cyborgmanifesto.org] which was a spoof lambasting the 
oldest-fashioned version of the cyborg and seemed wholly unaware of 
Haraway's different formulation), is that it's coming back again, but in a 
kind of amnesiac haze, and, unlike before, accompanied by serious 
animosity. This is what I believe mystifies her - not the initial interest.

&gt;i, personally, always understood cyberfeminism as an operational mode 
&gt;which is first of all, based on activity, which means you become a 
&gt;cyberfeminist by developing your own cyberfeminist theory/ piece/ 
&gt;work/thought - whatever medium you prefer to work in - and contribue this 
&gt;to the discourse. the discourse, at least the one around obn is not just 
&gt;open enough to allow all possible approaches, but obn's basic idea is to 
&gt;build platforms which allow exactly this.
&gt;
&gt;that is why i have never accepted a critique like the one from maria, 
&gt;saying cyberfeminism is not political or critical or radical or whatever 
&gt;nice adverbs there are around. why doesn't she [simply] formulate her idea 
&gt;of a political cyberfeminism and contributes it? why is it the better 
&gt;political gesture to blame others for not doing what i think has to be 
&gt;done? i am happy that this very comfortable gesture doesn't work any 
&gt;longer with cyberfeminism.

Well, I feel very uncomfortable speaking for someone else, and as you seem 
to imply that Maria is on this list, I'm sure this won't last for long, but 
surely these two things aren't mutually exclusive? First of all, her points 
re-emphasize Haraway's and presumably go along with cyberfem's 
'non-natural' use of technological tools; second, I think it's clear from 
everything's she's saying that she thinks the story ain't over - as it were 
- but yes, that there's a frustration there at the lack of specificity 
regarding what are broadly understood as its aims, and the 'backpeddling' 
on the feminism half of its name; third, I think she's trying to reclaim 
for something-like-cyberfeminism a far more diverse understanding of what 
'cyber' might be in the global economy - to bring in all the far flung 
female identitities which Haraway brought into the equation. Fair cop, no? 
Can't *that* be a contribution, from a practitioner whose 'medium' is text? 
When she talks about careererism, well, that stuff is so personal that the 
single term cyberfeminism just becomes too big an umbrella to really 
categorise the who and the why, but it's fair to posit it as a worry: even 
if it only functions to be shot down, including by those who may think 
careererism is a useful political strategy.

By the way, Suhail Malik lectures in art theory in the fine art dept. of 
Goldsmiths, here in London. Essentially, in this article he was revisiting 
a subject that was already a bane of his in 1994 - when he wrote one of our 
(Mute's) first big essays: The Immateriality of the Signifier: The Flesh 
and the Innocence of Michael Jackson.

Byeeee, Pauline.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Mute/Metamute/Mutella
2nd Floor East, Universal House,
88-94 Wentworth Street, London, E1 7SA.
T: +44 (0)20 7377 6949 // F: +44 (0)20 7377 9520
E: pauline@metamute.com // W: [www.metamute.com]
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Cornelia Sollfrank</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:31:43 +0100</date>
<content>tnx pauline, 

for posting the whole piece and putting it in context.
i started by just quoting in order to shed some light on the... aehm, case.
&gt;Donna Haraway is very mystified by this resurgence in interest ;) ).
reg. this i'd say that it just reflects a general need for 'prophecy', and if a thinker manages to condense a complex construct of ideas into a handy formula like a manifesto, a star is born.

i, personally, always understood cyberfeminism as an operational mode which is first of all, based on activity, which means you become a cyberfeminist by developing your own cyberfeminist theory/ piece/ work/thought - whatever medium you prefer to work in - and contribue this to the discourse. the discourse, at least the one around obn is not just open enough to allow all possible approaches, but obn's basic idea is to build platforms which allow exactly this. 

that is why i have never accepted a critique like the one from maria, saying cyberfeminism is not political or critical or radical or whatever nice adverbs there are around. why doesn't she [simply] formulate her idea of a political cyberfeminism and contributes it? why is it the better political gesture to blame others for not doing what i think has to be done? i am happy that this very comfortable gesture doesn't work any longer with cyberfeminism.

and i am really looking forward to her political approach to cyberfeminism.

cheers,
cornelia
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Cornelia Sollfrank</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:34:20 +0100</date>
<content>dear mary jo,

i hope you do not spend to much time and energy on the nagtive approaches to cyberfeminism;-)

there's also a lot of positive ones :-))

c.

&gt;Could we have bio/professional background info on Fernandez and Malik,
&gt;please?

Maria Fernandez (USA) &lt;Xochipilli@compuserve.com&gt;
is an art historian (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1993) whose
interests center on postcolonial studies, electronic media theory, Latin
American Art and the intersection of those fields. She has taught at
Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of
Pittsburgh,  the University of Connecticut at Storrs and at the Master of
Fine Arts Program at Vermont College.
Selected texts:  "Postcolonial Media Theory" Third Text, 47 (summer, 1999) 
expanded version in Art Journal, fall 1999.
Interview
CIE&lt;http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199711/msg00001.html&gt;
"New Canons, Old Histories..."
http://www.cgrg.ohiostate.edu/Astrolabe/journal/inaugural/fernandez.html


</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: [oldboys] Re: maria fernandez/suhail malik on cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Cornelia Sollfrank</from>
<to>oldboys@lists.ccc.de</to>
<date>Tue, 28 Aug 2001 18:42:44 +0100</date>
<content>hi pauline,

tnx for 'speaking for someone else'... 

yes, maria is on the list, but maybe she is on holidays or so. i hope she will also take the opportunity to comment.

&gt;First of all, her points 
&gt;re-emphasize Haraway's and presumably go along with cyberfem's 
&gt;'non-natural' use of technological tools; 

ok

&gt;second, I think it's clear from 
&gt;everything's she's saying that she thinks the story ain't over - as it were 
&gt;- but yes, that there's a frustration there at the lack of specificity 
&gt;regarding what are broadly understood as its aims, and the 'backpeddling' 
&gt;on the feminism half of its name; 
good that it's not over otherwise we had to ask ourselves what we are doing on this list;-)
(maybe we have anyway, oe esp. because it is not over)
there is a tradition within obn discussing the understanding of politics. (see also mute #13)
and the main question is if something (like cf) can have a political concern if there is not clearly formulated goals; if there can by a different understanding of politics than an intentional, which clearly was the feminism of the 70s. for me it makes much more sense to rethink strategies and tools than just replacing one goal by another and using the same strategies to try to reach them. but there will also be a section at the conference talking about what the hell is it that ties obn together? i dont know if we have the goals on our banners afterwards. maybe some have their goals already, just on very tiny banners?

&gt;third, I think she's trying to reclaim 
&gt;for something-like-cyberfeminism a far more diverse understanding of what 
&gt;'cyber' might be in the global economy - to bring in all the far flung 
&gt;female identitities which Haraway brought into the equation. Fair cop, no? 
&gt;Can't *that* be a contribution, from a practitioner whose 'medium' is text? 

it is at least a starting point. as you all might know already we are having the third international conference this year in december, just working on the call, and this will be exactly the right place to talk about utopias, understanding of politics etc. and to present more profound ideas of cyberfeminist politics i.e.
&gt;When she talks about careererism, well, that stuff is so personal that the 
&gt;single term cyberfeminism just becomes too big an umbrella to really 
&gt;categorise the who and the why, but it's fair to posit it as a worry: even 
&gt;if it only functions to be shot down, including by those who may think 
&gt;careererism is a useful political strategy.

that feminists accuse each other for only being feminist of career reasons is an old tradition, as old as the fact that proclaiming to be a feminist /cyberfeminist does harm to your career. it doesn't lead anyone anywhere and mostly shows personal envy. to make a serious topic out of it you have to be honest about female competition which is a complete taboo, still. and one should take into consideration that not everyone wants to go into the arena and take the risk to be publically beaten up. and if you do so, is it just for career reasons??

anyway, i finally had an inspiration for a domain name for my new homepage:

www.cyberfeminist-career-center.de
i think it is really funny:-)

best, c.
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; a byte of VN</subject>
<from>Josephine Bosma</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Sat, 28 Jun 1997 10:21:12 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>Its summer, allthough you wouldn't believe it here in cold Amsterdam.
Nettime has been rather silent, and the mails that did come were
*very* long and also the connection to anything like net.criticism
was somewhat lost to me sometimes.
Here's a little byte of VNS, an interview I did with Josephine Starrs
the 26th of March this year. It was kind of an addition to another
interview I did with Josephine and Leon Cmielewski about their
user unfriendly interface and their emotional computerlife, so its
not very long or deep. As I said, just a byte of VNS, for your
enjoyment.

JS: VNS_Matrix was four women: Francesca Di Rimini, Virginia Barratt,
Julianne Pierce and myself, Josephine Starrs. We started about five
or six years ago with the cyberfeminist manifesto for the twentyfirst
century.
We started postering cities in Australia with that manifesto. We wanted
to work with technology, we're all from different backgrounds: writer,
performance artist, filmmaker, I was from a photography background. We
didn't have access to any particular new technology, but we had access
to a photocopier, so we just started writing about technology, because
we were worried that it seemed such a boys domain at that time, in the
artworld and so on.
We started computers and we did internet performance work, we've done
installations, we've done billboards. We had this agenda of encouraging
women to get involved if they want to look at their relationship with
technologies, to get the hands on the tools and to have fun with it.
Part of the project was to use humour in this process, rather then a
seventies style of feminism where you got up on a soapbox and blabla..
We tried to make it like technology isn't intimidating, its fun to use.
In proces we all started to get completely sucked in and we started
having too much fun I think. (laughter)
The last project has been to make this computergame called Bad Code.
So far we've made the prototype of that. Now we are looking for
developers to develop it further.

JB: Its for girls right?

JS: Its not particularly FOR girls, its just not aimed at fourteen year
old boys. So by not aiming at fourteen year old boys, girls like it.

JB: You're from different diciplines, but do you all have a feminist
background? Hows the everage age? Do you think there is different
generations in feminism?

JS: Yes, we all have a feminist background. We are all in our mid
twenties.(laughts) Our ages range from thirty-three to fourty-two,
so..I don't know how to answer the last question. I guess there's all
that stuff about the first wave and the second wave of feminism, but
cyberfeminism goes beyond all that.

JB: It covers all of them?

JS: yeah.

JB: Do you have any examples or other cyberfeminists that you enjoy?

JB: Certainly. Lets see, who would be on our list of cyberfeminists..
Well, Sadie Plant is my favorit cyberfeminist. I love her quote that
cyberfeminism is simply the acknowledgement that the patriarchy is
doomed. I think Sandie Stone and Brenda Laurel should be on the list.
There are a few groups in Australia, the Digitarts, Linda Dement, Zoe
Sophoulis, lots of women working in the area and writing about new
media and so on.

JB: Are there any females (they don't have to necesarely call themselves
feminists) that come before the cyberfeminist wave, that inspired you?
That you think have made a kind of breeding ground for you to work from?

JS: Its true that I was influenced in the eighties, like everyone else,
by writings of french feminists like Irigaray and Kristeva. That french
feminism kind of informed our original manifesto in a way. But we were
trying to use that as a springboard to find another way of looking at
things. And I guess Donna Harraway especially inspired us at the time.
There are a lot of women artists that a lot of people have never heard
of in Australiawho started to work in the area, like Linda Dement who
did the CyberFleshGirlMonster-CD. She is a good friend. We thought
feminism had become far to theoretical and we didn't know which way to
go. So we thought: what did they do in the seventies, they had
manifesto's and they got out there and posted.. So we thought we'ld
become activists. We had a lot of fun doing it, more in a sort of
ironic, humorous way.

JB: Feminism is a bit suffering from the fact that the diversity in
issues concerning women, who make up half of the world population and
have different backgrounds and possibilities, this diversity is vast
and hard to to work with.
Are you working in any way with the issues there or do you seek
connections with for instance groups that fight for very simple basic
rights?

JS: I have done a lot of teaching in art schools and community set ups.
I know what it is like to teach a woman how to use a computer, who has
a real fobia.
There are different ways of teaching, without intimidating people
completely. In that way we've tried to be active and encouraging women
not to be intimidated. We live in Australia, its a wealthy western
country. We're aware of the fact of course that there are all these
women in for example the Filipines going blind making this technology
that we're using. We feel that we can't cover everything though. we
are cynical about the techno evangelism coming out of California saying
technology is going to save the world and make everybody happy, because
it always talking about a certain part of the population of course that
have access to that technology. But it is not going to make us stop
using it, or stop us from networking with different people.

JB: Talking about women online: do you think, with Kristeva and
Irigaray's work in mind, can you notice different styles of discourse
on line between women and men?

JS: Thats a good one. If you're talking about chats or moos,
everybody's trying to peek whether you're talking to a man or woman,
and I think I've probably been fooled some of the time, also a lot of
people thought I have been a man and I have gone with that and
pretended to be a man. But in terms of the writing, I think some of
my friends who are writing, I am thinking now of one of vnsmatrix:
Francesca DiRimini aka Gashgirl, that her writing is particularly
influenced by perhaps feminist writings. So it sort of has grown up
and then expanded onto the online thing, because its a nonlinear kind
of writing and because you can use the hypertext in a different sort
of way. I do not want to generalize, but there is a nice style that
women are developing in their online writing.

JB: What do you think will be the future of academic male discourse
online?
It can never stay as straight as it is..

JS: (laughts) I have no idea. It is very straight yes. I am amazed
by some of the postings that happen. I don't join in a lot because
often its just so serious, just so straight. I prefer to have to play
online, play with words and play with the people that I'm corresponding
with, which aren't all women.

JB: I think I understand what you mean, but of course if somebody
listens to this or reads this, they might very well think: O, there
are these women again, they cannot have a serious conversation. I don't
think you mean serious, right?
There's something else in these texts that you cannot log into, cannot
connect to. Could you describe it in a different way?

JS: I guess its more that the style of writing puts a distance between
you and the person that is supposed to be communicating with you. Thats
the only thing I can say really. I talk about serious issues with the
people that I correspond with. I am not belittleling seriousness. There
are a lot of serious things to be discussed. There is a lot of serious
work to be done. But there is also this thing of putting a distance
between you and the person you are communicating with.

JB: and this serves a purpose of course, but now I am leading the
witness.
*</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Where is feminism in cyberfeminism</subject>
<from>Faith Wilding</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 6 Jan 1998 15:31:10 -0500</date>
<content>Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?

