Lesson 1, Part 2

100 Anti-theses about Cyberfeminism

‘100 Anti-theses about Cyberfeminism’ is the next text we are going to consider on this course.
This text is available in the ebook and from the Old Boy’s Network website.

To launch a manifesto you have to want:
A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3

Let’s continue Tzara’s idea from the first part of the lesson to this.
100 Anti-Theses is written as a list of negative refusals, saying no to a wide range of things.
Is defining an idea always achieved by stating what it is – in the positive and in the affirmative?
Can negation be a positive force?

Sometimes, definitions can be achieved by identifying what one is rejecting i.e. writing a critique in terms of a refusal to be trapped by certain terms, assumptions, stereotypes or ideas. Negation in this sense can create a positive identity out of what is refused. Negation is a common avant-garde tactic in the arts. Negation can embody critique. It can also be quite playful and ironic.

This is suggested by the title of the manifesto “100 anti-theses” in this part of Lesson 1.

Let’s consider the following four questions in relation to this manifesto:

1. Is writing “yes” to something, the same as a “thesis” and is shouting “no to” something always an “anti-thesis”?

2. Did these cyberfeminist anti-theses, as a series of refusals, create the possibility or space for new approaches to cyberfeminism to emerge?

3. The anti-thesis is a tactic in which the counterpoint to any stated or implicit thesis is made. Is this the position in which most feminists find themselves, i.e. reacting against a well-established order, asking questions against the grain of “common sense”?

4. Or do anti-theses follow the scientific method of thesis – anti-thesis – synthesis. Can they produce new forms of synthesis and a sense of possibility?

On cyberfeminisms

The 100 anti-theses were written collectively at the First Cyberfeminist International that took place in Kassel, Germany, September 20-28, 1997, as part of the Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X. There were 30 participants from many countries in this 8-day event.

The idea of a Cyberfeminist International continued through several conferences, events and publications over the next few years, through the Old Boy’s Network, as well as the email list: Faces-l.

The 100 anti-theses on cyberfeminism recalls the scale of Martin Luther’s famous 95 theses (October 31, 1517) pinned to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church, which became the basis for the Protestant Reformation. This form of declaration about cyberfeminism was meant to be extremely ironic, playful and question people’s understandings of the relationship between women and technology.

Take a look at the Old Boys Network website. Their slogan at the time was “the mode is the message—the code is the collective” (Itself, a repurposing of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the Medium is the Message’ from 1964).
Think about how the politics of irony are pursued in their performances.

What is OBN? https://obn.org/
‘OBN stands for Old Boys Network. OBN is regarded as the first international Cyberfeminist alliance and was founded in 1997 in Berlin. Since the early days the network keeps changing due to changing members. OBN is a real and a virtual coalition of Cyberfeminists. Under the umbrella of the term ‘Cyberfeminism’, OBN contributes to the critical discourse on new media, especially focussing on its gender-specific aspects’.

What is an Old Boys Network?
‘Normally, the term ‚Old Boys Network‘ is used as an idiom, a metaphor to describe an informal interrelation of men [here to be understood as synonyme for human beings of male sex]. In this case, the Old Boys of one Network all went to the same elite school/college/university.
The concern of an Old Boys Network is to support and obtain support for individual careers. Older boys in a powerful position help younger ones and stabilize their own position that way. They exchange information, and every single Old Boy profits from the success of another Old Boy.
It should be noted that dictionaries, particularly those which went into print before 1997, might not contain some important new meanings regarding the term. Nowadays, ‚Old Boys Network‘ may also be in use for: a cyberfeminist network, a brand for cyberfeminist activities, a dangerous cyberfeminist virus… [to be continued].’

Who is OBN?‘The founders are Susanne Ackers, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Vali Djordjevic, Julianne Pierce. Since OBN has come into being in 1997, the contributing Old Boys as well as OBN‘s organisational structure have been in constant flow.’

Did the 100 anti-theses help establish useful definitions of cyberfeminism or were they creating a space for a more intense discussion to occur because they refused certain limiting definitions?

The concept of the Old Boys Network was based on the Cyberfeminist strategy of irritation and elusiveness. The network could have been viewed as a motor for political mobilization, a self-help group, a service by/for techno-enthusiasts, a feminist task force or an art project, a philosophical speculation or a fiction. The opacity of the nature of the consortium effectively turned out to be its strength. It triggered speculation and created a mythology that was attractive to potential participants, who could project their individual ambitions onto what OBN might have become.

Cornelia Sollfrank ‘Revisiting cyberfeminism’ Art Papers Vol. 39, Iss. 3,  (May 2015): 29-33.

Was this the start of cyberfeminism as a movement? Should we read the manifesto as the start of cyberfeminism?

The term cyberfeminism was coined by VNS Matrix (read Venus Matrix), an Australian artist collective active between 1991 and 1997, who, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Their art was a “mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent” (Schaffer, Kay (1999). The Game Girls of VNS Matrix: Challenging Gendered Identities in Cyberspace. In: Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment, eds. Anne O’Farrell and Lynne Vallone. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 147-168.:150) and as such was concerned with subverting the perceived androcentrism of new technologies, for instance by re-imagining “the clitoris [as] a direct line to the matrix.

