AustLit

'This article explores the emergence of the cyberfeminine within electronic poetry and the ways in which the digital environment can open up new readings and writings of the feminine. Using Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext work Patchwork Girl as the initial model for a form of cyberfemininity that operates through hybridity and excess, this article examines the legacies of “patchwork” digital femininity in the works of Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland. Written in the invented language mezangelle, Mez Breeze’s works posit the feminine as fluid, flexible, always cyborgian, and always deeply bodily. Thus, the troubled language of mezangelle reflects these troubled cyberfeminine bodies: simultaneously organic and mechanical, embracing and queering femininity, and invested in an embodied existence that functions, in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, as a “source of interference in, and danger to, the operations of reason” (5). Breeze’s hypermedia works, which combine visual, aural and textual elements, also directly address this “unreasonable” feminine body and the challenges to liberal humanist subjectivity that cyberfemininity presents. Stephanie Strickland’s sequence “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” explores cyberfemininity through the titular character Sand (so named for the silicon that makes up her circuits). Strickland uses hyperlinking to proliferate possible readings and demonstrate the potential complexity and flexibility of a cyberfeminine identity. By comparing Breeze and Strickland’s works, this article identifies the ways in which digital spaces offer a unique opportunity for the exploration of cyberfeminine identities and, potentially, other queer identities beyond the limits of white heteropatriarchy.' (Publication abstract)