Introduction

This reader provides a brief look into the history of women in technology, with a focus on feminist theoretical and practical approaches to the changes that technology has brought into the lives of women.

The reader includes a collection of seven key texts from cyberfeminist discourse, as well as other material that give a historical context. It is built on the hypothesis that, as Sadie Plant describes it, 'there is an intimate and possibly subversive element between women and machines especially the new intelligent machines - which are no longer simply working for man as are women no longer simply working for man'.

The first part of my research is looking at women's introduction into the workforce in the technology field. The focus is on the type of work women were doing as 'human computers', a job that was considered low-level, menial and was, therefore, overlooked when it came to praising the advances in technology. As anexample, the selected text on this topic is 'When Computers Were Women' by Jennifer S. Light, in which she talks about women's work on the ENIAC computer after the second World War. Seen only as placeholders for the men gone to war, women were eventually removed from their positions and from historical memory.

An aspect that comes back often in the materials gathered in this reader is the connection between writing software and weaving. Working with textiles has always been interlaced with the lives of women. The first wellknown programmable computer was build based on a punch card system used by the first electric loom. Apollo

computers had their memory weaved by hand. Sadie Plant's work, 'The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics' is an excellent introduction on the natural progression from women weaving threads of textiles to women weaving data into software. Her focus on Ada Lovelace as the archetype of the woman working with computers is further developed in her book 'Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture'. From the latter, the space restrictions and desire to keep my researched focused led to the selection of a couple of key essays that best represent the scope of the reader, and provide a passage to the rest of the texts.

The following 3 texts situate themselves in third wave feminism and its connections to computer technology. In the 90s, feminists produced work that looks at the relationship between women and technology, and supports the idea of embracing technology and making it work in their favour. At the same time, they envision a new type of future which moves beyond previous limitations on gender, feminism and politics. What follows is the piece entitled 'Where is theFeminism in Cyberfeminism', an article written by Faith Wilding in which she provides an overview of the development of cyberfeminism as a concept, movement and form of organization. One of the essential cyberfeminist artistic projects comes in the form of the '100 anti-theses' devised at the First Cyberfeminist International, a manifesto written in the form of a list of 100 anti-definitions of cyberfeminism, which consider labeling as a restriction, and thus describe cyberfeminism by what it is not, rather than what it is.

The final text reproduced in this reader comes as another manifesto, a more contemporary example of the direction of cyberfeminist discourse today. 'Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation', created by the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. The manifesto promotes the embracing of alienation, seeing it as freedom rather than restriction, and

as grounds for collective organization. It urges the need for the unification of the political left, as well the need to use existing technology to reshape our world.

This reader has been produced using free web to print software. Using HTML and CSS as a base, and Weasyprint as a software that takes them as input, the final PDF was generated. Please note that it has taken innumerable attempts for it to reach its current form, due either to a number of features not being supported by the software, or to my clumsy usage of HTML and CSS.

Last but not least, the abstracts hold a little secret. In pure oulipian style, the restriction they all adhere to is the number of words, always the same, 90.