Processed Lives

Gender and Technology in Everyday Life

Melodie Calvert, Jennifer Terry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134824427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Considers how the terms of gender are embodied in technologies, and conversely, how technologies shape our notions of gender. The contributors explore the complex territory between the lust for, and the fear of, technology, commenting on the ambivalence women experience in relation to machines. Discussing topics such as embryonic fertilization, the virtual female, networking women, the sexuality of computers, surveillance systems, UFOs, and the emancipation of Barbie,
rocessed Lives offers a provocative, visually rich critical approach to th multifaceted relationships between masculinity, femininity and machines. Contributors: Barbie Liberation Organization, Ericka Beckman, Lisa Cartwright, Gregg Bordowitz, Sara Diamond, Judith Halberstam, Evelynn Hammonds, Kathy High, David Horn, Ira Livingston, Bonita Makuch, Margaret Morse, Soheir Morsy, Liss Platt, B Ruby Rich, Connie Samaras, Joya Saunders, Julia Scher, Andrea Slane, Mary Ellen Strom, Christime Tamblyn, Nina Wakeford.

part one

Digital worlds

1
Virtually Female: body and code

Margaret Morse

INTRODUCTION: NEW WORLDS AND TIRED OLD CODES

Gender in, gender into, the gender of cyberspace—these are areas of some anxiety for women, considering the period in which we live. A major technologically driven, global reorganization of work and of the infrastructure is underway. What was once and largely still is a male-oriented domain of technology and the computer has generated a virtual realm, aka cyberspace, in which socio-economic activity and communications increasingly take place. Considering the actual distribution of practical and theoretical knowledge about science and technology by gender, it is no wonder that androcentric values dominate electronic culture. What will become of us as women and our limited successes in real space once the domains in which we have made our mark are dematerialized and put on the Net or in the Web? Is cyberspace genderless? When females are virtual, is feminism moot?

Information is the naked instrumentality of cyberspace, a commodity language stripped of its relation to a social and historical context and to the subjects who enunciate it One might imagine a blank slate, unmarked and unconstrained by appearances on which to inscribe fresh aspirations. However, cyberspace is more like Freud's metaphor of the mystic writing pad: lift the sticky plastic page off the surface and all the delicate over-writing of the last quarter-century is whisked away. On the other hand, put the page back down on the sticky matrix and the lines of the “frontier” and “colonization” engraved deeply long ago map themselves unapologetically onto new cyberskin.¹ In a vacuum freed of mediating traditions and the ameliorating accretions of culture, old myths about technology and gender prevail: technology is posed against “the human body—comparatively unadaptable, vulnerable, mortal—that is felt to be the ultimate obstacle to the perfection of the machine environment.”² Cynthia Cockburn notes in “The Circuit of Technology: Gender, Identity and Power,” that the masculine identification of and with technology has survived the muscular period of the “heroic age of mechanization,” and appropriated information technology, and one might add, fine motor movements for itself. Western femininity and its “constitution of identities organized around technological incompetence” have apparently survived fairly intact into the present as well.³

In contrast, in “Mysteries of the Bioapparatus,” Nell Tenhaaf offers the provocative notion that cyberspace represents the femininization of the symbolic system.⁴ If this is an invitation to join in a discursive struggle to define cyberspace, I gladly accept. My recent writing, “What Do Cyborgs Eat?” sought to debunk these disempowering assumptions, proposing the vision of a technology that is abject and mortal.⁵ However, define cyberspace as I will, fashioning an inclusive and compassionate electronic culture out of the raw stuff of bits and bytes demands more than critique or what amounts to symbolically turning the table on masculine prerogatives. Even though we may have difficulty in setting the clock on our VCRs, the times demand that we re-engage information with our own values, in a practice that challenges emerging rules of ownership and exchange that exclude so many of us. However, when it comes to “hands-on” technology, why is volitional action or what amounts to willing myself into technological competence so much easier said than done?

