Is Cyberfeminism Colorblind?
By María Fernández

Continued:

The events of September 11th seem to have inspired a rapprochement of cyberfeminism to feminism. The Very Cyberfeminist International held in Hamburg in December of 2001 included long standing feminist groups with previous tenuous connections to cyberfeminism. There were clearly political concerns as representatives of RAWA were flown from Afghanistan to give a lecture at the end of the conference. This was a welcome change given the former indifference of the movement to world politics but the gesture seemed awkward in light of the marked absence of artists and theorists of color at the conference. Of seven women of color who attended, four were from the US, two from Asia and one from Europe. The members of Rawa were not invited to participate in conference panels or discussions preceding their lecture.⁵

Discussions of race have been avoided in European cyberfeminism. The recognition of racism as an obstacle in exchanges and collaborations among women (including cyberfeminists) is refused on the grounds that races do not exist. It is posited that if an individual recognizes racism it must be because he/she claims a personal identity based on physiognomy. So in addition to ignorance, those willing to discuss issues of race and racism are accused of essentialism.⁶ There seems to be confusion between racism as a social problem and the voluntary affiliation of an individual with a specific racial category. The centuries-old condemnation of the absurdity of racial classifications by those in the lower echelons of racial hierarchies seems to be insignificant, as the realization that race is a construction is upheld as a newly discovered truth. This displaces the responsibility for racist attitudes and behaviors from the perpetrators to the recipients. Thus the arrogant and dismissive attitudes of Second Wave Feminism towards racial issues, extensively critiqued by feminists of color are reenacted in cyberfeminism. For several years I have argued that postcolonial theory, especially postcolonial feminism is a valuable resource for cyberfeminists to increase their understanding of these issues. To my surprise, post colonial theory is often portrayed in European cyberfeminist circles as divisive "identity politics." Many European cyberfeminists also view postcolonial theory as outdated in comparison to Lacanian psychoanalysis and post structural French theory despite the indebtedness of late twentieth- century post colonial theorists to various currents of French thought. While this factual error could be a product of the recent receptivity to French critical theory in the academies of some of the non anglophone European countries, the placement of postcolonial theory in a distant past also obeys the logic of a discourse that places non-Europeans as living and thinking in a time always anterior to their European counterparts.

Etienne Balibar, among many others, has argued that identity is a discourse of tradition, and one of the privileged names of tradition is "culture."⁷ Discourses of culture and tradition have been at the forefront of nationalistic and colonizing projects in various parts of the world and are currently invoked in Europe and North America to mobilize citizens against the hordes of aliens "invading" the land. It was precisely these monolithic understandings of nations, cultures, and identities that colonial and postcolonial studies sought to interrogate. Where identities in colonial and diasporic settings were recognized as heterogeneous, fluid, and constantly in the process of transformation, national and cultural identities were perceived as rigid and resistant to change. Some theorists including Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak regarded the construction of cultural identities as strategically useful but inhibiting in the long term.

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