If relatively few writers dispute the relevance of the “cyber” in cyberfeminism, the place of feminism, in contrast, has been frequently debated. The all-female artist and activist collective VNS Matrix (Adelaide, Australia; 1991–1997) was likely the first to unite the terms with their poster entitled “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” (1991). The humorous and polemical manifesto provocatively imbued new media technologies with feminine characteristics: “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.” British philosopher and writer Sadie Plant, among the earliest proponents of cyberfeminism, proposed that the social relations engendered by new digital technologies are intrinsically associated with women and the feminine. Her best-known text, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (1997), argued that actions such as nonlinearly distributed processes should be embraced as “positively feminine.”
Publication Details
- Type
- Book Section
- Title
- Cyberfeminism
- Author
- Publication
- The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, Benjamin J. Robertson (eds.), pp. 107–109, 2014, English
- Publisher
- Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, USA
- ISBN
- 978-1421412245
Attached Files
- Cyberfeminism, Kate Mondloch. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, 2014, pp. 107–109 [pdf 181.22KB]