 From Cyborgs to Hacktivists: Postfeminist Disobedience and Virtual Communities
As Ann Brooks puts it in Postfeminisms, "the concept of `post' implies a process of ongoing transformation and change" (1). Postfeminism is that indicator that shows us the organism formerly known as feminism has grown into something far more complex than its liberal origins would lead us to expect. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, second wave feminism, which had spoken predominantly from and to a position of white middle class privilege, began to fracture to include a broader chorus of voices, classes, and races. Postfeminism or, more exactly, postfeminisms have expanded to include a multitude of situated perspectives within the context of postmodern thinking, and have swelled to embrace the new emphasis on what Michèle Barrett identified in 1992 (the year that the World Wide Web was born) as "fluidity and contingency" - features that are the trademark stock in trade of the cyber age. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Barrett believed feminism's paradigm shift to be the result of a new interest in culture that in turn gave rise to a whole new collectivity of subjectivities. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site It is no accident that this shift coincided with the advent of a technology that foregrounded networked communications. It was only a few years earlier, in the fledgling days of the personal computer back when the Internet was still a vehicle predominantly for hackers and technogeeks, that Haraway first articulated a politics of connectivity for women in the context of these new technologies. In her "Cyborg Manifesto" Haraway's half-woman, half-machine revels in the confusion of body boundaries and fractures all sense of an originary unity or simplex gender through embracing the cyborg as a model: a being who revels in discursivity, multiplicity, hybridity, and perversity. As the Web has evolved, it has become something of a gene pool for creative explorations of sexualities, subjectivities and identities - and has proved to be as liberating for men as for women in that regard. Cyberfeminist scholar Sadie Plant even argues for the feminizing influence of technology in a connected age. Without a doubt, though, this new technology's most important role has been that of facilitating communication. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site
"cyberfeminism is post-feminist"Cyberfeminism was born at a particular moment in time, 1992, simultaneously at three different points on the globe. In Canada, Nancy Paterson, a celebrated high tech installation artist, penned an article called "Cyberfeminism" for Stacy Horn's Echo Gopher server. In Australia, VNS Matrix (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt) coined the term to label their radical feminist acts and their blatantly viral agenda: to insert women, bodily fluids, and political consciousness into electronic spaces. That same year, British cultural theorist Sadie Plant chose the same term to describe her recipe for defining the feminizing influence of technology on western society and its inhabitants. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site
Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Hacktivism as a praxis was born in December 1997 when Critical Art Ensemble member and software engineer Carmin Karasic was so appalled by the events of the Acteal Massacre - 45 Zapatistas were murdered at the hands of the Mexican government - that she set out to create a Web interface that would perform political protest as an aesthetic act. Three other Critical Art Ensemble members joined her in forming a new collective they named the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. (The group's name is drawn from the concept of civil disobedience first proposed by Henry David Thoreau.) Their electronic civil disobedience engine is named FloodNet; funded by RTMark and launched in September 1998, it is Karasic's brainchild in her war against injustice. Filling the browser page with the names of the dead, this activism tool "would access the page for Mexico's President Zedillo seeking bogus addresses, so the browser would return messages like "human_rights not found on this server" (Cassell). Unlike the attacks launched by cracktivists, no damage is done by this software agent. When the Electronic Disturbance Theatre alerts its "online activists to `commence flooding!'" they visit EDT's website and click on FloodNet's icon (Harmon). The software then directs their browser to the target, and cues the same page to load over and over again. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Similar to the disruptive aestheticization of codework by the Dutch trio jodi.org, Karasic sees her collectivity interface as something more closely akin to "conceptual art" than to cyberterrorism (Harmon). No one and no data are harmed in these `attacks,' but websites are effectively shut down while the protest is being transmitted. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Advancing human rights through the electronic media is also the purview of another collective, a cyberfeminist one called subRosa. It is currently comprised of Laleh Mehran, Hyla Willis, Steffi Domike, Lucia Sommer, and Faith Wilding. It was also formed in the fall of 1998 - around the same time that Karasic was vowing to respond to Mexican excesses with FloodNet. Donna Haraway was the first to identify science as one of the most insidious cultural forms women needed to address to regain control of their bodies; subRosa follows in that tradition. subRosa uses its art to critique "the relationships between digital technologies, biotechnologies and women's bodies/lives/work" (Griffis). The goal of these hacktivists, akin to the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's, is the creation of communities, what they call "female affiliations that respect difference and create productive projects in solidarity with others who are working on similar ones" (Griffis). Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Postfeminist Artists and GroupsElectronic Disturbance Theatre. Flanagan, Mary. The Adventures of Josie True Fusco, Coco. Coco Fusco's Virtual Laboratory Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site Works Cited and ConsultedCritical Art Ensemble source ... http://www.electronicbookreview.com
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Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site GenTerra is a performance by Critical Art Ensemble and Beatriz da Costa. GenTerra is the name of a fictitious company dealing with "transgenics" - the isolation of one or more genes from one or more organisms to create another, new organism. Products created through this process - for example, transgenically modified foods - have often caused controversy. GenTerra claims to produce organisms that help solve ecological or social problems. GenTerra is essentially participatory theatre. On entering the space, the public is invited to discuss the facts and issues surrounding transgenics with the artists and scientists, who are dressed in white lab coats. Materials are provided to allow people to make and store their own transgenic bacteria. Visitors become actively involved in the area of risk assessment. By setting itself up as a corporation driven by profit but also by a sense of social responsibility, Critical Art Ensemble's Genterra highlights the complex relationship between for-profit ventures and the ethical considerations involved in transgenics research and product development. The project aims to make the general public more aware of transgenics, and the facts and fictions that surround it. GenTerra was created in consultation with Dr. Bob Ferrell, Department of Genetics, University of Pittsburgh, and Linda Kauffman, Department of Molecular Biology, the Mellon Institute, along with Beatriz da Costa, Robotic Art Researcher, Carnegie Mellon University, Semi Ryu and Garth Zeglin, Robotics Consultants, Carnegie Mellon University.
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By Carolyn Guertin .......... For many the term postfeminist might call to mind the vanilla pleasures of metrosexuality, webcams, online soaps, and blog culture, but, for me, a 40-something cyberfeminist scholar, curator and some time activist, the politically-minded feminist texts I work with are in fact dyed-in-the-wool postfeminist ones that occupy a different place on the postfeminism continuum from those more loudly-lauded, lighter confections. Usually given a bad rap by the media, postfeminism has been accused of being antifeminist, whereas it is instead what the next wave of second wave feminism has become. Its name is not a marker or movement that intends to imply that feminism is dead and gone, any more than Donna Haraway's "postgender" and N. Katherine Hayles' "posthuman" mean the death of those old shoes.| Similary articles: |
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