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Sadie Plant - On the Matrix; Cyberfeminist Simulations
"Sadie Plant - On the Matrix; Cyberfeminist Simulations" 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
Chapter 19 SADIE PLANT ON THE MATRIX Cyberfeminist simu lations Her mind is a matrix of non-stop digital flickerings. If machines, even machines of theory, can be aroused w.oman not do likewise? (Misha 1991 113) all by themselves, may (lrigaray 1985a: 232) A FTER DECADES OF AMBIYALENCE TOWARDS technologv, many la, feminists are now finding a wealth of new opportunities, spaces and lines of thought amidst the new complexities of the 'telecoms revolution'.
Definition · paragraph 1
Chapter 19 SADIE PLANT ON THE MATRIX Cyberfeminist simu lations Her mind is a matrix of non-stop digital flickerings.
Definition · paragraph 10
334 SADIE PLANT cyberspace tale. STnners, Fools and the stories in Patterns are texts of extraordinary densitrv and lntenslty, both in terms of their writing and the u'orlds they engineer' If-Gibson began to explore the complexities of the matrix, Cadigan's fictions perplex reality and identity to the point of irrelevance.
Definition · paragraph 8
332 SADIE PLANT their prescribed relationship and persists regardless of what man cffects and defines as the history of technology. W"uri.rg is the exemplary case of a denigrated female craft vuhich now turns out to be intimftely connect"d to th. history of computing and the digital technologies. plaiting arrd wearring are the 'only contributions to the history of discoveries and inven- tions'iFreud 1985i167) which Freud is willing to ascribe to women.
Definition · paragraph 4
328 SADIE PLANT extent and pervasiveness of patriarchy \\'ere once an occasion lor pessimistic paralysis, things look rather differcnt ir-t on ug" for which all economic systems are reaching the hmils of their modern functioning.
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.