CyberFeminism: Difference between revisions

'''CyberFeminism''' is a philosophical and artistic movement which seeks to try and find the historical relationship between feminity and technology and seeks to analyze it via [[File:Poststruct.png]] Post-Structuralist and [[File:Postmodernicon.png]] Postmodernist critique. CyberFeminism can broadly be said to be a part of the [[File:PostmodernFem.png]] Postmodern Feminist and [[File:Postfem.png]] Post-Feminist tendencies of the Feminist Movement and with that it can also be said that it is part of the [[File:3WF.png]] Third Wave of Feminism.

CyberFeminism as a movement started in the early 1990s with the arising of the internet in the western world and has had elements of its ideas dating back to the 1970s in the Radical Feminist movement. The movement created a lot of 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.

Shulamith Firestone is a big contributor to the groundwork for the CyberFeminist project, especially for 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.

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 Sadie Plant or VNS Matrix down to the nuclease of the whole movement.

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 generally and instead focus on her art and with that, the CyberFeminist movement lost one of its foremost intellectuals.