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

"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.¹ 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.

While drawing on academic disciplines, I also focus rather deliberately on the theoretically informed empirical investigations by sociologists into Internet practices. Saskia Sassen's work addresses the embeddedness of the digital in the physical, material world, and she catalogs the ways that digital technologies "enable women to engage in new forms of contestation and in proactive endeavors in multiple different realms, from political to economic" (2002, 368). In contrast, Lori Kendall (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002), in her richly nuanced ethnography of the gendered dynamics in the multiuser domain (MUD) BlueSky, argues that digital technologies reproduce rather than subvert white, heterosexual, masculine cultures and hierarchies of power. In a 1997 article "Changing the Subject," Jodi O'Brien writes eloquently about the strict policing of gender identity online and the limitations of identity tourism. And Victoria Pitts's (2004) research about women's use of the Internet on breast cancer forums offers an important corrective to the discourse about disembodiment popular in cyberfeminist writing. My focus is based at least partly on familiarity; I am a sociologist by background and training, so it is the field in which I am most conversant. Focusing on empirical sociological research about Internet practices is also an effective strategy for informing theoretical claims about the subversive potential of digital technologies. Finally, my focus on sociological research is meant to serve as a challenge to those who claim to want to transform as well as inform society yet have little engagement in the cyberfield.

Beyond "Zeroes and Ones": Gender, Race, and Cyberfeminism(s)

Cyberfeminism is neither a single theory nor a feminist movement with a clearly articulated political agenda. Rather, "cyberfeminism" refers to a range of theories, debates, and practices about the relationship between gender and digital culture (Flanagan and Booth 2002, 12), so it is perhaps more accurate to refer to the plural, "cyberfeminism(s)." Within and among cyberfeminism(s) there are a number of distinct theoretical and political stances in relation to Internet technology and gender as well as a noticeable ambivalence about a unified feminist political project (Chatterjee 2002, 199). Further, some distinguish between the "old" cyberfeminism, characterized by a utopian vision of a postcorporeal woman corrupting patriarchy, and a "new" cyberfeminism, which is more about "confronting the top-down from the bottom-up...