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Cassandra Barboza Barboza 1

Dr. Logan

LIT 4554

11-10-11

Discussion Leading: Technologies

Sadie Plants Beyond the Screen: Film, Cyberpunk, and Cyberfeminism and Rosi

Braidott is Cyberfeminism with a Difference

KEY WORDS:

Plant

- Machine- Cyberfeminism- Hypertext- Nostalgia- Virtual reality

Braidotti

- Postmodernity- Parody or parodic repetition- Embodiment- Phallogocentrism

KEY POINTS:

Beyond the Screen: Film, Cyberpunk, and Cyberfeminism by Sadie Plant

- Machines and women have at least one thing in common: they are not men. (503)

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- With recent developments in information technology, the relationship between womenand machinery begins to evolve into a dangerous alliance . Silicon and womensliberation track each others development. (503)

- Cyberfeminism - is information technology as a fluid attack, an onslaught on humanagency and the solidity of identity. (503 )

- Its flows breach the boundaries between man and machine, introducing systems ofcontrol whose complexity overwhelms the human masters of history Secreted in culture,its future begins to come up on the screen, downloaded virally into a present still striving,with increasing desperation, to live in the past. (503)

- Cyberfeminism is simply the acknowledgement that patriarchy is doomed.( 503)

- No one is making it happen: it is not a political project, and has neither theory nor practice, no goals and no principles. It has nevertheless begun, and manifests itself as analien invasion, a program which is already running beyond the human.

- The connection between women and technology has been sedimented in patriarchalmyth: machines were female because they were mere things on which men worked:

because they always had an element of unpredictability and tended to go wrong, to breakdown. No matter how sophisticated, the machine is still nature, and therefore understoodto be lacking in all the attributes of the man: agency, autonomy, self-awareness, theability to make history and transform the world. Women, nature, and machines haveexisted for the benefit of man, organisms and devices intended for the service of a historyto which they are merely a footnote. (503)

- There is only one human species, and it is male homo sapiens. There are no othersa piens. Women is a virtual reality. (504)

- Now these lines of communication between women, long repressed, are returning in atechnological form. (504)

- The weaving metaphors are especially lovely in their connection to a virtual word and ahistory of women. Technology is now our system of weaving. (504)

- In spite of every attempt at domestication, the agents of history have now to contendwith runaway economies, overheating atmospheres, computers which can beat them atchess, and gun-toting women like Thelma and Louise. These are occasions for regret tothose nostalgic for the days when planning and mastery seemed unproblematic. (504-05)

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- Technology has always been intended as toys for the boys which further means that itis developed without and against women, and used only as an extension of masculine

power. (505)

- Yet it is these technologies, the pinnacles of mans supremacy, t he high-tide of hisspeculation, that leave his world vulnerable to cyberfeminist infection .

- Virtual reality - the simulation of space, the pixelled manifestation of another zone.

- Women, who know all about disguise, are already fami liar with this trip. Imitation andartifice, make-up and pretence: they have been role- playing for millennia alwaysexhorted to act like a woman, to be ladylike: always to be like something, but never to

be anything in particular, least of all herself. There is as yet no such thing as being a realwoman. To be truly human is to be a real man. Woman does not yet exist, except as sheappears on the set: wife and mother, sister and daughter: always performing duties,keeping up appearances, the acting h ead of the household. (505 -06)

- Women have always been in a struggle to search for the missing ingredient butCyberfemininity is something quite different. It is not a subject lacking an identity, but avirtual reality, whose identity is a mere tactic of infiltration. (506)

- The Cyborg is the representation of a feminist invasion into the most sacrosanct oforganisms: the human. (506)

- To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like agarment, is to put on the female. If the male human is only human, the female cyborg isthe only cyborg. (506)

- Nature itself is a cybernetic organism, a self -regulating system of which man is merely afunction. (507)

- Maybe we are not at all in control of our destinies as Plant suggests. If technology is likenature we never truly held the reins, but were only pretending to do so.

- The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an illusion. (507)

- In Plants almost apocalyptic view, we are heading for a post -human world, in which theintentions of the human species are no longer the guiding force of global development.(507)

- Man has finally made nature work, but now it no longer works for him. (508)

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- It is as though humanity was simply the means by which the global system, the matrix, built itself; as if history was merely the prehistory of cyberfeminism.

Cyberfeminism with a Difference by Rosi Braidotti

- Postmodernity- the specific historical situation of post-industrial societies after thedecline of modernist hopes and tropes.