Faith Wilding

Introduction

"What is cyberfeminism? Sadie Plant claims it is an absolutely post-human 
insurrection -the revolt of an emergent system which includes women and 
computers, against the world view and material reality of a patriarchy which 
still seeks to subdue them. This is an alliance of 'the goods' against their 
masters, an alliance of woman and machines. It is a revolt of the chattels." 
--Caroline Bassett, With a little help from Our (New) Friends?

During the recent Cyberfeminist International (CI) meetings at Documenta X in 
Kassel, Germany (1), much discussion centered on whether or not there 
should--or could--be a definition of cyberfeminism. FACES (a women only 
on-line list) had been debating this issue with varying degrees of passion for
months; the press and other interested parties wanted to know; we, the 
participants, wanted to know. The chance to talk about this important issue 
face to face was invaluable since this perplexing question lies at the heart 
of many of  the contradictory contemporary positions and attitudes toward 
feminism(s) on-line, which need to be addressed if there is to be an engaged 
(cyber)feminist politics implemented on the Net. By looking more closely at 
the reasons put forth against  defining cyberfeminism, and their implications,
and by offering some possible definitions of cyberfeminism, I hope to suggest 
how such a politics might be translated into practice. The impetus for this 
essay springs from the experience of eight days of intense daily living and 
working with almost forty women participants of the 1st Cyberfeminist 
International. The daily collective interactions, discussions, presentations, 
meals, work, and play, represented a browser through which possible practices 
of a cyberfeminist movement became visible. The women present understood this 
to be a significant historic moment; subsequent on-line discussions and 
planning are adding to the evidence that much research and development still 
lie ahead.

Against Definition

 "The 1st CYBERFEMINIST INTERNATIONAL slips through the traps of definition 
with different attitudes towards art, culture, theory, politics, communication
and technology--the terrain of the Internet." --1st CI Press Release

Some definitions of cyberfeminism have already been offered in the writings 
and art practices of Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix, Linda Dement, Rosi Braidotti, 
Alluquere Rosanne Stone, and others. Why then this preoccupation with 
definitions of cyberfeminism in the CI discussions?  The reasons given for 
refusing to define cyberfeminism--even though they may call themselves 
cyberfeminists--indicate a profound ambivalence in many wired women's 
relationship to what they perceive to be a monumental past feminist history, 
theory and practice, and its relevance to contemporary conditions facing women
immersed in technology. I will discuss four of the main manifestations of this
ambivalence and explore their implications.

1. Repudiation of "old style" (70's ) feminism.

 According to this argument,"old style" (70's) feminism is characterized as 
constricting (politically correct), guilt inducing, essentialist, 
anti-technology, anti-sex, 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 avant garde feminist movements, 
including strategic separatism (women only lists, self-help, chat groups, 
networks, and woman to woman technological training), feminist cultural, 
social, and language theory and analysis, creation of new images of women on 
the Net (feminist avatars, cyborgs, genderfusion) to counter rampant sexist 
stereotyping, feminist net critique, strategic essentialism, and the like. The
repudiation of historical feminism is problematic because it throws out the 
baby with the bathwater and aligns itself uneasily with popular fears, 
stereotypes, and misconceptions about feminism.

Why is it that so many younger women (and men) know so little about 
even very recent histories of women, not to speak of past feminist movements 
and philosophies? It is tempting to point the finger at educational systems 
and institutions which still treat the histories of women, minoritarian, and 
marginalized populations as ancillary to "regular" history, relegating them to
specialized courses or departments. In the US, young women entering college 
often blithely claim equality with men declaring that feminism isn't needed 
anymore--in complete disregard of the fact that the very structures of the 
institutions are masculinist; that what counts as the main body of knowledge 
to be conveyed is still almost entirely white, male, and western European; 
that the new technology departments springing up everywhere are heavily male 
dominated (2); and that women professors still are less likely to be tenured, 
tenure-track, or full-time, and often still make less than male professors at 
comparable ranks. And all of this despite the fact that as a recognized field 
of knowledge and study, feminism and gender studies are firmly established in 
academia.

But the problems lie deeper than the education systems. The political 
work of building a movement is a technology which must be learned by study and
practice and needs the help of experienced practicioners. The struggle to keep
practices and histories of resistance alive today is harder in the face of a 
commodity culture which thrives on novelty, speed, obsolescence, evanescence, 
virtuality, simulation, and utopian promises of technology. Commodity culture 
is forever young and makes even the recent past appear remote and mythic. On a
recent panel a young woman said that 70's feminism has taken on mythical 
proportions for her generation, making the prospect of  measuring up to such a
history overwhelming for her and her peers. Conversely, many older feminists 
are unsure of how to connect to the issues of new media generations, and how 
to go about translating feminist ideas to the information culture. The problem
for younger women then, becomes one of how to create a feminist politics and 
activist trajectory of their own to address new cultural and technological 
conditions and experiences.     

To be sure, the problem of the loss of historical knowledge and active
connection to radical movements of the past is one which is not limited to 
feminism--it is an endemic problem for leftist movements in the US.  By 
arguing for the importance of the knowledge of history I am not interested in 
invoking nostalgic homage to moments of past glory. If cyberfeminists wish to 
avoid making the mistakes of past feminists, it behooves them to know and 
analyze feminist histories very carefully. And if they are to expand their 
territory on the Net and negotiate issues of difference across generational, 
economic, educational, racial, national, and experiential boundaries, they 
must seek out coalitions and alliances with diverse groups of women involved 
in the integrated circuit of global technologies. At the same time, close 
familiarity with postcolonial studies, and with the histories of imperialist 
and colonialist domination--and resistance to them--are equally important for 
an informed practice of  cyberfeminist politics.

2. Cybergrrl-ism. 

Judging by a quick net browse, one of the most popular feminist avatars 
currently offered to young women on the Net is "cybergrrl-ism" in all of its 
permutations: "webgrrls", "riot grrls", "guerrilla girls", "bad grrls", etc. 
As Rosi Braidotti (3) and others have pointed out, the often ironical, 
parodic, humorous, passionate, angry, or aggressive work of many of these 
recent "grrrl" groups is an important  manifestation of new feminine 
subjective and cultural representations in cyberspace. Currently there is 
quite a wide variety of articulations of feminist and protofeminist practices 
in these various 'groups' which seem to range from "anyone female can join" 
chatty mailing lists, to sci-fi, cyberpunk, and femporn zines; 
anti-discrimination projects; sexual exhibitionism; transgender 
experimentation; lesbian separatism; medical self-help; artistic 
self-promotion; job and dating services; and just plain mouthing off. 
Cybergrrl-ism generally seems to subscribe to a certain amount of net 
utopianism--an "anything you wanna be and do in cyberspace is cool" attitude. 
Despite the gripings against men in general--and technogeeks in 
particular--which pervade some of the discussions and sites, most cybergrrls 
don't  seem interested in engaging in a political critique of women's position
on the Net--they'd rather "just do it", and adopt the somewhat anti-theory 
attitude which seems to prevail currently. 

While cybergrrls sometimes draw (whether consciously or unconsciously)
on feminist analyses of popular representations of women--and on the 
strategies and work of many feminist artists--they also often uncritically 
recirculate and re-present sexist and stereotyped images of women from popular
media--the buxom gun moll; the supersexed cyborg femme; the 50's tupperware 
cartoon women, are favorites--without any analysis or critical 
recontextualization. Creating more positive and complex images of women which 
break the gendered codes prevailing on the Net (and in the popular media) 
takes many smart heads, and there is richly suggestive feminist research 
available, ranging from Haraway's monstrous cyborgs, Judith Butler's gender 
masquerade, Octavia Butler's recombinant genders, and all manner of hybrid 
beings which can unsettle the old masculine/feminine binaries.

The many lines of flight of cybergrrl-ism are important as vectors of 
investigation, research, and invention. But these can't replace the hard work 
which is needed in order to identify and change the masculinist structures, 
content, and effects of the new technologies. If it is true, as Sadie Plant 
argues that "women have not merely had a minor part to play in the emergence 
of the digital machines.....(that) women have been the simulators, assemblers,
and programmers of the digital machines."(4) then why are there so few women 
in visible positions of leadership in the electronic world? Why are women 
programmers and hackers still a tiny minority, and often considered anomalies?
Why is the popular perception still that women are generally anti-tech, and at
best secondary players in the high tech world? Sadly, the lesson of Ada 
Lovelace is that even though women have made major contributions to the 
invention of computers and computer programming, it hasn't changed the 
perception--or reality--of women's condition in the new technologies. Being 
bad grrls on the Internet is not going to change matters much either, nor 
challenge the status quo, though it may provide refreshing moments of 
iconoclastic delirium.  But if grrrl energy and invention were to be coupled 
with engaged political savvy and practice.....Imagine!

3. Net utopianism

 Many cyberfeminists feel that 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--that in 
fact, the e-media can be recoded, redesigned, reprogrammed to meet women's 
need and desire to change the feminine condition. This variety of net 
utopianism declares that the choice is yours in cyberspace--you can be 
anything you want to be--and refuses to be pinned down to definitions which 
might imply a fixed set of beliefs, practices, or responsibilities or a fixed 
subject position. As has been noted in a previous essay (5) there is much to 
be said for considering cyberfeminism a promising new wave of feminist 
practice which can contest technologically complex territories, and chart new 
ground for women. It is of utmost importance however to recognize that the new
media exist within a social framework that is already established in its 
practices and embedded in economic, political and cultural environments which 
are still deeply sexist, and racist. Contrary to the fond delusions of many 
net utopians, information exchange on the Net does not automatically 
obliterate hierarchies through free exchange of information across boundaries.
Also, the Net is not a utopia of nongender, it is not a free space ready for 
colonization without regard to bodies, sex, age, economics, social class, or 
race. Despite the indisputable groundbreaking contributions by women to the 
invention and development of computing technology, today's Internet is a 
contested zone historically originated as a system to serve war technologies, 
and is currently part of masculinist institutions. Any new possibilities 
imagined within the Net must first acknowledge and fully take into account the
implications of its founding formations and present political conditions. This
being so, it can be seen as a radical act to insert the word feminism into 
cyber space, to interrupt the flow of masculine codes by boldly declaring the 
intention to bastardize, hybridize, provoke, and infect the male order of 
things by politicizing the environment of the Net. It is people who can become
politicized, not machines, though they may be enlisted as allies in our 
conspiracies. Feminism has always implied dangerous  disruptions, covert and 
overt action, war on patriarchal beliefs, traditions, social structures. 
Cyberfeminism can model a brash disruptive politics which aims to dismantle 
the patriarchal conditions which produce the codes, languages, images, and 
structures of the Net.

  
4. Fear of political engagement

Another ambivalence about defining cyberfeminsm is the fear of forced 
political consensus, the fear that discussions will be closed and differences 
elided.  Perhaps by refusing definition, regressive identity politics and 
party lines, political squabbling, and ideological formulations can be 
avoided. As a playful counter to the desire for definition, and as a 
provocation to the press, the CI composed and posted the "100 Anti-theses" (a 
parody of Martin Luther's theses) which "defined" cyberfeminism by saying what
it is not. This definition by negation or absence was an attractive means for 
engaging conversation, piqueing curiosity, and engaging in language play--and 
it was certainly fun as a collective writing project. But one cannot describe 
something by saying what it is not, and once the playful point is made, it's 
clear that the 100 antitheses are too abstract, ambiguous, and evasive to 
function as an organizing strategy politically. While there are many 
cyberfeminists who are developing extremely sophisticated feminist theories of
language, subjectivity, the body, technology, and female representation in 
cyberspace, there is little understanding of how these theories link to the 
mundane realities of diverse women's work and experiences on the Net - much 
less how they could translate into a transformation of net practices and 
structures. During the CI discussions at Documenta X, and subsequently 
on-line, it has become more and more evident that current conditions of Net 
politics and cyberspace demand more than playfulness if cyberfeminism is to be
a force in critiquing Net policy, structure, hierarchies, access, and the 
effects of new technologies and technoscience on women. Arriving at definition
is itself part of an emergent practice, for definitions will shift and 
complexify as practice becomes more complex. Definition can be a declaration 
of solidarity with those engaged in justice struggles and "freedom projects" 
(6) everywhere. Cyberfeminists have too much at stake to be frightened off 
tough political strategizing and action by the fear of squabbles, 
ideologizing, and political differences. If I'd rather be a cyberfeminist than
a goddess, I'd damned well better know why, and be willing to say so. 

Definition as a political strategy 

Linking the terms "cyber" and "feminism" produces a crucial new formation in 
the history of feminism(s) and of the e-media. Each part of the term 
necessarily modifies the meaning of the other. "Feminism" (or more properly, 
"feminisms") has been understood as a historical--and 
contemporary--transnational movement for justice and freedom for women, which 
depends on women's activist participation in networked local, national, and 
international groups. It focuses on the material, political, emotional, 
sexual, and psychic conditions arising from women's differentialized social 
construction and gender roles. Link this with "cyber", which means to steer, 
govern, control (especially automated systems), and we conjure up feminism at 
the helm: New political, social, and cultural possibilities which are quite 
staggering. "CyberfeminismS" (7) can link the historical and 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 
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 technoscience 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. 

While refusing definition seems like an attractive, non-hierarchical, 
anti-identity tactic, it in fact plays into the hands of those who would 
prefer a net quietism: Give a few lucky women computers to play with and 
they'll shut up and stop complaining. This attitude is one of which 
cyberfeminists should be extremely wary and critical. Access to the Internet 
is still a privilege, and by no means to be regarded as a universal right (nor
is it necessarily useful or desirable for everyone). While brilliant consumer 
marketing has suceeded in making ownership of a PC seem as imperative as 
having a telephone, computers are in fact powerful tools possession of which 
can provide a political advantage (the personal computer is the political 
computer). If the Internet is increasingly the channel through which many 
people (in the overdeveloped nations) get the bulk of their information, then 
it matters greatly how women participate in the programming, policy setting, 
and content formations of the Net, for the information coming across the Net 
needs to be contextualized both by the receiver and the sender. On the 
Internet, feminism has a new transnational audience which needs to be educated
in its history and its contemporary conditions as they prevail in different 
countries. For many, cyberfeminism could be their entry point into feminist 
discourse and practices. While there is a great deal of all kinds of 
information about feminism available on the Net (8) --and new sites are 
opening up all the time--it must be remembered that the more this information 
can be contextualized politically, and linked to practices, activism, and 
conditions of every day life, the more it is likely to be effective in helping
to connect and mobilize people. A potent example can be seen in the Zamir 
Network (Zamir  "for peace") of BBS and e-mail which was created (after the 
eruption of civil war in Yugoslavia in l99l) to link peace activists in 
Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia across borders via host computers in 
Germany. The point is that computers are more than playful tools, consumer 
toys, or personal pleasure machines--they are the master's tools, and they 
have very different meanings and uses for different populations. It will take 
crafty steerswomen to navigate these channels.

