CyberFeminism

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"Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism."

CyberFeminism is a philosophical and artistic movement which seeks to try and find the historical relationship between feminity and technology and to analyze it via Post-Structuralist and Postmodernist critique. CyberFeminism can broadly be said to be a part of the Postmodern Feminist and Post-Feminist tendencies of the Feminist Movement and with that it can also be said that it is part of the Third Wave of Feminism.

Etymology

  • CyberFeminism - The term CyberFeminism has unclear origins but what is known is that the term refers to Cybernetic Feminism i.e. a Feminism which analyses the feminine via cybernetics and connects the two.
    • CyberFem - A shortend version of the term CyberFeminism.
    • Cybernetic Feminism - A elongated version of the term CyberFeminism.
  • Cyborgian Feminism - Cyborgian Feminism refers to Donna Haraway's form of what is essentially proto-CyberFeminism. In this proto-CyberFeminism she analyzes the relationship women, society, and cyborgs have to each other and how cyborgs can serve to further the formation of a Postgenderist Society.
  • VNS Matrix Thought - VNS Matrix Thought refers to the ideas the art collective V(e)N(u)S Matrix had in which they combined Dadaist art, Cyborgian Feminism, and their readings of Simone de Beauvoir. As Julian Pierce put it: "In 1991, in a cozy Australian city called Adelaide, four bored girls decided to have some fun with art and French Feminist theory... with homage to Donna Haraway they began to play around with the idea of cyberfeminism." [Reference 1]

History

CyberFeminism as a movement started in the early 1990s with the rise of the internet in the Western world and elements of its ideas date back to the 1970s with the Radical Feminist movement. The movement created several artistic collectives which are still around to this day such as VNS Matrix. The CyberFeminist movement is said to have ended in the early 2000s with the dissolution of many CyberFeminist organizations and the discontinuation of the CyberFeminist Internationale.

Influences

CyberFeminism is strongly influenced by the Radical Feminist movement of the 70s second wave of Feminism. Taking the ideas Shulamith Firestone had of world free from the biological slavery women were forced into via their ability to give birth. Another big influence was Donna Harraway who introduced certain elements of Post-Modern analysis to the ideas Shulamith Firestone had created and this resulted in what Firestone essentially predicted would happen: Cyborgian Feminism. This is the corpus of Proto-CyberFeminism.

But CyberFeminism isn't simply defined by the parts that it took up from its then unnamed predecessor, it included elements both of Deleuze using his ideas of rhizomes to great effect.

Proto-CyberFeminism

The intellectual origins of CyberFeminism can be found in writers of Second Wave Feminism.

Shulamith Firestone is a big contributor to the groundwork for the CyberFeminist project, especially in her work The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution written in 1970 in which she sees the radical potential that biotechnology offers for the liberation of women from child rearing and other biological limitations.

The same can be said of Donna Haraway in her groundlaying work A Cyborg Manifesto written in 1985, in which she conceptualizes the feminine potential that the cyborg as an amorphous being clouding the taxonomy of existing species offers to the Feminist Project.

Creation of CyberFeminism

The exact point in time of the creation of CyberFeminism can not be pinpointed but it is generally accepted that VNS Matrix was the first CyberFeminist collective to exist, being formed in the early 90s, but whether the term was coined by them or by Sadie Plant is a topic that is still in debate. The general stances are that one can either narrow down the nuclease of the whole movement to Sadie Plant or VNS Matrix.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

Sadie Plants Departure

Abandoning of CyberFeminism

Co-opting by Nick Land

Death of the CCRU

The First CyberFeminist International

The Old Boys Network

The Peak of CyberFeminism

Decline

CyberFeminism has since the early 2000s declined heavily in popularity, and many factors have played into this. The abandoning of the CCRU as a CyberFeminist project and its eventual turning into a quasi-cult caused Sadie Plant to distance herself from politics in general and instead focus on her art. With that, the CyberFeminist movement lost one of its foremost intellectuals.

Along with that soon reality started to catch up with many of the CyberFeminists as they soon realized that the old prejudices which existed in meatspace also soon came to exist in cyberspace essentially causing the loss of the utopian vision that CyberFeminism had of the future.

Many of the foremost CyberFeminst intellectuals also refused to take charge of the movement in any capacity giving it no direction, making it wander around aimlessly.

The fact that CyberFeminism refused to define it also hindered any attempts of tying further people into the movement and with that stagnation of the movement ensued. In essence, it had disappeared as fast as it had risen.

