The creation and use of the ‘Cyberfeminism Index’ is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art. Contributors are hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations. They consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, ‘Cyberfeminism Index’—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.

Paperback, published in 2022, 608 pages.

Praise

“This invaluable research tool will hugely expand, update, and perhaps even revolutionize the feminist discourse. It might even be considered a work of conceptual art in itself.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972

“This book served as my doorway to cyberfeminism and I now see what an energetic continent awaits me. Anywhere I stepped it burned my hair off, it’s that brilliantly intense.”
—Kevin Kelly, founding editor Wired magazine