Is Cyberfeminism Colorblind?
By María Fernández

Continued:

Border crossings, hybridity, the performative as well as the ideational aspects of identity were well-established concerns of postcolonial theory before the advent of cyberfeminism. It is ironic that today the same concepts are employed to construct exclusive cyberfeminist subjectivities and to prevent discussions of race and difference.

European and American artists, academics, and activists can became cyberfeminists by claiming the name but the members of Rawa, labor activists from various indigenous or aboriginal groups and even European women theorists of artists of color working in technological media are not recognized as cyberfeminists even if they use the same technology with similar competence. What seems to determine their inclusion or exclusion from cyberfeminism is the attribution to them of specific positions on subjectivity. Women of color are assumed to embrace rigid concepts of identity in contrast to the hybrid, border crossing subject positions made possible by digital communications and championed by cyberfeminists. In short, women of color remain trapped in their bodies as their (white) Euro-American counterparts transit cyberspace unencumbered either by bodies or identities. This polarization recapitulates a long-standing trope in colonial narratives: the native is anchored to the land as the colonist has freedom of movement.

This leaves us with a cyberfeminist subject who transcends material and historical specificities, a subject who has the knowledge and authority accurately to represent other women's identities and experience and implicitly claims control of the privilege of inclusion and exclusion on the basis of similitude -- a subject strikingly reminiscent of the "universal subject" as privileged agent of history. As various scholars have argued, specific social agents construct notions of universality. A universal subjectivity is predicated on the rejection or occlusion of its own particularity.⁸ Thus, it is not surprising that dominant cyberfeminism has rejected examinations of the legacies of race including the construction of whiteness. Where second wave feminists upheld the image of a "universal woman," cyberfeminists hold the hybrid, border crossing, mutable subject as a new model of universality.

As in colonial discourse, so famously discussed by Bhabha, cyberfeminism demands mimicry from its others in exchange for recognition. As women of color are believed to hold and defend monolithic identities, they are constantly challenged to update to the latest version of hybridity and "border crossings" - presumably facilitated by the computer - to enter the new world of cyberfeminism. Given a long history of discussions of hybridity and, border crossings in postcolonial feminism (Gloria Anzaldua and Cheri Moraga were cited by Haraway but are never mentioned in more recent cyberfeminism) the requisition of mimicry only reaffirms the need for engagement of cyberfeminists with postcolonial theory even at an elementary level.

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