Reloading Cyberfeminism. - Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture - book review

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Katie Mondloch

Reload: Rethinking Women Cyberculture

581 pp./$29.95 (sb)

(Cambrdige, MA: MIT Press, 2002)

Norbert Wiener initiated the modern use of the Greek term "cyber" (originally meaning to steer or govern) around 1948 to characterize what he called "cybernetics:" an interdisciplinary science that investigates automatic control processes in biological, technical and social systems. Taking off from Wiener's cybernetics, the word "cyborg" (cybernetic organism) was coined around 1962 to describe a human being linked to mechanical devices that assist the human's vital life functions. The cyborg has been foundational for feminist theorizations ever since Donna Haraway's pioneering and influential 1985 article, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," and indeed the cyborg figure is ubiquitous throughout the assorted texts in Reload. Haraway's cyborg feminism hopes that a cyborg identity will allow women to escape the problems enabled by the tired dualisms of patriarchal society--by most accounts making Haarway a cyberfeminist avant la lettre.

Cyber. The addition of a mere five letters can revamp a word's meaning, transforming an otherwise lackluster term into something stylish and forward-looking. The specific undertaking of Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth's noteworthy anthology of fiction and criticism, Reload: Rethinking Women Cyberculture, is to merge the discourses of feminism, cyberculture and cyberfiction. While the terms "cyberfeminism" and "cyberculture" pervade Reload's collected essays, they are accompanied by few consistent and precise definitions. Before examining this informative anthology in detail, a brief detour to consider the etymology of all things "cyber" is worthwhile.

While surely linked to the concepts of the cyborg and cyberspace (science fiction writer and all-around cyber visionary William Gibson coined the literary term "cyberspace" in his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer to describe immersive data spaces and virtual reality), the evolution of the term cyberfeminism is not easy to trace and is (tellingly) non-linear and variegated in its applications. The all female artist and activist collective VNS Matrix ("VeNuS" Matrix) in Adelaide, Australia may have been the first to employ the term with their 1991 billboard manifesto, "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century." Since then, VNS Matrix's Virginia Barret has been influential in popularizing an understanding of cyberfeminism as the legacy of Haraway's "cyborg feminism" outlined in "A Cyborg Manifesto." Participants in the 1994 London conference "Seduced and Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World" likewise spoke of "cyberfeminism" as a derivative of Harway's cyborg feminism.

Taking a different and almost polemical approach to the definition of cyberfeminism, Sadie Plant believes that the social relations engendered by new technologies are to be embraced as "positively feminine." Plant's cyberfeminism celebrates the way that non-linearly distributed digital processes are, according to Plant, intrinsically associated with women and the feminine. Distinct from Plant and VNS Matrix's largely uncritical embrace of new technologies, Cornelia Sollfrank and Faith Wilding popularized a variant application of the term cyberfeminism as part of their work with the activist group Old Boys Network (OBN) founded in 1997 in Berlin. For the OBN, cyberspace is understood as entirely consistent with patriarchal society and cyberfeminism is an undertaking committed to creating and maintaining real and virtual places for women in regards to new technologies while taking into account the age, race, class and economic differences of women all over the world. In light of all of these competing definitio ns, the pluralization "cyberfeminisms" appears frequently and not without good reason. Reload offers yet another take on the nature of cyberfeminism that succinctly synthesizes the various approaches outlined above, although the productive differences among the competing definitions of cyberfeminisms are effectively diminished. Reload's editors Flanagan and Booth define cyberfeminism as a new wave of feminist theory and practice concerned with issues of identity and the body in cyberspace, and go on to propose that cyberfeminism is a pivotal influence on the writers collected in this volume. While many of the essays in Reload are arguably inspired by the sort of cyberfeminism defined by Flanagan and Booth, it is important to note that other selections would be much better understood through one of the variant definitions of cyberfeminism outlined above.

Flanagan and Booth originally developed the collection of 28 texts in Reload for pedagogical purposes; the two were unable to find a collection of essays on women s cyberfiction when they were teaching a university course on cyberculture. The editors have provocatively interspersed the fiction and criticism chapters so that (consciously or otherwise) Reload's juxtapositions between fiction and criticism enact the very themes of nonconformity and discontinuity that concern the majority of the writers. Setting out to challenge what the editors consider to be the twin myths of most writing on cyberculture--the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian notion of a gender-free cyberworld--the book successfully complicates the situation. Reload is divided into three parts--"Women Using Technology," "The Visual/Visible/Virtual Subject," and "Bodies." Although the rationale for these categories is not addressed in the text, it Is not too presumptuous to assume that the editors aspired to surmount traditi onal categories, such as "Fiction" and "Criticism," and hoped that intermingling both kinds of writing under these broad themes would lead the reader to make some interesting connections on her own. In fact, this anthology is so wide-ranging that the diverse texts indicate innumerable opportunities for future interventions at the intersection of cyberculture and feminism.