scenes as a way of looking into the nature of agency and rhetoric in computer games,
emphasizing the ways in which cut scenes and gameplay interact to form a distinct lan-
guage of dramatic expression.
References and Further Reading
Cheng, Paul. 2007. “Waiting for Something to Happen: Narratives, Interactivity and Agency and
the Video Game Cut-Scene.” Situated Play: Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games Research Asso-
ciation Conference. w ww.digra.org/digital‑library/publications/waiting‑for‑something‑to‑happen
‑narratives‑interactivity‑and‑agency‑and‑the‑video‑game‑cut‑scene/.
Hancock, Hugh. 2002. “Better Game Design through Cutscenes.” Gamasutra. w ww.gamasutra
.com/view/feature/3001/better_ game_ design_through.
Klevjer, Rune. 2002. “In Defence of Cutscenes.” Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference
Proceedings. w ww.aqui.rtietz.com/game_ design/In _ Defense_ of_Cutscenes.pdf.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Weise, Matthew. 2003. “How Videogames Express Ideas.” Level Up Conference Proceedings: Proceed-
ings of the 2003 Digital Games Research Association Conference. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc
/summary?doi=10.1.1.190.2031.
Cyberfeminism
Kate Mondloch
The evolution of the term cyberfeminism is not easy to trace and is evoca-
tively nonlinear and variegated in its applications. Examining the terms that make up
the compound word offers a logical starting point. The “cyber” part of cyberfeminism is
typically taken to denote cyberspace—“feminisms applied to or performed in cyberspace”
is Wikipedia’s roomy yet convincing definition (see cyberspace). American feminist
theorist Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism (see cyborg and posthuman) is another
formative source. Haraway’s celebrated 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol-
ogy, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (reprinted in Haraway 1991)
embraced the cyborg metaphor in order to argue for the inclusive transgression of bound-
aries (gender, race, difference) and the development of deliberately hybrid social identities.
Unsettling cultural feminist critiques of technology with a purposefully ironic stance, her
article famously concluded, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” The participants in
the 1994 London conference “Seduced and Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World,”
among others, describe cyberfeminism as the direct heir of Haraway’s cyborg feminism,
although the theorist’s essay predates both the term cyberfeminism and the widespread
recognition of cyberspace by several years.
If relatively few writers dispute the relevance of the “cyber” in cyberfeminism, the
place of feminism, in contrast, has been frequently debated. The all-female artist and
activist collective VNS Matrix (Adelaide, Australia; 1991–1997) was likely the first to unite
the terms with their poster entitled “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”
(1991). The humorous and polemical manifesto provocatively imbued new media tech-
nologies with feminine characteristics: “we are the virus of the new world disorder /
rupturing the symbolic from within / saboteurs of big daddy mainframe / the clitoris is
a direct line to the matrix.” British philosopher and writer Sadie Plant, among the earliest
proponents of cyberfeminism, proposed that the social relations engendered by new digital
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technologies are intrinsically associated with women and the feminine. Her best-known
text, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (1997), argued that actions such
as nonlinearly distributed processes should be embraced as “positively feminine.”
Many self-identified cyberfeminists took issue with the utopian technophilia and bi-
ological essentialism embedded in approaches such as those of VNS Matrix and Plant.
American artist and activist Faith Wilding’s influential essay “Where Is the Feminism in
Cyberfeminism?” (1998b) brought the issue to the forefront, critiquing the deliberate or
willed ignorance of alternate political feminisms among many cyberfeminists. Wilding
and Cornelia Sollfrank 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
108 Berlin. For the OBN, cyberspace was understood as entirely consistent with patriarchal
Cyberfeminism society: “Cyberspace does not exist in a vacuum; it is intimately connected to numerous
real-world institutions and systems that thrive on gender separation and hierarchy”; cy-
berfeminism, accordingly, should be a political undertaking committed to creating and
maintaining real and virtual places for women in regard to new technologies—such as
creating new feminist platforms and resources, including hands-on techno-education
for women and working directly with code—while also critically assessing the “impact of
new technologies on the lives of women and the insidious gendering of technoculture in
everyday life” (Wilding 1998a, 49).
