Photo © Spinifex Press

Speakers:Front left to right: Susan Hawthorne and Suniti Namjoshi.
Back left to right: Josie Arnold, Dale Spender, Rye Senjen, Jane Guthrey, Renate Klein, Virginia Westwood, Beryl Fletcher and Heather Kaufmann.

Conference Outline

For further explorations of cyberfeminism: read about CyberFeminism the book. For extracts from CyberFeminism: Visit the SITE

Abstracts

Josie Arnold is a lecturer in Media, Literature and Film at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Her teaching and research interest lie in writing, Australian literature and feminist poetics. She is currently making a CD-ROM on Australian Cultural Representation in the Media.

Cyberfeminism is about not being considered or considering oneself as woman-as-other in cyberspace. In this paper I try to act as a surveyor of the newly discovered electronic terrain of cyberspace that is currently being colonised. I forward the metaphor of aerial mapping as I look for signs of poetics, particularly feminist poetics. In treating cyberspace as a text, I consider how there is no electronic utopia because there is no anterior position to the dominant conceptual frameworks that we bring to the colonisation of cyberspace. Finally, I try to explore some of the ways in which we might read/write the electronic spaces that involve interactive multi-media.

Beryl Fletcher (Hamilton, New Zealand), author of The Bloodwood Clan (1996), a novel about four generations of women separated by time and space, brought together by information technologies. Alice, the great-grandmother, tells her story to an oral historian, not knowing where this will lead her. Pixel, young, a nethead and full of energy, wants to turn her great-grandmother's story into a computer game. From oral history to publishing in print and on the Net, Beryl Fletcher's book does for fiction what Dale Spender does for non-fiction. Beryl Fletcher's first book, The Word Burners, won the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Award for South East Asia and the Pacific in 1992. A New Zealander, her second book explores aspect of New Zealand culture with her novel, The Iron Mouth, which transforms the story of Helen of Troy into a film.

I am a feminist novelist writing about the lives of contemporary women. Until now, cyberfiction has been the exclusive preserve of science fiction writers (usually male) but cyberspace is fast becoming an everyday reality in the lives of many women. To me, cyberspace is an exciting Real Place where women live and work and play, a place that is ripe for representation within realist feminist fiction. This paper is the story of how I came to write my novel The Silicon Tongue (Melbourne: Spinifex, 1996), and how I fell in love with the Internet. I will read excerpts from the book to illustrate the themes that came to fascinate me during the writing of this novel: the transformation of women's stories and memories from private speech to public (cyber) space: the political and technological manipulation of women's fertility: the possibility of a reconciliation between body and mind in cyberspace.

Jane Guthrey (Melbourne), co-author of The Internet for Women (1996) is a graphic artist with an interest in computers. She is well-versed in the history of women's involvement in the development of computers, and also provides a comic look (through cartoons) at some of the surprising challenges of the Internet, finding a huge range of women's sites and delving into the history and uses of some of these sites.

Rye Senjen (Melbourne), is the co-author of The Internet for Women (1996). A research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence section of Telstra, her work focuses on the future directions of artificial intelligence, in particular in new developments on Internet software and hardware. She has worked in the field for more than fifteen years. The Internet for Women is a hands-on guide directed at women who have grown up on print. She explains the origins of the Internet and its wide-ranging applications from Email, to IRC, to newsgroups and Web sites.

Can Internet technology improve women's lives materially, emotionally and spiritually, and if so which women and where? Can the technology build individual women's self-respect, strength and confidence? Can the Internet be used by groups to build structures for change. Does it educate women? Does it have the potential to increase women's power and influence? To answer some of these questions we must first understand the opportunities that Internet services afford us. We will give a brief overview of Internet services available today and how they can be used to create a place were women feel a sense of belonging. We recount examples of how women have taken ownership of this technology and used it for personal and political change.

Susan Hawthorne, publisher at Spinifex Press and lecturer in the Department of Communication and Language Studies at Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, has been researching the impact of electronic publishing in the Australian publishing industry. This work has led her to look at possibilities of non-linear narrative in fiction, conceptual development of interactive multimedia and the use of on-line publishing outlets. She has also recently completed a critical examination of cyborgs and virtual bodies. She is involved in the establishment of a Home Page at Spinifex Press and in developing books that will generate opportunities for more women to enter this flourishing field.

"[Virtual reality] will represent the greatest event in human evolution. For the first time mankind [sic] will be able to deny reality and substitute its own preferred version."

This paper explores the claims being made about virtual reality, from the least to the greatest. What are the connections between real and virtual worlds? What might it be that we want to deny? Virtual reality claims to create new and different worlds, to make gender, race, class, mobility and sexuality distinctions a thing of the past. The growing literature on equity and diversity in cyberspace is discussed, as well as issues of embodiment/disembodiment and their impact on feminist theory. Finally, the paper looks at the dreams and visions feminists have had and their possibilities for the virtual future.

Heather Kauffman (Melbourne) has worked in Migrant Education and has written Computers: a Resource for Teaching Literacy in the Adult Migrant Education Program. She is now a partner in Protea Textware Interactive Multimedia which develops product for adult language and literacy learners. Heather Kaufmann has worked on concept creation, design, scripting and storyboarding of interactive multimedia projects, including Alphabet (Protea Textware, 1995) and Dictionary (Protea Textware, 1995). Along with Virginia Westwood she recently participated in AusTrade Trade Mission to Japan and Korea.

