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Plant - Babes in the Net (New Statesman 1995)
"Plant - Babes in the Net (New Statesman 1995)" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
On-line services' coming of age; Information technology's eradication of gender-based limitations. (AN: 9503031839) Business Source Alumni Edition arts in society BABES IN THE NET Sadie Plant explains why women have the last laugh in cyberspace The storm has broken in the past few months. Turn on the TV, and there's virtual reality, multi media, the Net, computers, and video games.
Definition · paragraph 1
Database: Section: Record: 1 Babes in the net. By: Plant, Sadie. New Statesman & Society.
Definition · paragraph 2
And if women face the same old problems there as in their everyday lives, they are also, and increasingly, discovering new possibilities for work, play, and communication of all kinds in the spaces emergent from the telecoms revolution. As for politics, even those of the sexual variety, questions of the "what is to be done?" variety are no longer the only ones to raise.
Definition · paragraph 1
1p. 1 Black and White Photograph. Abstract: Comments on the impact of the information technology on the role of women in society.
Stakes · paragraph 2
Yet more toys for the same old boys: not much of a sexual politics here. But facts and figures are as hard to ascertain as gender itself in the virtual world. And if women face the same old problems there as in their everyday lives, they are also, and increasingly, discovering new possibilities for work, play, and communication of all kinds in the spaces emergent from the telecoms revolution.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.