A seminar series and course designed and coordinated by Carmen Lael Hines at the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid.

Cyberwitches and Feminist Internet is a seminar series designed to place feminist theory in close dialogue with technology, cyberspace, and the political formations that shape social media and its aesthetic universes. Approaching feminism as plurality and spatiality, the course engages what a feminist approach to internet theory entails. How can we engage with topics related to artificial intelligence, UX design, cybernetics, and the digitalization of consumption through gender and sexuality studies?

Focusing on the figure of the cyberwitch, we take as a point of departure  gender as a technology and an essential component of capitalist history—and, therefore, our platform-capitalist present. Much like the internet itself, internet theory is an evolving and largely undefined field. It relates to questions of what forms and forges the digital world—from heat, water, and sand to cables running through the ocean. It also refers to the impact of new technologies on global politics, democracy, and social relations. Digital platforms and the softwares that drive them shape not only how we live together, but the vocabularies and aesthetics behind how we imagine what it means to live together.

The purpose of this course is to think about the internet and new media through queer and feminist approaches to digital culture. We will collectively explore new vocabularies for cyber-theory, platform studies, and the dissolution of binaries between hardware/software, artificial/real, and simulated/organic.

What does it mean to become cyberwitches in digital landscapes shaped by capitalist forms of production? How can cyberwitch networks shape open-source commons? Finally, how can queer feminism(s) help us imagine new forms of the digital?

Session Titles:

#tradwife: Gendered New Media and Its Discontents with Carmen Lael Hines

Holistic Healing in Digital Spaces with Morgane Billuart

Erotic Bureaucracies: Power, Consent, and the Poetics of Bureaucracy with Cy X

Alien Feminisms with Luciana Parisi

Crossings: Avatars and the Thresholds of Identity with Andrew Mallinson / Feminist Internet

Posthumanist Erotics: Feminist Approaches to Cyber-Sexuality with Carmen Lael Hines