- "Hardware, software, wetware-
-before their beginnings and beyond their ends,
women have been the simulators, assemblers, and
programmers of the digital machines."
--Sadie Plant, Zeros and
Ones
It
would be hasty to dismiss Sadie
Plant's recent book, Zeros and Ones, as being totally
second-wave feminism. True, she seems quite
interested in the deep, dark, technological
feminine; she speaks of the male Ones and their
binary opposites, the female Zeros; and she manages
to weave together a genuine her-story of
technology. Yet, she also reaches beyond these
constrains into a complex relationship between
women and machines. This relationship, tied up in
problematics surrounding identity, technology and
the body, is at the heart of the contemporary
movement called cyberfeminism.
Emerging from
Adelaide, Australia in the early nineties, a group
of artists and activists, calling themselves VNS
Matrix, published the first Cyberfeminist
Manifesto. From this early rant, the cyberfeminist
movement began to grow and shift. It began to
coalesce around Europe. And on September 20, 1997
in Kassel, Germany, the First Cyberfeminist
International met at Documenta X, an international
exhibition of contemporary art.
Despite
international recognition, cyberfeminism remains a
highly problematic theoretical framework. No one is
quite sure what it means. Its leaders, when they
are not abandoning the movement all together, have
often given less than inspired readings of
political and technological issues. Because of this
cyberfeminism remains a bit disappointing as
avant-garde political movements go. There's no
viable party line, strictly trade union
consciousness.
That said, the
emerging cyber culture has certainly produced a
need for cyberfeminism. Let's describe that need
through the following set of questions: How does
technology gender us? Does the internet escape
discrimination through gender anonymity? Can
technology help us overcome patriarchy? Why are
computer geeks disproportionately male? Who wrote
the history of computers? Are digital machines
fundamentally male or female?
My goal is to give
a report on the status of cyberfeminism today, to
approach the subject of feminism and technology, in
both its historical and ideological dimensions. As
Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble have noted
in their recent study of cyberfeminism,
"the
territory of cyberfeminism is large. It includes
the objective arenas [of] cyberspace, institutions
of industrial design, and institutions of
education--that is, those arenas in which
technological process is gendered in a manner that
excludes women from access to the empowering points
of techno-culture." Cyberfeminism in its very nature
necessitates a decentered, multiple, participatory
practice in which many lines of flight
coexist.
Part of the same
movement that produced "girl power" e-zines like
gURL and the now famous
Geekgirl, the nineties cyberfeminist
is a unique mixture of activist, cyberpunk,
theorist and artist. Historically, cyberfeminism
has developed in two directions: the radical
politics of Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix on the one
hand, and the more mainstream work of the
Old
Boys Network (OBN is a mostly European consortium
of cyberfeminists) and the FACES email community on
the other (FACES, surprising enough for cyberspace,
is a "women only" email list). Supplementing this
are the various online publications that address
the question of feminism and technology, including
the new media art resource RHIZOME, the nettime community and the
pop~TARTS web page, a feature section
of Telepolis (a German-based online theory zine),
which specializes in material on woman and
technology. Cyberfeminist theory has also
flourished in the print community with such recent
books as Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones and Sandy Stone's
The War of
Desire and Technology.... Although cyberfeminism has also
benefited from the half-dozen or so anthologies
emerging in recent years on digital studies--not
the least of which are Timothy Druckrey's
Electronic
Culture,
the Krokers' Digital Delirium and Lynn Hershman Leeson's
Clicking
In--much of
this material remains male dominated, neglecting
the scope and depth of contemporary cyberfeminism.
Cyberfeminism's theoretical roots tend to grow out
of an interesting mixture of Donna Haraway and
French third-wave feminism and
poststructuralism.
The schism between
the two halves of cyberfeminism has been
exacerbated within the community on more than one
occasion, including VNS Matrix member Francesca da
Rimini's description of the current state of
mainstream cyberfeminism as nothing more than some
"quaint
essentialist quilted rant." To their credit, the Old Boys
Network (OBN) has been instrumental in bringing
cyberfeminism into the institutional PGA Tour of
cyberspace: the ISEAs, DEAFs, and Ars Electronica
festivals that run on and off throughout the year.