Contemporary CyberFeminism

While there are still CyberFeminist collectives around like VNS Matrix, most have either died or turned to become Post-CyberFeminist. CyberFeminism very much is a dead movement as of currently seeing surges in popularity with the establishment of Laboria Cuboniks sparking interest in CyberFeminism from a much younger audience, which was quite unfamiliar with the techno-utopianism that was practiced by the CyberFeminists, making them seem very alien as a movement, a product of its time.

Influenced

Post-CyberFeminism and the Birth of Xenofeminism

Post-CyberFeminism is the result of the direct fall of CyberFeminism, it takes into account the shortcomings and the utopian visions that CyberFeminism as a political project had and came to the conclusion that the CyberFeminist future was over, that it was something incapable of being reached, at the present day, if CyberFeminism was not to realize itself as an existing thing. These flaws were made abundantly clear in Helen Hester's After the Future: n Hypotheses of Post-CyberFeminism an essay which tried to line out the issues of how CyberFeminism's negation of definition as seen in The 100 Anti-Thesis did irreparable damage to the movement and caused an unstable support base incapable of committing to offensive action.

With her essay, Helen Hester then laid out a new formula for the creation of Hypotheses of Post-CyberFeminism adding her own first Hypothesis "Hypothesis: Xenofeminism is a gender abolitionist, anti-naturalist, technomaterialist form of posthumanism, building upon the insights of cyberfeminism. Its future is unmanned" this simply meant that if anything Post-CyberFeminism was CyberFeminism realizing itself to become Xenofeminism.

Accelerationism

Occult Post-Humanism and the CCRU

LesbiaNRx, the Nihilistic Conclusion of CyberFeminism

Examples of CyberFeminism

Comparisons

Postgenderism

Radical Feminism

Xenofeminism

Intellectuals of CyberFeminism

Sadie Plant

Foundations and Beliefs

Core Tenets

Against Definition

CyberFeminism resists any attempt at defining itself for the simple reason of creating a open community and truly adhering to their ideas of fluidity and postmodern analysis. It is also important to mention that in response to attempts at the definition of CyberFeminism the Old Boys Network responded with the publishing of "100 anti-theses on CyberFeminism", this document explicitly tries to define what CyberFeminism is not while subtly showing its plurality of meaning and ideas of what it is through the use of four different languages (english, german, french, and dutch).

A CyberFeminist Conception of History

Feminization

CyberFeminism states that over the course of human society the amount of women in the workplace has increased this Sadie Plant states is due to the fact the traits that women have had are ones that flourish under industrial production such as hand-eye coordination, prescision, muscle memory etc. as such the work force will become more and more female over time, this in Sadie's opinion shows the fault lines that both women and technology run on.

Gender Quakes

The gender quake is a specific event in which the balance in society gets upset and the culture gets redefinied through the ever increasing feminization of society a notable example that Plant picks out is the huge cultural shift around feminity and technology in the 90s that happened in the western world.

Women as Zeros and Men as Ones

Sadie Plant conceives women as unwhole, ununfied, not full, and dispersed i.e. as zero not as something but as nothing as pure negation. Where's she conceives of man as something as something whole thus through this inherent contradiction one could argue that she sees the woman as something more inherently malleable and formable. A being made for the future the one made to surpass man.

CyberFeminist Theory Fiction

Theory Fiction as a concrete genre started out in the CCRU on which CyberFeminism at the start had a huge influence before the CCRU devolved into utter insanity.

One of the contributions CyberFeminism brought to the CCRU was the fiction it as a movement pulled from being inspired by Bladerunner and William Gibson's books.

This all in all lead to a certain CyberFeminist writing style expressed to its most potent extent in Sadie Plant's Zeros + Ones.

The book had no formal chapters instead working on a basis of mini-chapters which differ wildly in content from each other but like the primordial soup it all works together. In effect the writing style is to highlight one of the books points the fact that everything at it's most fundamental level is a rhizome and as such there are no centralized parts only parts working with and into each other, micromeshing.

Liberation from Procreation

Shulamith Firestone in her work The Dialectic of Sex asserted that for any chance of the liberation of the woman to occur they would need to be freed from the burden of procreation and from the burden of carrying children a burden, which in the end allowed for the males of society to take advantage of the woman and make her the subservient part in a system of sex based discrimination.

Seizing the Means of Reproduction

For the woman to free herself she would need to seize the means of reproduction in essence abandoning her biological responsibility and instead adopting a new body free from the burdens the old one had, thus making women truly independent from men and capable of asserting themselves as their own.

