Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment

Abstract

"If you can't slap him, snap him," is the tag line for the website HollaBackNYC (http://www.hollabacknyc.com). The site's creators, fed up with everyday harassment by men exposing themselves on New York's streets and subways, encourage women to use their Internet-enabled cell phones to snap photos of harassers and upload them to the site. This ingenious use of technology is emblematic of an array of new expression of feminist practices called "cyberfeminism." Among cyberfeminists (Orgad 2005; Plant 1997; Podlas 2000), some have suggested that Internet technologies can be an effective medium for resisting repressive gender regimes and enacting equality, while others have called into question such claims (Gajjala 2003). Central to such claims and counterclaims about the subversive potential of Internet technologies is theorizing that constructs women of color as quintessential cyborgs (Fernandez 2002, 32), as when Haraway writes about the "cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita" (1985, 7). In this essay, I offer an overview of cyberfeminist theories and practices. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical literature and empirical research, I review cyberfeminist claims about the subversive potential of human/machine cyborgs, identity tourism, and disembodiment within a global networked economy alongside analyses that highlight the lived experience and actual Internet practices of girls and self-identified women. While some cyberfeminists contend that the Internet shifts gender and racial regimes of power through the human/machine hybridity of cyborgs (Haraway 1985), identity tourism (Nakamura 2002; Turkle 1997), and the escape from embodiment (Hansen 2006; Nouraie-Simone 2005b), I argue that the lived experience and actual Internet practices of girls and self-identified women reveals ways that they use the Internet to transform their material, corporeal lives in a number of complex ways that both resist and reinforce hierarchies of gender and race. Adapted from the source document.