Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies is a seminar series designed to place feminist theory in close dialogue with the complexities of cyber-space, technology, and the many philosophical formations that configure digital worlds. Approaching feminism as plurality and spatiality, we will discuss multiple iterations of feminist efforts on a global scale – and work through ways of engaging feminism in developing artistic practices, inside, outside, and between digital environments.

In the historical configuration of “the witch,” we find a space where economic and gendered forms of domination were enacted and solidified. Across the broad field of feminist theory, the category of witch emerges as a method to consider the gender binary as essential to capitalist history, as well as a tool to trouble epistemological binaries of subject and object. In increasingly digitally mediated environments, issues related to the gendered foundations of capitalist relations are fundamental to contextualize the tentacularity of economy. This seminar series will address many branches of feminist approaches to consider the figure of “the witch” as a metaphor of identification with difference, and as a method for approaching feminist perspectives on digital worlds.

Exploring ideas from afro-futurist, cyber, xeno, glitch and un-categorized feminism(s), with guests from the wide web of intersectional feminist theory and new-media/technology studies, we will collectively consider what feminism means, and how to engage it in practice, online and off. What does it mean to become cyber-witches in digital landscapes shaped in and through capitalist forms of production? How can cyberwitch networks shape open-source commons? In essence, how can feminism(s) help us imagine new forms of the digital?

Session Titles:

 

“The Witch” as Method: Materialist-Feminist Approaches to Digital World-Making by: Carmen Lael Hines & IPS

Witching with Cyber- Nymphs, the hydro-sexual movement and eco-technological tools for digital art practice by: Cyber_nymphs (Justyna Górowska & Ewelina Jarosz)

Eros Study: Teledildonics by: Cy X

Gender Accumulation to Transsexual Revolution?: The witch’s place in forming contemporary trans subjectivity by: Francis Whorrall-Campbell

The De-colonial Gesture: Incantations by: Dr. Tiara Roxanne

what will be the role of an antiracist decolonial feminist technology for liberation? by Françoise Vergès

Defining Feminist Technology by Helen Hester

 

** References for this course’s conceptualization include: Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Purdue University Press: 2008; and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia: 2008.