Suffragettes to She-Devils:

Women's Liberation and Beyond

Liz McQuiston

VNS Matrix, a group of four Australian women artists, offer a new tack on cuntpower for the next century. They formed in 1991 with a mission, in part: ‘to hijack cowboy toys and remap cyberspace’. Their interactive computer-simulation, entitled ‘All New Gen’ (1992) employs the constructs and mentality of boys-own computer games, but subverts the gender stereotypes. Hence, All New Gen and her band of renegade DNA Sluts (Patina de Panties, Dentata and the Princess of Slime) go on a journey to sabotage Big Daddy Mainframe, tangling along the way with various technomutants such as Circuit Boy (a techno bimbo and Big Daddy’s sidekick), whom they castrate cyber-style at a convenient point. It is a wild and wonderfully orgasmic vision, which also subverts the notions of winning or losing, and even scoring. For the rules keep changing: ultimately ‘the linear is redundant on the All New Gen Net, and the polymorphous and the perverse rule’.

Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women's Liberation and Beyond. Liz McQuiston, 1997. Book cover
Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women’s Liberation and Beyond. Liz McQuiston, 1997. Book cover

Publication Details

Type
Book
Author
Liz McQuiston
Publication
Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women's Liberation and Beyond, pp. 155–157, 182–185, 1997, English
Publisher
Phaidon Press Ltd, London, UK
ISBN
0 7148 3619 2

Attached Files

Projects Referenced