Framework

Variants

Conflicts Within CyberFeminism

Conflicts within CyberFeminism could be said to be either extremely wide spread, or non-existent, as the very nature of the movement invited ideological conflict to form a better more accurate analysis. As such conflict was a process within the CyberFeminist movement.

Factions Within CyberFeminism

One thing that is generally observed is that there is a ideological split between CyberFeminists inspired heavily by Sadie Plant and the people that inspired here and everyone else in the CyberFeminist movement. Many did not take up the Deleuzian ideas Sadie Plant espoused, but this did not result in the creation of factions since CyberFeminism was by its very definition undefinable and with that the ability to draw lines in the sand was lost.

Schools of Thought

Cyborgian Feminism

Cyborgian Feminism is the ideology of Donna Harraway. Cyborgian Feminism asserts that through the innate connections that we have with technology we are all essentially already Cyborgs and that through this new vectors towards genderlessness are opened through the Cyborgs open-source and undefinable nature. She connects this with her theory of Feminism and Socialism.

VNS Matrix Thought

V(e)N(u)S Matrix was a CyberFeminist art collective which heavily relied on early digital Dada art as a medium which allowed CyberFeminism to flourish, along with this they are rather unique from other CyberFeminists due to the fact that they more deeply focus on the connections between French Existentialist Feminist theorists like Simone de Beauvoir and Donna Harraway.

Personality and Behaviour

How CyberFeminism Acts

Aesthetics

Stylistic Notes

CyberFeminism hates being defined in any way she almost always views any attempt at defining her as an attack on her and with that also comes her love of fluidity of definition and meaning. She is also very artistic sitting at her computer for hours at a time creating digital feminist Dada art, her interest in art also naturally extends to her programming where she enjoys creating highly abstract games.

CyberFeminism is deeply ashamed of her past with the CCRU and tries to forget the whole thing happened, avoiding any interaction with former members wherever possible.

Design

Symbols

Flags

Flag of CyberFeminism
Color Name HEX RGB
Pink #FC96CA 252, 150, 202
White #FFFFFF 255, 255, 255
Black #141414 20, 20, 20
Grey #565656 86, 86, 86

The CyberFeminist flag design is quite unusual from other flag designs, drawing on the organic inspirations CyberFeminism has. The grey background is supposed to be an assortment of blobs of cells resembling the primordial soup.

The zero is the symbolic for the woman (refer to Sadie Plants Zeros + Ones) as well as the plus under it resembling the Venus plus another symbol for the female.

The flagella on the zero are supposed to make it represent a bacterium alluding to the biological inspirations CyberFeminism has had.

The white and pink represent Feminism while the black represents the Post-Anarchist influence on CyberFeminism through Deleuze and Guattari.

Props

CyberFeminism often wears the crown Ada Lovelace wore, a golden headband with a golden flower attached to the side. This is mostly her showing respect for the legacy Ada Lovelace left on programming and computer science as a field being what one could call the first person to be a programmer.

How to Draw CyberFeminism

  1. Draw a ball,
  2. Fill the ball in grey,
  3. Draw black bloobs on the grey
  4. Draw a pink zero and make the background of it white and draw a white outline to it
  5. Draw a pink plus sign under the zero and draw a white outline to it
  6. Draw white squigly lines going from the white outline
  7. Draw two cyborg eyes (dark grey outside and lavender inside),
  8. Add Ada Lovelace's golden headband
  9. And you're done
Color Name HEX RGB
Pink #FC96CA 252, 150, 202
White #FFFFFF 255, 255, 255
Black #141414 20, 20, 20
Grey #565656 86, 86, 86
Dark Grey #2C2C2C 44, 44, 44
Lavender #BD95EF 189, 149, 239
Gold #E8D346 232, 211, 70

Variation Designs

How to Draw Cyborgian Feminism

Flag of CyberFeminism
  1. Draw a ball and fill it with a very dark purple-ish blue.
  2. Replace the top left quarter of the ball with robotic parts, ideally shown as the inside of the ball with the "skin" tearing off stretching to the eye, which is robotic and glowing light red.
  3. In a light yellow, Draw an industrial cog in the middle, and a cross below it in the shape of a venus symbol (♀).
  4. Add a red bow, or alternatively a yellow flower crown with green vines, and you're done!
Color Name HEX RGB
Light Yellow #FFBFAA 255, 191, 170
Very Dark Purple-ish Blue #242133 36, 33, 51
Red for the bow #E72C2C 231, 44, 44
Light red for the eye #FF4F4F 255, 79, 79
Lighter red for the eye #FF8787 255, 135, 135