Cyberfeminism, and the OBN in particular, has had particular resonance within the
visual arts. OBN appeared in the spotlight in the 1997 international art exhibition Docu-
menta X in Kassel, Germany, where the group hosted the First Cyberfeminist Interna-
tional (CI). Seeking to resist rigid definition, the CI published what they called “100
anti-t heses” (OBN and the First Cyberfeminist International 1997). Incorporating sev-
eral different languages, the one hundred anti-theses defined what cyberfeminism, ac-
cording to the CI, was not; for example: “12. Cyberfeminism is not an institution”; “19.
Cyberfeminism is not anti-male”; “40. Cyberfeminism is not essentialist.” The subRosa
collective (founded by former OBN member Faith Wilding in 1998)—an international
group of cultural researchers who combine art, activism, and radical politics to explore and
critique the intersections of digital information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies,
lives, and work—continues to be at the forefront of art and cyberfeminism.
No matter how diverse the strategies proposed by self-identified cyberfeminist activists
and writers, all share a commitment to critically engaging rather than hastily discount-
ing all things “cyber” (read: new media technologies, as well as their cultural and social
contexts). Social and political activism has been an important component of cyberfeminism,
and writers have brought the term to bear in a range of disciplinary contexts—including
art, sociology, law, political theory, biology, genetics, computer science, cyberpunk, and
sci-fi —both inside and outside of cyberspace (in order to reach those who lack Internet
access). The specific terms of cyberfeminist engagement have tended to shift alongside
the goals of broader feminist ideological positions. If early efforts concentrated on get-
ting women to participate more fully in what was understood to be “masculine” techno-
logical realms, subsequent cyberfeminists, informed by postcolonial theory, have fo-
cused on ethnic and racial difference, interrogating the various conditions that uphold
our techno-dependent society, as well as the digital divide.
The term cyberfeminism was coined in 1991, and cyberfeminist activity flourished
throughout the 1990s, coincident with the early excitement and anxiety associated with
the wide-scale introduction of the World Wide Web and networked computing. Since
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then, the term cyberfeminism has achieved a global reach (albeit with an Anglo bias). Cy-
berfeminism has been the topic of conferences, edited volumes, articles, and art exhibi-
tions all over the world, and it is impossible to identify any single definition at present. In
today’s climate of ubiquitous computing and information flows, some have asked if the
term cyberfeminism may have outlived its usefulness. In the twenty-first century, it seems
apparent that all politics, feminist or otherwise, must confront the “cyber.” On the other
hand, it’s important to note that cyberfeminism has suffered the neglect of other femi-
nist projects; many new media historians and critics consistently overlook the role of cy-
berfeminism in historical and contemporary theories of technology, lending a special
political urgency to its historicization.
■ See also gender and media use, gender repres ent at ion, virtual bodies
References and Further Reading
Braidotti, Rosi. 1996. “Cyberfeminism with a Difference.” New Formations 29:9–25.
Fernandez, Maria. 1999. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Third Text 47:11–17.
Flanagan, Mary, and Mary Booth Austin, eds. 2002. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Kember, Sarah. 2003. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. New York: Routledge.
OBN and the First Cyberfeminist International. 1997. “100 Anti-T heses.” w ww.obn.org/cfundef
/100antitheses.html.
Plant, Sadie. 1997. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday.
Reiche, Claudia, and Verena Kuni, eds. 2004. Cyberfeminism, Next Protocols. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
VNS Matrix. 1991. “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century.” w ww.sysx.org/gashgirl/ VNS
/T EX T/PINK MANI.HTM.
Wilding, Faith. 1998a. “Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism.” Art Journal 57 (2):
46–59.
———. 1998b. “Where Is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” n. paradoxa 2:6– 1 2.
Wright, Michelle, Maria Fernandez, and Faith Wilding, eds. 2002. Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist
Practices. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Cybernetics
Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters
Cybernetics, like many metadisciplines, evades easy definition: there may
now be as many definitions of cybernetics as—or perhaps more than—there are self-
identified cyberneticians. Since the mid-1940s, its amalgamation of themes of commu-
nication and control in computational biological, social, and symbolic systems has inspired
and bedeviled researchers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Accounts have variously identified cybernetics as a science of communication and con-
trol (Wiener 1948), a universal science (Bowker 1993), an umbrella discipline (Kline, n.d.),
a Manichean science (Galison 1994, 232), and a scientific farce founded on sloppy analo-
gies between computers and human organisms (Pierce 1961, 208–227).
MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener is often credited with launching the field with
his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948).
Wiener based Cybernetics on his World War II research aimed at better integrating the
agency of human gunners and analog computers within antiaircraft artillery fire control
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