While cyberfeminists should avoid some of the damaging mistakes and 
blindnesses which were part of past feminist thinking, the knowledge, 
experience, and feminist analysis and strategies accumulated thus far are 
crucial to carrying their work forward now. If the goal is to create a 
feminist politics on the Net, to empower women, and to create new 
possibilities for becoming and action in the world, then cyberfeminists must 
reinterpret and transpose feminist analysis, critique, strategies, and 
experience to encounter and contest new conditions, new technologies, new 
formations. (Self)definition can be an emergent property which arises out of 
practice and changes with the movements of desire and action. Definition can 
be fluid, and need not mean limits; rather, it can be a declaration of 
desires, strategies, actions, and goals. It can create crucial solidarity in 
the house of difference-- solidarity, rather than unity or 
consensus--solidarity which is a basis for effective political action.

A Cyberfeminist cell

How might cyberfeminists organize to work for a feminist political and 
cultural environment on the Net? What are various areas of feminist research 
and net activity that are already beginning to emerge as cyberfeminist 
practice? The 1st Cyberfeminist International during Documenta X in Kassel can
serve as an example of a prototype cell of feminist Net organis(m)ation.

A varying and diverse group of more than thirty women--with a steady 
core of about ten--worked and lived together during the CI. The women were 
self-selected by open invitation to members of the FACES (women-only) mailing 
list (affiliated with nettime).  The main responsibilities for organizing the 
CI workdays was taken on by OBN (Old Boys Network)--an adhoc group of about 6 
women--in on-line consultation with all participants. Besides deciding on the 
content of the CI, the OBN took care of the myriad details of housing, travel,
scheduling, technological needs, interfaces with nettime and Documenta, 
budgeting and communications. Because of the open and exhaustive on-line 
communications between the OBN leadership and participants, collaborative 
working relationships were already established by the time the participants 
met together face to face in Kassel. 

From the first day this collaborative process--a recombinant form of 
feminist group processes, anarchic self-organization, and rotating 
leadership--continued to develop among women from more than eight countries, 
and from different economic, ethnic, professional, and political backgrounds. 
Each day began with participants meeting to prepare the Hybrid Workspace, work
on various task-forces (text, press, technical, final party, etc.) and 
organize the public program for the day. There followed three hours of public 
lectures and presentations for Documenta audiences. Afterward the closed group
met again for dinner, and to discuss common issues such as the definition of 
cyberfeminism, group goals, future actions and plans. Work was divided 
according to inclination and expertise; there was no duty list and no 
expectation that everyone would work the same amount of hours. Space was 
opened up for conviviality, impulsive actions, brainstorming, and private 
time. At all times connection of participants to the FACES list was maintained
electronically. Practically all group activities were video- and audiotaped 
and photographed. Many of the women brought their own computer equipment from 
home and set it up in the open work/meeting space; and most of the lectures 
were accompanied by projected images and readings from the lecturers' 
web-sites. Two of the Russian women who were traveling to Kassel by a 
circuitous, even illegal, route because of visa problems, faxed in their trip 
diary all week as a performance, until they actually arrived. Another 
participant taught the group how to set up CU_SeeMe_ connection and continued 
to participate virtually after she had to leave. Thus there was an interesting
interplay between virtuality and flesh presence.  The face to face 
interactions were experienced as much more intense and energizing than the 
virtual communications, and forged different degrees of affinity between 
various individuals and sub-groups, while at the same time making all kinds of
differences more palpable. Brainstorming and spontaneous actions seemed to 
spring more readily from the flesh meetings. The opportunity for immediate 
question and answer and extended discussion after delivery of the papers also 
enabled more intimate and searching interchanges than are usually possible 
through on-line text only communications. 

There was a wide variety of content presented in the various lectures,
web projects, and workshops: Theories of the visibility of sexual difference 
on the Net; a workshop on digital self-representations of online women in 
avatars, databodies; analyses of gender representations, sex-sites, cybersex, 
and femporn; strategies of genderfusion and hybridity to combat stereotyping, 
essentialism, and sexist representations of women; a proposal for 
schizo-feminist embodiment; discussion of the fetishistic desire for 
information, and the paranoia created by the new technologies; a quiz on 
famous women in history; studies of differences between women and men 
programmers and hackers; an examination of electronic art based on language 
rather than numbers; reports on the organization and nature of webgrrls lists,
and much more (9). 

The chief gains from the CI were trust, friendship, a deeper 
understanding and tolerance of differences, the ability to sustain discussions
about controversial and divisive issues without group rupture, mutual 
education about issues of women and the e-media, as well as a clearer 
understanding of the territory for cyberfeminist intervention. Some 
participants felt that too much time and energy had gone into the public 
programs at the expense of more in-depth closed group discussion. But there is
much to be said for cyberfeminists being able to present their 
research-in-progress to each other in this kind of discursive and experimental
format. While the CI did not result in a formal list of goals, actions, and 
concrete plans, there was general agreement on areas of further work and 
research. These include:
 * Creating a list of cyberfeminist artists, theorists and speakers to be sent 
to media festivals, presenting institutions, museums, and other public venues.
 * Creating and publishing cyberfeminist theory, net criticism, position papers,
bibliographies, data bases, image banks.
 * Creating a feminist search engine which could link cyberfeminist websites; 
feminist lists, country by country reports of netactivity and 
cyberorganization for women.
 * Creating coalitions with female technologists, programmers, scientists and 
hackers, to link feminist Net theory, content and practice with technological 
research and invention.  
 * Cyberfeminist education projects (for both men and women) in technology, 
programming, and software and hardware design, which address traditional 
gender constructions and biases built into technology.
 * A transnational cyberfeminist action alert site.
 * Creating new avatars, databodies, new self (ves) representations which 
disrupt and recode the gender biases usual in current commercially available 
ones.
 * Cyberfeminist meetings at all media festivals, activist conferences, 
exhibitions, and on other occasions whenever possible.  
  
Conclusion

"(Cyber)Feminism is a browser through which to see life." (10)
If cyberfeminism has the desire to research, theorize, work practically, and 
make visible how women (and non-women) worldwide are affected by new 
communications technologies, technoscience, and the masculinist, capitalist 
dominations  of the global communications networks, it must begin by 
formulating its political goals and positions clearly. Cyberfeminists have the
chance to create new formulations of feminist theory and practice which 
address the complex new social conditions created by global technologies. 
Subversive uses of the new communications technologies can facilitate the work
of a transnational movement which aims to infiltrate and infect the networks 
of power and communication through activist, feminist, projects of solidarity,
education, freedom, vision, and resistance. To be effective in creating a 
politicized feminist environment on the Net which challenges its present 
gender, race, age, and class structures, cyberfeminists need to draw on the 
researches and strategies of avant garde feminist history and its critique of 
institutionalized patriarchy. In order to disrupt, resist, decode, and recode 
the masculinist structures of the new technologies, the tough work of 
technical, theoretical, and political education has to begin. Cyberfeminists 
must resist utopic and mythic constructions of the Net, and strive to work in 
activist coalitions with other resistant netgroups. Cyberfeminists need to 
declare solidarity with transnational feminist and postcolonial initiatives, 
and work to use their access to communications technologies and electronic 
networks to support such initiatives.

Notes  
l. The 1st Cyberfeminist International met during the cyberfeminist workdays 
in the Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X in Kassel, September 20-28, l997.
2. At Carnegie Mellon University, women students comprise about l0% of the 
computer science department.
3. "Cyberfeminism with a Difference" Rosi Braidotti. 
[www.let.ruu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm]
4. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technocultures.  p. 37
5.  Faith Wilding and CAE, "Notes on the Political Condition of 
Cyberfeminism."
6. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness.
7. Using the term "feminism" is very different than using the term 
"women"--although perhaps one should consider using the term "cyberwomanism" 
which acknowledges the critique of racist white feminism so justly made by 
bell hooks and others.
8. See for example the listings of l,000 feminist or women-related sites in 
Shana Penn, The Women's Guide to The Wired World . New York: Feminist Press, 
l997.
9. For more information and papers see [http://www.icf.de/obn]
10. Alla Mitrofanova, CI lecture.
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Future is Femail</subject>
<from>Faith Wilding</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Fri, 18 Sep 1998 11:53:05 -0400</date>
<content>Note: This is a considerably shortened version of Verena Kuni's text. For the 
complete version please see the OBN Cyberfeminist Reader,available from 
Cornelia Sollfranck.

The Future is Femail"
Some Thoughts on the Aesthetics and Politics of Cyberfeminism

By Verena Kuni

What intrigues me, is being alternative and completely conformist at the
same time."
k.d. lang

1. Preface
The following text reflects the attempt to reproduce a lecture I gave at
The First Cyberfeminist International in Kassel, in September l997. I have 
since revised and added to this essay based on responses to presenting it to 
different audiences. It is presented in very abbreviated form here.(The 
full-length version of this paper was published in the Cyberfeminist Reader by
OBN, ed. Cornelia Sollfrank).

This essay centers on visual representations of gender, and is especially 
addressed to artists (re-)presenting their work in the visual field of the 
World Wide Web who are concerned with this issue in their everyday practice.

2. Future is Femail!
Now, just to add an ad for Cyberfeminism--let us admit that...
Future is femail. This is a fact most men seem not to be capable of
accepting - except in the case it is called Barbarella and has the body
shape of Jane Fonda. 

One of the issues of Cyberfeminism should be to question how to get even
with old-fashioned fantasies of that kind and to throw a pinch of sand
into the gears of cybernetic bachelor's machines (Junggesellenmaschinen),
how to finish off the damned sexist-machistic colonialisation of
Cyberspace...

(Here I omit a long discussion of the development of the Internet within 
masculinist structures; of Sadie Plants' and Donna Haraway's contributions to 
the discussion of the relationships of women and technology; and a discussion 
of the definition of cyberfeminism.)
 
3. A new subversive cyberfeminist energy takes effect wherever
women artists work consciously with means of replication and simulation
rather than referring to traditional strategies of representation. At
this point, it seems to be near at hand that electronic media - as they
principally support different techniques of replication and simulation
- should match a correspondent artistic practice perfectly.  Sounds like
good news for feminist artists working with new technologies: Is
Cyberfeminism just another name for a new born feminist avant-garde?

At this point it is important to ask ourselves about specific effects of new 
media technologies that might seriously interfere with the break with concepts
of representation (as claimed by Sadie Plant). To answer this question in 
relation to the aesthetics and politics of Cyberfeminism, the World Wide Web 
as an expanding field not only of feminist activities, but also of artistic 
practice seems to be an appropriate area to discuss.

4. Label it! On Netchicks and PopTarts
Similar to the multitude of different notions and concepts of
Cyberfeminism discussed in the field of theory we can find a broad range
of Cyberfeminist presence on the Web: from personal homepages to
ambitious zines, from webrings, jumping stations and networks to artistic
projects there is a growing number of sites provided by women that are
not only dealing with feminist issues, but also associate themselves
explicitly with the label  Cyberfeminist".  But how can we distinguish
between  feminist" and  Cyberfeminist" webwork? As I have already pointed
out, regarding the discussions about the relations between Cyberfeminism
and the so called  Old school feminism" on one hand, and the continuing
disagreements between different feminist and Cyberfeminist positions on
the other hand, it does not make very much sense to define
Cyberfeminism as the sum of feminist activities. I would like to propose 
another definition: Cyberfeminist practice as both a political and aesthetic 
strategy - and, as a strategy working consciously with means of replication 
and simulation rather than referring to traditional strategies of 
representation. But how far does this definition fit into a medium like the 
World Wide Web which is loaded with one of today's most common means of
representation: the image? Well, representation is not only built up on
visuals, and do not forget that basically the WWW is nothing
but a big hypertext. Unfortunately, this doesn't make things better at
all.

Net politics begin with the naming of a domain or a site - and in general
this will be a name that defines not only its geographic or physical
origins, but also the contextual and ideal framework a project is
situated in. According to this, let us look at how feminist and
Cyberfeminist projects deal with this tool.  What can be noticed here
generally is that on the one hand a majority of feminist as well as
Cyberfeminist sites refer to a spectrum of terms more or less explicitly
associated with femininity in respect to the female sex. On the other hand the
way this term is related to the female sex seems to be a first
criterion to distinguish between feminist and cyberfeminst presence on
the Web. At first hand, this can be mentioned as an indication for the
unease of a younger generation against concepts developed by an older one
that worked on a different basis not only considering the historic
situation and the socio-political context, but also considering the media
available to work with - and therefore leading not only to a different
self understanding, but also to different strategies. As RosieX from the
CyberFemZine  GeekGirl" remarks, even the idea of a  movement" itself  is
based on an older style feminist rhetoric which tended to homogenize all
women with the same wants/needs/desires to embrace each other [...]. 

Whereas feminist projects tend to relate to terms like  woman" or
femina" or to go back to names grasped from the pool of history and
mythology like  Ariadne",  Elektra" or  Sappho" - thereby following
similar concepts to many projects during the first and second wave of
feminist movement that tried to point out the need for consciousness
about a  female identity",  herstory" and so on - looking at projects
associating themselves with the concept of Cyberfeminism we can find a
remarkable predilection for the use of a special slang I would like to
describe as an ironic play with the so called toys for boys, recognizing
traditional notions of  female identity" as already prestructured by the
male perceptions of  the female". For example, there are quite a lot of
names using and sometimes also fusing the world of computer technology
with phrases normally used as vulgars for women, for female sexuality or
for ugly feminist, as in Clara Sinclairs  Netchicks Homepage", Akke
Wagenaars  RadicalPlaygirls", Crystal Tiles  Feminist Pop Tarts", the
german  Cyberweiber" - and yes, we can even put the notion of
Cyberfeminism" into this category. Another major part of the projects
refer in a similar way to the word  girl" changing it into  grrl" and
thereby citing the Riotgrrl movement that emerged from the music scene
during the eighties and transferring it into cybersphere, as it is the
case in site-names like  PlanetGrrl",  GeekGrrl" and so on. Similar to
the Riotgrrl movement in music (or the Bad Grrls in contemporary fine
arts), this is also about the need to be part of a scene and at the same
time keep one's distance to the gender politics it is ruled by. As
Chrystal Tiles from the  Feminist Pop Tarts" puts it:  A very practical
reason grrrls/geeks/nerds use these codewords in titles or our site is to
make it clear that we're not naked and waiting for a hot chat with you! I
mean, just do an infoseek search using the keyword 'girl' or 'woman' and
see what you find. Cybergirl.som (not to be confused with Cybergrrl!) s a
nekkid-chick.gif site or something [...] Ever heard about the cliche
'It's not a man's world, it's a boy's world'? Well, I think of girl,
geek, grrl, etc. as words women of whatever age can use to signify that
we refuse to play the circumscribed, no-win,
lady/cutie/muffin/angel/whore/bitch game, and a way to fight back against
the boys will be boys and old boys stuff that is so subtle, yet so
powerful in our society."

