Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit
Authors: Brodsky Judith K. 
Published: November 2021

In Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit, Judith K. Brodsky makes a ground-breaking intellectual leap by connecting feminist art theory with the rise of digital art. Technology has commonly been considered the domain of white men but—unrecognized until this book—female artists, including women artists of color, have been innovators in the digital art arena as early as the late 1960s when computers first became available outside of government and university laboratories.

Brodsky, an important figure in the feminist art world, looks at various forms of visual art that are quickly becoming the dominant art of the 21st century, examining the work of artists in such media as video (from pioneers Joan Jonas and Adrian Piper to Hannah Black today), websites and social networking (from Vera Frenkel to Ann Hirsch), virtual and augmented reality art (Jenny Holzer to Hyphen-Lab), and art using artificial intelligence. She also documents the work of female-identifying, queer, transgender, and Black and brown artists including Legacy Russell and Micha Cárdenas, who are not only innovators in digital art but also transforming technology itself under the impact of feminist theory.

In this radical study, Brodsky argues that their work frees technology from its patriarchal context, illustrating the crucial need to transform all areas of our culture in order to achieve the goals of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation, to empower female-identifying and Black and brown people, and to document their contributions to human history.

This book is about how women and gender variant digital artists are transforming technology under the impact of feminist theory. It documents the history and contemporary practice of such artists in one volume for the first time and shows how they have made significant contributions to the aesthetic and practice of digital art and have altered digital technology itself.

The 1960s and 1970s generation of feminist artists re-purposed traditional art disciplines seeking out new art forms to express women’s experience. In looking at the history of digital technology and art through the lens of feminism, feminist art theory played an important role in the development of digital artmaking and helped to free digital technology from the limitations imposed by its patriarchal origins and transforming it into an accessible way of apprehending the world for people everywhere.

Feminism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s among mostly white, heterosexual and lesbian women to accord women parity with men. Postcolonialism, queer, and critical race theory recognized feminism as a social justice movement but transformed it to become inclusive of gender fluidity, race, power, and oppression in general. It became an intersectional movement and is used as such in this book.

Although rejecting patriarchal binary definitions of gender, this book restores women digital artists to their rightful place in history, covering artists globally and from underrepresented groups, a broad range of disciplines including video, animation, design, kinetic sculpture, 3-D computer modeling, painting, installation, performance, hypertext literature, virtual and augmented reality, and public art. The artists are innovators in interdisciplinarity, working with sound as well as visual imagery, breaching the barrier between high art and popular visual culture, creating video games and working with community organizations, transforming digital technology into a more human mode of communication.