Most spectacularly OBN was able to lead the
so-called First Cyberfeminist International at last
summer's Hybrid
Workspace
(a think tank for progressive politics and
aesthetics at the recent Documenta X exhibition).
That said, This paper is primarily addressed at
what I believe to the more interesting faction of
cyberfeminism, that of Plant, Stone and VNS
Matrix.
Sadie Plant and
Sandy Stone are perhaps the two best entry points
into contemporary cyberfeminist theory. It is
Plant's view that technology is fundamentally
female--not male as the legions of geeks, computer
science teachers, and Wired magazine editors would
have us believe. Stone, on the other hand, focuses
on how virtual communities produce things like
bodies, identities and spaces.
Plant, like French
feminist Luce Irigaray before her, belongs to the
recuperationist school of feminism. She argues that
power structures, which have unequally favored men
and male forms in society, should be made more
equal through a process of revealing and valorizing
overlooked female elements. The book turns on the
story of Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer
programmer. Ada's history is enthralling. As
assistant to Charles Babbage, Lovelace helped build
early calculation machines such as the Babbage's
Difference Engine. Clearly not enough is known
about this figure and her interesting place in the
development of computer society. Plant's goal is to
recuperate this lost female origin from within the
history of technology. However, as her
manifesto-like "Feminisations: Reflections on Women
and Virtual Reality" shows, Plant wishes not to
valorize some negative space created by patriarchy,
but to unveil the always already feminine space of
technology. This is ultimately a more powerful
move. Plant prophesizes that
"Masculine
identity has everything to lose from this new
technics. The sperm count falls as the replicants
stir and the meat learns how to learn for itself.
Cybernetics is feminisation." Technology can give
feminism something that it never had at its
disposal, the obliteration of the masculine from
beginning to end. With inspiration from the VNS
Matrix and their cyberfeminist manifesto, Plant
starts to move toward defining the pure
feminine.
Zeros and Ones
persuasively shows how women have always been
inextricably involved with technology. Using the
telephone operator as an example, she argues that
women have traditionally comprised the laboring
core of networks of all kinds, particularly the
telephone system. From the power loom to
typewriting, even to the discovery of computer
"bugs," Plant categorizes technology as a
fundamentally female object. She argues that women
are intelligent machines, that the robotic is
feminine, that the zero--the nothingness of binary
code--has always been the 0-ther, the
female.
On the writing of
Zeros and Ones, Plant remembers: "when
I started the book it was really to try and
correct, what I thought was the great
miss-conception at the moment about the
relationship between women and computers in
particular and technology in general. It seemed to
me, that a lot of 'orthodox' feminist theory was
still very technophobic."
Throughout her work
the matrix is a primary metaphor. This materializes
itself historically in the weaving processes of
industrial power looms, in the predominantly female
telephone operators, in the trope of the woman as
computer programmer (Ada Lovelace, Grace Murray
Hopper) and in the web-like structure of
cyberspace. Because of this history, Plant writes
that technology is fundamentally a process of
emasculation. "The
matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place
for historical man," says Plant. If technology is
essentially feminine, then the women is the
computer. Or rather, like the Turing machine (a
machine that can be any machine), women can imitate
the computer. Women are the ultimate mimetic force.
Plant writes, "Women
cannot be anything, but she can imitate anything
valued by man: intelligence, autonomy,
beauty...perhaps the very possibility of
mimesis."
The imitating force is strengthened by the
emergence of the digital as a powerful semiovic
network. The digital provides a space of valences
that exists outside of and potentially preempts
patriarchal structures. As Plant describes it,
"the
introduction of binary code introduces a plane of
equivalence which undermines the very foundations
of a world in which male and female have played the
roles of superstructure and material
base." In
this model binary code replaces what have
traditionally been the producers of value, these
being the phallus, the law, the father, etc. In
Plant, technology is less a question of good or and
more the possibility for an objective weakening of
patriarchy. "Cyberfe
minism to me implies [that] an alliance is being
developed between women, machinery and the new
technology that women are using."
