1. Cyberfeminisms are based on different feminisms.
Cyberfeminism is the product of a shift in perception concerning categories of politics,
body, gender, labour, etc. in the so called posthuman age.
Therefore we position cyberfeminist notions according to their attitudes to these categories.
One the one hand cyberfeminism emerges from a marginal position - refering to male dominated (virtual and real)
spaces. On the other hand it is born from the dominant position of infrastructure and knowledge.
An analysis of different approaches should be aware of their priorities and omissions.
2. Women calling themselves cyberfeminists react to new technologies and act because of the need to
work with them and to take spaces for women.
Early techno-enthusiasm (e.g. Plant, Haraway) has set the course for more realistic approaches,
which mostly see possibilities for feminist agency on a discursive (symbolic) level.
3. Their notion of politics should be defined as subvesiv. (Male) revolutionary pathos seems to be rare.
Cyberfeminist practices therefore are strategical, temporary, anti-essentialistic, minoritary, parodistic,
aesthetic, ...
4. Cyberfeminism has to criticize radically new media and technologies and to demythologize models of a free, pluralistic, bodyless and structurally democratic cyberspace.
5. Cyberfeminist approaches strongly refer to bodies. No cyberfeminist writes about disembodiment, bodyless space or transgression of embodiment (these are the themes of male phantasies: Barlow, Bolz, Gibson, and other cyberpunk). Aristarkhova, Motrofanova, Jahrmann etc. explicitly write about embodiment.
6. Cyberspace must be understood as a discursive, linguistically and materially structured space - therefore interwoven with power.
7. Cyberspace not only refers to virtual space (software surfaces), but also to the design and production
of hardware and the production of knowledge.
Cyberfeminists must focus on the women in the semiconductor-industries as well as on teleworkers and male designers.
We cannot think cyberspace without the dicussion of labour and labour conditions under globalization and neoliberalism.
Wilding, Biemann,
Aristarkhova, Jahrmann are taking these conditions into account.
8. We disapprove of bourgeoise and elitist cyberfeminist approaches which do not focus on the real capitalist power conditions.
9. New technologies can change social conditions and offer new possibilities such as a shift in gender categories. But this only takes place at the expense of others via the invention of new or a strengthening of old categories (e.g. racism). There only can be a shift in hierarchies.