An ongoing
exercise of political alertness is certainly essential, but so is the visibilizing sharpness of creative minds to represent the
subtlest, most hidden effects of forms of domination in the social order; effects
materialized through strategies of invisibilization
(normalization of symbolic violence) as well as strategies of blindness (seeing
with the eyes of the Other). Politics and creativity are vital, then, because
violence never rests; it constantly reworks its foundations and the gains of its
effectiveness in the inscription of power on sexed bodies and now too in the reiteration
of its codes on new agents that represent us (or who we are) in an online world.
These creative and political exercises reveal that in a postcorporeal context, forms of sexual domination are still
hidden and strategies of blindness towards the act of symbolic and real violence
against women are still being normalized.
So effective
is this tendency towards repetition (and by extension, normalization) that for
the artist and the (feminist) political activist who confronts forms of sexual
domination on the Internet, a mere “gaze” with visibilizing
intentions is not enough. They must go beyond the mere discovery of encrypted
(invisible) writing in online structures and habits. It is also necessary to overcome
trances of blindness; that is, the dilemmas of any position of discourse whereby
it acts simultaneously as object and reflexive subject, so that by being included
in that which we wish to delimit, we unconsciously incorporate structures of the
masculine order as structures of perception (it would be, then, a blindness provoked
by looking through the eyes of the Other).
If what we
are shown as normal is merely the result of reiterated normalization (a political
and moral duty traditionally assumed by institutions), any creative or political
undertaking which aims to mobilize against the mechanism of an androcentric, patriarchal normalization must face the resignation
that feeds the system with its unconscious repetition, its essentialist vision of the difference between the sexes and
the blindness of those who cannot look with their own eyes.
Remembering that what, in history, appears to be eternal is merely the
product of a labor of eternalization on behalf of certain
(interconnected) institutions such as the Family, the Church, the State and the
Education System (…) (these simple abstract concepts being stenographic designations
of complex mechanisms which in some cases must be analyzed in their historic specificity),
is to reinsert in history and thus return to historic action the relation between
the sexes that the naturalist, essentialist vision denies them (Bourdieu
2001).
This would
be, then, a form of political creativity that cannot fail to appeal to all those
who make steganographic readings (as opposed to stenographic)
of the world, not because of the conformist evidence of a tendency to perpetuate
symbolic violence through forms of invisible writing and consensual blindness,
but also through an exercise of resistance to the historic principle that maintains
them. Nothing is exempt from this conservative standard, no matter how young it
may seem. No technology, no form of science is free from masculinist
hegemony and its normalizing strategies. What's more, we look upon science and
technology with maximum suspicion. It is not surprising that the system has set
up mechanisms within science that guarantee the preeminence of these invisible
writings, whose partiality is never recognized since almost all masculine advances
have been honored with the historic privilege of “objective
science,” although this means nothing but an alibi to act, as Donna Haraway suggests, from the filter of an “abusive ideology”
(Haraway 1991).
Creative and
political production on the Internet reveals the maintenance (buried or explicit) of exercises of power and sexual
vulnerability based on this historic norm, with the added difficulty of the use
of the new as a banner of a fictitious change. The new always tries to present
itself as something innocent, neutral and ideology-free, encouraging us to set
aside the usual distrust with which we feminists usually face other visibly loaded
media, arranged into a hierarchy according to a patriarchal ideology-machine.
While it may
be true that in the early years of its existence, most female users saw in the
Internet an opportunity for effective political action (its dehierarchized
structure seemed ideal for this), the Net has not resisted the invisible writing
and blind eye of patriarchal power. Instead, it continues to reiterate models
of domination, oftentimes protected by the bravery that comes with anonymity and
the self-regulatory processes of those who see that historically strong identities
and the situations of domination and reactionary powers that maintain them are
falling apart. The horizontal nature of the medium, which is constantly invoked
as a suitable habitat for deconstruction and dehierarchization of who we are, does not only suggest the
materialization of individuals' creative energies in new forms of emancipation,
but in many cases merely acts as a disguise for the repetition and sublimation
of the collapse of androcentric power.
This repetition
cultivates situations of domination of women in different ways, such as the ways
in which telecommuting is made precarious and feminized
(converting the telematic home into a digital prison),
the scarce presence of female executives in the computer and technological industries,
or how bodies and sexual identities are represented on the Internet. In all these
cases, there is an underlying, active patriarchal ideology.
