Haraway/Halberstam
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto one of her main points is that “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” According to Harraway, a cyborg is a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Halberstam goes deeply into this, directly citing Haraway’s essay. Halberstam refers to Haraway’s description of a cyborg as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation” and states that it is “particularly useful for feminists who seek to avoid the ideological dangers of recourse to an authentic female self.”
Basically, Haraway is discussing how humans are both natural and socially constructed. These social constructions are what can bring us down. Women specifically strive to achieve the ideal version of what they believe a woman is and should be. Both Haraway and Halberstam seem to describe the cyborg as good but also dangerous – according to Halberstam, the “female cyborg becomes a terrifying cultural icon because it hints at the radical potential of a fusion of femininity and intelligence.”
I found the Haraway reading to be very difficult, and the Halbrstam to be a bit better. While I agree with their point about the views on women and defining gender, it was hard to get through and I’m not entirely sold on the concept of a cyborg or what it means for feminism.
Feminism and Health in The Hunger Games
This post originally appeared on my blog Writing Not Raging about a year ago.
I was inspired to write this post by a chapter in Cyberfeminism 2.0 – “Beyond Democratization and Subversion: Rethinking Feminist Analytical Approaches to Girls’ Cultural Production on the Internet” by Rosalind Sibielski. Sibielski, talking specifically about the production of fan videos by girls recreating Twilight (if you haven’t heard of this series, time to break up that rock your living under), argues that such cultural production falls outside of normal feminist analysis. Because the girls are recreating content that is inherently not feminist, their cultural production online cannot said to be subversion – even though such production, in general, is often treated by feminist analysis as inherently subversive. (more…)
Video Dialogue Recording, Oct 1, 3:30-4:30
This comes by way of Anne Balsamo at the New School, one of the founders of the FemTechNet DOCC. I am planning to attend; I hope to see some of you there!
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Video Dialogue: Katherine Gibson & Lucy Suchman
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center (Room I202), Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street
Video Dialogue: Katherine Gibson & Lucy Suchman
A conversation between Katherine Gibson, Research Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, andLucy Suchman, professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, United Kingdom.
This event is part of the Video Dialogue Series produced by FemTechNet for the 2013 DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course): Dialogues in Feminism and Technology. The 2013 DOCC is an experiment in an alternative approach to organizing online learning based on feminist pedagogies. It runs from September to November 2013. More than 30 instructors from 14 institutions will participate in this collaborative learning experiment.
Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and Co-Director of Lancaster’s Centre for Science Studies. Before taking up her present position she spent twenty years as a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she was a founding member and Manager of the Work Practice and Technology area. Her research included ethnographic studies of everyday practices of technology design and use, as well as interdisciplinary and participatory interventions in new technology design. Her recent book, Human-Machine Reconfigurations (Cambridge University Press 2007) investigates the dynamics of human-machine communication.
J.K Gibson-Graham is the pen-name of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham, feminist political economists and economic geographers based at the University of Western Sydney, Australia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their first book, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy(1996) investigates alternative communities economies.
Haraway and Halberstam
Both of the readings for this week are available online. You can find Haraway here and Halberstam here on JSTOR. You have access to JSTOR articles through your home campus library holdings. If for some reason you have trouble with that, you should also be able to access if through a free account that will let you read three articles. Leave a comment if you have any trouble.
Introduction
Hi all! My name is Adrienne, and I’m a student at Brooklyn College who is currently double majoring in Health and Nutrition Science and Sociology. I’m also technologically challenged and just recently learned how to access all of the content on this site— women and technology at it’s finest.
A few days ago, I bought frozen yogurt from a Yogo truck parked in SoHo. Had to try to buy. The owner of the truck gave my me and my friend our complicated yogurt order and refused to accept my money. He took out a dollar, told me to write my number on it and put it in the tip jar, and handed me back the rest of what I had paid. I refused to accept the money I owed him because it wouldn’t have been fair to take the yogurt without paying, but what made him think that he could get someone’s number because he offered free frozen yogurt (which was mediocre and nothing compared to Red Mango’s froyo)? What made him think my half-vanilla, half-tart yogurt topped with strawberries, blueberries, granola, and cookie crumbs and maybe some bananas and mochi was worth my number or my dignity?
