Cyberfeminism, hackfeminism and the new challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Latin America

Digital feminist activism in Latin America has gone through different stages, corresponding to the cycles of mobilization on the continent. In the first phase during the nineties, feminist organizations and groups began to connect through email and websites to disseminate content and form transnational alliances. With the arrival of Web 2.0 and the intensive use of social media, in the first decade of the new Century many women and girls without prior feminist experience formed connected crowds that took concerted action in the streets and online. This last wave of feminism coincides with the exacerbation of the contradictions between the freedom to communicate that social media entails and its orientation towards surveillance and business purposes. Furthermore, when the mobilizations of Latin American women reached their peak in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced feminists to use digital media with even greater intensity. In those circumstances, hackfeminist initiatives also had to grow to support all those women actvists and human rights defenders who received enormous amounts of online violence. According to Michel Foucault, "Genealogy is a particular investigation of those elements that we tend to feel are without history. It is a work of demythologisation that sets out to dislodge the hidden meanings and false semblances under which a historical reality is concealed" (1997, p. 15). This paper seeks to trace a genealogy of feminist digital activism in Latin America from the 1990s to date, from the dense interweaving of technologies, struggles against gender violence to the recent questioning of AI from a feminist decolonial perspective.