Following this, it seems that within the  Name Space"  of the World Wide
Web Cyberfeminist Grrlism is not only a means to create and to claim
free spaces" for women in the net, but a strategy of masquerade as a tool
to undermine dominating gender politics that keep control over the
female data set" (i. e. visual or linguistic objectifications of that
which male netusers regard as  female") as well.
Furthermore this strategy is not only important for the
naming, but also for the visual design of Cyberfeminist web projects, as
I will try to demonstrate in my sketch of an  iconology of Cyberfeminist
webdesign" following below. By trying to find categories and common
grounds I do not intend to return to the problematic issue of a  female",
feminine" or  feminist aesthetic". Rather, my purpose here is to describe
Cyberfeminism by the means of its aesthetical and political strategies -
and thereby to develop perspectives on the representation of gender in
the visual field of World Word Web.

5. Masquerades of the Cyborg
Regarding the Web as a visual field and stating that Cyberfeminist
politics include the screendesign, we will have to take a closer look at
the constituting elements like the construction of a site, the use of
logos and frames as well as colours, background textures and so on.
At first let us ask what a Cyberfeminist website could look like. Is
there a possibility for an imaginary with a Cyberfeminist bent? For quite a 
lot of theorists in the field of Cyberfeminism the use of new technologies is
more or less closely associated with the desire to erect a new symbolic
order in cyberspace that allows not only for imagining notions of
identity and sexuality beyond the binary code, but to incorporate them as 
well.In this context, the figuration of the Cyborg as outlined by Donna
Haraway plays an important role as a synthetic techno-flesh being that in
itself already dissolves the gendered knot beween body and cultural
identity.

"The cyborg as imaginary figure and lived experience changes the notion of 
what at the end of the twentieth century is being understood as the experience
of women".

Another notion to discuss is the concept of hybridity, founded on the idea of 
difference rather than of identity. Donna Horaway characterized her cyborg as 
"an ardent adherent of partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversion." Following
that, we may conclude that the potential of a cyberfeminist figuration--any 
public image, be it a logo, a corporate identity, or a screendesign--could be 
based on a strategy of difference and hybridity. Or if we speak in terms of 
visual representation (as Judith Halberstam proposes it in reference to Judith
Butler) as a strategy of masquerade that may be the only option to outline 
different images and different visions of possible alliances of women and 
technology.

Coming back to our reflections about possible strategies for visual artists 
working on and with the World Wide Web: Is it possible to understand 
masquerade as a strategy of representation beyond representation, let's say: a
representation that at the same moment undermines traditional concepts of 
representation by using techniques of replication and simulation, irony and 
parody? 

I would like to finish by looking at that what we could call
the current reality of Cyberfeminist practice on the World Wide Web,
thereby trying to condense the results of my investigations in this field
into a short summary of what I call an iconological reflection" of the 
aesthetics and politics of Cyberfeminism. In so doing,I am proceeding from the
assumption of the World Wide Web as a kind of graphic interface that can be 
understood as an arena of visual representation where aesthetics and politics 
are woven together inseparably.

6. Blue Stockings and Tupperware Aesthetics
Looking at the majority of websites devoted to feminist issues, in the
first instance we will find a lot of them following what I already
described as the traditional practices of first and second wave feminist
movement. However plain and unpretentious the design of a site, there
will be at least the good old Venus' Mirror as a sign to show the
project's orientation, others will use the colour purple to design their
letters, some even do not hesitate to use a floral patterns for their
backgrounds and frames. And of course there is the traditional way of
labeling, by calling the projects after  big names" from  women's
history", be it mythological as  Artemis",  Ariadne",  Electra", be it
historic like the zine  Blue Stockings" refering to suffragette's
movement or just simply by  naming the public":  WWWomen",  lesbian.org"
and so on. No doubt this politics of definition makes sense in a world
wide business center, where you want to place and distribute your offers
by using a clear concept for sales promotion - but thinking of
Cyberfeminist strategies as mentioned before we will still look for
something different. Given the fact that there are lots of projects
calling themselves not  only" feminist, but  Cyberfeminist", this group
will be our field of research.

Indeed, browsing through the variety of Cyberfeminist activities from
personal homepages to those run by groups and associations, from e-zines
to artistic projects,there's no question that the range of webdesigns is
being broadened significantly - but yet the impression will remain that in sum
there are common features as well, allowing us to continue our
reflections about how Cyberfeminist aesthetics and Cyberfeminist politics
might correlate. And of course, we will also have to ask in this context,
how far the practice correlates with the strategies projected and
claimed in Cyberfeminist theory. For example, regarding the fact that
representations of femininity on the web are widely dominated by the male
gaze (be it to sell pornography, be it to sell technology as toys for
boys) it is no wonder this is also an issue for Cyberfeminist activities
longing for a practice of difference. But at the same time, we will have
to bear in mind that working on this issue means to get into the complex
of representation, body and gender politics where difference is always in
danger of being confused with and mistaken as  the other", a perspective
from which any visual notion of  women" will be an image mirroring
traditional points of view.

First of all, a really remarkable part of Cyberfeminist iconography
refers to an already existing pool of images of  strong" and  liberated"
women, i. e. the cross-dressing vamps of the  roaring twenties", the
super-women known from comic strips like  Superwoman",  Spiderwoman" or
Hellcat", the sexy biker bitches and supervixen pin ups invented by the
sixties, up to the angry grrls of nowadays rriot grrl movement - in short
: in the majority stereotypes of liberated women that still bear a lot
of sex appeal as well. And regarding the webdesign itself, it is also
remarkable that quite a lot of them - if not addicted to the current
fashion of techno-pop imagery with brilliant colours and psychedelic
background patterns - tend to prefer pastels to create a new  tupperware
aesthetics". Even if the Cyberfeminist housewife no longer deals with
household technology only, the GeekGirl operator girl is no longer
surrounded with phones and wires, but with motherboards and chips, even
if some of the SuperGrrls wear intellectual glasses and even if the  All
men must die!"-homepage threatens the surfers with blood red weapons of
all kind: In the end, all these images refer to a repertoire of one
dimensional images of femininity - and we will have to consult them
carefully again and again to ask in what way the intended shifts and
breaks support a different notion of female identity and are appropriate
to undermine rather than to confirm the traditional stereotypes of
gender.

Appendix: A Cyberfeminist iconology in short

1  the colour purple: old fashioned confessions?
Venus' mirror and the colour purple as we know them from the history of
feminist movement, name spaces with reference to godesses and heroines:
constituting elements for the feminist rather than the Cyberfeminist
design...
- Godesses wear the colour purple:  Electra" and  Ariadne"
http://www.electrapages.com/
http://www.onb.ac.at/ben/ariadfr.htm
- Venus' mirrors all over: From  WOWWOmen" to  Lesbian.Org"
http://www.wowwomen.com/
http://www.womenz.net.au/
http://www.ceiberweiber.com/home.htm
 http://www.lesbian.org/index.html
- Images from the  roaring twenties":  Isle of Lesbos" and  Webgrrls
Deutschland"
http://www.sappho.com/
 http://www.webgrrls.de/

2. Here comes the next generation: gurls 'n' grrls...
- Suzie Pop goes Techno:  gURL" and  GeekGirl"
http://www.gurl.com/
 http://206.251.6.116/index.html
http://206.251.6.116/geekgirl/010con/backish.html
- picturebook Grrlisms:  Grll!"
http://www.grrl.com/Home.html or
http://www.grrl.com/
- Masks and masquerades:  Womyn &amp; grrls"
http://exo.com/~emily/feminist.html

3. Superwomen and the Like
- CyberGrrl Classics: The Universe of  Planet Cybergrrl"
http://www.cybergrrl.com/
http://www.cybergrrl.com/planet/
http://www.webgrrls.com/
- SuperGrrl with glasses:  GeekDashGirl"
http://www.geek-girl.com/
- Manga Pop:  Spidergirl"
http://www.yo.rim.or.jp/~ari/

4. Tupperware Aesthetics
- Pin ups in pastel:  RiotGrrls"
http://www.riotgrrl.com/
- Happy housewifes:  Die Hausfrauenseite"
http://www.hausfrauenseite.de/
- Tupperware techno: Friendly Girls Guide
http://www.youth.nsw.gov.au/rob.upload/friendly/index.html

5. Tech Babes
- Tech babes from  Metropolis": f-e-mail
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/f-e-mail/
- Do the Cyborg: Victoria Vesnas  Bodies inc."
http://arts.ucsb.edu/~vesna/
http://arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc/
- Rather temperate: the real  Techbabes"
http://www.techbabes.com/

6. Superfemmes
- Belle Silhouette:  Amazon.City"
http://www.amazoncity.com/
- LipstickFemmes:  SassyFemme"  
http://www.txdirect.net/~sassyfem/mainpage.html

7. Wombs und Vaginae Dentatae
- Entrance to the female space:  yOni Gateway"
http://www.yoni.com/
- Heavy Metal Vagina Dentata:  Womb"
http://womb.wwdc.com/

8. Men haters und Bad Bitches
- Hot hearts cold as ice:  Heartless Bitches"
http://www.heartless-bitches.com/
- Even more bloody:  All Men Must Die!"
http://www.kfs.org/~kashka/ammd.html

9. Ambitious bitches and disgusting girls
- Marita Liaula:  Ambitious Bitch"
http://www.edita.fi/kustannus/bitch/index.html
http://www.edita.fi/kustannus/bitch/destdive.html
- Mare Tralla:  Disgusting Girl"
http://www.artun.ee/homepages/mare/kmm.html
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~ghmlc/mina.htm

10. Cyberfeminist Spaces and Bodily Architectures
- Cyberfeminist Universe:  VNS Matrix"
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/manifesto.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/spiral.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/themepark.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/game.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/gashgirl/
http://sysx.apana.org.au/~gashgirl/doll/dollyoko.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/~gashgirl/doll/yukiko.htm
- Enter via Hymen:  Womenhouse"
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/womenhouse/
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>8.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Duration performan</subject>
<from>Faith Wilding</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 8 Sep 1998 16:22:00 -0400</date>
<content>Duration Performance: The Economy of Feminized Maintenance Work

Faith Wilding

[Performer dressed in a maid's uniform and apron sits at a computer console 
typing these words:] 
This is a story about invisible hands.
This is a story about endless work.
This is a story about women's work of maintenance and survival.
This is a story about the laboring female body in the invisible feminine 
economy of production and reproduction.
This is a story about repetition, boredom, exhaustion, stress, crashes.
This is a story about tedious, repetitive, straining, manual labor harnessed 
to the speed of electronic machines.
[During the narration, the following loop is projected on a video screen:]
clean, wash, dust, wring, iron, sweep, cook, shop, phone, drive, clean, iron,
enter, mix, drive, delete, clean, purge, wash, merge, edit, shop, fold, phone,
file, select, copy, curse, cut, sweep, paste, insert, format, iron, program, 
type, assemble, cook, email, fax, cry, forward, sort, type, click, dust, 
clean, etc.

1.Feminist Maintenance Art: In recent decades, the mass deployment of
electronic technology in offices and workplaces has profoundly changed the
structure of work, and the relationship of home and work life in ways that
are having particularly disturbing effects on women.  In the US, women who
have largely been concentrated in the lower echelons of the labor
market--such as clerical work, the garment industries, manufacturing and
service jobs--are increasingly being thrown out of waged labor and forced
into part time privatized telework, home-based piece work, and service
labor. This situation is once again confining many women to the private
sphere of the home where they perform double maintenance labor: that of
taking care of the family, and that of working in the global consumer
economy. Made possible by automated Information Technology (IT), and
controlled by mobile capital, it is a market economy based on just-in-time
production and distribution strategies that speed up and control the pace
of work and life. 

The global disappearance of secure salaried and waged jobs does not mean
the end of hard labor or tedious, repetitive, manual maintenance work.
Worldwide, much of the rote maintenance work of keyboarding, data entry,
electronic parts assembly, and service labor is still done manually,
predominantly by women.  But the spread of automated machinery into the
workplace and the hidden nature of homework and telework is contributing
to making women's work and women's laboring bodies invisible again. 
 
In the 1970s feminist performance artists developed work which made
visible women's laboring bodies and their daily maintenance work--the
repetitive, endless, unpaid work that sustains and makes possible the
daily lives of individuals, families, and institutions. The feminist
duration maintenance performance--the actual performance of a domestic
task such as ironing a sheet, scrubbing a floor, etc. lasted as long as
the real-life task--thus compelling the audience to experience the
real-time tedium of women's maintenance work.Feminist maintenance and
duration performances were a strategy to make women's labor visible, and
to foreground issues of working conditions, the gender division of labor,
unpaid labor, and agency in women's domestic work and lives. 

Recently, cyberfeminists have begun to meet, both face to face and
electronically, to discuss ways of analyzing, revealing, and transforming
women's current relationship to IT, as well as how to intervene in the
replication of traditional gender structures in electronic culture. I will
discuss some ways in which these concerns relate to women's changing labor
conditions worldwide; and also suggest how the 70's strategies for making
maintenance labor visible could be adapted by cyberfeminist artists and
activists today. 


[Performer returns to console and types. Her typing is projected on the
screen.]

By the early 1980s, women in the US were 43% of the paid labor force. And
43% of all paid employed women were clerical workers. In the US, women
were: 80% of all clerical workers 97% of all typists 99% of all
secretaries 94% of bank tellers 97% of receptionists A MAJORITY OF THESE
JOBS WILL BE/ ARE DISAPPEARING In the US women currently are: 31% of
computer programmers 29% of computer systems analysts 16% of executive
managers 92% of data entry operators 58% of production operators 77% of
electronic assemblers THESE STATISTICS ARE NOT CHANGING FAST. Black women
in the US are: 3% of corporate officers 14% have work disabilities 59% of
all single mothers. HOW MANY OF THESE JOBS WILL DISAPPEAR? At home all
women are: 66% married working mothers 100% of mothers 99% of childcare
workers 99% primary caregivers to the aged 83% of unpaid household workers
99% of domestic caretakers 99% of physical, emotional, and psychic human
capital maintenance workers. IN THE ELECTRONIC HOME WILL MOTHERS BECOME
OBSOLETE? IN THE ELECTRONIC WORKPLACE WILL WOMEN BECOME OBSOLETE? 