WILLING AND UNWILLING BODIES

The first challenge to shaping and taming this emerging world is the will itself and the human problem of unwill, especially in relation to femininity. I want to first discuss the somewhat embarrassing problem of technological ineptitude (not to be confused with technophobia) as it afflicts me and perhaps other klutzy women deeply involved in a critique of technological discourse to be accomplished by means of and even in the very medium we critique (yes, a double-bind).

Consider that my imperfect feminine identity, a construction of codes by trial and error, has been more virtual than unconscious or biologically determined all along. Beauty culture—the femininity you can buy— never provided enough coverage: I never felt feminine enough. Furthermore, since I've never been sure what it means to be a woman, I've had to rely on other people to tell me, “you can't do that.” For example, after reading the literature distributed at a junior high career day in 1957, I decided to become a dentist. The reaction I received led me to the conclusion that femininity didn't include dentistry. The larger problem was that, in essence, none of the literature there was actually addressed to me.

At about that age, math phobia and technical ineptitude are culturally implanted in numerous American female adolescents. I think of the implant as a painful internal prosthesis, a glass ceiling within that subconsciously restricts the body from entering paths of desire that are tacitly forbidden. Of course, there are exceptions, women who are mechanics, experts in high mathematics and artists quite at home with machines of all kinds. Further, the “femininity” in question is culturally circumscribed: it is Western and probably heterosexual, as well as racially inflected with “whiteness” and by ethnic assumptions about whose job it is to mediate between the family and the world. My travels in Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War revealed women as crane operators, mathematicians and engineers untransformed by beauty culture: these women questioned a lot of things, but never their femininity. In spite of recognizing and experiencing all this relativity, and try as I will, I remain divided, will against unwill, in awkward attempts toward technological competence in spite of something foreign in myself (that is, my specific kind of femininity implant) that deflects me from my resolute path.

Michel Foucault viewed power as the “infinitesimal mechanisms” that operate on the body of the individual, deploying subjectivity in this way and not that.⁶ Then, will and unwill might be thought of as the internalized experiences of the minute and trivial that produce or don't produce homo faber. When it comes to my body in technological performances, unwill enters the page from the matrix below, like faulty instructions or an old program that has never been erased, causing slip-ups and occasional crashes. Unwill or the part of us that slips or forgets is also the part of us that is slothful, that loses motivation or a sense of purpose, in nuce, that resistance of the flesh to being harnessed or programmed by this or that ideology. Unwill is thus a hazy mixture of vegetative corporeality and an ineptitude that amounts to culturally inscribed hysteria. As a woman in a male-oriented technological world that devalues the flesh, my struggle is thus against myself embodied as a woman—albeit a culturally constructed one. My unwill is then to some extent or other my femininity and my female flesh itself. Such unwill is not amenable to talking cures; even once instructions are recognized and lifted off the page, deep gouges in the matrix remain. How then do I get my disciplined and punished body to co-operate with my feminist (as opposed to feminine) ideals?

Recently I braved the throngs of screaming kids at the San Francisco Exploratorium to try out an intermix of Web sites and installations. At a computer terminal linked to a virtual city, I got caught in an endless loop. Suddenly I noticed a little hand under mine, clicking the mouse. Someone was tucked onto my seat and giving me little pushes. Luckily for my self-esteem, the program wasn't working and the little guy now in charge of the computer was caught in a loop too. Yet, it was clear that something about our culture says to him, this is your place: claim it.

There have been few moments when I have felt this invitation to be addressed to me. One such epiphany, as ridiculous as it might seem, was viewing the opening screen of Christine Tamblyn's CD-ROM, Mistaken Identities (1995), namely, an image digitized from a woman's night-gown. The pink screen with tiny rosebuds on the monitor transformed the slick beige machine into something excessively feminine. I was surprised at my own reaction; I let out a deep breath and felt released and at ease.⁷

GENDER IN CYBERSPACE

What is cyberspace? My operating premise is that virtual communities and/or environments such as may be found on the Internet or in particular computer-supported worlds allow us to enter and move around inside in what amounts to our own symbolic system. In a three-dimensional pictorial and/or aural virtual world one is literally, albeit virtually, inside the visualization of a symbolic field; in language-generated worlds, this “insidedness” must be understood more figuratively. In either case, the point of view from inside can be revelatory.

