Co-founded by Annie Goh and Marie Thompson, Sonic Cyberfeminisms utilises the histories and legacies of cyberfeminism to critically and creatively interrogate the relationship between gender, sound and technology. Beginning in 2014, Sonic Cyberfeminisms was borne of a desire to expand conversations around representation in electronic music by denaturalising gender and its relationship to technology. Cyberfeminism, as a heterogenous body of theory and practice concerned with the feminist problems and possibilities that accompany informational technologies, offers a rich entry point for understanding how impositions of gender are reinscribed, reconfigured and refused within auditory technoculture. In this presentation, I will introduce Sonic Cyberfeminisms both as a collective feminist project that has produced different forms, outputs and way of working; and as a conceptual tool that names a set of concerns, interests and investments that have necessarily shifted with the changing social and technological terrain of the past decade.
Marie Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University, UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. From 2020-2024 she led Tinnitus, Auditory Knowledge and the Arts: a project concerned with how the arts mediate experience of tinnitus and the diverse ways it affects people’s lives. With Annie Goh, Thompson is a founding member of Sonic Cyberfeminisms: Goh and Thompson will publish a book based on this project in 2026 on Goldsmiths Press. She is also currently writing a book on music technologies, crisis and the automation of care, which is under contract with UC Press.