Cyberfeminism

• not easily defined in a single way

• discusses the relationship between gender and digital culture

• “‘old’ cyberfeminism, characterized by a utopian vision of a postcorporeal woman corrupting patriarchy” (Daniels 102)

• “‘new’ cyberfeminism, which is more about ‘confronting the top-down from the bottom-up’”(Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright 2003, 22–23) - (Daniels 102)

• both the practices and critiques of cyberfeminism seem to imply that “gender” is unified and digital technologies mean the same thing to all women regardless of class, race, and sexuality

• Practices of cyberfeminism include the experiment of various technologies of women from several domains including work, education and domestic life (Daniels 103).

• The most influential person in cyberfeminism is Donna Haraway (Daniels 105).

• “A central debate within cyberfeminism has to do with the tension between the political economy required to mass produce the infrastructure of the Internet and its reliance on the exploited labor, on the one hand, and, on the other, claims for the subversive potential of those same technologies” (Daniels 105)

• “Cyberfeminism is neither a single theory or a feminist movement with a clearly articulated political agenda” (Daniels 102)

• Has a range of definitions/theories that include “debates and practices about the relationship between gender and digital culture” (Flanagan and Booth 2012, 12 In Daniels 102)

• “Some cyberfeminists contend that the Internet shifts gender and racial regimes of power through the human/machine hybridity of cyborgs (Haraway 1985), identity tourism (Nakamura 2002; Turkle 1997), and the escape from embodiment (Hansen 2006; Nouraie-Simone 2005b)”

• “A wave of thought, criticism, and art that emerged in the early 1990s, galvanizing a generation of feminists, before bursting along with the dot-com bubble.” (Evans 1)

• First made by Sadie Plant

• Cyberfeminist saw the inetrnet as a place to dissolve sex and gender and bias

• “Feminists emerging from a tradition of nonlinear writing and art practices saw potential in non-narrative hypertext as a medium, and feminist critics compared web connectivity to the consciousness-raising groups of 70s third-wave feminism”

• “Cyberfeminism has tended to include mostly younger, technologically savvy women, and those from Western, white, middle-class backgrounds. The ranks of cyberfeminists are growing, however, and along with this increase is a growing divergence of ideas about what constitutes cyberfeminist thought and action”

• Third-wave feminism