Held aloft, yet
notabl{ aloof from the cyberfeminist movement is
Allucquère
Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, transgendered theorist of the
history of cyberspace, desire and the virtual body.
Stone's early essay
"Will the Real
Body Please Stand Up?" helped set the stakes for
contemporary debates on the status of the body in
virtual communities. The place of the body is
central to cyberfeminism. Stone argues persuasively
that binarisms such as nature/culture actually
function logically as
"a strategy for
maintaining boundaries for political and economic
ends, and thus a way of making
meaning."
The insertion of the body into virtual space
actually produces meaning through the articulation
of differences between bodies and non-bodies,
between spaces and non-spaces. Like Foucault's
rejection of the "repressive hypothosis," Stone
claims that new technologies are not transparent
agents that remove issues of gender from view, but
rather they proliferate the production and
organization of gendered bodies in space. She shows
that the dominant spatial metaphor (what Doreen
Massey might call an "imaginary geography") for
interactions in virtual spaces is, simply enough,
the metaphor of our daily physical, Cartesian
space. And like our offline space, virtual spaces
are inhabited by bodies with
"complex erotic
components." This working metaphor is, of
course, totally arbitrary as Stone points out,
since there is nothing in the logic of digital
networks that necessarily prestructures itself as
Cartesian, or body-based, or desiring. So then, why
are online communities so based on desire, space
and bodies? This is the cyberfeminist question for
Stone.
Sherry Turkle
echoes this sentiment in her
"Constructions
and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual
Reality."
For Turkle digital technologies focus heavily on
the question of identity. Like Stone, Turkle
describes what happens in online communities,
spaces where role playing and genderbending are par
for the course.
Virtual space,
then, is imagined as a prosthesis, as an enormous
extension of our physical bodies. Through this
giant phantom limb (the net) we must, of course,
interact. Stone shows that communications
technology is conventionally thought of as
"1) an apparatus
for the production of community... 2) an apparatus
for the production of body... [and] 3) a mediating
[agent] between bodies and selves...i.e.,
interfaces." Community, body, interface--an
unlikely offspring of binary code! Most
fundamentally, participants in online communities
like the object-oriented social spaces called MOOs
"learn to
delegate their agencies to body representatives
that exist in imaginal spaces contiguously with
representatives of other
individuals." The creators of one of the most
popular MOOs, LambdaMOO, describe this relationship
of bodies in social terms: "LambdaMOO
is a new kind of society, where thousands of people
voluntarily come together from all over the
world." As
Stone and others show, a participatory social
practice (i.e. community) based on an imagined
ether-scape of desiring and interacting bodies is
basic to how we conceptualize digital
spaces.
Cyberfeminist
pioneers VNS (VeNuS) Matrix provided the front line
guerrilla tactics for Stone and Plant's theoretical
efforts. VNS Matrix emerged from Adelaide,
Australia, in the summer of 1991. Francesca da
Rimini (also known as Gashgirl and/or Doll Yoko)
gives her story of how it all started:
"Like
all good coagulating stories it starts with slime,
and maybe ends with blood. I live on the edge of
the Australian desert in a small town of lies and
whispers with a palpable palpitating underbelly...
It was the summer of 91. Definitely not the summer
of love. We were four girls. We were hot and bored
and poor (for me not much has changed, except I am
no longer bored). We decided to try and crack the
porn cartel with some chick porn. We made some
images on stolen computers, Beg, Bitch, Fallen,
Snatch. We decided it was more fun playing with
computers than endlessly scanning our pussies and
so Velvet Downunder morphed into VNS Matrix.
Tagging ourselves the virus of the new world
disorder and fuelled by red wine and g-slime (which
could only be replenished by engaging frequently in
pleasurable distractions)."
