Faith Wilding on Cyberfeminist Art Activism

By Claire Pentecost

Faith Wilding, who joined the faculty of SAIC’s Performance department last year, is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses aspects of the somatic, psychic, and sociopolitical history of the body. Currently Wilding works with subRosa, an artist’s collective that produces performative and new media projects that critique the relationships between digital technologies, biotechnologies, and women’s bodies, lives, and work. subRosa was initiated in the fall of 1998 as a project at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, from which it has evolved into its current form, a collective of five women dispersed throughout the U.S. A new book, Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices, edited by Faith Wilding, Michelle Wright and Maria Fernandez, was recently released by the group and published by Autonomedia Books. subRosa can be found on the Web at www.cyberfeminism.net.

Claire Pentecost: For the last decade or so you have been associated with something called cyberfeminism. Can you give us a definition of that term?

Faith Wilding: Our activist art practice is cyberfeminist because it is based on a contestational feminist analysis of the effects of technologies, both information and biotechnologies on women’s material lives. That means we look at how these technologies are changing women’s relations with their bodies, work, and social relations. SubRosa’s work embodies feminist content and agency within the electronic technologies, virtual systems, but also within RL (Real Life) spaces. The electronic and the RL aren’t segregated.

CP: Do you feel that at this point any engaged feminist work has to also engage the issue of technology?

FW: It’s really hard to avoid the impact of technology because it’s so ubiquitous and the changes it produces are increasingly disruptive, especially in the so-called less developed countries. It is drastically changing women’s relationship to labor, living conditions, and domestic life and economics. The kinds of technology-driven changes that North Amer-icans and Europeans spent a century adjusting to are hitting countries in the global south all at once.
CP: Why do these changes need to be addressed from a feminist perspective? Aren’t they affecting men and women both?
FW: Of course, and feminism is a useful lens for men as much as for women. It seems ironic, however, that just as young women in the North are saying we don’t need feminism anymore, it is being discovered and energized in other countries. Feminism has laid down strong analysis for examining women’s relation to the larger culture in every dimension of life. In the process of corporate globalization, women are being specifically targeted as the wedge to open traditional societies to change, whether the impetus is coming from market forces or something like the World Health Organization. Women are the primary consumers of medical services; they attend directly to the needs of family; they are frequently the contact point for food aid, and they are primary decision makers in the maintenance of family life.

CP: Have you run into criticism or problems around the issue of importing feminism itself as a western value?

FW: This came up when we did workshops in Singapore. An organization of young women artists there based their work on the practices of feminist artists of the last three decades in the west. They vocalized mixed feelings about needing these models but felt they were extremely useful as a starting point, which could then be adapted to their own situation. There seems to be enough flexibility within feminist history and theory to accommodate the changing needs of women in many situations.

We have to remember that western feminism critiqued western patriarchal culture, which is the same culture now pressuring the world to conform to its model. Also, by now there have been major contributions to different theory and practice of feminism from all over the world. You could say that feminism itself continues to grow and expand as more women from different situations need to create ways to address the issue of their empowerment. In the U.S. so much of feminism is now academic or theoretical, missing the kind of practice that must inform theory. I am learning all the time from strong women’s organizations in other countries, like RAWA in Afghanistan.

CP: Speaking of theory, I have noticed several times in your writings that you refer to Luce Irigaray’s concept of “female affiliation.” Can you tell us what you mean by that?

FW: Female affiliation in practice means recognizing, welcoming, and acknowledging women in all their differences in public speech, in written language, in embodied space; it is a resistant act that contests embedded mythologies of human universalism and sameness. In other words, female affiliation recognizes the lived reality of women, how it differs from that of men, and how that produces subject positions different from men’s. Women must work from this difference to begin to establish a sense of what not-male (also not-white, not-dominant, etc.) might be.

I’m just now reading an exchange of letters between Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva. They discuss the idea of the sacred and how women experience and create this. In the world this comes in a multiplicity of different experiences and the difference extends to the forms of public expression that experience might take.

CP: So you are saying that the formation of women’s subjectivities has political implications?

FW: Of course, because it is finally about women’s agency. What is possible and/or permissible for women to do culturally and politically? Even in their oppressed situations they are very creative in manifesting not-male forms of agency. For instance, Clement speaks of big Catholic church meetings in Africa where women have hysterical fits, speak in tongues, fall on the floor as you might see in a charismatic Christian church here. Clement suggests that this might be an annexation of the sacred, a way that women can occupy the person of the sacred which they are denied as public figures since they can’t be priests or bishops or the pope.

Irigaray maintains that women and children still need rights specific to their traditional vulnerability in the culture.

CP: I imagine that you’ve been accused of essentialism for supporting positions like that one. But it seems to me to be a moot question here: whether or not women (and by extension, children, who still remain the responsibility chiefly of women) are essentially more vulnerable is not the point. The question is whether or not we are going to practice a kind of realism that acknowledges that women are in a different relation to power.

FW: This is why Irigaray’s critique of the “equal” value of liberation is important. In the end it’s about developing a society that values difference and is willing to accommodate it. Irigaray refers to Marx who said that the way men dominate women is the basis for all forms of domination. Marx does not develop this idea any further, but many feminists have pushed that idea to extend feminism to a critique of domination models in themselves.

CP: Can you give some examples of work you and subRosa have done in response to these ideas?

FW: Well, let’s look at Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). These technologies have a much more profound impact on women than on men. Even on the physical level, egg donation is a much more harrowing process than sperm donation. Egg donors have to take high doses of hormones that effect their body and their mood or psyche. They undergo constant monitoring and testing, or surveillance if you will, for long periods of time. Egg harvesting is a painful surgical procedure. Often several tries are needed, protracting the stress and strain of this chemical and logistical invasion. It furthers the traditional mandate that women as child bearers must put the welfare of the child first, even at the expense of her own physical and mental health. Just as in the abortion issue, the needs of the mother may be pitted against those of the unborn. Unfortunately these technologies often serve the idea of “compulsory motherhood,” leaving ever fewer acceptable choices to not have children at all.

Around this issue we have done several interactive performances in which participants may be exposed to the recruiting techniques, the scrutiny and surveillance of egg donors, and the kinds of decisions women are asked to make confronting these technologies. We have appropriated and intervened in conventional cultural forms like the biotech trade show, the educational seminar, the marketing of services and products, the think-tank, in order to reveal the relations of power that organize these technologies. All of our projects include graphic work such as posters, brochures, and maps as well as objects we make.

CP: How do you address the claim that these technologies aren’t being forced on women — women are choosing them?

FW: It’s such a complex dynamic, how choice, need, and desire work together in an individual subject. Social conditioning has a huge part in this, and that is what is not being questioned here. What could women be if they did not constantly think of themselves as either dependent on, or in competition with, or in opposition to, men, but rather as different but complete in themselves and with themselves? Irigaray eschews “equality feminism” as a false goal. She says: “Women must of course continue to struggle for equal wages and social rights against discrimination in employment and education, and so forth. But that is not enough: women merely ‘equal’ to men would be ‘like them,’ therefore not women.” (This Sex Which is Not One pp. 165-66)

I am looking forward to exploring and discussing many of these issues with students in my interdisciplinary course Performing Next Feminisms in Spring 2004.

Images courtesy of Faith Wilding