Genealogy of Artist/Activist Collaborations
and Art Groups

A recent exhibition “Cyberfem. Feminisms on the Electronic Landscape,” (Espai d’Art Contemporani, Castellon, Spain, 20 October–21 January, 2006/07, curated by Ana Martinez-Collado), brought together a diverse group of works by cyberfeminist artists from many parts of the world (including artists Dora Garcia, Ana Navarette, Olia Lialina, Kristin Lucas, Eva Wohlgemut, Lynn Hershmann, Shu Lea Cheang, Dora Garcia, Prema Murthy, OBN, Deb King, Salome Cuesta, Coco Fusco, subRosa and many others). According to the curator, the exhibition was “conceived as an expanded territory, a hybrid space of creation and activism constructed using new digital technologies. …Speaking of (cyber) feminism today—feminism, Internet, art and activism—is to speak of experimental creation, communication, interactivity, research and association. Internet is now consolidated as a space of visibilisation of women from a multifaceted plurality of directions.” It would be interesting to discuss and examine this statement.
Since the utopian (and specifically Western) moment of CF’s founding, it has been critiqued for tending to separate itself from earlier (Western) histories of feminism, and especially from the feminist activism and theory that fueled the second wave women’s liberation movement and the feminist art movement. Cyberfeminism, many tech-savvy women hoped, could perhaps leave behind the vexing feminist concerns with female essentialism, sexism, racism, and crippling gender roles, to explore a new world of post-human bodies without borders, digital machines, virtual networking, and pleasurable play with communications and imaging technologies. CF has also been criticized for its neglect of concerns about racism, sexism, and difference on the Internet. (See for example, “Surfing the Waves of Feminism: Cyberfeminism and its others” Susanna Paasonen, labrys, estudos feministas / études féministes janeiro / julho 2005 - janvier /juillet 2005; and “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” Faith Wilding, <www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fwild/faithwilding/>
Ironically, while an important part of Haraway’s cyborg manifesto concerns itself with women’s lives in “the integrated circuit of global production,” and discusses the painful effects of the “feminization of labor,” and the contingent and precarious nature of the lives of millions of female and male workers in the global factories and border zones all over the world, this has not been the focus of much cyberfeminist theorizing and activism among (Western) artists and academic feminists to date.
So it is important to ask: What possibilities for “thinking (and doing) things differently” have been opened up by cyberfeminism and women in net culture? Maria Fernandez has written: “A starting point for developing change could be the revaluation of the old dictum: ‘The personal is political.’ It is now necessary to become aware of how we deal with differences in our most intimate spheres. At the same time we need to strengthen our presence in the greatly contested digital domain as technology has been an integral part of the construction and positioning of identities. In the current state of technologically facilitated global capitalism it becomes imperative to find new ways of interacting in and out of cyberspace.” (See Introduction, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices. A subRosa anthology, Autonomedia, 2003)
It would be interesting to learn how feminist activists and artists have made use of ICT. Worldwide, women’s and people’s movements practicing self-organized and grass-roots (feminist) activism use the expanded territory of cyberspace. Examples include RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan); Cindy Sheehan organizing US military mothers to bring their children home; and Pink Bloc, Women on Waves, Women in Black, Soldier’s Mothers, the Zapatista Women’s brigades, the Mothers of Juarez, the Atalantis Project, to name but a few. The Zapatistas and many of the landless people’s movements rely on their Web presence as an organizing base, to give them visibility and credibility and to communicate with similar movements worldwide. They are spreading many hands-on technologies via the internet, and building coalitions with many different constituencies.