Invisible Writing
There must be around two million people, most of them women, but also men,
who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide.
It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through
pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again (Zizek 2001).
The flip side
of living in an increasingly virtual world is a disquieting apologia of the physical
feeling of the body. While we are all being inserted into an artificial, digital
world, there seems to be a movement taking place in the opposite direction. Zizek
cites “la passion du réel” — the passion of the real. His friend Alain Badiou borrows this term to
refer to the tendency (a "reality without reality" that characterizes
the entire 20th century), by which in order to be conscious of "the real",
touching objects and pinching bodies no longer suffices. The most real experiences
will be the ones that are particularly violent, corporal and extreme, able to
offset the excess artificiality of a prefabricated world. This process apparently
involves a certain degree of self-regulation, of homeostasis, by which one tries
to recover corporal, physical sensation in a world where "the real"
seems absent. Abruptly jerking the wheel when driving a car at full speed, provoking
an accident like the stars of the Cronenberg's film Crash,
or bringing sex to the point of death, like Sada Abe and Tatsuya Fuji in Oshima's Empire of Passion
(cited by Zizek), would be two examples of this.
These drifts allude to the processes by which, when faced with some kind
of overdose (of screens, of flesh…), an opposite response is automatically generated
to try to counteract a feeling of "loss". These are the homeostatic
mechanisms by which one self-regulates a state exposed to the interaction of the
medium, and these are precisely mechanisms that interest us in pursuing our line
of argument about invisible writing as a fragmented form of gender violence on
the Internet. Mechanisms that seem to pop up in what we do and see several times
a day and on different scales. They appear with particular frequency in places
where the individuals in question feel they may be losing something valuable (the
body or power would be good examples). Their
action tends to preserve and maintain a
status quo that is being threatened. Thus, in relations between the sexes (relations
of power) we could say that these processes of self-regulation are constantly
at work to different degrees, to ensure the survival of an androcentric,
patriarchal supremacy. These would be processes of "normalization" of
power. However, to leave no room for confusion, this self-regulating tendency
does not lead to balanced, symmetrical relations between the sexes; rather, it
sustains a mythical-ritual system that reveals a profound asymmetry between the
sexes and genders.
The principle of the inferiority and exclusion of women, which the mythical-ritual
system confirms and amplifies to the point of making it the principle of division
of the entire universe, is no more than fundamental asymmetry, that between man
and woman in the terrain of symbolic exchange; of the relations of production
and reproduction of symbolic capital, whose central mechanism is the marriage
market, which make up the foundation of the entire social order. In it, women
can only appear as objects, or better put, as symbols whose meaning is constructed
without their input and whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or
increase of the symbolic capital possessed by men (Bourdieu 2001).
For many abusers,
isn't the radicalization of a feeling of ownership over their partners a way of
counteracting their wives' possible attempts at emancipation and independence
(economic, professional, personal)? This feeling is present in certain unforgettable
phrases uttered by men regarded as eminent thinkers of our culture, who condemn
women from their pulpits, in their books and in "their" history, proclaiming
her to be the slave of man for her "physical and mental weakness" (G.
Bedoya 2002).
It is also present in still-contemporary phrases uttered by abusers and repeated
in the media (“I killed her because she was mine”). In all these “death sentences”
(real or symbolic) there is always an underlying warning, a mandate from power,
as if trying to amass surplus warnings in case it ever occurs to anyone to even
out or dehierarchize the hegemonic situation. This warning
(materialized in blood, blows, words) cannot be understood as a concrete, isolated
event. Each blow is a quote. In gender violence,
abuse through words or the body is never a unique occurrence; when it happens,
all acts of this nature that come before it are evoked. In its utterance (verbal
or physical) each one of the dead, wounded or abused women from every culture,
every time period, are present. In its reiteration, the act of domination takes
root and is fortified, so that many times only a gesture is needed to warn of
what is to come (or might come). A single word or tone of voice thus become metaphorically
performative, the mere utterance of which (sometimes
even the mere intuition of their presence, their preamble, such as the beginning
of a quote that we all know by heart) produces that which means: violence as a
way of self-regulating a situation of power.
Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation didn't repeat
a "coded" or iterative utterance? Or in other words, if the formula
I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identified
in some way as a 'citation'?...in such a typology, the category of intention will
not disappear, it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be
able to govern the whole scene and the entire system of utterance (énonciation) (Derrida
1988).
