Much press has been devoted to the disembodied nonmateriality of cyberspace with its complementary and seemingly contradictory ability to augment our senses through the simulation of real environments. This separation of the real and virtual is, of course, intensely problematic. Just as this celebration of disembodiment ignores the computer itself, it also erases the material component of the body that experiences cyberspatial surfing, and leaves it marooned as an unplugged informational object. In fact, Elizabeth Grosz argues that cyberspace has been relegated to the traditional, unliberated space of the feminine as a territory ripe for conquest, a virgin land awaiting exploitation (160).

A glyph from Diana Reed Slattery's Glide Meaning 'maze, glide or flowing'

If we define cyberspace in isolation, it can be seen as a gendered feminine space, but if we examine it as the relational space that it is, we see that the virtual is informed by the real as much as the real is by the virtual. Cyberfeminists have largely challenged this prior claim, setting out to redefine virtual spaces relationally for feminist ends in order to reinsert flesh and blood bodies back into the simulated realm as interactive agents.

Cyberfeminism was born at a particular moment in time, 1992, simultaneously at two different points on the globe. In Australia, VNS Matrix (a collective comprising Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt) coined the term and crafted a Manifesto to label their radical feminist acts and their blatantly viral agenda: to insert women, bodily fluids and political consciousness into electronic spaces. That same year, British cultural theorist Sadie Plant chose that term to describe her recipe for defining the feminizing influence of technology on western society and its inhabitants. In 1997 at the first international cyberfeminist conference in Germany, the Old Boys' Network (OBN), the organization that had arisen to be the central hub of cyberfeminist thinking, refused outright to define the school of thought, and instead drafted the "100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism" to refuse closure or classification. The assumption underlying their rules is that there can be no definition because any attempt to impose closure only limits what cyberfeminism is. Their edicts range from the whimsical "not a fragrance" or "not caffeine-free" to not a "praxis," "tradition," or "ideology." These are 'definitions' that can exist only in opposition, just as cyberculture is inextricably interconnected with the real even as it seeks to transcend it. Faith Wilding calls it a "strategy" for claiming and taking up space (n.p.). Like Indra's Net, the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness where each soul in the universe is represented by a jewel at every connection, it is impossible to envision cyberfeminism as a whole precisely because it is an amorphous hybridity. Cyberfeminisms, to be more exact, are a celebration of multiplicity, collaborative forces and uncontained bodies. They are a form of embodiment that uses historical context as a way of writing itself free of old boundaries, of leaping out of the predestined, restrictive historical framework into a new future. This future is relentlessly material, embodied in the present tense, acknowledging the physical realities of the conjunction of bodies and machines as much as creating environments for the creative state of immersion. This is a proprioceptive habitation of the (virtual) world that re-embodies the reader by incorporating her physical actions into the interactive nature of navigation.

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