Revisiting Cyberfeminism: Theory as a Tool for Understanding Young Women’s Experiences

Early cyberfeminists conceptualized cyberspaces as fundamen tally liberating, theorizing their capacity to move beyond the traditional binaries and limitations of popular gender and feminist politics. Human-machine mergers made possible by technology were imagined as facilitators of “post-gender worlds”:¹ and virtual spaces were initially envisioned as utopian sites of unrestricted, transcen dent emancipation from gender-related constraints.² Cyberspaces showed promise to disrupt conventional patriarchal hierarchies, colonial power interests, and militarized, commercialized technolo gies of advanced capitalism,³ representing a “brave new world.” In this brave new world, the hierarchical and subjugating logic underscoring social binaries and privileging male over female, hetero-over homosexual, Caucasian