07 12 2000
Andrea Hapke: re: (Translation from Russian)


Dear Irina,

i had to think a while about Your letter.

i liked very much Your remarks on the restistance to the speed of the internet, even more as I have just recently bought an own computer plus modem, and can feel with my own body, how it starts getting hold of me. and i think a lot about this. maybe this balance between technophily and technophoby is hardest in the everyday usage of computers.

but i even thought more about Your words concerning the comparison of feminism and cyberfeminism. what we wrote as a provocative exaggeration is our sincere and serious question. and it emerged not from analyzing western but russian developments. in russia both feminism and cyberfeminism are fields which are just developing - and they are going very different ways, as it seems to me. even their focuses on the situation of women and the ideas, how and whether to change it, are very different.

i know that one shouldn't understand either feminism or cyberfeminism as homogeneous movements. on the pages of the cyberfeminclub i find various approaches. and regarding your feminism, Irina (Ak.) and Alla, many questions and astonishment arise in me. maybe just because feminism comes first for me, and not cyber (is that old-fashioned?); and cyberfeminism is inavoidable for me, as an answer to cyberspace's gradual takeover of our lives.
but for me feminism emerges from the knowledge that there is a discrimination of women by ascribing qualities, stereotypes and roles to them. on the one hand it is necessary to deconstruct these stereotypes, to show how they emerge and act. but the fact that they are constructions doesn't mean to me that they do not exist in social realities. your works show the possibility, to deconstruct - with the help of technology - binary systems, which lead to or ground hierarchies. i like this approach a lot. but it bothers me that you write your texts and interviews as if these hierarchies wouldn't exist at all, as if there wouldn't be the necessity to think about them any more.

cyberfeminism is the most common thing in the world, or in cyberspace...?

there also are other examples. the authors of the catalogue "internet for women!" (internet zhenshinam!) http//iw.owl.ru show the need of such a catalogue with ressources for and about women. they motivate this with their analysis of which information is being offered to and about women by the russian internet. the results of this analysis are quite sad.

i would really like to know, how such a small circle of women like yours relates to this. or should we really "not call russia a patriarchal country" and does "the female really not stand for the marginal" there? (irina aktuganova "feminism, that's such a word" http://www.cfc.spb.ru/russian_feminism.html) i am astonished about this, but I would like to understand, how this goes together with the word feminism. i really wish that an understanding of the real situation of women would be woven into cyberspace - even more because it seems to me that they are not too different there...(as the analysis by owl shows)

i hope that i could explain a little bit our first letter and our thoughts regarding cyber/feminism.

"Feminism, that's such a word..."

in 1993 Larissa wrote that western feminism is too political...

what do you think?
with best regards,

andrea


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