Virginia Westwood (Melbourne) is an interactive multimedia developer and partner (with Heather Kaufmann) in Protea Textware. She is the Developer of Alphabet (Protea Textware, 1995) and Dictionary (Protea Textware, 1995). Virginia worked for many years developing information systems with the CSIRO including as Manager of the AUSTRALIS Information Service and as a member of the Commission for the Future. She is now a partner in Protea Textware Interactive Multimedia which develops product for adult language and literacy learners. Virginia has been involved in the development of CD-ROMS, online, networked and PC databases for many years and her focus will be on issues around interactivity and technical developments. Virginia Westwood and Heather Kaufmann have been designing, producing and publishing interactive multimedia computer programs for the past 18 months.

We have published three titles for adult literacy and English as a Second Language learners in that time. We will discuss the potential we see in this new technology for the production of educational software and why we made the decision to get involved in multimedia production. We will describe what the term 'multimedia', and in particular, what 'interactive multimedia' means to us. We will also give a brief overview of what's involved in producing a multimedia title on CD-ROM, from developing the concept, storyboarding, programming and producing the resources such as the pictures and the sound files, to the process of digitising the resources, producing the gold master CD and, finally, the production of the glass master from which multiple copies of the CD are duplicated. We will describe what it's like trying to make a living by producing and selling CD titles. Lastly, we will present our perception of what it's like for women in the (very male) multimedia industry.

Renate Klein, Director of the Australian Women's Research Centre and Senior Lecturer in Women's Studies at Deakin University, is the author of many feminist works on women and technology and brings to the discussion of cyberspace political and social analyses developed in critiques of other recent technologies. Her most recent publication is Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, co-edited with Diane Bell (1996).

As a radical feminist I'm interested in what ways the whole range of information technologies can contribute to social change for women. Crucially, what does/will 'cyberfeminism' look like? Is it a feminism 'of the heart' (Zelda d'Aprano's term, 1995) that promotes justice, dignity and above all safety from all forms of violence? Is it the strategy we need precisely at this point in history when women once more - and worldwide - are invisibilised in the current 'globalisation' hype that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer?

In my paper I will be looking at issues of power and control - who has it? who is/remains (further) excluded? and at issues of information, knowledge and wisdom: they are not the same. I will also discuss feminist writings on Life on the Screen (Sherry Turkle, 1995): how useful is her theory of multiple selves for women's liberation? Similarly, is the technological (dis)embodiment celebrated in post-modern body writings in women's best interest? A few words on 'cybersex' - what's new, what's (very) very old about it? - will lead to a discussion of Donna Haraway's celebrated icon: the cyborg, and to the introduction of 'post-human' bodies.

I will conclude that neither cyborgs (nor goddesses for that matter) will do away with patriarchy and that in order to be(come) internationally useful for women as a social group, cyberfeminism must embrace practices and theories that remain connected with the lives of ordinary, 'real' women.

Suniti Namjoshi is the author of Building Babel (1996) and Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's Studies at Exeter University, England. Born in India, a Canadian citizen and resident of England, her work draws several cultural traditions together. The author of many works of fiction and poetry including St Suniti and the Dragon and the classic Feminist Fables, Suniti Namjoshi's latest work explores the possibility of building new worlds, metamorphosing the ancient Babel, through words and technology, into a vastly different place. Building Babel is a work that takes the Internet as its starting point, as a place of metaphor realised and where poetry might be taxed. Suniti has been exploring how the Internet can be used as a medium for a dense text and poetry. The book includes an electronic chapter which readers can add to, opening Babel to everyone.

I have an axe to grind. I want writers - particularly women - particularly those who enjoy poetry and dense text - to get interested in using the World Wide Web as a means of broadcasting and interacting with other writers and readers of poetry. The Web is the more mapped and more easily navigable part of the Internet. There's nothing particularly difficult about navigating it. Nor is there anything particularly difficult about using HTML (Hypertext Mark Up Language) to set up a Web page. What the Internet offers is an analogue for the process of building culture. This process goes on anyway, with or without computers or indeed, any particular form of technology. However, the notion of bits of information stored in computers immediately suggests the other equally obvious notion of bits of information stored in humans brain cells. That is culture. And the accumulation, interchange and restructuring of this information is the cultural process. That we make use of the tools on offer and engage in the process consciously is, in my opinion, critical.

Dale Spender (Brisbane) is the author of Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (1995) and initiator of WIKED, an international database on Women's Studies and author/editor of 30 other books. She was the first author of a book focusing on feminist issues arising from the Internet and is a well-known feminist and educational theorist. An avid net surfer, Dale Spender has spoken on this topic to large crowds in Australia and overseas.

There are as many issues for feminism in cyberspace as there are in the real world. And just as men got there first in almost every other technological and influential area, and then women had to work to gain a place, so too is the same dynamic operating in the new cyberworld. In education, in the arts, and, of course, in the technology, men are the decision makers and women are in danger of being the consumers of male products. Unless strategic decisions are made. Soon.

The telephone was also a male invention which women were widely believed not to be good at; and it didn't take long for them to make it their own. When women see cyberspace as a communication forum (rather than a superhighway) - it could be much the same.

women@spinifexpress.com.au