Continuing our exploration of terms we think with we are evoking the Encyclopedia of New Media’s definition to further investigate the concept of Cyberfeminism.

Cyberfeminism is a term coined in 1994 by Sadie Plant, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in Britain, to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies in general. The term and movement grew out of “third-wave” feminism.

Prior to the advent of cyberfeminism, feminist study of technology tended to examine technological developments as socially and culturally constructed. The ranks of cyberfeminists are growing, however, and along with this increase is a growing divergence of ideas about what constitutes cyberfeminist thought and action.

For Collective Rewilding, cyberfeminism, albeit in different traditions, relates to Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto. Haraway's calling to problemartize the rigid distinction between human, animal, and the machine serves as a provocation to inquire into how and to what degrees is our relationship to nature today highly mediated and determined by the technological? The HD screens, the smartphone photos, and more importantly by the enframing logic of the technological underscored by Heiddeger? Is it today impossible to reformulate our relationship to the environment without simultaneously reframing our relationship to the technological? How can an intersectional feminist ontology contribute to this transformation?

Even though women throughout history have been active in developing new technologies, cyberfeminists have argued that technology has still been looked upon as a masculine creation. Feminists such as Judy Wacjman, a professor of sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Cynthia Cockburn, an independent scholar and activist in London, argued that technology needed to be continually interrogated and re-conceptualized. And that is why today W21 collective is also helping change the terms of the conversation through datafeminism. From cyberfeminism to datafemism!!