How to Draw VNS Matrix Thought

  1. Draw a ball,
  2. Fill the ball in blue,
  3. Draw the letters VNS in white on the blue background
  4. Draw two cyborg eyes (dark grey outside and lavender inside),
  5. And you're done
Color Name HEX RGB
White #FFFFFF 255, 255, 255
Blue #0000ff 0, 0, 255
Dark Grey #2C2C2C 44, 44, 44
Lavender #BD95EF 189, 149, 239


Relationships

Friends

  • Anarcho-Transhumanism - Our way to be free of any preconceived notions about our biology our way to free us from child rearing and from being the womb of the patriarchy.
  • Internationalism - CyberFeminism is a global movement without myth, without origin, without nation.
  • Post-Leftism - The true movement to change the current state of things.
  • Postgenderism - The future is a feminine non-binary primordial soup.
  • Neo-Marxism - A great deconstruction of Marxism
  • Post-Humanism - The distinction between human, machine, plant, ameoba, and animals will entirely disapear
  • Situationism - I love your art so much inspired me to do some dadaist stuff
  • Cyberocracy - Women are Cyborgs!
  • Deleuzoguattarian - "We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognizable to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind which, like everything, had been unthinkable before. We found ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their parasites? Were they ours? Either way we became components of our own imprisonment. To all intents and purposes, we disappeared."
  • Soulism - "An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughless, amok. "
  • Post-Industrialism - With every genderquake feminization continues.
  • Industrialism - The punch card and the spinning stoole eneabled the feminine to take advantage of the world it was created and adpated for before it even existed.
  • Radical Feminism - The radical dialectical and materialist analysis you pushed for to understand our position is one of the great innovations you have brought to our project
  • Xenofeminism - I wish you the best in your journey and in carrying my legacy. Be better than I was.
  • Techno-Anarchism - Utopia awaits us in cyberspace!
  • Queer Anarchism - Together free as genderless masses!

Frenemies

  • Marxist Feminism - You gave Shulamith Firestone the tools to analyze the material conditions of our sex but to say you are short-sighted would be an understatement.
  • Feminism - I love you but your analysis is severly lacking.
  • Acid Communism - I don't know what to say....
  • LesbiaNRx - You know I like you daughter and your analysis somewhat, daughter, but why do you like him more? I just don't know how to feel about you..
  • Marxism - Engels was a true Feminist, even if a bit short-sighted.

Enemies

Bibliography

Literature

Primary Literature

Sadie Plant
Shulamith Firestone
Donna Haraway
Old Boys Network

Interviews

Interviews with Sadie Plant

Further Information

For overlapping political theory see:

Accelerationism, LesbiaNRx, Radical Feminism, Feminism , Marxist Feminism, Xenofeminism, Postgenderism, Anarcho-Transhumanism, Techno-Anarchism, Post-Humanism, Situationism, Post-Leftism

Websites

Wikipedia

Online Communities

Reddit

Videos

Organizations

Groups

  • Old Boys Network
  • VNS Matrix

Gallery

Portraits

  • Portrait of CyberFeminism, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

    Portrait of CyberFeminism, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

  • Credit: User:Muddy Mudkipz (Old Design)

    Credit: User:Muddy Mudkipz (Old Design)

  • Old icon

    Old icon

Portraits of variants

  • Cyborgian Feminism portrait and design by Insmarechale

    Cyborgian Feminism portrait and design by Insmarechale

  • Old Portrait and design of Cyborgian Feminism, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

    Old Portrait and design of Cyborgian Feminism, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

  • Portrait of VNS Matrix Thought, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

    Portrait of VNS Matrix Thought, Credit: Aycee Lovelace

Comics

  • Credit: hydratedbirb, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: hydratedbirb, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: KeyjoardRussia, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: KeyjoardRussia, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: Daarekistelemmet, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Daarekistelemmet, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: Jokie, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Jokie, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: Jedpilled, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Jedpilled, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: Jedpilled, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Jedpilled, Source (Old Design)

Compasses

  • Credit: Alex, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Alex, Source (Old Design)

  • Credit: Aycee Lovelace, Source (Old Design)

    Credit: Aycee Lovelace, Source (Old Design)

Citations

Notes

References

  1. ↑ https://www.monoskop.org/images/7/77/First_Cyberfeminist_International_1998.pdf

Navigation

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