I’ve always been interested in gender roles and stereotypes and expectations that frustrate me, but incidents like the one described above make me more eager to learn about the social rules and norms that deem that sort of behavior socially acceptable.
And feminism’s intersection with technology, which could either be egalitarian or patronizing to women, is also fascinating.
Reading Response
When I first began reading this article I was really interested to see how Somerville would be able to tie race with homosexuality. To me, the only gaping connection I could make is the discrimination that’s generally associated with the two. Somerville starts out by saying that sex is the problem. Crazy, right? But, not sex exactly but the racial questions that revolve around sex. Reading on I still couldn’t make the connection a to where race played a role, except for the fact that the question of homosexuality was arising around the same time as racial segregation. What I found extremely interesting though, and what kind of helped put the pieces together, was the fact that a medical opinion was valued over religion, etc. Which was really surprising, since the church has always been a thriving force in social issues. But, since a medical opinion was valued so much, and physicians tended to be white, upper class etc. the physicians themselves developed this sense of ethnocentrism, where they began using anatomy as a means of associating gender with the “invert” or homosexual anatomy. The physicians used their own keys and legends to define what was considered normal, and then dubbed the homosexuals as abnormal, and linking their qualities to specific races.
It’s so crazy to see how easily we can define what is “correct” and what’s not. How any person with the slightest bit of credibility or reputation can just overturn a status quo. Recently, I was having this discussion with a friend of mine, where today people who do “homosexual” things are only considered that way, because as a society we decided that it’s “feminine” for males to dance, and get manicures, and wear flamboyant clothing… Again, we as a society have also decided that those are traits that are generally “feminine,” and that any girl who acts otherwise, is considered homsexual. It’s incredible to see how much power society holds, and how any single class, race, etc. with a little bit of importance can define an entire structure.
Comparing this to Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” I see the same theme. Society has very high expectations that they associate with labels. Whether you’re straight, a feminist, or a lesbian there are always words, images characters that automatically pop into your head when you hear those terms. These words are representations of what we have been conditioned to believe and to expect of the people rocking these labels. In reference to a speech Butler was going to give at a conference in Yale, Butler says she’s going to Yale “to be” a lesbian now. Which is completely true. She was going to Yale to present her experiences, the lesbian experiences that everyone expected from her. Butler talks about how “coming out” is supposed to be liberating, it’s supposed to equate to being yourself, not hiding who you are in fear of rejection, but coming out comes with its own “closet.” Once you are “out” you have been cast for a different role, you have to fit the character that comes with being a homosexual and if you don’t, well… you’re essentially back where you started. So since our measurement, the bar each one of us is striving to reach is the bar that society has made for us. Well, where does society get these ideas? Who decides what is acceptable and what is not? Where is the clean slate that’s completely clear of society’s footprints–Clear of any standards or expectations?
Technology Diary 2: Big Machinery
As I sat down to write this blog post, I realized that my blog posts in the technology diary are probably very different than those of my other classmates. Being the only man in the class, I find myself comparing the usage of technology from a man’s perspective to that of a woman’s, rather than just discussing the relationship between feminism and technology.
Regardless, this week I want to talk about something that is very stereotypically male, an obsession with big machinery. This is probably one of the biggest male gender roles out there, but I often find it to be true. I even find myself (even from a young age) having a strange attraction to cars, construction equipment, and other large machinery. I think some of this can be contributed to what Rosser said when discussing the different theories of feminism; men’s usage of technology is representative of their outlook of the world, to conquer and shape aggressively, and thus machinery that does that is appealing. But this is not he sole reason, part of it, I think, can also be attributed to men historically being the designers and operators of these types of technology and it thus becomes so closely weaved into our gender roles that it lacks a real explanation.
But then there are outliers. There are men who are completely disinterested by these types of technology, and women who are completely fascinated by it. It could be a social anomaly lacking a single explanation, or it could be the antithesis of the stereotypical male obsession with big machinery. Regardless I’d like to open up the discussion to the community.
Bring a Device on Sept 26
If you are able to, please bring your device of choice (that allows you to use this site) to class with you today. Thanks.
