Do you know your IRL from your AFK? Ever heard of the mercenaries of slime? And what does all this have to do with the gloriously liberated feminist future the web was supposed to deliver? A mind-boggling conference at the ICA had the answers. You don’t have to wear a hi-tech bodysuit to be a post-cyber feminist, though some did. 

The ICA’s recent Post-Cyber Feminist International conference drew an arty crowd of intellectuals, feminists and the intellectual, feminist, gender non-conforming. Want to know what self-determined, non-gendered DIY fashion looks like at the gorgeous, bleeding edge? This was the place: with everything from experimental tailoring to rubber face masks, at times the dressed-up vibe verged on Comic-Con for PhD candidates.

Foul-mouthed, irreverent and sexually liberated, the original Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st century was written by the Australian collective VNS Matrix in 1991. Describing themselves as “mercenaries of slime” and proclaiming that “the future will be unmanned”, VNS Matrix evoked an era in which computer interactivity was radically sexualised and gloopily physical. They took the emerging technological paradigm ­– in which software penetrated hardware – and imagined its ultimate evolution. Six years later, the first Cyberfeminist International was held in Kassel, Germany, and the idea of a networked, feminist future was discussed in optimistic terms. We now inhabit that future. Or at least we do from a technological perspective. Alas, while the tech matured, the idea that it might provide some kind of intersectional/feminist haven did not. The porn-heavy, troll-dominated reality of life online can make off-grid existence in a cave in Wales look like a tempting alternative. For those pondering a future spent dressed in foraged goat fur and subsisting on bilberries and lichen, the Post-Cyber Feminist International examined what new technologies can still offer, how to use them positively, and how online spaces might be queered and hacked.

A Very Partial Primer

That’s “post-cyber” not “post-feminism”. And that’s post-cyber as in “living with cyberspace” rather than “occupying an era entirely after cyberspace”.

Think AFK not IRL

Using the term IRL – In Real Life – to distinguish events in physical space from those online leads to a strange sense of disjunction, as if the two spheres of activity are somehow neatly separated. On the one hand, it gives mean tweeters a false sense of security, as if what is written online is somehow not “real” and thus doesn’t cause “real” harm and upset. On the other, we should aspire to bring the freedom of self-expression online, performed through avatars or chatroom identities, into offline life. Rather than IRL, think AFK: Away From Keyboard – a term coined by media theorist Nathan Jurgenson to suggest the progression of identities on and off the computer.

Post-cyber feminist bodies At the International, bodies became testing grounds for experiments in science and gender, and avatars escaped into the everyday. We saw artist and biohacker Mary Maggic – visibly pregnant – pee elegantly on stage and harvest hormones from urine donated by audience members. Cibelle Cavalli Bastos led a workshop on complex identity and invited participants to ungender their body movements. E.Jane, a conceptual artist whose “primary residence is cyberspace” screened a music video starring their online alter ego Myhsa and admitted: “She’s real. I put her on the internet and I put an album out. She’s more popular than me now.”

#deprogram

In a discussion sphere dominated by more-or-less academic terminology, the language of computers offered a useful, widely understood set of analogies. Among these was Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’s use of “malware” as a metaphor for our accretion of received prejudices. “We function like some sort of computer that ends up getting a lot of malware installed without realising,” said Bastos. “Racism, sexism, classism: that’s all malware. We learn that shit and we need to get it out of our system. We need to deprogram.”

Whatever happened to the military-industrial complex?

Pioneer cyberfeminists Faith Wilding and Diana McCarty recalled wariness in the early days of the internet. For some feminists, engaging with the internet meant engaging with the military-industrial complex that created it. That may have sounded wacky and even paranoid back then, but in our post-9/11, mutating “war on terror” era, online surveillance is part of our lived reality. There are other types of information-gathering taking place: as Shira Jeczmien, editor of Screen Shot, pointed out: even the vocabulary we use online is mined, all feeding into a system of machine learning.

Solidarity in cyberspace

Essayist Joni Cohen spoke movingly about communities of care, extending online and off, and the important role the internet plays in relation to mental health, disability and issues affecting trans communities. Cohen argued for the understanding of “lifemaking” as a form of social reproduction: not just making new life, but the role of sustaining life within communities of care. She quoted her essay We Build a Wall Around Our Sanctuaries, co-authored with Sophie Monk: “And so we plan our escapes from the scourges of the family and the state; we make endless cups of tea for one another; we share our Valium and our oestrogen prescriptions; we clean each others’ rooms when our siblings are too immobilised by depression to do it themselves.”

Pay attention to Diane Abbott

An analysis by Amnesty International earlier this year showed that, of all the abusive tweets sent to women MPs over a six-month period, half were directed at Diane Abbott. During the charged and eloquent discussion Black Feminism and Post-Cyber Feminism, writer and filmmaker Siana Bangura evoked the blinkered complacency of British attitudes towards race. The visibility of racist violence in the US has allowed Britain to occupy a moral high ground that the online abuse meted at Abbott illustrates it ill deserves. “Everything is so institutionalised,” says Bangura of the UK. “No one wants to be called a racist: they’re almost more scared to be called a racist than they are of racism itself.”

Low-tech is tech too

“Technology is how a society copes with physical reality,” wrote the science fiction author Ursula K Le Guin. Technology doesn’t begin and end with the network: it’s matches, washing machines, contraceptive pills and hormone treatments. Looking back to the cyberfeminism of the 1990s, Faith Wilding evoked the glory of electronic mailing lists. For Parisian afrofeminist Kiyémis, an old-school blog – Les Bavardages de Kiyémis – affords a platform for discussions of race frowned upon by the French state and excluded from discourse within the university.