Each abuse, then, is not only a positioning that
reaffirms the identity of the dominating subject, it also reasserts the identity
of he or she who is listening, renewing the ties of dependency and submission
(recycling the eyes of the Other), stabilizing the system and recalling the place
which, in the game of power, still corresponds to each of them. The repetition
of these situations of violence becomes, for the individuals who experience them,
something terribly "normal"; both of them identify themselves in their
ideology so that the writings that produce them become invisible.
In its pronouncement, violence dissimulates its
origins and the primary conventions by which the man demonstrated (what he thought
was) his physical and mental superiority. Yet violence is also an effect of the
materialization of sex on the subjects, the materialization of their historicity
that makes this violence something structural. In fact, this (structural) consideration
has meant protecting it by calling
it a "private" matter. That which contributes to sustaining a regime
of values and preserving conventional relationships between couples and families,
hiding many types of violent behavior by calling it "normal". And then
when, for some reason, they step out the front door, they go back to considering
it (in hushed voice) a "private matter" (“a lover's spat,” “prison disguised
as love”). If the private is not made public, it too becomes invisible writing,
or what is the same to the rest of world, it is cancelled
out.
Perhaps the
Net has something more to say on this matter. Could it be that a medium like the
Internet, where the private and the public converge, does not offer new ways of
understanding the invisibilization of personal conflicts
confined to the ostracism of "the private"? It is not just a question
of the "all-seeing eye" and webcams invading
our homes, turning the kitchen into a public meeting place, but also that the
filters used so the public can access the private without homogenizing patina
(and vice versa) are more viable in a network where the user also produces and
distributes information. Moreover, we cannot underestimate the changes that "the
private" has been undergoing, in recent decades, as a result of the feminist
struggle and artistic activism. If the important thing for an androcentric
society is to maintain certain control mechanisms so the situation doesn't teeter,
feminist art on the Internet aims to visiblize and subvert
these mechanisms. In fact, in this political arena we find politically committed
works of net.art, such as the monument to victims of
domestic violence Parthenia
(www.parthenia.com) by Margot Lovejoy, which operate
precisely in this convergence, making private and real stories of domestic violence public. Or others such as Mythic Hybrid (http://www.premamurthy.net/project_mythic.html)
by Prema Murthy, where using
a search engine, a deconstruction of mythologies about feminine hysterics and
collective hallucinations attributed to workers in South Asian microelectronics
companies is simulated, subverting the mechanisms of unidirectional interpretation
and the partisan "filters" that relate women to technology, from the
multiple perspectives suggested by the very action of web searching.
Yet this interpretation,
presented as a creative, feminist possibility for action, has already been met
with skeptical responses in the camouflaged hegemony of Internet, which keeps
repeating (especially when it comes to the participation and representation of
women) the same univocal forms of writing history that we have always seen. It
could be that the best allies of the conservative spirit whose patina covers the
power structure are the myths that sustain the violence considered structural.
In fact, historically transmitted myths about gender are an essential part of
patriarchal structures where gender violence is developed and maintained, myths
loaded with perverse "blue and pink" signs whose destiny is impregnated
with implicit messages about what we "can be" in the world. There is
no need to look very far: the images and narrations that make up the collective imaginary conceal forms
of resistance to the patriarchy, forms of violence and subjugation of women safeguarded
(without irony) behind the apparent fiction of the story and the artificiality
of the images. This denunciation of the mythology implicit — or in many cases shameless — in some of
most important stories (just have a look at the Bible) is also considered in the
net.art work entitled The Intruder (http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/) by Natalie
Bookchin, where she makes an ironic, cyberfeminist re-reading of "ownership" and "violence
against women" in Borges' homonymous story La
Intrusa ("The
Intruder").
These mythologies
do not disappear on the Internet. In many cases, they are actually more widespread,
particularly in video games and the sex businesses that flood the Net. The strengthening
of stereotypes and violence upon the virtual "body" that recreates the
woman is a regular occurrence in cyberspace. It is a new way of giving free reign to the responses
generated by a patriarchal model in which we maintain our sociocultural values. This model continues to be supported
in men's healthy relationship with sex and women's still reproachable
relationship with themselves. Thus, women end up being regarded, in the majority
of make-believe video game situations or lucrative sex businesses, as sexual merchandise
and objects, while men consume, maintain and finance this system as active subjects.