  
2. The Political Conditions of Homebased Telework
(Note: Many of the particulars of this lecture refer to conditions in the US, 
but they are also applicable to many Western European countries, Canada, and 
Australia.)

Recently, cyberfeminist theorists, activists, and artists have been
addressing the role of women in the history of computer development, and
the contemporary gender constructions embedded in the new technologies. In
"The Future Looms,"  cyberfeminist Sadie Plant exemplifies some of the
more wildly utopian claims that have been made for women in technology:
"After the war games of the l940s, women and machines escape the simple
service of man to program their own designs and organize themselves;
leaking from the reciprocal isolations of home and office, they melt their
networks together in the l990s." (2) This free mythical realm--neither
home nor workplace--presumably is cyberspace, which is imagined as a brave
new world for women. Would it were so! But alas, research reveals a far
more complex situation for most women who work in the high tech
industries. Here I will briefly summarize the political and economic
conditions of contemporary female office and home-based teleworkers, and
the regressive effects on women's roles in the home (and of the home in
the market economy) caused by the displacement of large numbers of
employed women who have been forced back into the "informal" (part-time
and home work) labor economy by the global restructuring of work. 

When large numbers of [mostly white and middle-class] women first started
entering the waged labor market, their traditional gender roles of
maintenance and service were easily translated into the division of labor
in offices, banks, and many other work places.  Beginning in the late
l890s women increasingly became the majority of copyclerks, typists,
calculators, stenographers, switchboard operators, bookkeepers, clerical
workers, filing clerks, bank tellers, keypunchers, and data enterers. When
automated office technology was introduced in the 70s, women also became
the majority of computer users in offices and work-places. Because such a
high percentage of employed women (43%) are clerical workers, it is
important to study the effects of the deployment of information technology
on clerical work.  Researchers have noted the differences in how women and
men use computers:  "women seemed to have acquired computer skills that
leave them doing very different jobs than men who use computers." (3)
These skills tend to be the rote entry, filing, and maintenance of data,
done in isolation in front of a terminal. No particular new skills or
knowledge are needed for this work, and most companies never invest the
money to train women clerical workers in more advanced computer techniques
that would give them a chance to climb the internal company job ladders.
They are condemned both to mental and physical repetitive stress syndromes
to such a degree that the turnover in clerical workers is almost 100% in
many offices. 

In the 1990s many of these clerical jobs are being replaced by automated
computers and networks of robotic machines. Secretaries and clerical
workers are the first casualties of the electronic office. Lacking
advanced skills and knowledge capital, these displaced women workers often
have no other choice than to resort to low-skilled part time work, or
home-based telework. Such "home-work" includes different kinds of work
ranging from professional telecommuting, entrepreneurial businesses,
salaried employment, and self-employed freelance work, to (often illegal)
garment and needle industries, electronic parts assembly, and clerical
computer work. While for some upper-echelon female white collar workers
and professionals telecommuting has become part of their job and enhances
their value as employees, for the great majority of other casualties of
electronic joblessness, the forced "choice" of home work is a big step
down--measured in terms of wages, benefits, and working conditions--even
from clerical work in an office, and usually amounts to nothing short of
the enslaved maintenance work that keeps global capital's production lines
and data-banks speeding along.  Opportunities are especially bad for women
of color and immigrants, who tend to be concentrated in jobs with the
lowest level of skills most affected by office automation. 

The political conditions of office and homework in the 90s are
restructuring home and work life in crucial ways, and are producing a
worldwide labor crisis. 

Home work is feminized labor:   

Feminized home work is a structural feature of the contemporary US
telework, data-entry, and service economies, as well as an aspect of the
global sweatshop economy (which includes all kinds of assembly work), and
the computer chip and electronic parts manufacturing industry. "To be
feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled,
reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than
as servers;  subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that
make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always
borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex."(4) Work is
restructured in a way that downgrades and feminizes professional work, and
in turn lowers the pay level and satisfaction of the job.  Ironically,
much of the automated technology was designed to replace the rote
maintenance labor--mostly performed by women--in offices and factories,
and the resultant displacement of women from the public workplace, and the
renewed invisibility of their work, has had the effect of devaluing
women's labor and home-making services even more, both financially and
emotionally. 

Home work sustains the gendered division of labor:

It is hardly news that home-based work in industrialized nations has
historically been extremely exploitive. The global restructuring of work
manifests locally, and home work usefully demonstrates "problems in
capital-labor relations and in the gendered division of labor."(5)
Telework is defined as "work delivered to the worker via
telecommunications as opposed to the worker going where the work is."
"Home-based" telework refers to the individual working in the home, rather
than in a centralized location. Surveys show that teleworkers are 5 times
as likely as other workers to be women and to be working illegally,
without benefits or insurance. Teleworkers are often not trained in the
proper uses of machines and materials, or informed of the health hazards
of certain processes. They are paid by the piece--even by the
keystroke--rather than by the hour, and the pressure to speed up
production and work longer hours is motivated by economic necessity rather
than by the employer. There is never time to retrain for higher levels of
work, or to get the education to participate in the more lucrative work of
knowledge production and management.  For example, although women were
central as early developers of software, after it became evident that
software was the lucrative part of computer technology, they were
increasingly demoted to coding and keystroking functions, and have not
been able to regain their early level of participation. 

Home work reinforces women's subordinate status in the home and labor
markets: Despite the much discussed separation of public and private
spheres, the history of home work clearly shows that public power
(capital) has been used to structure the private lives and control work
opportunities for women.  Add to this the fact that the new communications
technologies have opened the home space to the world, and conversely have
brought the world into the private space of the home, and we get a
blurring of boundaries that allows surveillance of the home-based worker
and "makes the home more accessible to employers, marketers, and
politicians." (6) Women teleworkers become industrialized women, while
women in waged jobs become Taylorized homemakers.  As sociologist Arlie
Hochschild noted: "[people]...become their own efficiency experts, gearing
all the moments and movements of their lives to the workplace." (7) For
home-based teleworkers there is no distinction between home and workplace,
with the result that when both personal and worklife become Taylorized
they have no escape.  For women who have often been forced to "choose"
home-based work because of the lack of childcare options--a common problem
for illegal aliens, for example--home-based telework therefore amounts to
a doubling of their bondage to the home space. The blurring of boundaries
in the home-space between private and public also often places the woman
in a doubled psychological subordination--to her employers and to her
husband. The traditional feminine roles of emotional caregiving and
physical caretaking become entwined with her externally controlled,
maintenance telework in the home. In the long run, female rebellion
against these pressures could have the effect of redefining the division
of male and female labor, and of repositioning the importance of home life
and private free time within the public economy and social relations. In
the short run, since home life has no recognized public economic value, it
is being more and more curtailed, automated where possible, and
reorganized to serve the needs of paid work; and women who work at home
have the doubled role of worker and caregivers. 

Home work undercuts progressive labor conditions and standards:

The geographic mobility of capital made possible by IT uses waged labor,
which is space-bound, with the result that geographical areas are
increasingly reduced to the status of a captive labor pool. While this
makes new modes of production (especially home telework) possible, it does
not challenge "the place of the home in the economy, or of women in the
home" (8). The home space and the female working in it under the sign of
"choice" actually become the site of regressive labor practices and
intrusions of outside control made possible by the dissemination and
flexibility of the very information technology that now immobilizes and
isolates the woman worker. This isolation also contributes to women's
increasing marginalization in the computer sciences, and to the
stratification of women in the computer industry between a small
percentage of highly skilled engineers, scientists, systems analysts and
knowledge workers, and the vast numbers of low-paid, low skilled computer
workers.  It is this great disparity and its concomitant economic and
political consequences that cyberfeminists need to study and address. 
 
[Performer goes to console to type]

I'm the Total Quality woman. I am the culturally engineered, downsized, 
outsourced, teleworked, deskilled, Taylorized mom, just-in-time, take-out, 
time-saving, time-starved, emotionally downsized, down-right tired...
My home is my work, my work is my home. 
I work with machines; I live with machines; I love with machines;
computer, modem, TV, VCR, printer, scanner, refrigerator, washing machine, 
dryer, vacuum cleaner, cars telephones, fax machine, hairdryer, vibrator, CD 
player, radio, pencil sharpener, blender, mixer, toaster, microwave, cell 
phone, tape recorder... 
[Animated bits come on screen]
IT is now the single biggest part of the US economy, 11% of the GNP.
Globalization. Free Trade Zones. The Market Economy.
Bye Bye Borders.
There is no place to hide.
Knowledge management: Husbandry for ideas.
Mass customization: The market of you.
Just-in-time learning: knowledge at your fingertips.
[Performer puts her arms round the console and chants]
Just-in-time conception,just-in-time production, just-in-time delivery, 
just-in-time assembly, just-in-time laundry, just-in-time dinner, just-in-time
childcare, just-in-time quality time, just-in-time sex, just-in-time pleasure,
just-in-time pain, just-in-time stress, just-in-time insanity, just-in-time 
sacrifice, just-in-time drugs, just-in-time death.

 
3.  Activism, Intervention, Resistance
The political conditions of home-based telework I've outlined pose questions 
about the effects of restructuring work for women in the integrated circuit: 
Will this reorganization  of work further stratify jobs by race, ethnicity, 
and gender?  Will the changes in work structures "reproduce existing patterns 
of inequality in only slightly changed forms, perhaps leading to different, 
more subtle forms of inequality?" (9)

What are possible points of intervention, resistance, and/or activism for 
cyberfeminists and artists (among whom I include myself) working with computer
technology? On the micro level, it is time to educate ourselves thoroughly 
about these conditions, and to disseminate this information as widely as 
possible through the different cultural and political venues in which we work.
We must rethink the  contexts in which computers are used, and question the 
particular needs and relations of women to computer technology. We must try to
understand the mechanisms by which women get allocated to lower-paid 
occupations or industries, and make visible the gender-tracking that obtains 
in scientific fields of work. For example, many women tend not to choose 
certain fields because of the "male culture" that is associated with them.

Cyberfeminists could use the model of the recent feminist art project
"Informationsdienst" to create "Information Works" that address the
political conditions of telework, and make visible how the deployment of
IT is affecting the restructuring of work and the loss of jobs in the
market economy worldwide. (10) A teleworker's bill of information and
rights, disseminated to offices and private homes through a webpage on the
Internet could also clarify the linked chains of "women's work" and
working conditions for women worldwide. A "Home work School" on the
Internet and in local community centers--taught and organized by home
working women (many of whom are increasingly artists, single mothers, poor
urban black women, immigrants, and displaced older women)--could offer
(free) classes in everything from the politics of the new global labor
economy and its effects on women's lives and work, to feminist history,
and creative and practical lessons in upgrading computer skills. Wired
women need to form new unions that bring together women computer
engineers, analysts, managers, programmers, clerks and artists. We need to
form coalitions with immigrant rights groups that are interested in
computer literacy.  The classical tactics of organizing to improve working
conditions must be translated into new forms which take into account the
decentralization and reprivatization of workers, and subvert the already
established communication chains of IT to reach and organize the people
displaced by it. The creative ideas of cyberfeminist artists experienced
in computer networking could be especially useful here. 

On the macro level, cyberfeminists need to initiate a visible resistance
to the politically regressive consequences of relegating women back to the
homework economy and imposing on them the privatized, invisible, double
burden of labor. Many libertarians, economists, and labor leaders are
addressing the social isolation and economic privation suffered by
millions of casualties of electronic joblessness by calling for the
creation of socially productive jobs with a guaranteed annual income (or a
social wage) for workers displaced by automation. They are also supporting
moves for a shorter workweek, for job sharing, for more equal distribution
of knowledge and maintenance work, and calling for corporations that
benefit from the global market economy made possible by IT to return some
of this great wealth to support a Third Sector of social and community
work. While many of these demands seem desirable steps toward a more
equitable labor economy, in practice they amount to a social welfare tax,
and do nothing to challenge the intense stratification and concentration
of wealth and power, increasingly produced by the global market economy,
with devastating effects, on already marginalized, impoverished, and
invisible populations, and on women. Cyberfeminists need to analyze the
effects such schemes might perpetuate on the gender division of labor.
Will women continue to be concentrated in the low-paying "caring" and
social maintenance jobs which double and extend their housekeeping
"skills" to the whole community? Or will we fight to have such socially
productive work be revalued by awarding it decent salaries, benefits, and
job security? Such work should be acknowledged as vital to the survival of
human life and should be highly rewarded--not just monetarily, but also by
granting workers the greatest autonomy in planning and structuring the
work, by having them determine working conditions, pay, benefits, and
hours. Above all, we must rejoin the fight that was never won: the
re-valuing--by way of decent wages, benefits, and improved labor
conditions--of the human work of childraising and family care-giving that
is vital to the productive lives of all human beings.  If such maintenance
work were liberally rewarded, and balanced with adequate free time and
educational and social opportunities, it would be work attractive to both
men and women, and could do much to substantially change traditional
domestic--and paid labor--gender roles. 

Given the groundbreaking changes IT is causing in the relationship of home
to work, and in the place of the home (and private life) in pancapitalist
economies, some radical rethinking must take place about women's changing
conditions in both the domestic sphere and the public economy.  The
suggestion that the home should again become a locale of resistance to
capitalism's predatory effects on privacy, sociality, and free time may be
a regressive one for women, because it treats these problems as private
ones with private solutions. The utopian promises claimed for IT--for
example, the possibility of being freed from never-ending repetitive work
and heavy manual labor; the drastic reduction of working time for all
people and the concomitant expansion of self-managed free time--must be
skeptically countered with a critique of the ways in which IT has actually
increased work time and has eroded aspects of the pleasure and meaning to
be found in work--such as sociability, worker solidarity, job security,
and pride in skills.  This critique should be combined with vocal
opposition to and denunciation of the reintroduction of regressive labor
conditions and policies for workers worldwide. It is crucial that we
address the human sacrifice that the worldwide proliferation of home-based
telework and sweatshop labor causes for millions, predominantly women. The
wide social indifference to such vast inequities once again renders
invisible the life-sustaining unpaid or underpaid maintenance work
performed by women. 

