VNS Matrix published the manifesto in 1991. The tech industry ignored it. The internet was built anyway.
Literal meaning: Cyberfeminism is a feminist theoretical and artistic practice that engages technology — specifically digital technology and networks — as a site of gender politics: neither celebrating technology as inherently liberating nor rejecting it as inherently masculine, but claiming it as contested terrain.
Origin: Two origins in 1991, independent of each other: VNS Matrix, an Australian feminist art collective, published their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, which declared “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” and reclaimed the language of computing and flesh for feminist politics. The same year, Sadie Plant in the UK began developing a cyberfeminist theory that identified the computer, weaving, and femininity as historically connected — drawing on Ada Lovelace’s role in computing history. The term was adopted at the First Cyberfeminist International in Kassel, 1997.
A feminist engagement with digital technology as contested political terrain — claiming computing, networking, and code as sites of gender struggle.
The Appeal: Cyberfeminism offered a way to engage with technology from a feminist position that was neither technophobic nor uncritically celebratory. It named women’s historical contributions to computing — hidden in the standard narrative — and refused the gendering of technical competence as masculine. It also had genuine aesthetic energy: VNS Matrix’s work was provocative, funny, and technically engaged.
The Friction: The original cyberfeminism was contested from within feminism: critiques of its whiteness, its focus on access rather than structural change, and the risk that celebrating women’s participation in existing technical systems reproduces rather than challenges those systems. Contemporary intersectional feminist technology critique — the work of Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Joy Buolamwini — extends cyberfeminism’s core concern (technology is gendered and racialised) while addressing these critiques. Informatics of Domination is what cyberfeminism responds to. Situated Knowledge is its epistemological foundation.
Why This Matters: Cyberfeminism names the claim that technology is not neutral terrain — and that feminist engagement with it is not optional. Once you know the tradition, contemporary research on algorithmic bias, facial recognition racism, and platform harassment sits within a longer history.
Related terms: Cyborg · Situated Knowledge · Informatics of Domination · Digital Libertarianism · Inclusive Design
Read more:
- Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century — VNS Matrix (1991)
- Programmed Inequality — Hicks, M. (2017). MIT Press