Take, for instance, gender identity in a text-based virtual realm online such as an MUD or multi-user dungeon. Unlike situations determined by one's biological gender assignment and physical appearance, it is possible to become a member of any sex or species and to change oneself at will, creating personas and “rooms” which can express themselves to others. Such mutability would tend to underline the arbitrariness of gender and reveal its symbolic as opposed to its biological function. Oddly enough, however, judging from the experiences of my students in surfing the Net, virtual worlds do not necessarily or even commonly reveal interactions that transcend gender or cross culture. “Virtual females” told me how often they were hit upon (confronted in a sexually charged manner with demands or expectations to put out or perform sexually, albeit virtually). Why? Because the values encoded in the symbolic system prevail in the minds of the users. In physical reality, it's not so easy to become He-Man or Barbie, character dolls that are the crystallization of notions of masculinity and femininity; however, in a virtual world, stereotypical ideas about gender and sexuality can be simply brought to bear without the inevitable contingencies and imperfections that plague the act of physically embodying a gender identity. (Here the role of the body in moderating or impeding technology can be seen in a more positive light.) Even when male users are capable of successfully posing as women in virtual communities, a kind of gender polarization rather than a transcendence of gender takes place. Such interactions are caught with a vengeance in the very same dualisms that structure our language and relations to material reality, wasting the potential for insight that virtual play with symbolic forms could give us as a culture.

THE GENDER OF CYBERSPACE

Some speculate that, like technology, cyberspace itself—what I think of as an externalization of symbolic code—is masculine.⁸ Such a perspective seems to be from outside and to emphasize control of the virtual environment. Others, including cultural theorists who share a Kleinian psychoanalytic framework, think of it as feminine (especially, when considering the inside, an area enveloped like a fetus in a woman's body).Then, perhaps cyberspace is hermaphroditic, divided by gender inside and outside. The interiority of cyberspace, like the interior of a cave, is like being enclosed inside the womb. Furthermore, the interfaces of cybernetic space have been imagined as a seductive and dangerous garment The fantasy of putting on such a second, virtual skin is said to express a longing “to become woman.”⁹ Perhaps this desire to put on the other (from a male point of view) explains the commonplace of men's fiction as female personas on the Net. Furthermore, its gender might depend on what it means to put on the other. My own experience of putting on the interface of virtual reality—the gloves and the head-mounted display—was like putting on a technological empowerment which, like the freedom of flight, allowed me to enter a masculine world otherwise foreclosed to me, even in my dreams. I was both psychically outside and in contro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the wexner centerc
• Introduction Machines/Lives
• part one Digital worlds
• 1 Virtually Female: body and code
• 2 Girl TV
• 3 Remote Control: the electronic transference
• 4 She Loves It, She Loves It Not: women and technology
• 5 Networking Women and Grrrls with Information/ Communication Technology: surfing tales of the world wide web
• 6 Hiatus
• 7 Romancing the System: women, narrative film, and the sexuality of computers
• 8 Taylor's Way: women, cultures and technology
• part two Bodies
• 9 Indiscretions: of body, gender, technology
• 10 Present Tense
• 11 New Technologies of Race
• 12 The Visible Man: the male criminal subject as biomedical norm
• 13 Inseminations
• 14 Unnatural acts: procreation and the genealogy of artifice
• 15 23 questions
• 16 Biotechnology and the taming of women's bodies
• 17 Brains on toast: the inexact science of gender
• part three Home
• 18 Techno-homo: on bathrooms, butches, and sex with furniture
• 19 Home surgery instructions
• 20 Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?
• 21 Vulnerabilities
• 22 The party line: gender and technology in the home
• 23 Information America
• Contributors
• Index