Notes: 
1. Miwon Kwon, "In Appreciation of Invisible Work,"  Documents No. 10, Fall 
l997: 17.
2. Sadie Plant, "The Future Looms,"Clicking In: Hot Links to a Cool Culture, 
ed. Lynn Hershman. San Francisco: Bay Press, l997: 123.
3. Barbara Gutek, "Clerical Work and Information Technology," Women and 
Technology,  ed. Urs E. Gattiker. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, l994: 206.
4. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, New York:
Routledge, l985: 166.
5. Andrew Calabrese "Home-based Telework,"Women and Technology . ed. Urs E. 
Gattiker. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, l994: l77.
6. Ibid. 163, 169.
7.  Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind , New York: Henry Holt and Company, l997: 
49
8. Calabrese, 179.
9. Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Charles Tolbert II, "Technology and Emerging 
Patterns of Stratification for Women of Color," Women, Work, and Technology.  
Ed. Barbara Drygulsky Wright, et al. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan 
Press: 320.
10.  See Sabeth Buchman, "Information Service: Info-Work," October No. 71, 
Winter, l995: 103 ff.
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>9.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Josephine Bosma: What are Words Worth</subject>
<from>mute</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Sun, 26 Oct 1997 19:38:09 +0100 (MET)</date>
<content>This text appeared in the latest edition of Mute, in which there
is a little special about cyberfeminism.

*
What are Words Worth?

How to discover the cyborg in yourself? Once the question was, in answer to
the ultimate patriarchal image of god as man and man as god: how to
discover the goddess in your female self. Tragically long after the council
of Trente somewhere in the 16th or 17th century where the question 'Do
Women Possess a Soul' was raised, the discussion about women being a social
construction or a species that is essentially born, has continued deep into
our times. After Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs' "I'd rather be a
cyborg then a goddess", the term cyberfeminism was born. 'Rather being a
cyborg then a goddess' means shaking off some last remains of possible male
sexism which lie hidden within the meaning of the word 'goddess'.
Cyberfeminists attack patriarchy within one of its bases of power: the
creation of rules for communication and the exchange of information. Taking
part in the development of the internet, which is by no means a finished
product, and defining the world differently from there, they can slip
outside of traditional structures. Like most 'alternative' net.related
culture however, cyberfeminism has stayed in the margins of both real life
culture and the internet for the past six years. Now cyberfeminists seem to
be expanding their territory.

Technology has always been dominated by its male contributors (despite many
attempts to get girls to participate), but with the internet it seems
technology has bred one of its rare products that women can easily connect
to. Here we have a toy or tool that is not just highly technically complex,
but also offers great social challenges. This is technology that 'lives'
and is connecting to lives, creating new realities, emphasising dormant
freedoms of expression and being. Now that computers are connected to
networks and offer an expanding social perspective, it is much more
interesting to get involved in the development of the hardware, software,
theory and social practice of 'computerlife'. As Alla Mitrifanova, a
cyberfeminist and media critic, amongst other things, says: "Generally
speaking the internet reality is a specific cyberfeminist issue. I think
that net communication could easily show this freedom of presentation mode:
freedom of images, of roles, of subject-concepts."

Now this freedom needs to be explored and, more importantly, it
should produce new realities that extend to the real life situations
(outside the net that is) of women, as it's still 'war' the minute you go
out on the street. Alla Mitrofanova thinks that with a change of
(self)perception, comes an automatic change of reality: "Some knowledge
constructions, some psychic constructions, discursive and non-discursive
practices regulate our physical activity and that's why there is a
correlation between our presence in the internet and our real behaviour
outside of the computer screen. While we have no centre in the internet
space and can choose different possibilities, we can see in real life that
our behaviour shows signs that there is no centre, no male or female
position in the field of motivations, and that we are relatively free in
the choice of aesthetics." The question provoked by a statement like this
of course is: do experiences like this go beyond the very personal and how
deeply can they affect social and political life in the long term?

The term 'cyberfeminism' needs some exploration and elaboration. With its
relative incomprehensibility outside of a small circle, this might not be a
bad thing. Sometimes that means starting from the beginning. The Old Boys'
Network, an initiative of amongst others Cornelia Sollfranck, who is mostly
known for performance art, will explore the following questions in the
Workspace at Documenta this year: "Cyberfeminism.... Fresh ideology? New
code of behaviour? Artistic playground? Semiotic straightjacket?" Cornelia
Sollfranck would like to keep the term cyberfeminism as open as possible:
"As far as I know there are no definitions or there are many different
ones. We'll try to bring together all the different notions of this term.
We'll think of strategies for how this term could perhaps help set up a new
goal, a new political goal." And: "For me cyberfeminism is a concept of
every single person starting to think by themselves and not reading the big
thinkers." This last idea seems like an unwise misinterpretation of
democratic and emancipatory principles. Especially in a time when the
development of feminism into post-feminism, neo-feminism, cyber-feminism is
scattering the powers of women and confusing their goals, all will benefit
from some historical awareness. The writer Faith Wilding wrote after
pre-reading my article: "I think we should all read whatever we can.
Ignorance of what has been done and thought by others will only lead to
needless repetition and lost time."

"I think, in light of our experiences online, our investigation of network
communication areas and mailinglists and websites, that women don't have a
dominant voice in these media, although they have a lot to say. Maybe the
environment of the internet is really a great environment for women,
because people can't interrupt what you're saying. Men can't interrupt you.
You can always finish your sentence online," says Kathy Rae Huffman,
curator and media critic. She has started an initiative called Face
Settings with her friend Eva Wohlgemuth, who is an artist, that deals with
communication between groups of women. Being born travellers and explorers
they are interested in getting groups of women just outside the "network
community" connected and giving them a "kickstart" on the internet. Besides
all the other specific information that can be found there, they have
online parties via their website and a closed mailinglist called Faces.
Concerning the groups of women from 'remote' places like Zagreb, St.
Petersburg, Bilbao or Dublin that are not so present within many internet
discourses, Kathy Rae Huffman says: "They have different perceptions of
what the internet is and what communication means. It's much more important
to be connected to people outside, they don't have many opportunities."
Asking yourself what cyberfeminism means, the sharp contrast between the
opportunities for rich and poor, men and women, races and cultures within a
fast developing high tech world becomes disturbingly evident, it grows on
you in an eerie way.

Once part of 'The Network', will all 'cyborgs' automatically be equal? What
does it mean to communicate online? Eva Wohlgemuth: "We think that women
are communicating differently and we somehow observe how we are doing it
ourselves. We observe our contact with other women." A basic idea behind a
lot of cyberfeminist rhetoric is the disappearance of gender on the net.
However, this idea is often uttered carelessly. In the same way that the
alleged absence of the body in virtual networks has created many
misunderstandings, now the wish for freedom of gender and the fragile real
presence of this freedom in a liberated mind are connected to the
invisibility and intangibility of presence on the net, creating the
illusion of freedom from undesired genderrelated social and political
contructions. What freedom is there in the 'disappearance of gender' when
this freedom is one of hiding in travesty, androgyny or invisibility? Could
there be other approaches for establishing this greatly desired freedom?

As written language is the main medium of communication on the internet, it
is a logical step to see if maybe here there is already a noticeable and
usable difference in communication and the creation and perception of
knowledge and culture. Like with the present changes the internet brings,
there has been a previous 'information revolution' with the invention of
print at the end of the middle ages. This invention liberated us from the
possession and creation of knowledge by the church, but it had some
disadvantages too. "If there is one thing that print has given us, it is
the concept of standardisation. Partly because print itself doesn't change,
the medium has helped to promote a mindset in which we want other aspects
of life - and language -  to remain fixed and unalterable." In the book
Nattering the Net by Dale Spender, a researcher and teacher who is also
'co-originator' of WIKED, a database on women, the first chapter is a
wonderful reader for anyone involved in the books-versus-computers debate.
"The dismay and distress at the passing of the print era has more to do
with bringing to an end a patriarchal presence that has been encoded in
communication than it has to do with the loss of print." Writing on the net
is different. This means once again that powers will shift and culture will
be redefined. To have influence in this, one has to be present and shape
the change. This presence needs to be a noticeable and clear one.

Josephine Starrs of VNS Matrix mentioned, when asked which women had
influenced her, the French philosophers Irigaray and Kristeva. Their
'&#233;criture feminine' has a radical approach to language as a liberation
tool. When asked if she sees different styles in discourse between men and
women online Josephine Starrs says: "..I am thinking now of one of VNS
Matrix: Francesca Da Rimini aka Gashgirl, ...her writing is particularly
influenced by feminist writings. It has sort of grown up and then expanded
into the online thing, because it's a nonlinear kind of writing and because
you can use the hypertext in a different kind of way. I do not want to
generalise, but there is a nice style that women are developing in their
online writing." Academic, male discourse as it is extended on some
internet mailing lists, is an insult to the nets' possibilities. The
intentions of writers who refuse to let go of traditional reasoning are
often lost in the lustre of datafragments that whirl across a computer
screen. I can imagine some good and maybe funny cyberfeminist actions here.
Rules and traditions concerning linear reasoning and the creation of
meaning by academies and institutions could be tackled in performance-like
interventions on different internet platforms. Women who engage in this
should be aware of the fact that what they do might not be appreciated. The
internet was designed and produced by many, many males and they are very
protective about its protocols and traditions. "Internet research has to
have an appropriate analytical discourse: not descriptive, not
hierarchical, but operative..." Alla Mitrofanova is a good analyst of the
tool she likes to work with: "The Internet came not through thinking, not
through concepts or images, it came through practice, through functioning."
It is within this functioning that new ideas and interventions could occur.
Diana McCarthy, involved in the organisation of the Faces mailinglist,
writes: "I think one of the main failures of feminism was that it went for
equal inclusion in a rotten system. What I'm more interested in is a
feminism that looks to change paradigms that are bad (even if they are
efficient)."

Maybe some of the qualities of the commotion, the creation of visions which
erupt with the development of a radically new communication tool bear close
resemblance to the experience of the uncovering and denouncing of
restrictive social phenomena. Maybe some freedom lies in the dissection and
deconstruction of the style of media use by the 'dominator', patriarchy.
Maybe all we have to do is amplify, intensify the revolutionary force of
the new media themselves. The definitions of rationality, science and art,
all restrictive, male academic traditions should have trouble surviving. We
do not only want the streets back, as the slogan for safe streets goes, we
also need a much more radical change: we need language back.
Josephine Bosma

WebSiteStory
Radio Patapoe
Amsterdam

"As a woman I have not enough formal expressions, in discourses there is no
cultural expression of the body and the sexualised body. Motherhood and
pregnancy are totally hidden under medical and pedagogical discourses. We
have silence in the most productive existential experiences. Having freedom
we have kind of strong creative obligations to produce more formal
expressions in a poetic way. That is what cyberfeminism and other
extravagant self articulations are about."

Alla Mitrofanova, Rotterdam, April 19th 1997.
--
-----mute7 out now, deadline mute8 30-5-1997

---------mute: 2nd floor, 135-139 Curtain Rd, LONDON EC2A 3BX.

----------------------------T: +44 171 613 4743/ F: +44 171 613 4052

----------------------------------E: mute {AT} easynet.co.uk/ W: www.metamute.com

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</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>10.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Cyberfeminism Part 1</subject>
<from>Steven Kurtz</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>14 Jul 97 15:45:10 EDT</date>
<content>Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism

Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble

Cyberfeminism is a promising new wave of (post)feminist thinking and practice.
Through the work of numerous Netactive women, there is now a distinct
cyberfeminist Netpresence that is fresh, brash, smart, and iconoclastic of many
of the tenets of classical feminism. At the same time, cyberfeminism has only
taken its first steps in contesting technologically complex territories. To
complicate matters further, these new territories have been overcoded to a
mythic degree as a male domain. Consequently, cyberfeminist incursion into
various technoworlds (CD-ROM production, Web works, lists and news groups,
artificial intelligence, etc.) has been largely nomadic, spontaneous, and
anarchic. On the one hand, these qualities have allowed maximum freedom for
diverse manifestations, experiments, and the beginnings of various written and
artistic genres. On the other, networks and organizations seem somewhat lacking,
and the theoretical issues of gender regarding the techno-social are immature
relative to their development in spaces of greater gender equity won through
struggle. Given such conditions, some feminist strategies and tactics will
repeat themselves as women attempt to establish a foothold in a territory
traditionally denied to them. This repetition should not be considered with the
usual yawn of boredom whenever the familiar appears, as cyberspace is a crucial
point of gender struggle that is desperately in need of gender diversification
(and diversity in general). 

The Feminist Cycle

One aspect immediately evident is that the Net provides cyberfeminists with a
vehicle crucially different from anything available to prior feminist waves.
Historically, feminist activism has depended on women getting together
bodily--in kitchens, churches, assembly halls, and in the streets. The
organizing cell for the first phase of feminism was the sewing circle, the
quilting group, or the ladies' charity organization. Women met together in
private to plan their public campaigns for political and legal enfranchisement.
In these campaigns the visible presence of groups of women plucked from the
silenced isolation of their homes, became a public sign of female rebellion and
activism. Women acting together, speaking in public, marching through the
streets, and disrupting public life were activities that opened up political
territories that were traditionally closed to them. 

During the second wave of feminism, which emerged in the early sixties, women
again started meeting together to plan actions.  They met in
consciousness-raising groups that became the organizing cells for a revived
feminist movement. This time, feminists began to master a new tactic: Creating
counter-spectacle in the media. Women staged actions targeted at highly visible
public icons.  Such patriarchal monuments under feminist assault in the US
movement included the Miss America Pageant, Playboy offices and clubs, Wall
Street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pentagon, and the White House.
Everywhere the actions occurred, the news media was there to document outrageous
female misbehavior.  These tactics spread the news of growing feminism
nationally and internationally. Visible female disruption and subversion also
provided images of female empowerment that inspired many women (and men) to
begin taking direct autonomous action on behalf of the rights of women. 

If the first wave was marked by women's incursion into new political
territories, this second wave was marked by a march into new economic
territories and by a reconfiguration of familiar ones. Most significant was
women's demand for access to the means of financial independence-a struggle that
continues in the third phase of feminist practice. On the more traditional end
of the struggle, domestic space was no longer perceived as a totalizing feminine
space, but was re-presented as a space of ambiguity with both celebratory and
exploitive characteristics. On the political front, feminism focused on
liberation practices, and left the old right wing practices behind, such as
temperance movements.

