subRosasubRosa is a cyberfeminist cell of artists and activists based in several US cities that “combines art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work.” In this essay, subRosa tracks the state of current cyberfeminist activity and dialogue at a historical moment when information and communication technology has asserted itself as a dominant catalyst of the capitalist system, presenting new challenges for 21st-century feminist theorists and practitioners.
subRosa
U-Gen-A-Chix: Cultures of Eugenics (2002)
from the exhibition YOUgenics
SW Missouri State University
Students learn about and discuss Advanced Reprotech processes, the history of eugenics, and biotechnology
Courtesy the artists
| In many parts of the world different feminist voices are currently calling for a new vision and engagement in local and global feminist activism. Much of this renewed interest in feminism is a result of the social, cultural, economic, and political effects on women's lives (globally) of the new digital communications and biotechnologies. Women all over the world encounter daily incursions of technology in their lives and communities, and many of them are struggling with ways to both resist and engage the power of these forces. At the beginning of the 21st century, the advancing global hegemony of US information and communication technologies (ICT)—which make the overwhelming success of pan-capitalism possible—presents radically new challenges for feminist theory and practice. Now is an important moment for the re-examination of historical feminist issues in relation to the condition of women in “the integrated circuit.”1
In the US today there is no longer a vocal, visible, public feminist movement, although there are many local pockets of feminist practice. But there is a pressing need for a renewed vision and engagement in local and global feminist issues. One early response to these conditions has been the emergence of the eclectic formation of cyberfeminism. In the last ten years, cyberfeminism has become a significant field in contemporary cultural practice. Cyberfeminist web sites and electronic publications have increased from a handful in the early ’90s to thousands today. Yet cyberfeminism currently functions more as a label to grant currency to a panoply of positions than as a political movement. The importunate question of the feminism within cyberfeminism still haunts virtually every discussion on the topic. 2 Heir to both post-feminism and post-structuralism, and sharing multiple aspects with second-wave feminism, cyberfeminism has often refused a defined political positioning within feminisms.3 Sadly, some manifestations of this ambivalence stem from ignorance of even very recent feminist histories, as well as the great differences within feminist theory and practice and the relevance of each to contemporary conditions. For example, although cyberfeminism presents itself as inclusive, cyberfeminist writings often assume a formally-educated, white, upper middle-class, English speaking, art world-situated readership, which is nevertheless presented as unsituated and universal. 4
Contestational Cyberfeminism
subRosa
Can You See Us Now? ¿Ya Nos Pueden Ver? (2004)
installation view at Mass MoCA
from the exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere
Participants cut out and pin their clothing tags on a map of the world, revealing global distribution of clothing production
Courtesy the artists
| Current global conditions of acute economic injustice and suffering in the digitized, war-supported world order are being contested by a gathering wave of self-organized demonstrations and direct actions against corporate, economic, and bio-colonization and authoritarian takeover. 5 Youth, women, and the politicized poor are initiators and shock troops of these actions worldwide. Feminism's strong history of direct action, cultural intervention, and postcolonial, net-activist strategies are generative inspirations, and cyberfeminists can have a crucial role in this gathering wave. Using our skills, tools, access, and knowledge we can initiate and support critical direct action and solidarity projects with women worldwide who are facing—from the bottom up—the top-down power vectors of corporate globalism.
Far from being obsolete, feminist political philosophy and analysis can be fruitfully brought to bear on the new conditions that ICT has created for women. For example, we need much more research on the specific impact of ICT on different populations of women whose lives are being profoundly altered by new technologies, often in ways that lead to extreme physical and mental health problems. Since most women are already doing a “double shift” (production and reproduction), the demands and pressures of the high-speed, just-in-time economy affect them differently than it does most men. The high levels of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, and stress disorders even among professional women (the most documented group) attest to the high human costs of our economic and cultural systems of productivity. Pan-capitalism has blurred the distinctions between developed/underdeveloped, first world/third world. These conditions coexist in almost all geographical locations. In the aftermath of colonialism, there are more migrants, refugees, and exiles than ever before, and many of these migrants are women.
As women from “third-world” countries increasingly become home-service and child-care laborers employed by wealthier families—as well as the world’s electronic parts manufacturers, assemblers, and data maintenance workers—the lives of white women and women of color are mutually reliant. This interdependence stresses the relevance of postcolonial studies for critical cyberfeminisms. Migration is immediately relevant to electronic media and cyberfeminism, as it often results from devastations caused by global capital. We must begin de-colonization in our own networks and embodied relations. Developments in biogenetic technologies that profoundly affect environmental and human futures must be a major focus of cyberfeminist concern, particularly since much cutting edge medical technology is being developed and tested by the military, with the proviso that there be lucrative civilian applications. Some of these military technologies are already having far-reaching effects on women, for example in ultrasound pregnancy monitoring, telesurgery, robotic medical monitoring and care, and invasive imaging techniques.