Adequately defining cyberfeminism seems an impossible task, not only because the movement (if it can be called that) in its original manifestation was rather short lived, but also because it actively refused definition. A multilingual list of 100 anti-theses, for instance, reveals that cyberfeminism is neither a theory, a picnic, nor a green crochet placemat (yes, really). Others have attempted to rather loosely define cyberfeminism as anything women might engage in when “using Internet technology for something other than shopping via the Internet or browsing the world-wide web (sic.)”, based on the belief that they “should take control of and appropriate the use of Internet technologies in an attempt to empower themselves” (Gajjala, Radhika and Annapurna Mamidipudi (1999). Cyberfeminism, Technology, and International ‘Development’. Gender and Development 7( 2), 8‐16 :6).

Nicole Shephard What was/is cyberfeminism? Part 1

Julianne Pierce was a member of both VNS Matrix and OBN, so perhaps, one can find the same spirit or set of ideas is just developed between the two groups in ‘100 anti-theses’.
1998 was the publication date of Sadie Plant’s influential book Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, so can these anti-theses be said to precede this? Or were they developed in parallel?

An important influence in the work of OBN was Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985)

Instead of resorting to a technophobic utopian model embraced by a number of 20th-century feminist activist groups, Haraway argued for the channeling of an inborn agency, to be put toward the reinvention of feminist and socialist politics within the paradigms of networking, informatization, miniaturization, and the entanglement of bio- and information politics. The cyborg has shepherded this critical exploration of this alternative potential for resistance in a revolutionary way: it refused to reject technology as purely a patriarchal, imperialistic, or capitalist force destined to destroy the Earth, and to exploit and alienate people.

Cornelia Sollfrank ‘Revisiting cyberfeminism’ Art Papers Vol. 39, Iss. 3, (May 2015): 29-33.

The relationship between “cyber” and “feminism” which arose from this event is explored in Faith Wilding’s essay ‘Where is the feminism in cyberfeminism?‘ and this text was widely circulated on the internet. You can find this essay reproduced in volume 2, 1998 of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal edition on ‘Women and New Media’.

More cyberfeminist resources and texts are available from Old Boy’s Network’s Reading Room.

A new film by Charlotte Eifler ‘Feminism is a Browser’ (2019) considers the work and ideas of different key members in the FACEs network of women media artists, hackers and writers, started in 1997: preview here.

Here are two quotes about the ‘100 anti-theses of cyberfeminism’:-

The first cyberfeminist international agreed not to define cyberfeminism and produced “The 100 anti-theses of cyberfeminism” (100 things that cyberfeminism is not) instead: 1. cyberfeminism is not a fragrance 2. cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement 3. sajbrfeminizm nije usamljen 4. cyberfeminism is not ideology 5. cyberfeminism nije aseksualan 6. cyberfeminism is not boring 7. cyberfeminism ist kein gruenes haekeldeckchen 8. cyberfeminism ist kein leerer kuehlschrank 9. cyberfeminism ist keine theorie 10. cyberfeminism ist keine praxis 11. cyberfeminism ist keine tradition 12. cyberfeminism is not an institution (OBN, 1997)
Written in a combination of (at least) English, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Dutch, Spanish and German, the anti-theses continue to define cyber-feminism as not for sale, abject, a picnic, caffeine-free, anti-male or a banana. The anti-theses are telling of the importance of both international networking and playful irony in cyberfeminism. In fact, irony became something of a cornerstone of cyberfeminism from Haraway’s ironic cyborg figuration to VNS Matrix’s ironic art projects, the ironic practices of grrrl zines (Ladendorf, 2002) and OBN’s (Old Boy’s Network) politics of irony. Cornelia Sollfrank (1998, p. 61) sees irony, humour and seriousness combined as the quintessential cyberfeminist strategy, a productive tension that makes it possible to join contradictory views.

Susanna Paasonen ‘Revisiting cyberfeminism‘ Communications 36 (2011), 335-352.

Whilst the OBN’s website archives the anti-theses in the form of a numbered list, the First Cyberfeminist International reader represents them in the form of a diagramme. Here, negatively charged words or phrases (depicted next to encircled minus signs) are distributed around the word ‘CYBERFEMINISM’ (which is itself surrounded by a clutch of free-floating plus signs). In keeping with the conceptual preoccupations of the movement, the anti-theses are represented in a dispersed and non-hierarchical manner (Old Boys Network, 1998: 89).
There is much to like about the OBN’s negatively characterising gesture. It is memorable, witty, and packs a rhetorical punch. Perhaps more importantly, it facilitates freedom from restrictive and potentially divisive acts of labelling and definition, creating an image of the movement from which few are likely to feel substantially estranged or excluded. This is an important move in an attempt to construct a feminism not based on ‘woman’ as a straightforwardly unificatory signifier.

Helen Hester ‘After the Future: n Hypotheses of Post-Cyber Feminism‘
(Helen Hester is one of the authors of the ‘Xenofeminist manifesto’ explored later in the course.)

