Women Write Risk:
cyberfeminism and hypertext
published in M/C magazine

During her visit to Australia for the Adelaide Festival event, Verve: the other writing, Director of the UK-based trAce Online Writing Community, Sue Thomas lists those Australian writers who have made their presence felt on the web. Citing Adelaide and the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble as the locus for much electronic writing activity, she makes two observations. First, Thomas notes, of the writers involved with EWRE "almost all ... are from the visual arts, all producing work for and from contemporary artspaces." Second, as she lists the many writers/visual artists who have engaged with e-text, she questions why the majority are women.1

Did women just take to cyberspace as if ducks to water? Or did they find in cyberspace, a virtual 'room of their own' in which to work and publish: the sort of space which had been denied them in the physical realm? I am reminded of another, more historical, observation about the development of an earlier technology, the 'flying machine'. Apparently, in the early days of flying, women took to the air for pleasure and freedom, for 'spatial respiration'. Those aviatrix were gradually driven out or excluded as the airways became increasingly competitive, regulated and militarised. Could it be that perhaps cyberspace offers a similar kind of space - of pleasure, freedom and breath - that the skies once offered those women flyers?

Women writers are able, at least for the moment, to convene their literary practices in and through cyberspace without the canonical, careerist or corporate imperatives which frame academic and publishing institutions. Historically, women's unruly presence and participation in public space is said to have disrupted public spaces. Women's mindless corporeality is said to have devalued cultural endeavours including intellectual and artistic practices. Such values have been consistently founded on the rationalist binarism of mind/body or public/private in which women are 'othered'. Such baggage, as we know, has been consistently difficult to shake given that we continue to talk through the terms of those binarisms in residual ways.

In the era of industrial 'progress' which gave rise to transportation networks and compressed spatialities, women were more able to escape the private realm. Similarly, as information technologies disrupt the separation of public and private spheres, women have experienced greater mobility and access to the public realm. Such an observation is predicated on a notion of cyberfeminism which Sadie Plant identifies as feminism's shared and ongoing relationship with the development of communications technologies: "you can almost map them onto each other in the whole history of modernity. Just as machines get more intelligent, so women get more liberated."2 There is, as there might have been with those early women flyers, a sense of both adventure and risk in 'taking to cyberspace'.

For Susan Luckman, "in the realms of nineties' cyberspace, this sense of adventure has been seized by cyberfeminists on the Internet."3 This sense of adventure is often couched in 'bad grrrl', cyborg or outlaw terms. Donna Haraway claims that "writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs ... Cyborg politics is the struggle for language."4 Perhaps less 'maverick' than the cyberpunk 'hacker' or 'monad', cyberfeminism has clearly provided opportunities for a more nomadic and corporeal engagement with cyberspace. These 'bad grrl' manifestos and/or manifestations characterise (cyber)feminism as a politics of 'risk', comprised of agents and performances of 'risk'. In part, this risk is characterised when Haraway states, "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."5 For women and for feminists, 'risk', akin to trangression, might be the movement between and across different and diverse realms which destablises seemingly naturalised tendencies and positions. According to psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips:

we create risk when we endanger something we value, whenever we test the relationship between thrills and virtues. So to understand, or make conscious, what constitutes a risk for us - our own personal repertoire of risks - is an important clue about what it is that we do value; and it also enjoins us to consider the pleasure of carelessness.6

Risk might foreground a kind of 'becoming'. In recent times, much emphasis has been placed on the fragmenting of feminism into feminisms including cyberfeminism in which multiplied and fractious identities are performed and contested. Perhaps this is 'risk' in action, where the construction and power of women, as the core value of feminism, is endangered. What emerges from this swell of ideas and identities are profound changes, hybridities and experiments. In the context of a cultural and critical environment which values and necessitates transgression and multiplicity, risk, as a kind of desire, is a powerful force for movement and negotiation. In the context of feminism or cyberfeminism, the risks taken by women do not allude to mastery nor to consolidation (as in phallologocentric heroism), but to transformation and re-evaluation.

The bifurcation which situates women in the realm of the 'bodily' also inscribes those bodies as 'carers' and as keepers of 'virtue'. Subsequently, the woman who takes risks is the woman who does not care. For Helene Cixous, the woman writer must "dare what you don't dare ... Write! What? Take to the wind, take to writing, form one body with the letters. Live! Risk: those who risk nothing gain nothing, risk and you no longer risk anything."7 The issue for Cixous is doublefold and needs to be addressed as not only 'risking writing' but also 'writing risk'. As many contemporary Australian hypertext writers - including Linda Marie Walker, Teri Hoskin, Terri-Ann White, Francesca Da Rimini, Melinda Rackham and Jenny Weight - are demonstrating, gendered and experimental writing practices which both 'risk writing' and 'write risk' are thriving on the internet.

Writers are engaging aspects of 'ecriture feminine' as a means of exploring the reflexive and sublime aspects of digital life. By example, Theresa Senft prefers an 'ecriture digital' which acknowledges the difficulty of writing the body and moves towards 'cyborg politics'8, while Teri Hoskin refers to an 'other writing'. For Hoskin, as curator of both lux: notes for an electronic writing and Verve: the other writing, ecriture feminine is a practice for electronic writing/reading which requires 'expenditure'. Outside the realm of exchange, commodity and market value, this willfully embodied "practice is an undoing of the limits of logic".9 Both Senft and Hoskin provide for not only risking writing and writing risk but by association, for the [re]connection of the corporeal and conceptual. Like the flight of the aviatrix, the (cyber)feminist writer can experience such risking and writing as pleasure, freedom and breath. Through such acts of 'not caring' - or carelessness - feminism can create value around performative and experimental hypertextual practices.


Notes
1 Sue Thomas, `The new textual landscape', Real Time@Telstra Adelaide Festival, Issue 4, <http://www.ozemail.com.au/~opencity/Adfest4/st_verve.html>
2 Rosie Cross, `Cybergettes', 21C, issue 3.95, pp 17-19
3 Susan Luckman, `(En)Gendering the Digital Body: Feminism and the Internet', Hecate, xxv/ii.1999, p 37. Importantly, Luckman also argues that not all women have the same and equal access to cyberspace and to writing. Contexts such as class and nationality have bearing on women's access.
4 Donna J. Haraway, `A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, p 176
5 ibid., p 181
6 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, Faber and Faber, London, 1994, p 29
7 Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, (ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p 41
8 Theresa Senft, `Performing the digital body - a ghost story', Women and Performance, Issue 17, <http://www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/introduction.html>
9 Teri Hoskin, 'An other writing', `Working the Screen' Supplement, Real Time, 32, August September, 1999, p 12

This essay was published in M/C Reviews