Organic bodies and bodily processes—particularly those of women and fetuses—are being invaded at the molecular level and re-engineered to meet the cyborgian and eugenic needs of the global market place. Cyberfeminist scientists and technicians—as well as artists working with these technologies—are well positioned to expose and subvert the ideologies and practices of new flesh, reproductive, and genetic technologies, and to assess their particular political, economic, social, and eugenic impact on different groups of women globally. 6
A contestational cyberfeminism must also address the circumstances of young women now entering the technocratic class. To break the “glass ceiling” and become an active part of the exploiting class that benefits from gender hierarchy is not a feminist goal, nor anything to be proud of. In this context, bell hooks’ definition of feminism, proposed almost two decades ago, remains relevant to cyberfeminists:
“Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women will have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels of sex, race, and class to name a few, and a commitment to reorganizing US society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” 7
Cyberfeminist Site-u-ational Theater
subRosa’s work is one example of a cyberfeminist practice that centers on the uses and implications of biotechnology as it applies to sexual difference, race, and transnational labor conditions. Our research/production takes many forms, including performance, video, publishing, web projects, and teach-ins. subRosa’s main approach to art production has been “site-u-ational,” a form of situated participatory theater revamped for the information age. 8 This variety of performance is transdisciplinary; it employs various new and old media to create open-ended performative environments in which participants can engage with objects, texts, technologies, activities, and learning experiences, and interact with each other and the artists. When successful, such projects generate a dialogue of conflicting and various voices, and question the taken-for-granted codes of social interaction and methods of learning and knowledge operating in everyday life. subRosa aims to create an emergent public and a temporary public space, where participants are able to experience and understand the politics and material effects of the new digital and biotechnologies on their lives.
This article draws from a more detailed consideration of cyberfeminism, “Situating Cyberfeminism,” by Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding, in Domain Errors! a subRosa project edited by Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright: www.refugia.net/domainerrors
For more information on subRosa and cyberfeminism, visit:
www.cyberfeminism.net
channel.creative-capital.org/medium_article_4.html
www.massmoca.org
1 A term coined by Rachel Grossman to “name the situation of women in a world [so] intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology.” Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” p. 165, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991).
2Faith Wilding, “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” n.paradoxa, Vol. 2, 1998.
3For example, in discussions at the First Cyberfeminist International at the 1997 Documenta X in Kassel, a definition of cyberfeminism was declined in favor of the declaration that cyberfeminism was a practice which embraced a gamut of attitudes towards art, culture, theory, politics, communications, and technology—the terrain of the internet. This was a tactic presumed to attract women from diverse backgrounds and orientations, particularly young women unwilling to call themselves feminists. Instead of a definition, the participants devised the 100 anti-theses—definitions of what cyberfeminism is not. These included the statement "Cyberfeminism is not a-political,” but its politics remained unspecified.
4Ironically, this attitude replicates the damaging universalism of “old-style feminism.” There is little mention of the crucially different conditions—be they economic, cultural, racial or ethnic, geographic, or environmental—under which women worldwide experience sexuality and pleasure, aging, menopause, motherhood, child rearing, ecology, and the environment; or of alternative ways of living and working that may preclude ICT. These subjects, central to postcolonial feminist work in theory, literature, and the arts, remain peripheral to the core of cyberfeminist writing.
5 Women farmers in the global South, for example, are leading struggles against the bio-piracy and forced planting of genetically modified crops practiced by global gene giants like Monsanto. See, for example, Diverse Women for Diversity: www.diversewomen.org and Vandana Shiva’s homepage: www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=90.
6 In the ’70s the Feminist Women’s Health Movement challenged the medical establishment in the US by establishing its own clinics, new abortion procedures, alternative healing practices, and feminist sexual counseling. These tactics subverted patriarchal medical authority and eventually forced women’s health care providers in the US to change some of their standard gynecological and obstetric practices. Similarly, Women on Waves—www.womenonwaves.org—is an example of a feminist health intervention in response to new global conditions.
7 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 194-195. For a discussion of the relation of feminisms to the “virtual class,” see Faith Wilding and the Critical Art Ensemble, “Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism,” p. 23, First Cyberfeminist International Reader.
8 Critical Art Ensemble has formulated the term “recombinant theater” to describe this kind of performance, deliberately referencing the revolutionary process of genetic engineering (recombinant genetics or transgenics) that produces new genetic (DNA) sequences and genomes by combining genes, often across species boundaries.
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