Other theses of cyberfeminism online

Donna Haraway  A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985)

VNS Matrix
Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991)
and
Bitch Mutant Manifesto (1994), available in the ebook (discussed in Lesson 3, part 3).

SubRosa (Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis)
‘Refugia: Manifesto for Becoming Autonomous Zones’ (BAZ) (2002), available in the ebook.

It would be possible to discuss at great length one of the most popular and widely read essays on cyberfeminist thought: Donna Haraway’s essay, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (written in 1985). Its ironic-political fiction (as a counter-hegemonic narrative) was meant as an alternative socialist-feminist manifesto. Its anticipatory achievement (prior to the widespread use of the internet, which started in the 1990s) has been developed in many essays on the post-human, labour and technological development, cyberfeminism and science fiction. This essay is wide-ranging in scope because it looks at how thought itself has been and is being reorganised in Command-Control-Communication-Intelligence (C3) structures with new postmodern, post-human and global dimensions, away from Enlightenment and previous dualistic models dissolving the idea of (hu)man’s separation from both nature and machine. The figure of the cyborg as a metaphor (a fiction) for a future view of a transformed human species (mediated by science-fiction), but especially for women, is summed up in the last line of the manifesto: ‘Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’

Chela Sandoval’s expansion and use of Donna Haraway’s ideas was a major contribution to US Third World Feminism/critical race studies: see ‘New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed’. in Chris Hables Gray (ed) The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge Press,1995) and Jenny Wolmark (ed) Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (Edinburgh University Press,1999)
and
Her book on Methodology of the Oppressed developed these ideas. Part of it is available to read online: here.

The quotes by Faith Wilding, Maria Fernandez and Christine Ross below suggest some of the important dimensions of how this debate has developed in social media theory and feminism.

‘Cyberfeminism must radically expand the critique concerning the media hype about a utopian technoworld. While abuse of the bureaucratic class, low-end technocratic class, and workers involved in product manufacturing has been adequately documented, what about age, race, or gender? The ability to assign oneself social characteristics on-line is seductive for those whose real-world social environment has been eliminated by pancapitalism’s destruction of social spaces of autonomy. What awaits people in a minoritarian position once they are on-line? Will they find familiar and significant rhetorics, discussions, and images? Is there a continuity of discourse between the real and the virtual? While there are some virtual pockets in which continuity exists, real-world social stratifications are, in general, reflected and replicated in cyberspace’

Faith Wilding, ‘Notes on the political condition of cyberfeminism’ Critical Art Ensemble Art Journal New York Vol. 57, Iss. 2,  (Summer 1998): 46-59.

In her famous essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the1980’s,” Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism,” as a foundation for feminist politics.22 By basing her cyborg on the model of mestizaje, the phenomenon of racial mixing that took place during the colonial period in the New World, Haraway attempted to bridge a profound gap that had opened in the United States between white and Third World feminism. As she explains, the category woman in previous feminisms “negated all non-white women.” White women “discovered (i.e., were forced kicking and screaming) to notice the non-innocence of the category ‘woman.”‘ She refers here to a series of contestations by women of color that had challenged the universalist claims of the feminist movement. Building on the work of feminist theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway posits that women of color “might be understood as “a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities.”

Maria Fernandez ‘Postcolonial media theory’ Art Journal, New York Vol. 58, Iss. 3,  (Fall 1999): 58-73.

In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” initially published in 1985, Donna Haraway sees the conflation of body and technology as constitutive of the cyborg-a hybrid of machine and organism in which technologies of communication and biotechnologies articulate the polymorphous recrafting of bodies. The productivity of Haraway’s theory lies in its postulation that the cyborg, as a creature without origins that forms itself through the confusion of boundaries (between the human and the animal, the natural and the artificial, the body and mind), is a fiction that nevertheless maps “our social and corporeal reality” and allows us to imagine beneficial couplings which undo identity in terms of mutability. This proposition is concomitant with Judith Butler’s postulation of corporeality as performativity, an act of imitation, identification, or melancholic subjection to social norms which is always a reenactment of norms. Like the cyborg, the performative body “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality,”and its fluidity of identities “suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization.”
‘The insufficiency of the performative: Video art at the turn of the millennium’ Christine Ross, Art Journal, New York Vol. 60, Iss. 1, (Spring 2001): 28-33.

Continue the lesson in Part 3

Other ideas about cyberfeminism occur in this course in discussions of VNS Matrix, Manifesto for the Gynecene and Xenofeminism in Lesson 3.

Click here to continue the lesson

Part 1 ……. Part 3

Summary 

Manifestos with colour titles can be found in the ebook.
Those marked with an external link can be found online.
Author’s websites are also linked, where known.

Who wrote these manifestos?

Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, author in the USA.

Mette Ingvartsen is a choreographer and performance artist in Sweden.

Old Boys Network began in 1997 with artists Susanne Ackers, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Vali Djordjevic, Julianne Pierce.

Mierle Ladermann Ukeles is an artist in the USA.