Cyberfeminism Index
By Mindy Seu
Published by Inventory Press
Los Angeles, 2022

From a 13th-century tabula to the S&P 500, indices have typically served as dull, if not convenient tools by and for educated men. But Mindy Seu’s index on cyberfeminism, the antithesis of archaic, patriarchal apparatuses, hacked the system. After tweeting about her idea in 2019, the designer and technologist spawned a semi-viral, collaborative Google spreadsheet. An impressively grassroots archive, the document grew to 700 publicly sourced entries of radical techno-critical works. Then, seeking to better convey the rhizomatic nature of digital knowledge and its dissemination, she transformed her compendium into an interactive website.

 Mindful of how quickly web code deteriorates, however, Seu again metamorphized her compilation into the Cyberfeminism Index (2022) proper. The physical publication appropriates academia’s and the printed medium’s enduring credibility, but Seu’s fluorescent green, highly stylized iteration is unmistakably modern. The design is also pragmatic: there is no impractical, extortionate hardback, only a soft cover as malleable as the index’s recycled-paper interior. Yet another subversion of the classical index format, it bears Seu’s name in large letters instead of minimizing her role in the margins.

 Elevating unorthodox content through a citable composition, the index begins with 14 scholarly “collections” on cyberfeminist niches (art, sex, coding), reading guides that can be explored further. A lattice of hyperlinks, depicted in the book as neon-green pills, then relay 30-plus years of chronological, yet non-hierarchical, annotated entries, beginning with excerpts from Donna J. Haraway’s iconic A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and ending with Julia R. DeCook’s intersectional critique of the same essay (2020). Interspersed are introductions to and by cyberfeminist pioneers—VNS Matrix, Sadie Plant, Old Boys Network—hackerspaces, new-media art, and the movement’s many microbranches, which have mutated beyond feminism’s Eurocentric, trans-exclusionary origins. 

Whether a video game screenshot, avant-garde poetry, or a long-form essay, Seu treats each entry with equal reverence; and within nearly 1000, no concrete definition for cyberfeminism emerges. Rather, the index represents a singular moment in an ever-evolving response to techno-oppression, demanding collaborative revision. Indeed, postdigital theory encompasses as much discord as it does consensus, often over the same disputes that plagued second-wave feminism. The difference is that the vast majority of these conversations now occur in cyberspace—and because internet access remains elusive for women without sufficient infrastructure or under rampant censorship, feminist discourse continues to lack total intersectionality. 

Cyberfeminism Index thus presents a perfectly incomplete introduction to the modern world of anti-establishment artists, scholars, activists, and hackers, whose work has the potential to uproot digital tyranny. As Seu suggested in a lecture performance given at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, if bodies are technologies, then social behavior is code, and with the right algorithmic influence, both are subject to reprogramming.