ABSTRACT
In recent feminist narratives, the language concerning digital feminist politics has changed. Utopian excitement coming with visions of hi-tech womanhood has largely given way to more or less down-to-earth discussions on the ways digitization puts feminist theory and activism in touch with one another (again), on the relations and continuities between on-and offl ine feminism, and on the ways these relations can be represented and why it would be desirable to do so. Issues regarding politics of location and diff erence become crucial in this respect, not to erase their analog registers, but to understand what a feminist politics online actually entails, in particular regarding forms of representation that continue to be seen as non-digital. Perhaps we are beginning to notice that the true reason for feminist excitement about the expansion of virtual reality space is not the sudden, redemptive abolishment of all interfering diff erences, but rather, the opening up of new possibilities of politics of diff erence. Rather than being borderless by nature, the digital produces diff erent kinds of borders, demanding a diff erent kind of understanding of locations. These new possibilities arise with the challenge of creating a politics fi tting to the current mode in which locations become slippery, ungrounded, and regrounded. In fact the tricky question current politics of diff erence and location has to deal with is how diff erence is embodied diff erently in the
ABSTRACT This article looks at the impacts ongoing processes of digitization have on feminist politics of location. It argues that, rather than being borderless by nature, the digital has to be understood as producing diff erent kinds of borders, demanding diff erent kinds of politics of location. New potentialities arise with the challenge of creating a politics fi tting to the current mode in which locations become slippery. Discussing the emergence of cyberfeminism in the early 1990s and a more recent example of digital feminism-the #SolitarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag-this article thinks through the following questions: what does the “cyborg” as a posthuman (and postgender) category have to off er for those who have been (and are) excluded from the notion of the “human”? More specifi cally, how can we understand and conceptualize the “cyborg” beyond triumphalist narratives of being beyond diff erence?