VNS
Matrix were
Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da
Rimini and Virginia Barratt. They have perpetrated
a series of cyberfeminist interventions including a
"bad code" anti-video game targetted at girls (or
at least not targetted at 14 year-old boys) and
featuring characters such as "Big Daddy Mainframe."
Da Rimini (as Doll Yoko) writes, "cyberfeminism/s
has become the field from which i work, from which
multiple lines of flight errupt anarchically,
generating dialogues, relations, conceptual and
physical objects."
To appreciate the
full force of the VNS Matrix cyberfeminist
manifesto, it is worth including in its original
form:
Their slogan "the
clitoris is a direct line to the matrix"
immediately jumps out of this provocative rant. It
is meant to highlight a fundamental material
coexistence between the machine and the female
body. Originally ignorant of the work of Sadie
Plant VNS Matrix built their own theory-based
activism centered around women and technology.
Julianne Pierce notes, "at
the same time as we started using the concept of
cyberfeminism, it also began to appear in other
parts of the world. It was like a spontaneous meme
which emerged at around the same time, as a
response to ideas like 'cyberpunk' which were
popular at the time. Since then the meme has spread
rapidly and is certainly an idea which has been
embraced by many women who are engaged with techno
theory and practice." Pierce notes that cyberfeminists
have never been anti-technology, rather they adore
machines and use them integrally in their political
action, art and writing.
In what produced a
temporary antagonism between the nettime feminists and their more
radical fringe, da Rimini (writing as Doll Yoko)
posted in June, 1997 to the nettime list that
"as
artists, [VNS Matrix] were serious bout usin
strategies like irony 'n inversion of cultural
stereotypes to raise some of the many issues around
women and technology .. access .. education .. jobs
.. portrayal of girls/chix/women in popular/games
culture etc etc." Da Rimini's sentiment is typical of
the VNS Matrix brand of cyberfeminism, a crude,
confrontational liberationist politics for women in
the digital matrix.
Throughout all of
cyberfeminist theory the theme of bodies and
identities dominates. As one critic notes,
"Bodies
generally are all the rage on the Net--whether they
are obsolete, cyborg, techno, porno, erotic,
morphed, recombined, phantom, or
viral."
Indeed, much of the focus on bodies steams from the
process of forgetting the body or trying to forget
about forgetting the body. As Stone and others have
written, the advent of cyberspace is the story of
bodies migrating and morphing into new contexts. In
fact, Lynn Hershman Leeson goes so far as to claim
that "new
[web] users are forming the largest immigration in
history"--a
powerful idea to keep in mind, that computer use
could possibility constitute a real immigration of
bodies from the offline to the online.
Another interest of
the cyberfeminists, the "posthuman" body is the
focus of TechnoMorphica, a recent book of art and
essays from the Dutch V2_Organisation. Unlike Donna
Haraway's
early work on bio/techno hybrids, TechnoMorphica benefits from contemporary
developments in areas such as augmented reality,
nanotechnology and prosthetics to arrive at a more
shockingly immediate description of the future of
art and the future of theory. If this intriguing
anthology must have a theme, it would be the "new
cyborg," the rearrangement of the organic world
around the model of the intelligent machine. The
well developed transformation of machines into
organisms and organisms into machines is the model
for the new cyborg. Amazingly, the book includes a
180 page, full color, frame-by-frame photo
documentation of Australian artist Stelarc's
"Stomach Sculpture," a swallowed video probe
exploration of the inside of the artist's digestive
track. Says Stelarc,
"the body has
been augmented, invaded and now becomes a host--not
only for technology, but also for remote
agents." He
elaborates on the "Stomach Sculpture" in a recent
CTHEORY interview: "with
the stomach sculpture, I position an artwork inside
the body. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a
self or a soul, but simply for a
sculpture."
Another piece that uses video footage of the inside
of the body is Mona Hatoum's "Corps Etranger."
Hatoum creates a haunting audio/visual space using
video footage from a micro-sized video camera
traveling down the esophagus and into the stomach.