- A symptom of this urban space, especially in the inner city is cleaned up. it is only a veneer. It marks

the death of the modernist dream of urban civil society. (520)

- Far from appearing antithetical to the human organism and set of values, thetechnological factor must be seen as co-extensive with and intermingled with thehuman. (521)

If in a conventional humanistic framework the two may appear as opposites, in postmodernity, they are much more inter-connected.

- The nostalgic longing for an allegedly better past is a hasty and unintelligent response tothe challenges of our age. (521)

- Death of Man (522) and ontological insecurity.

- Interactivity is another name for shopping, as Christine Tamblyn put it, and hyper -realgender identitiy is what it sells. (522)

- The body in question here is far from a biological essence: it is a crossroads ofintensitive forces; it is a surface of inscriptio ns of social codes. (522 -23)

- Embodiment - means that we are situated objects, capable of performing sets of(inter)actions which are discontinuous in space and time. (523)

- Hyper- reality pushes us toward a radical redefinition of political action. (523)

- Hyper -reality does not wipe out class relations: it intensifies them. (524)

- Hearing and audio material as a way out of the tyranny of the gaze. (524). Visual doesnot mean superior.

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- Art is always the first medium to reach a discourse. (525)

- The practice of parody = the philosophy as if

needs to become dynamic or nomadic and not just based on personal experience andalso allow for shifts of location and multiplicity. (526)

not a disavowal, just capable of ethic and moral agency. (526)

politically empowering = subversion of dominant codes. (526)

- Virtual reality forgets class and race relations. (526)

- The most effective strategy remains for women to use technology in order to disengageour collecrove imagination from the phallus and its accessory values: money, exclusionand domination, nationalism, ironic femininity and systematic violence. (527)

- The prices we pay and how to fix it

Men = disembodiment, repossess the body women = loss of subjectivity, lessconfinement of the body (527)

- A little less abstraction would be welcome. In the case of women. We do not wanttranscendence. (528)

- Femininity is an option and not a compulsory action. (528)

- Through laughter our anger becomes a tool of liberation. (529)

Overlap:

- Men are intent on domination

- Both articles seem to view the machine as a part of humanity and nature. Theyintermingle and are part of each other. It is impossible to separate these entities.

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- Both see nostalgia as a bad thing. I viewed the word nostalgia as related to traditional and thus a word that keeps us from being curious feminists if we are not careful and

vigilant to notice that it is a sentiment meant to prevent change.

- Whereas Plants article suggests we are already living in a world where femininetechnology is in cont rol, Braidottis article feels as if men are still staving off their demiseand cyberfeminism has not won yet.

Discussion Questions:

1. The concept that the machine is still nature is a new concept that has been recentlyopened up to most of us. When before we saw machine as other, now we see it andourselves as part of nature. In conjunction with the quote that It has nevertheless begu n,and manifests itself as an alien invasion, a program which is already running beyond thehuman, what can we say about and do against the people who will try to use it asanother form of oppression? When men try to define and confine the machine what willwe be able to do as feminists to stop that and use it to our advantage? The world oftechnology has been created to help us in words and understanding, but how do we use it

in life, what do we do with this advantage?

2. In understanding that with technology communication has again been opened up towomen, what does that say about the fact that still the language of technology is mainlywritten by men? Does this affect what we are able to say? If technology has always beenintended as toys for the boys which further means that it is developed without andagainst women, and used only as an extension of masculine power how do we combatthat? (505)

3. What does Plant mean when she says The screens of cinematic and televisual experience become touch sensitive, transforming the gaze and collapsing its vision into then tactileworlds of virtual reality is she talking about tactile in the sense of actual physical touchor does she mean tactile in the sense that women can reach it and use it, whereas beforethey were separated from a embodied form of communication now they have a newmode?

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4. What is Braidotti talking about when she says that The security about the categoricaldistinction between mind and body; the safe belief in the role and function of the nationstate; the family; masculine authority; the eternal feminine and compulsoryheterosexuality. These metaphysically founded certainties have foundered and maderoom for something more complex, more playful and infinitely more disturbing. (523) Ifshe is talking about the rule of cyberfeminism why does she call it disturbing? Asfeminist theorists this is what we want so Im not understanding why it would bedisturbing. Does it mean disturbing to others or is she talking about something elseentirely?

5. How do we combine the recognition of postmodernism embodiment with resistance torelativism and a fre e fall into cynicism? (523)

6. How do we prevent the empowerment of alternative forms of female subjectivity fromnot having the time to be brought to social fruition and what would be the factors thatwould prevent it from happening? (529)

Works Cited

Plant, Sadie. Beyond the Screens. Feminisms . Ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997. 503-08. Print.

Braidotti, Rosi. Cyberfeminism with a Difference. Feminisms . Ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith

Squires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 520-29. Print.