new pleasures, based on the ethics of (sexual) difference. In this process we do not look for any kind of “true” iden-
tity based on our “sex*, it is not an individual liberation of our desires or of some kind of inherent sexual energy. It
is a political social choice, albeit a risky one, in balancing within a particular disposition of power relations, which
are not stable or given, with an aim of modelling and inventing.

SUBJECTIVITY AND PLEASURE

Irigaray in “Je, tu, nous" (1990, 1993) shows that the topic of sexual difference can not be reduced to the issues of
sex and sexual act, as it has been done so far. It is about subjectivity understood as an intersection of our embodi-
ment and the world. In this sense virtual reality is not virtual as in non-real, it is a space for creation of very real
links, origins of new relationships, range of new pleasures. Probably, cyberfeminists were the first openly political
communities in cyberspace to play out their differences into new forms of cyber-organisations without programmes
and restrictions, which invite other people for collective pleasure, which is not I'un(e). We are obviously "making it
work" and “inventing new games" of power relations in cyberspace. In doing it, we move beyond our cultures of sex-
ualisation, we “de-sexualise” pleasure, being fully aware that it is necessarily (though not exclusively) a political
gesture: ‘For thousands of years, we have been made to believe that the law of all pleasure is, secretly at least, sex.
.». It was this codification of pleasure by the “laws” of sex that ultimately gave rise to the whole arrangement of sex-
uality. And this makes us think that we “liberating” ourselves when we "decode" all pleasure in terms of sex finally
brought into the open. Whereas we should be striving, rather, toward a desexualisation, to a general economy of
pleasure that would not be sexually normed’ (Foucault, 1996: 212).

It is important when trying to relate to our “womanness” not to ask questions like "Who am I?" or "What is the secret
of my desire?" We better ask “What relations, through femininity, can be established, invented, multiplied and mod-
ulated”? (Foucault, 1996: 308). Here femininity is not reduced to any kind of “truth in sex", but rather is seen as an
Opportunity to create multiplicity of relationships. We must use it not as "a form of desire", but as “something desir-
able". Here we recollect words of Irigaray on female genealogies and their cultural absence in misogynist and ma-
tricidal imagery that founds our societies. There is an urgent need for articulation of female relations, ties and
friendships outside "allowed" spaces. What is the pleasure for women in ‘being together’? Share our time, our ideas,
our experiences? To share our grief, knowledge and confidences outside institutional relations that construct us in
patriarchal cultures? These are not easy questions, and cannot be answered by utopian female essence. We have to
be careful not to celebrate our ‘being a woman’ as there are many differences among women that have to be ac-
knowledged while the common ideal of a ‘fusion of liberated identities’ implies a possible digestion of or a violence
against the Other.

This “politics of pleasure" is not some irresponsible ‘enjoying oneself’. In this sense it is a call for a responsible en-
joyment and it is not an “operation of the superego", as Slavoj Zizek has argued. Of course, there is no ‘jouissance’
outside a ‘political’, however it cannot be reduced to an only political dimension and that is its strategic strength.
Secondly, as Foucault has shown in his "History of sexuality" (Foucault, 1984a), in our societies there has been
much more governmental investments and normalisations in the realm of desire and its embodied forms, than in the
domain of pleasure, that makes pleasure more amenable for a political (feminist) intervention and strategic resis-
tance. Invention of new pleasures is not ‘safe’, as nothing can be ‘completely safe’ and it is not an issue here at all,
but rather seems more effective and promising for feminist politics and female subject inventions, especially in the.
Russian context.

OUR BODY

There is not virtual reality prior to/without our bodies and those relations of force that our embodiment allows to
pass through. To see cyberspace bodiless is as much a political choice as to see it embodied. Instead of seeing cy-
berspace as a place “free of a body” and its politics, where one can (at last!) take a relieve from that non-ideal
(overweight, digesting or aging) materiality, we can give back this somatophobia to Western reason. We can politi-

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