The need to
repeat these behaviors and identify who is in control and who is not, who acts
as subject and who becomes a thing, begs additional readings. The fact that this
situation of domination and, in many cases, violence (symbolic or real) repeats
itself makes us think that it is not something the subjects do innately, but rather
it needs to be reaffirmed in order to be maintained. In other words, it is not
static. If sex is a "regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs,”
(Butler 1993).
Violence is one of the mechanisms used to produce bodies. If materiality is the effect of power, it is during
this process that the masculine heterosexuality of consumers and video game programmers
accentuates the boundaries marked by their stereotype and hegemonic position.
They exaggerate them like one who is trying to counteract a world (beyond screens)
that is beginning to denounce the outdatedness of that
stance; that is, which situates male heterosexuality in crisis. The need to exaggerate
and reiterate these behaviors is only, then, the sign that the materialization
of sex in the body via discursive practices is not a static, closed process that
occurs in the individual. Instead, as Butler suggests, that materialization is
never complete, so bodies never end up accepting those determinations. Visibilizing
the instabilities of this dynamic process that affect the possibility of the rematerialization
of sex could perhaps make the very hegemonic system that produces them wobble.
If the wound marks of violence are left on the physical body, the marks
literally produced by physical abuse, the virtual body can likewise be wounded
by the subject's possible contradictory utterance (that is, the instabilities
of the dynamic process) when one rebels against the stereotype identity (dominant
or submissive) that only the perverse game of power can generate. Only in the
factitious spaces of representation and artificiality, such as art and the digital
medium, can we visiblize these contradictions and make
them coexist. The video piece I am Milica Tomic by Milica
Tomic comes to mind, where the presentation of the main character through successive, mutually
exclusive identities (whose utterances cancel out the previous one) is materialized
in the representation of physical wounds on the face. Visibilizing this incompatibility is only possible in the
terrain of artificiality. The stigmas of sexual identity also cause wounds (those
inflicted by power). Yvonne Volkart has suggested that
only digital technology is capable of creating such wounds. In the digital space,
both the cuts and the body are artificial and therefore incompatible. The situation
is metaphorical. The desires of the reproduced identities are not inscribed on
the body; however, the body finds itself faced with the paradox of being “at once
body and symbol” (the subject articulated on a vulnerable body is also real).
The Blind Eye (Seeing With the Eyes of the Other)
Why should the body end at the skin or include, in the best case, other
beings encapsulated by the skin? (Haraway
1991).
We netianas arise from life experiences
but we are radical forms of reincarnation (Zafra
2005).
“Seeing with the eyes of the Other” has, following the line of argument
presented here and in the specific context of the Internet, a double meaning.
On one hand, “seeing with the eyes of the Other” refers to one of the characteristics
of subjugated individuals when faced with any sort of gender violence; that is,
the domination of the gaze that blinds the victims. A gaze by which the abused
woman projects and observes from the role that has been imposed on her in a situation
of reiterated violence. One descriptive characteristic of this type of gaze is
the feeling of guilt that makes her feel responsible for the violence others inflict
on her (she sees through the eyes of the abuser). However, further consideration
of gender violence on the Internet suggests a second meaning, a unique reading
of the intersubjective and interfaceted
relationship characteristic of the Internet. “Seeing with the eyes of the Other”
refers, then, to the possibility of escaping those “fake eyes,” imposed by the
dominant ideology and maintained by the reactionary spirit of institutions, of
freeing ourselves from the eyes through many other possible eyes, through non-essentialist
exercises of temporal release from the body. It is not so much a therapy (although
“putting yourself in the other's place” usually generates situations of empathy
and tolerance for the "Other" that psychologists would surely recommend)
but a real creative, experimental exercise in “giving form to themselves.”