The third wave of feminisms (cultural-, eco-, theoretical-, sex positive-,
lesbian-, anti-porn-, multicultural-, etc.)--often collectively dubbed
Postfeminism--continues to use these models of public action and rebellion. A
recent case in point was the short-lived but highly visibleWomen's Action
Coalition (WAC) that began in New York in late l991, following a series of
events that enraged women in the US: The dramatic, nationally televised
Hill/Thomas hearings; the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson rape trials; and
the judicial battles over abortion rights: all these contributed to a sense that
it was time for women to launch a "visible and remarkable resistance" to social,
sexual, economic, and political oppression and violence. WAC quickly became a
media attractor as it launched action after visible action. WAC produced a
spectacle that was hip, sexy, cool, fun, outrageous, and visible. Eight thousand
women joined in the first year, and chapters sprang up around the US and in
Canada. Much of this initial success was due to the highly effective
communication and networking system that WAC immediately organized. Central to
this system was a phone tree, combined with adequate access to fax machines,
e-mail, and media contacts. In a sense, WAC was an early proto-electronic
feminist organization. Having motivated and organized so many women, WAC
reinvigorated feminist activism, and, in the US, led a new wave of contestation
in all the traditional feminist territories.  Like most radical organizations,
it was only a temporary tactical organization. It was unable to survive its
rapid growth, and all too soon reached critical mass, when explosive splintering
forced it to choose one of two outcomes: purge and bureaucratize, or dissolve.
WAC wasn't able to organize its way out of the contradictions of difference, nor
was it able to continue resisting some of the dogmatic tendencies of
"mainstream" and "security state" feminism which proscribe certain behaviors,
beliefs, and lifestyles. While the former option of purge and bureaucratize was
first attempted, the fabric of radicality was strong enough that dissolution
spontaneously occurred.

The third wave (with a few exceptions) has missed moving into one crucial area,
however, and that was the revolution in communications and information
technology. Cyberfeminism represents a new set of explorers ready to move the
struggle into this new territory. As yet, the movement is still too young to
face struggles inherent in the economy of difference. As on most frontiers,
there still *seems* to be room for everyone. At the same time, there are lessons
to be learned from history.  Radical movements in their infancy tend to return
to past patterns.  Cyberfeminism is no different, and key feminist issues such
as feminine subjectivity, separatism and boundary maintenance, and territorial
identification are bound to arise again, even if they seem dead in other
feminist territories. 

Territorial Identification

What is the territory that cyberfeminism is questioning, theorizing, and
actively confronting? The surface answer is, of course, cyberspace, but such an
answer is not really satisfying. Cyberspace is but one small part, since the
infrastructure that produces this virtual world is so vast. Hardware and
software design and manufacture are certainly of key importance, and perhaps
most significant of all are the institutions that train those who design the
products of cyber-life.  Overwhelmingly, these products are designed by males
for business or military operations. Clearly these are still primarily male
domains (i.e., men are the policy makers) in which men have the buying power,
and so the products are designed to meet their needs or to play on their
desires. From the beginning, entrance into this high-end techno-world (the
virtual class) has been skewed in favor of males.* In early
socialization/education, technology and technological process are gendered as
male domains. When females manipulate complex technology in a productive or
creative manner, it is viewed and treated as a deviant act that deserves
punishment. 

This is not to say that women do not use complex technology. Women are an
important consumer market, and help maintain the status quo when the technology
is used in a passive manner. For example, most institutions of commerce or
government are all too happy to give women computers, e-mail accounts, and so on
if it will make them better bureaucrats. This is why the increased presence of
women on the Net is not solely a positive indication of equality. It is a very
similar situation to late 50s/early 60s America when middle-class husbands were
more than happy to buy a second car for their wives--as long as it made them
more efficient domestic workers. Technology in this case was used to deepen the
confinement of women within their situation rather than liberate them from it.
(As a general rule, anything you get without struggle should be viewed with
intense skepticism). The technology and technological processes to which women
currently have access are the consequence of structural economic necessity.
However, all we need is a shift in consciousness to begin the subversion of the
current gender structure (this is the positve side of so many women being
on-line).

Thus, the territory of cyberfeminism is large. It includes the objective arenas
of cyberspace, institutions of industrial design, and institutions of
education-that is, those arenas in which technological process is gendered in a
manner that excludes women from access to the empowering points of
techno-culture. However, the territory does not stop there. 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. Cyberspace does not exist in a vacuum; it is intimately connected to
numerous real-world institutions and systems that thrive on gender separation
and hierarchy. Finally, cyberfeminism must radically expand the critique
concerning the media hype about the "technoworld." While the utopian
cyber-spectacle has been adequately deflated by documentation of its abuse of
the bureaucratic class, low-end technocratic class, and workers involved in
product manufacturing, this critique, in terms of gender and race, is very
modest.  For example, who can possibly believe that age, race, or gender do not
matter in cyberspace? The ability to assign oneself social characteristics
online is only an alibi for a very traditional and exploitive division of labor
that is representative of the overall system, and a seduction element for those
whose real-world social environment has been eliminated by pancapitalism's
destruction of social spaces of autonomy. We must also ask what awaits people in
a minoritarian position once they are online? Will they find familiar and
significant rhetorics, discussions, and images? Is there a continuity of
discourse between the real and the virtual (as there is for the white middle
class)? While there are virtual pockets in which continuity exists, the
overwhelmingly representative situation is geared to the same majoritarian
consciousness that  is found in the real-world. In other words, elements of
social stratification are reflected and replicated in cyberspace. 
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Cyberfeminism Part 2</subject>
<from>Steven Kurtz</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>14 Jul 97 15:45:48 EDT</date>
<content>Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism continued:

Separatism and Boundary Maintenance

Whenever feminism begins pushing its way into new territories, the avant garde
members of the movement face incredible problems and nearly insurmountable odds.
Cyberfeminism is no different. Relatively few women have the skills to see
through the cyber-hype, to understand the complexity of the system, and most
importantly, to teach other women how to survive and actively use the system.
For most women in the technosphere, it takes all their energy simply to survive
transgressing the norm and learning massive amounts of dense technical
information.  Just doing the latter is a difficult task that few people
accomplish, but throw in the condition of gender isolation (learning and working
in a male domain) and the generally negative social representation of being a
geek girl (i.e., going against the grain of female construction) and it becomes
immediately apparent that alienation levels are extremely high.  Under such
conditions, as in the past, separatist activity has been a useful tactic, as
well as one that can foster efficient pedagogical situations.

Kathy Huffman often jokes that "in cyberspace men can't interrupt you [women]."
The joke is funny because it does represent a truth of gendered interruption;
however, the pessimistic side of this point is that women are interrupted in
cyberspace. They are often overwhelmed with counter-discourse, ignored, or
totalized under the sign of being "politically correct." A remark by a woman may
not be interrupted, but continuity of discourse, with particular regard to
women's issues, is often interrupted. Here again there is a need for separatist
activities at this point in post/feminist decolonization of cyberspace. During
this early stage of development, women need to experiment in developing their
own working and learning spaces. This kind of activity has occurred in all
phases of feminists territorial decolonization, and has shown itself to be very
productive. Separatism should be welcome among cyberfeminists and among those
who support a cyberspace of difference. It should be remembered that separatism
among a minoritarian (disenfranchised) group is not negative. It's not sexist,
it's not racist, and it's not even necessarily a hindrance to democratic
development. There is a distinct difference between using exclusivity as part of
a strategy to make a specific perception or way of being in the world a
universal, and using exclusivity as a means to escape a false universal (one
goal of cyberfeminist separatism). There is also a distinct difference between
using exclusion as a means to maintain structures of domination, and using it as
a means to undermine them (another goal of cyberfeminist separatism).

At the same time, separatism can reach a point where it is counterproductive.
The cycle of useful production in regard to separatist activity can be traced by
the applicability of one of its main slogans, "The personal is political." In
consciousness-raising groups, personal information is typically disclosed. Then
patterns begin to emerge out of these disclosures. Notions that were thought to
be personal, private, idiosyncratic, and psychologically bound turn out to be
points of group knowledge and represent sociological tendencies. Group members
come to realize that their "individual" problems are only mirrors of social
pathologies that affect all the people of a given class, race, gender, etc. In
turn, each individual comes to realize that it is not a personal flaw that led
he/r to be in an unacceptable socio-economic situation, but that the structure
of the political economy is to blame. In order for this process to succeed,
there must be a solidarity of identity, and when oppression is high, this can
only happen in a separatist environment. However, once these social currents are
discovered and this knowledge is deployed among the given social group, the need
for separatist activity drops and can even become counterproductive. At this
point, the uneasy romance between coalition and diversity can begin.

For feminism in general, the time for separatist action seems to be over;
however, we must remember that all areas of society are not equally
gendered-some territories are more equalized than others. Given that cyberspace
is one of the most inequitable, it should be expected that a number of early
feminist organizational and educational tactics will be revived.

Feminine Subjectivity

Cyberfeminism is currently at that unfortunate point where it has to decide who
gets to be a separatist cyberfeminist and who does not. The haunting question of
"what is a woman?" once again returns. In theory, this problem is graspable, but
first, what is the problem? Looking back on any feminist movement, there have
always been tremendous conflicts within women's groups and organizations brought
on by attempts to define feminine subjectivity (and thereby, "us" and "them").
In the second wave, the feminine was defined in a manner that seemed largely to
reflect the subjectivity of white, middle class, straight women. The third wave
had to debate whether or not transvestites, transsexuals, and other "males" who
claimed to be female identified should be accepted into activist organizations
(and at the same time, women of color, working class women, and lesbians all
still had grounds for complaints). In addition, it was never decided how to
separate the feminine from other primary social variables that construct a
woman's identity. For example, part of the problem in many feminist
organizations, and in WAC in particular, was that the middle class professional
women had the greatest economic and cultural resources. They therefore had
greater opportunity for leadership and policy making. The women outside of this
class felt that the professionals had unfair advantages and that their agenda
was the primary agenda, which in turn brought about a destructive form of
separation. 

These are but some of the practical problems that have emerged out of the issue
of exclusivity and imperfections inherent in definitions. Defining feminine
subjectivity can never be done to the satisfation of all, and yet, practically
speaking, it has to be done. 

The current theoretical solution to this problem is to have small alliances and
coalitions that do not rely on bureaucratic process. Such coalitions should be
expected to dissolve at various velocities over time. Also, naively humanistic
or metaphysical principles (depending on one's perspective) like "sisterhood"
should be left in the past, and we must all learn to live with the conflicts and
contradictions of a house of difference. Of course, this is easier said than
done. Truth changes with the situation. In a territory like a US or British
cultural studies department, we can talk about living in a house of difference.
In other more inequitable territories, it is more difficult, and clear
boundaries (often essentialized) of differences for identity purposes are often
required. For example, telling a person of color who has just been beaten by the
police that "the officers were only reacting to a racist textual construction
that links people of color with the sign of criminality" is probably not going
to have much resonance (even though in legitimized academic territories the
argument is quite convincing). While the simpler explanation, "your ass just got
beat because you are a person of color" will be quite convincing, because in
this case, who is on what side of the racial divide is unambiguous in the mind
of the unwilling participant. In this context, the hard boundaries of
essentialism make sense and have greater explanatory power until the ambiguity
that emerges out of successful consciousness raising and contestation becomes a
part of everyday life. Consequently, one can expect that essentialized notions
of the feminine will continue to appear and find acceptance.** 

Dinner Parties

Cyberfeminism is currently drawing upon social and cultural strategies from past
waves of feminism. For example, dinner parties that celebrate women's
achievements and serve as convivial coalition building events are a famous part
of feminist history, as witnessed not only in the fundraising dinner parties
held by female suffragists, but also in Judy Chicago's Dinner Party; in Suzanne
Lacy's art/life performances; in Mary Beth Edelson's "Last Supper" detournement;
and in the countless feasts prepared and served to each other by feminists all
over the world in the past decades. In recognition that women need to feed each
other and desire conviviality, Kathy Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth in their Web
project, "Face Settings," are using the medium of the dinner party as an
organizing and educational tool for cyberfeminists. The events--which often
happen during international media festivals and symposia where men are the
leading actors--are meant to overcome the isolation of cyberculture, to get
women connected to each other, and to help them begin to learn and use
electronic technology in producing their own work. It has been shown that
forming strong working groups among people who only communicate virtually is far
less productive than forming groups among people who also meet in the flesh. For
this reason, it is important for cyberfeminist to make opportunities to meet
together bodily and form affinity groups to facilitate building a transnational,
transcultural movement. And what better way than a dinner party to dissolve the
estrangement so often produced by even the friendliest online communications?
Indeed, the virtual medium must not replace the affective and the
affinity-building functions of presence.
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Cyberfeminism Part 3</subject>
<from>Steven Kurtz</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>14 Jul 97 15:46:32 EDT</date>
<content>Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism continued:

Cyberfeminist Education

Cyberfeminists have already grasped the importance of making hands-on
technological education for women a core priority. But this education needs to
be contextualized within a critical feminist analysis and discourse about women,
Netculture and politics, and the pancapitalist labor economy. Cyberfeminists
need to make their voices heard much more strongly in the discussion of Net
development. In doing so, cyberfeminism needs to think about who they consider
their constituency. As a cultural and technical avant garde, cyberfeminists need
to remember that most women who now work with computers and information
technology in first world countries are at best glorified typists, for whom the
computer simply represents an intensification of work. The question must be
asked: What relationship do these women have to technology?  How is this
relationship produced, and how can it be contested? Cyberfeminism could provide
a consciousness raising site where women can tell stories about their
experiences with all the different aspects of technology, and how it affects
their lives.  Such a site could teach women to question the increasing
transparency of technological incursion into their workplaces and into everyday
life. And of course, there must be ongoing education, information, and activism
concerning the feminized "global homework economy (Haraway)" which is profoundly
worsening the lives of women in developing countries.
 
Feminist education (women's studies) as it was pioneered in the US in the early
1970's included the idea that a "separate" education, where women would not have
to compete with males, and where they would have the freedom to frame issues and
ask questions that challenged the hegemony of received practices and ideas.  The
Feminist Art Programs in California, for example, maintained their own studios,
courses, and teachers within an institutional academic structure. But more
deeply, it also became evident that a separate space allowed uncensored and
radical experimentation that included the meltdown of traditional disciplines,
practices, and territories of expertise, and that initiated some postmodern art
practices that have changed the face of mainstream art and art history in the
US. What might a feminist educational program in computer science and media
technology accomplish? Imagine!! 

