Cyberfeminism

The introduction and embrace of the machine has led  many previously solid lines to be blurred, none more so than gender. The information age and the internet have given us a new space to exist in, one where we control every aspect of our identity and presentation, but creative women have been exploring this idea long before social media or the world wide web. Donna Haraway advocates in her 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, for the “Utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender”, and argues that from the late 20th century on, we are all cyborgs, hybrids of human with machine, human with animal. Cyberfeminists have also been critical of other, more accepted forms of feminism, for advocating for women in a way that upholds current social divides and doesn’t promote the idea of a genderless or genderfluid society. While the cyberfeminist movement emerged in the ‘90’s, radical women and gender non-conforming thinkers have upheld its ideals since the rise of industrial society and beyond. Around two decades into the 20th century, Hannah Höch was already rejecting the popular idea of the “New Woman”, which gave women new freedoms in employment and expression, but freedoms which were confined to the limits of acceptability from the dominating male culture. Höch’s photomontages combined man with woman with machine to express her discontent, about 60 years before Harway’s manifesto or the term cyberfeminism. This exhibition does not intend to give a comprehensive timeline of cyberfeminist creatives, but rather provide a brief snapshot of the movement and its long and storied evolution.