Yet the difficulties
of producing the subject on the Net can not be underestimated. If the visible
is a guarantee of social definition, if social definition of the body is the product
of a social labor of construction and reiteration — that is, an exercise of vision
and identification — and this is also the fruit of a social hierarchization of bodies, then what happens when the physical
body is "not there," at least not conventionally speaking? What happens
when the most basic notion of sexual identity is put (potentially cross-dressed)
behind a screen? The body, or the corporealization of the subject, as Braidotti suggests, “should not be understood either as a
biological category or a social category, but rather a point of overlapping between
the physical, the symbolical and the sociological." (Braidotti 1994). By
this logic, the materiality of sexual difference is not limited to the physical
body, just as power is not concentrated in specific places. The basis of most
feminist redefinitions of subjectivity emphasizes the
sexually differentiated and corporealized structure
of the speaking subject; this is the point of departure for numerous epistemological
projects on subjectivity. For Braidotti for example,
redefining the corporeal roots of subjectivity is the seed of her epistemological
project on nomadism. This brings us to the observation that for the nomad quality of the online subject (whose
sexual identity and other characteristics inscribed on the body are artificial
online and potentially changeable) this anti-essentialist
approach is key to the link of the materiality of sexual difference to the body
on the Internet. A nomadic character of identities could then be an effective
way of freeing us from the blind eye. It would undoubtedly be a creative exercise
that would allow us to use the eyes of the Other using fluid, immaterial, disassembleable
nomadic bodies.
In fact, although the machine acts as a new field of inscription of socio-symbolic codes that converges with the physical body,
the drifting-off through the forms of immaterial presence where the online subject
is produced causes the body to rest (a rest that seems to temporarily free us
from the blind eye). This practice could become the new representation of a regulatory ideal (Butler 1993) (in
the Foucaultian sense) that also occurs in the physical
world, or the subversion and experimentation of new discourses that constitute
the virtual body.
Having arrived
to this point, our bodies on the Net cannot be understood as a biological category,
although perhaps as a performativity, a new variety
of bodies/verb of multiple, changeable appearances that when uttered are already
being realized. This begs another question: (if we recall Butler) the reiterative
and referential practice by which the discourse produces the effects that she
mentions makes us consider the performativity of the regulatory norms of sex, and thus, how
these favor the materiality of sexual difference depending on heterosexual hegemony
(power). In this context, what would the material and discursive limits of the
online subject be? What would the new forms of violence "without bodies"
be? In the physical world, these limits can be established by the forced effect
of sex (Butler 1993),
and just as sex regulates the terms that materialize bodies the validity (or
not) of these is confirmed in accordance with hegemonic models. But when the physical
differences and their variables are blurred or cancelled
out by hiding the bodies, we can play around with the place occupied by the discursive
and material limits of sex on the Internet. Then we can ask ourselves, "what
do bodies matter?” in a medium where the subject is produced through an interface.
Might this dematerializing process be the driving force of a new epistemology
of the subject in matters of sex as well? In this case, it would seem that sex
is not excluded from the realm of the body, but quite the opposite: the body is
excluded from the realm of sex, of its ideological materialization in gender which,
when liberated, adopts dematerialized, non-essentialist
formulas. In this context, the disturbing return seems not to be from sex to the
body but from the body to sex. Temporally freed from the burdens of the corporal,
the alternation of dematerialization and reincarnation
processes would perhaps affect a new symbolic horizon.
On the other hand, although individuals' sexual materiality is determined
by heterosexual, hegemonic patterns, according to which they are closely tied
to power relations, the fact that on the Internet this “materiality” is “dematerialized”
does not protect us from that action of power. The territory machine-Internet
is not exempt of that dominance (in fact, Internet is another production of power),
even if it has been sold to us an a utopian, horizontal, dehierarchized
structure. If in horizontal media new conditions about intersubjective
relations are established, a deceptive relationship is also present in them, caused
by thinking that our position (in a rizomatic network)
is equal to that of the other online subjects. The forms of resistance and action
would be different, however, as would the forms of power. In these kinds of structures,
the new articulations of power might be represented by the action of small, mobile
and disperse cells, less defined but which could be equally effective in their
attempts to perpetuate hegemonic systems in the technology industry. But in these
ways of establishing power and violence there are also new ways of building up
resistance to them (to their homogenization and banalization
strategies, the normalization of their myths). Some of the most interesting artistic
and political projects developed by feminists on the Internet come to mind: obn
(www.obn.org) or subrosa (www.cyberfeminism.net), for
example.
Creative perspicacity is necessary to re-read
and deconstruct the repetition and normalization of myths about gender on the
Internet. But this action is insufficient if it is not accompanied by bringing
women closer to the spheres where power has historically been held, those places
where paid labor has been done and technology has been invented. The infiltration
of the "Other" and the modification of the sphere of power itself are
fundamental if the violence of invisible writing and the blind eye of Internet
are to be subverted.