The footage is then staged within a larger
immersive installation booth that includes a
soundtrack of the artist breathing. Hatoum's
interest in the immersive environment plays itself
twice over: the user is plunged into the viewing
booth, then plunged down into a sickening
biological space lit up only by the techo eye. The
body is at once reviled and revealed.
In the same way
cyberfeminism aims to exorcise the essentialized
female body through a complex process of
revalorization and rebuilding. The Cartesian
subject is irrelevant here, as Plant explains:
"Basically
the two positions that are established at the
minute are either that you talk about disembodiment
or you talk about embodiment. Either you're out of
the body in some stratospheric zone or you're in
the organism. I think that neither of those are
correct. When people talk about getting out of the
body they are still assuming that there is some
kind of great transcendent space like heaven for
the soul, or something non-material at any rate, to
occupy. And as far as I'm concerned that isn't
there. The universe isn't like that, it's a
material process not some sort of idealist
construction. So you can't get out of matter,
that's the crucial thing. But you can get out of
the confining organization of matter which is
shaped into things and of course, organisms. The
organism is literally organized around its organs,
the vocabulary says it all really."
Contemporary
cyberfeminist art, including VNS Matrix's
self-described "cunt art," follows Plant's
guideline to the letter. Like Fluxus artist Shigeko
Kubota's performance "Vagina Painting," VNS Matrix
focused on a raw, fleshy, expressive use of the
body. Other cyberfeminist, technology-based art
includes Eva Grubinger's "Netzbikini." The Netzbikini project
parodies the act of buying a bikini, by offering
bikini patterns that one can download from the
internet and sew together out of "sheer,
transparent net fabric." The project turns
interactive as users are invited to submit photos
of themselves in their new bikinis. The photos are
exhibited on the Netzbikini site. Nancy Paterson
goes in a different direction on the question of
the body. Her "Stock
Market Skirt" is composed of a blue taffeta and
black velvet party dress, a computer and a stock
market ticker. The dress is connected to the
computer, which with the help of a robotic device
is able to raise or lower the length of the skirt.
As the stock market rises and falls, the computer
reads the market prices and varies the length of
the skirt accordingly. These two pieces show the
various ways cyberfeminist art has considered the
body.
Following close
behind the question of the body is the question of
identity. The question of identity is always a
delicate balance between a desire to critique
essentialism and a desire to remain politically
committed. Although not connected to digital
studies, Elspeth Probyn, in her Outside
Belongings
is one person who has tried to define a theory of
identity after antihumanism. There is thus a
natural affinity with her work and the goals of
cyberfeminism. Probyn writes,
"I want to
figure the desire that individuals have to belong,
a tenacious and fragile desire that is, I think,
increasingly performed in the knowledge of the
impossibility of ever really and truly belonging,
along with the fear that the stability of belonging
and the sanctity of belongings are forever
past."
Probyn's longing, then, is to navigate a theory of
practices--a theory of living--having already
digested a steady diet of antihumanist rhetoric a
la psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. The word
"performed" reminds us of Butler whose original
Gender
Trouble was
itself a struggle with questions of identity.
Unfortunately Probyn's navigation of the unknown
space after humanism leaves much to be desired. The
exciting early convocations of Foucault, hints of a
radically singular psychogeography of the self, an
aspiration to perform a "sociology of the skin,"
the mention of Stuart Hall's concept of
articulation, Deleuze's rhizomatics--all these ill
prepare the reader for Probyn's lapse into analyses
of the "richness" of her childhood, her mother's
"passion for horses" and other autobiographical
absurdities. An informal style not dissimilar to
Stone, Probyn's first person narration would profit
from a higher level of objective-ness, more new
novel and less memoir. In the end, I say to
Probyn's "longing" what Foucault says to Deleuze's
"desire": "I
cannot stand the word desire; even if you use it
differently, I can't help myself thinking or living
desire = lack, or that desire says
repression." Can we use the master's
tools?
