Cyberfeminists in the 1980s and 1990s saw only possibilities in the cyber realm, whether in Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) or VNS Matrix’s “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” (1991), the latter of which triumphantly declared “we are the future cunt.” Such optimism has long since shriveled. Today online misogyny (often facilitated by artificial intelligence) abounds in deepfakes, cheapfakes, doxing, trolling, mis/disinformation, and other forms of technology-facilitated (TF) or information and communication technology (ICT)-facilitated gender-based violences (GBV) intended to humiliate, harm and silence women and girls with the ultimate aim of revoking women and girls’ political power. Yet violence against women and girls is widely seen as apolitical. Following Laura Bates (2020), we construct misogyny as an ideology in whose name mass murders committed by anyone other than white men from the global North would see them deemed “terrorists” and “extremists.” Online misogyny is spreading rapidly and reaping both digital and physical world violences (Vickery and Everbach 2018; Bates 2020; McGlynn and Johnson 2021; Henry et al. 2021; McGlynn and Woods 2022).
We ask: What does re-imagining feminist digital utopias do for the futures of democracy and cyber security, as well as the burgeoning area of feminist cybersecurity? Critically re-reading feminist sci-fi and fantasy texts including Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Cinderella Is Dead by Kaylnn Bayron alongside earlier optimistic work from cyberfeminists, we tease out future directions for an inclusive, welcoming, accessible and democratic cyberspace intended for scholarly, policy and civic audiences. We meld feminist (cyber) utopic thinking with the empirical work of activists and feminist and critical scholars already countering oppressive uses of technology around the globe.
This includes groundbreaking work by Kurasawa et al. (2021), Bailey (2021), Hajj (2021), and mining lessons learned from case studies of Uyghur women in diaspora challenging China’s misogynistic anti-Muslim racism (Witteborn 2011; Yılmaz 2024), the digital activism of feminist, queer and peace advocates in Nepal and Sri Lanka (K.C. & Whetstone forthcoming), Black women’s digital resistance against misogynoir, anti-Black racist misogyny, (Bailey 2021) and the digital projects of feminist counterdata in Mexico and other countries that challenge an epidemic of feminicides, referring to those women killed for being women (D’Ignazio et al. 2022). We take seriously the experiences of feminists, minorities and activists from the global south (including the global south within the global north).
In an era of dystopian online realities, we argue feminist utopic visions offer a way forward to further democracy and cyber security when combined with grounded analysis of work resisting technology-facilitated gender-based violence as drawn from a range of places globally. The article also aims to further develop feminist cybersecurity as an area of research and offer activist and policy directions to expand women and girls’ political power online to ensure their full and equal inclusion in democracy.
