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
Braidottis Cyberfeminism with a Difference

KEY WORDS:

Plant
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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 women

and machinery begins to evolve into a dangerous alliance. Silicon and womens
liberation track each others development. (503)

Cyberfeminism- is information technology as a fluid attack, an onslaught on human

agency and the solidity of identity. (503)

Its flows breach the boundaries between man and machine, introducing systems of
control 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 an
alien invasion, a program which is already running beyond the human.

The connection between women and technology has been sedimented in patriarchal
myth: 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 break
down. No matter how sophisticated, the machine is still nature, and therefore understood
to be lacking in all the attributes of the man: agency, autonomy, self-awareness, the
ability to make history and transform the world. Women, nature, and machines have
existed for the benefit of man, organisms and devices intended for the service of a history
to which they are merely a footnote. (503)

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

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

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

In spite of every attempt at domestication, the agents of history have now to contend
with runaway economies, overheating atmospheres, computers which can beat them at
chess, and gun-toting women like Thelma and Louise. These are occasions for regret to
those 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 it
is 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, the high-tide of his
speculation, 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 familiar with this trip. Imitation and
artifice, make-up and pretence: they have been role-playing for millennia always
exhorted 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 real
woman. To be truly human is to be a real man. Woman does not yet exist, except as she
appears on the set: wife and mother, sister and daughter: always performing duties,
keeping up appearances, the acting head of the household. (505-06)

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

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

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

Nature itself is a cybernetic organism, a self-regulating system of which man is merely a

function. (507)

Maybe we are not at all in control of our destinies as Plant suggests. If technology is like
nature 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 the
intentions 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 the

decline 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, the
technological factor must be seen as co-extensive with and intermingled with the
human. (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 to
the 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-real
gender identitiy is what it sells. (522)

The body in question here is far from a biological essence: it is a crossroads of

intensitive forces; it is a surface of inscriptions 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 does
not 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 and

also 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 disengage
our collecrove imagination from the phallus and its accessory values: money, exclusion
and 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, less
confinement of the body (527)

A little less abstraction would be welcome. In the case of women. We do not want
transcendence. (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. They
intermingle 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 feminine
technology is in control, Braidottis article feels as if men are still staving off their demise
and cyberfeminism has not won yet.

Discussion Questions:

1. The concept that the machine is still nature is a new concept that has been recently
opened up to most of us. When before we saw machine as other, now we see it and
ourselves as part of nature. In conjunction with the quote that It has nevertheless begun,
and manifests itself as an alien invasion, a program which is already running beyond the
human, what can we say about and do against the people who will try to use it as
another form of oppression? When men try to define and confine the machine what will
we be able to do as feminists to stop that and use it to our advantage? The world of
technology 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 to

women, what does that say about the fact that still the language of technology is mainly
written by men? Does this affect what we are able to say? If technology has always been
intended as toys for the boys which further means that it is developed without and
against women, and used only as an extension of masculine power how do we combat
that? (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 tactile
worlds of virtual reality is she talking about tactile in the sense of actual physical touch
or does she mean tactile in the sense that women can reach it and use it, whereas before
they were separated from a embodied form of communication now they have a new
mode?

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4. What is Braidotti talking about when she says that The security about the categorical
distinction between mind and body; the safe belief in the role and function of the nation
state; the family; masculine authority; the eternal feminine and compulsory
heterosexuality. These metaphysically founded certainties have foundered and made
room for something more complex, more playful and infinitely more disturbing. (523) If
she is talking about the rule of cyberfeminism why does she call it disturbing? As
feminist theorists this is what we want so Im not understanding why it would be
disturbing. Does it mean disturbing to others or is she talking about something else
entirely?
5. How do we combine the recognition of postmodernism embodiment with resistance to
relativism and a free fall into cynicism? (523)
6. How do we prevent the empowerment of alternative forms of female subjectivity from
not having the time to be brought to social fruition and what would be the factors that
would 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.