Making the Virtual Real:
Feminist Challenges in the Twenty-First Century

Women’s voices, activities, networks, and activism

Most would agree that there has been an explosion of women’s voices, activities, and different forms of networks and activism (social, economic, political, cultural) online. Whether we are thinking of women’s involvement in all kinds of organizations, blogs, online publishing and business, campaigning, or community and network building, their engagement in the virtual world is clearly extensive, multifarious, and growing. Women’s online presence is as diverse and significant as I could ever have imagined it in the early days of my research, and it has probably grown much more rapidly than I, and perhaps many other researchers, expected it to.

Women are at the forefront of online adventuring and discovery, and this is truly exciting. Sue Thomas is among those showing the way, helping us to relate to online realities and their roots in other forms of endeavor. “Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we have all been . . .” For her virtual reality (VR) is about thinking and being. “I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions. I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.”¹

Women’s virtual presence expands well beyond feminist interests and agendas. Through different channels and for different reasons, women have harnessed the creative, social, communicative, political, cultural, and economic potential of the Web in many different ways.

If we see the online (sociospatial) setting as an expansion of the traditional public sphere of the offline (geospatial) setting, then women and feminists can be seen as major players in making that expansion meaningful. They are active in building online communities, long-term and goal oriented, as well as more transitory and social.² Women’s online voices and activities, and their linkages to their offline lives and the social processes affecting them, contribute to disrupting the public and private gendered limitations of the historical geospatial world.

The Internet is an international public (as well as private) space or series of spaces. The international presence of women and, equally important, their opportunities to build connections with one another within and across national boundaries, for all kinds of political, economic, cultural and social endeavours, feminist and women-oriented or otherwise, have expanded enormously thanks to the Internet. Women are more public beings than they have ever been, and it could be argued that this is a radical development. The Internet has aided women in forging public presences and identities and building on those to act in online and offline frameworks, international as well as national and local.

It could be argued that this is a whole new situation for women who have access to the Internet, that some of the barriers that women previously confronted in their attempts to access wider (public) settings have been overcome. The Internet facilitates women’s public presence and action, their access to virtual politics and the digital economy. This new situation has many stimulating and liberating implications for women and girls, for they now have many more possibilities to imagine alternative public selves and ways in which these can be achieved, for example, as international political activists and campaigners, Internet entrepreneurs and online innovators, community builders and shapers.

So now there are new challenges for feminist thinking to inhabit the problematics and possibilities of the online as well as the offline, for women’s individual and collective identities, for their diverse contributions to society, and for thinking about the kinds of futures that confront their communities and about how they might like to steer them differently. Women’s larger public presence, thanks to online communications and activities, is in many ways a major cause for celebration and hope among those men and women who see greater gender equality as at least in part about reaching towards women’s full potential across public and private spheres.

Let’s stay with the possibilities of online-offline interaction before moving on to the problematics. These possibilities put new pressure on feminist theory, activism, and politics. They call for new imaginings about paths to liberation, self-realization and discovery, and community generation. I call to mind two early pioneers in this area, whose analysis follows rather different but related directions, related certainly in the sense that they are focused on women as full participants in this new cyber age. Dale Spender made clear calls for women to be as fully involved as possible in this new Internet era, to be authors as much as users in the new multimedia environment, and usefully examined how ICTs were interweaving technological processes with other socially creative ones. From her perspective, the traditional notion of the author would translate into “a new combination of artist and scientist, a new breed which has both craft and technological expertise, a new band of infotainers.”³

Spender’s analysis helped me to develop my understanding of ICTs in a social as well as a technical sense, but it did even more than that. She stressed how ICTs, as tools and means of expression and communication, were becoming integral to social creation. They were impacting not only on how we created but also on what we created. Of authors, she adds: “They will be visually literate, as well as computer and print literate (and ‘sound-literate’ too). They could be the shapers of future culture in the way that authors have been the value-makers of the past.”⁴

Spender focused directly on the interface with ICTs and science and technology more broadly, as did Donna Haraway in her well-known work on the theme of the cyborg, which provided a basis for a lot of thinking in what we might call the cyberfeminist mode.⁵ Intrinsic to this mode, for me, is the recognition of the new intimacy between machines and interpersonal and social processes that ICTs and their expansion in daily life represent.

If we take the cyborg concept seriously, it gestures towards a fusion of machine and human processes. I would certainly see ICTs as yet another and distinctive stage in the story of men’s and women’s interdependence with machines, which has increasingly characterized life in industrial (and now also post-industrial) capitalism. Cyberfeminism as a new turn in feminist thought and politics takes up, among other things, the possibilities and the problems confronting women in a virtual world where ICTs increasingly mediate experiences and relations.⁶

This is a significant shift in feminism, both philosophically and practically. While cyberfeminism remains concerned with established questions of freedom and oppression, liberation and equality, feminist imagining and creativity, community building, and so on, it addresses these in the context of how women are relating to ICTs and what they mean in their lives.

1. Sue Thomas, Hello World: Travels in Virtuality (York: Raw Nerve Books, 2004), 44. [↩]
2. See Gillian Youngs, “Globalization, Communication and Technology: Making the Democratic Links,” Politica Internazionale 1-2 (January-April, 2001): 217-26. [↩]
3. Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1995), 92. [↩]
4. Ibid., 92. [↩]
5. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York: 1991) and Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse®: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997). [↩]
6. See, for example, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, eds., CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1999). [↩]