20 11 2000
Andrea and Jana: cyberfeminism, feminism and real women


Dear Cyber-/Feminists,
dear Irina, Larissa, Valentina, and Irina,

today we finally start our cyberfeminist discussion - in a small but heterogeneous circle. We are very glad that You have agreed to join this experiment and we hope that we all can learn and get to know some things in the course of this next month.
Taking part in the discussion are Irina Aktuganova, Irina Aristarkhova, Valentina Konstantinova, Larissa Lissjutkina and the two of us, Andrea Jana Korb and Andrea Hapke.
So we are two Russian cyberfeminists, two Russian feminists, and two critical, deconstructivist (cyber-)feminists from Berlin.

So we have categorized you with nice labels - but defining ourselves we try to find more concrete words - or rather to avoid such classifications at all.
But let's exaggerate some more (keeping in mind Teresa de Lauretis):
Cyberfeminists are individualists, having fun, and tending to postmodernist positions. Cyberfeminists are dealing with the mechanisms of the representation of the Woman and with politics of the symbolic, and sometimes forget about real women. Cyberfeminists above all are "cyber" (and not feminists).
And feminists act in solidarity, are interested in mutual strategies and politics.
Feminists are looking for the real women and often do not notice that representation refers to the Woman. Feminists hardly notice the differences between women.

Well, of course one can't say it like this, but...
What is the common ground between cyberfeminists and feminists? What are the differences? What do you think of such categories? What are such labels good for, and for whom, and whom do they represent?
We have lots of questions to you and we are very curious about what you will say, who you are, and what you care about.
And maybe that is enough to start a discussion...
We are looking for possible cyber-/feminist agencies, we want to build networks and to subvert gender relationsships. And You?

Meet you soon,
Andrea and Jana

______________________________________
P.S.:
some technical remarks:

We would like to discuss until the 20th of December (this limit seems convenient for us, because after that the non-orthodox Christian holidays will begin). There are no other external limitations to our conversations (or are there?).
The discussion will be organized as a mailinglist, so we ask you to send all e-mails and answers to our address (mailto:baba_yaga1@mail.ru), even if you just answer to one of the participants. We will send them to everybody involved. Apart from that we will publish everything on our website (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~brat/cyberfemin.html).
There you can also find quotations by Teresa de Lauretis concerning the Woman and women (file "discussions") and there we also tried to introduce all of you with our favorite quotations of you.
We also ask you to shortly introduce yourselves in your first e-mail.
Furthermore we would like to suggest to address each other in familiar terms (in Russian "ty" and not "vy"). We know that this is not at all usual in Russia, but we can find new rules of communicating in cyberspace, can't we? Or would that be inappropriate for you?
In English we wouldn't have this problem. But after your replies and with solving our encoding problems we decided to discuss in Russian, because the www is already saturated with English - and we find it important also to "do cyberfeminism" in other languages and explicitly to reach a Russian public. So we ask you kindly to excuse our mistakes and we hope that we all find a mutual language.
If there still should appear any technical troubles (encoding,...) or questions (about specific terms,...), please ask, as we will also ask.

Finally we wish to write a few words about ourselves, apart from that what you could already read on our website:

Andrea:
I grew up in the GDR, so I have experienced the transition to another system. Then I moved to Berlin to study Russian philology and cultural studies. But it all turned out a little different. I studied, lived a year in St. Petersburg, but I met people with which I started to do politics. I worked in different groups, mostly autonomous women's groups and groups that questioned hierarchies in society and tried to produce conditions of visibility for "others" who don't fit into norms.
One of my most important experiences was the attempt to realize our ideas of another society on a everyday basis, "making the personal politic": an alliance of people, which also chose the metaphor of the network for itself. There I met Jana.

Jana (I'm called Jana, so I won't get mixed up with Andrea):
In Berlin I'm studying Eastern European studies with a sociological and cultural major focussing on the fSU and Czech and cultural studies with a focus on gender studies, feminism and its (queer, post-colonial,...) critics.
Typical for Berlin are its many different "szenes", which often are excluding each other. So since I left Munich (FRG) seven years ago, I wandered between the szenes of women and lesbians (autonomous feminist politics), the subcultural art szene (performance, acrobatics, theatre,...) and institutionalized academic (women's) politics - never wholly identifiing myself with one of them. Until last year I was part of a "commune" here in Eastern Berlin, where we (12 women, 4 men, 2 children) tried to question everything without being dogmatic - and tried to be subversive by our mutual daily live.
Unfortunately the commune broke apart because of our inability to prevent or at least to notice evident exclusions. There I met Andrea, and now we do not only work on and in the same projects, but also write our final M.A. thesis together.
I also spent a year in Moscow and I often visit the Czech republic.


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