In the case of
Butler, feminism and the question of identity are
distinctly poststructuralist. Because of this she
participates in a critique of humanist theories of
subjectivity and social space more suited to the
cyberfeminist project. In Gender Trouble she has yet to consider the
"after" of humanism that is in Probyn, only a
critique of what she calls alternately
"ontological
constuctions of identity," "gender
ontologies"
and "metaphysics of
substance,"
in short, humanist metaphysics. And well done too.
Butler deftly navigates through the Scylla and
Charybdis of the theoretical left: avoid
essentialism, maintain the political agent. As
Butler queries,
"what sense can
we make of a construction that cannot assume a
human constructor prior to that
construction?" Butler, then, rooted in a deep
materialism, posits a human subject that is both
constituted by and constitutive of his/her social
environment. Butler's affection for Derrida shines
through clearly in this text as her marxist logics
take on a decidedly poststructuralist flair:
"Gender is a
complexity whose totality is permanently deferred,
never fully what it is at any given juncture in
time. An open coalition, then...will be an open
assemblage that permits of multiple convergences
and divergences without obedience to a normative
telos of definitional closure."
Like Probyn and
unlike Butler, the cyberfeminism of Plant, Stone
and VNS Matrix seems at times to be experimenting
with the post-gender, not merely a critique of
gender. The potentiality of the posthuman
(artificial life, prosthetics, viruses, cyborgs,
etc.), something only available with the advent of
technology, is instrumental here. Haraway's
prescient claim that
"the cyborg is
a creature in a post-gender world" might easily be turned
around to fit the needs of the cyberfeminists, that
the cyberfeminist is a post-gender creature in a
virtual world.
But is this
post-gender world possible? And do we really want
it? Catherine Richards highlights a curious
potential fate for cyberfeminism: will
cyberfeminism become nothing but ironic nostalgia
for past difference, that is, if we are ever truly
post-gender will we only be able to wax poetic on
the state of struggle in the gendered past? Asks
Richards, "if
something about contemporary virtual technology
erases gender as articulated, will radical
cyber-feminism be consigned to nostalgic content as
much as traditional lonely male
heroism?"
Plant, Stone and the VNS Matrix are our best allies
for navigating these difficult questions.
+ + +
Fragments of this
text first appeared in my review of Plant's
Zeros and
Ones,
published at the Thing
Reviews.
1 Sadie Plant,
"Feminisations: Reflections on Women and Virtual
Reality," in Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ed.
Clicking
In (Bay
Press, 1996), p. 37.
2 Sadie Plant, "The Future
Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics," in Lynn
Hershman Leeson, Ed. Clicking In (Bay Press, 1996), p. 132.
3 Ibid.
4 Allucquère Rosanne
Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" in
Michael Benedikt, Ed. Cyberspace. First
Steps (MIT
Press, 1992).
5 Stone, "Will the Real Body
Please Stand Up?" p. 102.
6 Ibid, p. 105.
7 Sherry Turkle,
"Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in
Virtual Reality," in Timothy Druckrey, Ed.
Electronic
Culture
(Aperture, 1996), pp. 354-365.
8 Allucquère Rosanne
Stone, The
War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Machine Age
(MIT Press, 1995). p. 89.
9 Ibid, p. 121.
10 Lynn Hershman Leeson,
"Romancing the Anti-Body: Lust and Longing in
(Cyber)space" in Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ed.
Clicking
In (Bay
Press, 1996), p. 328.
11 Joke Brouwer and Carla
Hoekendijk, Eds. TechnoMorphica (V2_Organisation, 1997), p.
15.
12 Elspeth Probyn,
Outside
Belongings
(Routledge, 1996), p. 8.
13 Cited in Probyn,
Outside
Belongings,
p. 47.
14 Judith Butler,
Gender
Trouble
(Routledge, 1990), pp. 5, 33, 25.
15 Butler, Gender
Trouble, p.
8.
16 Ibid, p. 16, emphasis
mine.
17 Donna Haraway,
Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women (Routledge, 1991), p. 150.
18 Catherine Richards, "Fungal
Intimacy: The Cyborg in Feminism and Media Art" in
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ed. Clicking In (Bay Press, 1996), p. 261.
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