Cyberspace lends itself nicely to the creation of separate learning and practice
spaces for different groups, and it seems fruitful to expand and maintain these
spaces for now in the spirit of feminist self-help. One of the most important
educational tools cyberfeminists can offer is an ongoing directory of electronic
strategies and resources for women, including feminist theory discussion groups,
electronic publishing and exhibition venues, zines, addresses, bibliographies,
mediaographies, how-to sites, and general information exchange.  While
compilations of these resources are already underway, there is a growing need
for a more radical and critical feminist discourse about technology in
cyberspace (as opposed to discourse in critical and media studies departments in
universities). In cyberfeminism, this discourse arises directly from actual
current practices and problems, rather than from abstract theorizing. Thus
cyberfeminism offers the development of applied, activist theory.

An obvious group to target for cyberfeminist networking, education, and
expertise is the first generations of young women now graduating from schools
and colleges (mainly in the US and Europe) who have had some training in
electronic media and in media theory. Having already begun to work in electronic
media in school, many of these young women will be searching for ways to get
electronically connected, and thus will experience in full force the gender
whammy of cyberspace. While many of them have had some exposure to feminist
theory and practice in the academy, most of them will be faced with a terrifying
void when it comes to feminist support and access in cyberspace. Since
cyberspace seems to attract younger women, it is important that cyberfeminists
develop projects and sites for purposes of recruitment. 
  
Cyberfeminist Body Art

Bodies generally are all the rage on the Net--whether they are obsolete, cyborg,
techno, porno, erotic, morphed, recombined, phantom, or viral. But most of these
"bodies" are little more than recirculated commodified images of sexuality
(particularly female and "deviant" sexuality) or medical imaging (such as the
infamous Visible Human project), and are presented uncritically.  Many artists
are contributing to an explosion of body art on the Net, much of it simply a
transposition of what already exists in other media. 

Cyberfeminist body-centered art is coming alive on the Net. As to be expected,
the vagina and the clitoris have pride of place in much cyberfeminist work such
as that of VNS Matrix. "Cunt art" was a fiercely joyous, liberatory, and radical
rallying icon for feminist artists and activists in the 1970s. Women's
consciousness-raising and medical self-help groups regularly examined each
others' genitals and reproductive organs, and the speculum became the symbol not
only of sexual liberation, but also of feminist demands for reproductive freedom
and for a woman-centered health-care system. As Donna Haraway suggests in
_Modest Witness_, feminists interrogating technoscience (and particularly the
new reproductive technologies), need to arm themselves with "the right speculum
for the job," one that "makes visible the data structures that are our bodies."
The visualization and data-gathering engines that drive both the new information
and reproductive technologies can be redirected and applied to the task of
"designing the analytical languages [the speculums] for representing and
intervening in our spliced, cyborg worlds" (Haraway, p. 212).

Cyberfeminism can create reconfigured networked bodies in cyberspace, bodies
that are passionately incorporated in textual, visual, and interactive works.
Simultaneously, deconstructive projects that address the proliferation of
dominant cultural, gender, and sexual codes on the Net will be more effective if
they come from a strong, libidinal center, and are understood through the filter
of women's history. Indeed, cyberfeminist body art projects are haunted by
women's bodily histories. They are often motivated by rage against the forces of
censorship, repression, and normalization. Primarily, though, they are motivated
by absence--the absence created by female infanticide, clitoridectomy,
anorgasmic medications, suttee, footbinding, enforced celibacy, sexual
misinformation, lack of birth control information, rape, forced pregnancy, and
by female restriction and confinement.

Part of theoretical feminism's project has been to explore the possibility of
difference in female sexuality and desire. Much French and American feminist,
literary, and psychoanalytic theory in the 1980s was dedicated to this research.
The Net offers possibilities for exploring these questions in a new
technological and information setting, and among a new population of
author/producers who are more grounded in practice than in theory. Although this
line of research seems to have left the binary of woman/nature far behind, it is
by no means certain that it will not fall into some of the traps of essentialist
feminism, or succumb to the lure of simply countering masculinist Netculture
with a feminine Netpornography. There is much to be gained from consciously
interpolating women's histories and bodies into cyberspace; much can be learned
from naming the absences, and beginning to create a multifaceted, fluid, and
conscious feminist presence. 

Conclusion

It seems safe to say that cyberfeminism is still in its avant-garde phase of
development. The first wave of explorers, amazons, and "misfits" have wandered
into what is generally a hostile territory, and found a new land in need of
decolonization. History is repeating itself in a positive cycle, where feminist
avant-garde philosophies, strategies, and tactics from the past can be dusted
off and reclaim their former vitality. Separatist activities in the real or
virutal forms of dinners, discussion groups, and consciousness raising sessions
are viable once again. Essentialist philosophies enacted in body art, cunt art,
and identity maintenance recombine with constructionist notions of identity
development. An epistemological and ontological anarchy that is celebratory and
open to any possibility is threading its way through cyberfeminism. The dogma
has yet to solidify. At the same time, the territory is a hostile one, since the
gold of the information age will not be handed over to women without a struggle.
To make matters worse, a big tollbooth guards access to this new territory. Its
function is to collect tribute from every entity--individual, class, or nation,
that tries to enter. Entrance for individuals comes at the price of obtaining
education, hardware and software; entrance for nations comes at the price of
having acceptable infrastructure, and to a lesser extent, an acceptable
ideology. Consequently, a more negative cycle is also repeating itself, as the
women who have found their way into cyberterritories are generally those who
have economic and cultural advantages in other territories; these advantages are
awarded through class position, with its intimate ties to cultural position and
race. As this group helps open the borders to other disenfranchised groups, it
must be asked, what kind of ideology and structure will await the newcomers?
Will it be a repetition of the first and second waves of feminism in political
and economic arenas? Will cyberspace and its associate institutions be able to
cope with a house of difference? Knowing and understanding the history of
women's struggle (along with other struggles in race relations and class
relations) is essential--not just as a resource for strategies and tactics, not
just so tactical responses to cybergender issues can be improved, but also to
see that the new gender constructions that come to mark the entirety of this new
territory (not just virtual domains) do not fall into the same cycle as in the
past. 

Consider this example. In the US, third-wave *activity* peaked in 1991. Barely
three years later, this visible resistance had again died down, leaving
continuing debates about feminism largely to the academy. In l997, federal
"welfare" laws were repealed in an all-out assault on the public safety net for
the poor. At the same time, forced labor through "workfare" and prison programs
has begun to intensify, and the expansion of the feminized global electronic
homework economy has produced a new wave of sweatshop labor. Since these
initiatives have a dramatic effect on poor and working-class women, one would
think that the conditions would be right for a new popular front of feminist
activism and resistance. However, the social body and public life seem so
splintered, alienated, stratified, and distracted by market economy, that as yet
no signs of such activism have appeared. Is this problem partly that the avant
garde has been paid off to the extent that the issues of the poor which do not
effect its members are no cause for action? Is this problem repeating itself in
cyberspace and in its manufacture? There are so many more problems to face than
just access for all.

Notes
* Just so the authors' position is clear: We do not support a reductive equality
feminism, i.e., support the existing system, but believe there should be equal
gender representation in all its territories. We do not support pancapitalism.
It is a predatory, pernicious, and sexist system that will not change even if
there was equal representation of gender in the policy making classes. Our
argument here is that women need access to empowering knowledge and tools which
are now dominated by a despicable "virtual class (Kroker)."  We do not mean to
suggest that women become a part of this class. To break the "glass ceiling" and
become an active part of the exploiting class that benefits from gender
hierarchy is not a feminist goal, nor anything to be proud of.

**In her essay, "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics," Sadie Plant
spins a mythical genesis for the convergence of women and machines in a
feminised cybernetics based on women's ancient invention of the craft of
weaving. This convergence "is reinforced by cyberfeminism... a perspective
(which) is received from the future." In the 70's creating a female mythology
was an inspiring and necessary part of recovering and writing the histories of
women, and of honoring female cultural inventions and female generativity (the
Matrix). Cyberfeminist mythologizing is a welcome sign of inspiration and
empowerment, and at this point in time, makes good tactical sense. Such work
offers a clear explanation of a constructive relationship between women and
technology, and it begins the process of rewriting the gender code of
cyberspace. However, in a political sense, the function of the mythic "natural
woman" has its limits. In this case, it seems just as likely that weaving was a
woefully boring task that was forced upon the disenfranchised. (This trend of
boring and alienating work as a the domain of the disempowered is certainly
repeating itself in the pancapitalist technocracy.) As cyberfeminist critique
increases in complexity, and therefore in ambiguity, the current cyberfeminist
mythology will have to fade away much as matriarchal Crete and cunt iconography
did in the late 70s.
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Feminist art (fwd)</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 18 Jun 1997 10:46:43 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>
Faith Wilding wrote:
Subject: Feminist art

Dear nettime,

I just have to say that the article Vagina on the Net demonstrated 
that the writer has a very superficial and misguided knowledge of feminist 
art, and very little understanding of the history of feminism in the last 25 
years. If Anne de Haan's article was a representative summation of feminist 
art on the WEB, and generally, then this is very sad. I see the Net as 
primarily a communications network at present, and I'm pained to see that the 
communication on feminism and feminist art is at such a low level. 
I do very much appreciate the work being done by VNS Matrix and a few others. 
But it seems that there's a serious under-representation of the work being 
done by feminist cultural creators on Nettime.
As a correction I must add that Lucy Lippard did not "found a feminist art 
institution" in the USA. The feminist art movement ("institution" is the wrong
term here entirely) was brought into being by diverse groups all over the USA 
working collaboratively and networking nationally. Much of this history is 
contained in the book: The Power of Feminist Art, edited by Broude and 
Garrard, and published by Abrams. Though the book has many flaws, one can gain
a good overview of the development and history of the feminist art movement 
from it. And let's not forget that feminist art is a mobile category which is 
now spread throughout the world. And lives!
 
In solidarity, Faith Wilding	
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Feminist art/ bossy cunts onlin</subject>
<from>rachel greene</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 18 Jun 1997 13:16:54 +0100</date>
<content>Obviously, there is much feminist artwork, theory, and thought online that
is not represented by the 'bossy cunts' discussion or the VNS Matrix.
Interested parties should query the rhizome CONTENTBASE under 'gender' or
'feminism' for more commentary in this area. [ http://www.rhizome.com ]

However, while many nettime threads take heat, and stop-the-thread posts
come and go, I want to voice my explicit support of 'bossy cunts online.'
To those who don't really believe sexism exists, I say... pick up a
magazine? see a movie? And, for sure, the "humanist" sexless agenda leaves
me cold between the legs.

Some have posted that this thread has been too low, or of inferior quality
-- but let's not dismiss politicizing discussions. What gets attention on
nettime? What gets dismissed? Further, I don't think Anne, or anyone
actually, has been claiming to represent respective collectives. In my
view, these issues are not discussed enough, and it is limiting not to
encourage a range of voices.


Rachel Greene
Editor
RHIZOME INTERNET

++CHECK OUT THE RHIZOME, ADA WEB AND MOMA COLLABORATION: http://www.tech90s.net

________________________________________________

         --&gt; rachel {AT} rhizome.com

         --&gt; http://www.rhizome.com

         --&gt; tel +1 212 328 2884

         --&gt; fax +1 212 406 1399

         --&gt; 368 Broadway #403, New York, NY 10013
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>14.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; cybersex catechism</subject>
<from>Niki Gomez</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 11 Dec 2000 11:51:13 +0000</date>
<content>[Sender: richard barbrook &lt;richard {AT} hrc.wmin.ac.uk&gt;]

cybersex catechism
"I fuck therefore I am" (Shu Lea Cheang - 2000)

1.0  Do you want to play with your self?
Shift your identity, be on top, attach an extra port.

2.0  Is the pussy the matrix?
We are jacking into the Big Daddy mainframe so we can jerk off.

3.0  Is one-hand typing the best form of safe sex?
I was unable to open up when I had a virus concealed in an attachment.

4.0  Why does the Net love pioneering porn?
Every other medium has its own intimate massage: telephone - chatlines;
motor car - backseat fumbling; hormone research - contraception; VCR - sex
films.

5.0  Does virtual sex cause real jealousy?
The swapping of text is the low bandwidth version of exchanging bodily fluids.

6.0  "Feeling horny?" Why can't I say this as easily in a bar as on-line?
When hiding behind my anonymous IP address, I can lose all my inhibitions
about exploring my deepest desires.

7.0  Have you read the joy of text?
Cybersex is the theory without the practice.

8.0  Do we have a fetish for technology?
Sometimes I prefer my toys to my lover.

9.0  Is technology good for sex?
My body has been upgraded with an extra hard drive, more RAM, lots of
shareware and the hottest plug-ins.

10.0  Wouldn't you like to download an orgasm?
Let's make XXXML into an open source protocol.
10-12-2000</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>14.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; cybersex catechism</subject>
<from>richard barbrook</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 14 Dec 2000 17:20:39 -0500</date>
<content>Hiya,

Oooops, my fault. I forwarded the *draft* of the FAQ for the December
cybersex cybersalon to the nettime listserver by mistake. My apologies to
all concerned.

I will now go and whip myself in penance for my sins.

Later,

Richard

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Richard Barbrook
Hypermedia Research Centre
School of Communications and Creative Industries
University of Westminster
Watford Road
Northwick Park
HARROW HA1 3TP

&lt;www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk&gt;

+44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590

-------------------------------------------------------------------
"While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we
are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The HRC is involved in running regular cybersalons at the ICA in London. If
you would like to be informed about forthcoming events, you can subscribe
to a listserver on our website: &lt;www.cybersalon.org&gt;.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>15.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; I did not fuck at CyberSalon. I was raped.</subject>
<from>shu lea cheang</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 13 Dec 2000 12:03:38 -0500</date>
<content>oh, dear, you have just put the words in my mouth.

&gt;[Sender: richard barbrook &lt;richard {AT} hrc.wmin.ac.uk&gt;]
&gt;
&gt;cybersex catechism
&gt;
"I fuck therefore I am" (Shu Lea Cheang - 2000)
&lt;Please remove this mis-quote&gt;
I failed to inter(dis)course
at my cybersalon cybersex talk.

As a mobile autogasm self-unit,
i do not endorse the cybersex catechism.
(catechism, do the British recite them during fucking?)

The Salon remains a masturbatory exercise.

In case of any confusion happen again,
A pussy is not a clitoris.
I did suck on VNS Matrix' clitoris,
but i claim my own pussy.

Quote me on this one.

shu lea cheang, 2000</content>
</mail>
</mails>
</chapter>