“It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen.”
- Dolly Parton, X, (24)
“Digitization is feminization,” Sadie Plant stated in 1994 at the Seduced and Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World conference in her lecture “The Feminine Cyberspace” (12). Feminization, in reference to cyberspace, is an intentionally vague term for certain shifts in the labor market, as well as in reference to virtual space as a landing ground for feminist activity (14), however the term is highly flexible and encourages fellow theorists to build onto it in a decentralized way. Cyberfeminism purported the idea of a world in which the internet served as a new force of feminization in culture, and sought to define it.
A theme throughout Cyberfeminist thought is woman as the simulator, and hence simulation as feminization. Though Dolly Parton was likely making a joke when she said she would have been a drag queen had she not been born a woman, the implications Rosi Braidotti took from this quote were clear – Dolly Parton is a born simulator (21). By “seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other,” women in the role of simulator in the First World are either able to ally themselves with Third World world women, or to alienate themselves further (28). Computer and internet accessibility is a problem in many areas, but where it's accessible, due to easily understandable platforms such as X and Instagram, instantaneous connections can be built faster than ever. Donna Haraway claims, “networking is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy – weaving is for oppositional cyborgs,” in her Cyborg Manifesto (28). This statement from 1985 precedes social media networking, yet applies perfectly to our current climate. What cyberfeminism seems to call for is a “workable network of translation into socially liveable modes of behavior,” in the words of Rosi Braidotti (12). In other words, to bring the cyber into the real, and social media stories from fleeting twenty-four hour posts to action in our lives, streets, apartments, and bedrooms.