The term “cyberfeminist” arose simultaneously in 1991 for scholar Sadie Plant in England, and the Australian feminist art group VNS Matrix. Like many Australian feminists, VNS Matrix became aware of Haraway’s Manifesto when it was reprinted in the journal Australian Feminist Studies in 1987, and paid homage to it in their (1992) Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 2Ist Century.”‘ Produced using electronic image-making technologies, it featured a horned woman in a shell amidst a molecular matrix, with a text announcing “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” and proclaiming themselves as the “”virus of the new world order … saboteurs of big daddy mainframe … terminators of the moral code … mercenaries of slime … we are the future [etc.].” The group went on to produce All New Gen, a series of lightboxes and the prototype of a computer game based on these themes.” During the mid 1990s, along with one of the VNS Matrix artists, Virginia Barratt, I conducted interviews with Australian women artists in digital media: we found that almost all our interviewees had read the Manifesto and been inspired in one way or another by it. Slightly later than us, and with a partially overlapping sample of interviewees, researcher Glenice Watson (2000) found that a number of Australian women pioneers of the Internet were committed to the practice of being feminist activists on and around the Internet, though not all identified as “cyberfeminists” per se.
Publication Details
- Type
- Book Section
- Title
- Section One: Robot : AI. ALife and Cyborgs: Cyberquake: Haraway's Manifesto
- Author
- Publication
- Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavaliaro (eds.), pp. 99–100, 312, 2002, English
- Publisher
- MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- ISBN
- 0-262-20145-3