CYBERFEMINISM AND THE BELARUSIAN UPRISING: DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES, AFFECTIVE SOLIDARITY, AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION

The following article explores how information technologies can function as infrastructures of resistance and collective world-making in the face of socio-political catastrophe, authoritarian suppression, and covert control systems. Focusing on the 2020–2021 Belarusian protests, it examines how digital environments became critical for reconfiguring political agency and collective solidarity. While often associated with surveillance and extraction, digital infrastructures also serve as platforms for alternative, decentralized modes of resistance. Revisited through a cyberfeminist lens, the Belarusian case reveals how feminist strategies intersect with digital tools to generate subversive forms of care, visibility, and political engagement. The entry point to the reimagining of digital technologies as a space for producing solidarity is Donna Haraway’s framing of agency as sympoetic and open-ended, thus revealing itself in bundles of networks and entanglements. Agency appears to be distributed amongst human and non-human (or more-than-human) participants in assemblies who co-constitute each other in the process of world-making or world-becoming. Hence, emerging infrastructures are never neutral and merely instrumental, but relational and affective as they are a product of daily interaction (or intra-action) and become a site of intersection of acts, desires, emotions, histories, bodies and technologies. In the course of Belarusian uprisings, digital space became one of those sites of distributed collective agency in-becoming through experimentation, creativity, openness, thinking and telling stories together. This analysis foregrounds the hybrid entanglements of technology, gender, and resistance, mapping how cyberfeminism offers theoretical and practical pathways for technopolitical transformation and emancipation.