[-empyre-] Re: the use in girls coming

[Fatima Lasay <digiteer@ispbonanza.com.ph>]

Notable excerpts from 1997, mentions VNS 1991 Manifesto (for the 21st 
century?), and after "the supersexed cyborg femme" and "cunt", I'm still 
interested in knowing how/where is cyberfeminism today (or at least how has 
VNS's evolved?)

Tnx,
Fats
---
From http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/www-wilding/wherefem.html
by Faith Wilding

The question of how to define cyberfeminism is at the heart of the often 
contradictory contemporary positions of women working with new technologies 
and feminist politics. Sadie Plant's position on cyberfeminism, for 
example, has been identified as "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 women and machines" (1). This utopian vision of 
revolt and merger between woman and machine is also evident in VNS Matrix's 
Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century: "we are the virus of the new 
world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big daddy 
mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix..."(2) Another 
position in this debate is offered by Rosi Braidotti: "....cyberfeminism 
needs to cultivate a culture of joy and affirmation....Nowadays, women have 
to undertake the dance through cyberspace, if only to make sure that the 
joy-sticks of cyberspace cowboys will not reproduce univocal phallicity 
under the mask of multiplicity...."(3)

The press release issued at the cyberfeminist discussions in Kassel 
declared that: "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." What 
strangely emerged from these discussions was the attempt to define 
cyberfeminism by refusal, evident not only in the intensity of the 
arguments, but also in the l00 antitheses devised there - for example: 
"cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement/ sajbrfeminizm nije 
usamljen/cyberfeminism is not ideology, but browser/cyberfeminismus ist 
keine theorie/cyberfeminismo no es una frontera/(4)..." Yet the reasons 
given by those who refused to define cyberfeminism - even though they 
called 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. Three main manifestations of this 
ambivalence and their relevance to contemporary conditions facing women 
immersed in technology bear closer examination.

---

While cybergrrls sometimes draw (whether consciously or unconsciously) on 
feminist analyses of mass media representations of women--and on the 
strategies and work of many feminist artists--they also often unthinkingly 
appropriate and recirculate sexist and stereotyped images of women from 
popular media--the buxom gun moll, the supersexed cyborg femme, and the 
50's tupperware cartoon women are favorites--without any analysis or 
critical recontextualization. Creating more positive and complex images of 
women that 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 fluid gender performativity, to Octavia Butler's 
recombinant genders. All manner of hybrid beings can unsettle the old 
masculine/feminine binaries.

Cybergrrlish lines of flight are important as vectors of investigation, 
research, invention, and affirmation. But these can't replace the hard work 
that is needed to identify and change the gendered structures, content, and 
effects of the new technologies on women worldwide. 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, (6)" then 
why are there so few women in visible positions of leadership in the 
electronic world? Why are women a tiny percentage of computer programmers, 
software designers, systems analysts, and hackers, while they are the 
majority of teletypers, chip-assemblers and installers, and lowskilled 
tele-operators that keep the global data and infobanks operating? Why is 
the popular perception still that women are technophobic? Sadly, the lesson 
of Ada Lovelace is that even though women have made major contributions to 
the invention of computers and computer programming, this hasn't changed 
the perception--or reality--of women's condition in the new technologies. 
Being bad grrls on the Internet is not by itself going to 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 theory and practice.....Imagine!

Imagine cyberfeminists theorists teaming up with brash and cunning grrl 
netartists to visualize new female representations of bodies, languages, 
and subjectivities in cyberspace! Currently (in the US) there is little 
collaboration between academic feminist theorists, feminist artists, and 
popular women's culture on the Net. What would happen if these groups 
worked together to visualize and interpret new theory, and circulate it in 
accessible popular forms? Imagine using existing electronic networks to 
link diverse groups of women computer users (including teleworkers and 
keystrokers) in an exchange of information about their day-to-day working 
conditions and lives on the Net; imagine using this information network as 
an action base to address issues of women digital workers in the global 
restructuring of work. Such projects could weave together both the utopian 
and political aspirations of cyberfeminism.


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