Caribbean Cyberfeminism?

Feminist online content production, organizing, movement and community building are rich archives for the study of Caribbean feminisms. To date, scholarly work on women’s and feminist movements in the region has failed to document and analyze these practices and sites of activism. Similarly, Caribbean feminist critiques of technology and new media are not well-developed. This paper seeks to fill that by examining Caribbean cyberfeminisms. Cyberfeminism refers to critical feminist approaches to technology, concerns about unequal relations of power in online cultures, technology development and usage as well as feminist analyses of what it means to be human in an age saturated by technology and media. This paper attends to these three distinct but interconnected meanings of the term in order to propose a Caribbean cyberfeminism as a critical approach to technology and new media. This approach is attentive not only to feminist online practices and their subversive potential but also to their complicity with a self-legitimating (and exclusionary) understanding of what it means to be human and the role of new technologies therein. Recognizing that neither technologies nor feminisms can make claims to innocence, I mobilize Sylvia Wynter’s critique of feminism as well as her appeal to move beyond Man towards the human to enter into dialogue with the growing bodies of Posthuman Studies and Feminist Technology Studies.