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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathSociety
 
 
 
 
 

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They demonstrated outside US museums from the mid-1980s, with large posters («Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum?»), to draw attention to the scandal that these institutions still showed no art by women.

In the early 1990s there was a lot of discussion about changes and reconfigurations for the individual given the conditions of the new digital space offered by the Internet. One thing they were sure of was that sexual roles were unimportant in the virtual world, as they can be changed at will. In the USA in particular, some theoreticians felt that the physical body would lose its importance on the Net. They saw cyberspace as a stage for the individual liberated from gender, race and class, who would find perfect conditions for his or her absolute self-realization in virtual space. This would finally put an end to discrimination and disadvantage for ethnic minorities. But this view stands and falls with the premise that body configurations on the Internet would cancel out those in real space.

 

As early as 1984, the cultural historian Donna Haraway had written her «Manifesto for Cyborgs,» in which she asserts among other things that society would find itself on the way into a post-gender world when it started developing cyborgs («cybernetic organisms»).[40] Haraway's manifesto made a great impact in academic circles at first. A cyberfeminist movement was set up by the British cultural historian Sadie Plant and the group of female Australian artists called VNS Matrix in 1994.[41] It was not until then that «the cyborg idea gained political momentum, while at the same time losing its theoretical incisiveness. The politicization of cyberspace suddenly made this a special place for women.»[42] Since 1997, the Old Boys Network (OBN) has organized various projects in the context of cyberfeminism, including the «First Cyberfeminist International» (Hybrid WorkSpace, Kassel, 1997), the «next cyberfeminist international» (Rotterdam, 1999) and the «very cyberfeminist international» (Hamburg, 2001).[43]

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