Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life

Sarah Kember

Computer hacking and science fictional depictions of transcendence as ‘getting out of the meat’ (Springer 1996) are associated with the then ‘new’ technologies of the Internet and virtual reality (VR), and with the notion of cyberspace as, in Woolley’s (1992:122) terms, the ‘new frontier’. The new final frontier, rather like the old one, was swiftly colonised by cowboys and so cyberfeminism was in part a kind of Calamity Jane for the new media, creating anarchy more specifically within patriarchal culture and strategically employing anachronistic or essentialist images of women. There were the Riot Girls (Braidotti 1996: 14) and VNS Matrix (1994) whose computer game heroine called Gen sabotages Big Daddy Mainframe and does for Circuit Boy (‘a fetishised replicant of the perfect human HeMan’) by bonding with DNA sluts and consuming plenty of G-slime.

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, Sarah Kember. Book cover
Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, Sarah Kember. Book cover

Publication Details

Type
Book Section
Title
Evolving feminism in Alife environments: Alife-as-we-know-it
Author
Sarah Kember
Publication
Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, pp. 177, 2003, English
Publisher
Routledge, London, UK
ISBN
0-415-24026-3

Attached Files

Projects Referenced