Power has gender and the mechanisms by which this determination is established
are the same as those that are used to maintain a situation of violence both on
and offline. However, the introduction of the Other
woman into power (jobs involving technological invention and leadership) would
not be viable insofar as power itself is not feminized;
not in the sense of promoting higher levels of participation, but in sense of
changing the structure itself and the understanding of power. It may well be that
this feminization is only possible through recognizing
and respecting the inner "Other" of male sexuality that preserves his
status (we cannot tolerate the “Others” because we cannot tolerate the otherness
in ourselves (Kristeva 1991).
This task is not easy. If the technologies that
are presented as neutral are merely the product and intention of culturally and socially codified specters of power, strictly
regulated on the ideological and cultural level, the battle stands to be particularly
tough, since the specters forged and strengthened over centuries of patriarchy
are not just part of the technologies but also our own identities and bodies.
Therefore, it seems that little can be done but smile with a tender nihilism that
reconciles us (as women) to our "sweetest, most submissive" quality
of mythical obedience and resignation. The battle is tough because giving in is
also an effect of the normalization of power but, undoubtedly, the dominated subject
is (perversely) satisfied by the temptation to escape her freedom and become a
thing. In that position, one escapes the pain of the awareness of an adopted existence.
With a certain degree of distance and all the resistance to succumbing
to this previously-described position, we see that it is necessary for the processes
of women's awareness and emancipation to go hand in hand with bringing them closer
to the spheres where power has historically been held. In the case of technology
and the Internet, this is achieved through women's professional incorporation
into fields not restricted to mere repetitive action mediated by machines (assembly
line workers, typists and gears on the lowest levels of the production chain)
and the rise of immaterial work mediated by communication networks (telework).
This emancipation of the woman through technology has different possible readings.
On one hand, the determination of the subjects' different roles based on their
gender (starting with their being considered as producers worthy of a Capitalist
system) facilitates the production and maintenance of stereotypes of men and women
and the roles traditional systems wish to preserve. On the other hand, the reconfiguration
of spaces where public and private activities have conventionally been developed
and differentiated gives rise to the need to rethink both spheres now merged into
a single space where production, reception and distribution of knowledge also
come together. In this context, digital technology may be both a medium that promotes
women's emancipation as well as a new mechanism of isolation in domestic spaces
(which many still have not managed to escape). In this case, the Internet could
become for many women a new prison, this time a digital one.
Invisible writing and the blind eye are present in these strategies of
power on the Internet, generating an apparent imbalance between the possibilities
suggested by the Net (those we imagine) and the (spectral) reality given to us.
However, this imbalance is no more than a new agent of the self-regulatory processes
that ensure the survival of androcentric, patriarchal supremacy. The imbalance does not
destabilize the process of normalizing violence, but rather it helps sustain that
system. Facing this situation requires the acute, ironic, and visibilizing action of creative minds as well as an ongoing
exercise of political alertness. But it also calls for the generation of “time” for thought, capable of resisting the fast
pace of the media, “time” that helps us deconstruct the "ghost" that
covers, like a hardened patina, the physical and social structures where technology
is invented and produced, where invisible writing and the blind eye make it difficult
for us to detect new and old forms of violence and domination (with or without
bodies).
Remedios Zafra is teacher
Permanent Lecturer and dr. PhD of Fine Art (University of Seville). As a writer
she has published the essays: Netianas.N(h)acer mujer en Internet, (colección
Desórdenes, L.T.), Las cartas rotas.
Espacios de igualdad y feminización en Internet (Briseño,
2002) and Habitar en (punto)net (Cátedra Leonor de Guzmán and University of Cordoba, 2004), as well as numerous
articles and essays about artistic creation, digital culture and feminism in specialized
and educational books and magazines. She was the winner of the 2004 Caja
Madrid National Essay Award, the 2000 Carmen de Burgos National Essay Award, the
2001 Leonor de Guzmán Professor
Research Award and the Antonia Pérez Alegre
National Poetry Prize in 2005. She has headed up diverse artistic projects on
the Web, among them the online magazine Mujer y Cultura Visual, the creative project e-dentidades (web-side 1.0,
Mediateca CaixaForum, Barcelona,
2004) and the net.art
exhibition Habitar en (punto)net (Espai
f, Mataró, Barcelona, 2003).
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Northwestern University Press,
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