Technology Diary: Books
The piece of technology I chose to discuss today is one that people probably do not associate as “technology” anymore, but I believe that books were one of the first forms of technology as they helped to spread new ideas. The two readings assigned specifically focused on the categories assigned to people based on sexual orientation and race. As referred to in the Somerville reading, scientists wished to categorize people, especially women, by their sexualities and races, and connected these two concepts to the appearance of their genitalia. Books have always been considered extremely good for a society, and higher literacy rates usually mean a wealthier and more successful society. However, these research “experiments” are perfect examples of how books and scientific journals and other outlets of “higher learning” can harm rather than help. People were so desperate to learn in the name of “science” that they ended up exploiting those who they were studying (like Sarah Baartman). All of this was done in the name of education, and the findings, however skewed they were, were used to “educate” the masses in the literate Western world.
I love books and education – especially education about people. I have always found myself fascinated by scientific studies in the field of anthropology and psychology, and it’s clear that in the past few hundred years, others shared my interest. However, sometimes what scientists believe to be true, what they have “discovered” in their “research” may not be true at all, which is why it is important to look at everything we read with an open and questioning mind. During the time of these studies discussed in the Somerville reading, these studies supported what is referred to as “scientific racism.” Books involving scientific research were a very gendered form of technology, as they were mostly aimed towards (white) men, while “novels” and “romances” were aimed towards (white) women. So many people were learning extremely racist concepts and ideas, backed up by “science.” It definitely makes me think of books in a different way, because what could I be learning now that is only a result of pseudoscience and preconceived notions? On the bright side, people are learning new things every day because of books, new things that leave us with more open minds instead of closed ones. Overall, I think that books are a great form of technology, but it is very interesting to think about how they can also lead to something bad.
Reading Response 9/26
This week’s (and last week’s) readings enhanced my understanding of Michel Foucault’s theories, especially his work in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. The first chapter of Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture utilized the framework Foucault set up in The History of Sexuality. Somerville focuses on the emerging scientia sexualis discourses in the 19th century. Like Foucault, Somerville framed her analysis on the shift from crime/ prohibition to perversion/ abnormality. Unlike Foucault, Somerville fills in more historic details with the introduction of discourses about race and to some extent about gender to the discourse of sexuality. However, Foucault’s “domains” of the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” and the “hysterization of women’s bodies” is still relevant and present in Somerville’s analysis (Foucault, 1978, p. 104-105). Somerville points out similarities and the somewhat tautological relationship between medical discourses involving race and (homo)sexuality, which was her argument for the chapter (and presumably the book). Following Foucault’s framework, Somerville also provided some examples of the reverse discourses by critics of the hegemonic discourse about homosexuality and sexual inversion such as writers like Edward Carpenter and Edward Stevenson/ Xavier Mayne drawing from their contemporaries’ discourses of race and evolution to advocate for homosexual rights (Somerville, 2000, p. 20, 32).
Somerville also seems to hint on a racialized domain of the hysterization of women’s bodies in this chapter with the samples of detailed comparative anatomy accounts of the sexual anatomy of women as well as the numerous amount of medical scrutiny the sexual anatomy of African women received at that time. It is implied that this amount of quantification of women’s bodies is a form of control in both Somerville’s and Foucault’s analysis, but I wish this concept was elaborated. Like how these historic discourses about homosexuality continued to influence present day discourses (it was only until 1973/ 1974 that homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), these discourses about the sexuality of women of color echo in many contemporary controlling images of the sexualities of women of color. Perhaps, further along this course, we will discuss/ read about this in detail. This critique or want for more discussion brings up de Lauretis’ critique of Foucault and the distinction between Foucault’s “technology of sex” and de Lauretis’ “technology of gender.” De Lauretis points out that Foucault fails to take in account of gendered “form[s]” of sexualities (1987, p. 14). Combined with Somerville’s discussion, racialized forms are missing as well (though, I would argue that Foucault does address class). However in the larger scope of Foucault’s framework of normalizing power as opposed to prohibiting power, the unspoken norm is white, middle-class/ bourgeois, and male.
This leads to Butler’s discussion on the limitations of discourses such as how “coming out” discourses and labeling leaves much to be desired (pun not intended) in discussing sexuality and identity. Butler also brings up an interesting distinction that seems to fall out the cracks of Foucault’s framework. Butler distinguishes two types of oppression: “overt prohibition” and covert “unviable (un)subjects…who are neither named nor prohibited” (Butler, 1991, p. 20). “Overt prohibition” fits in the Foucauldian framework as it allows for reverse discourse as a point of resistance, but the “abjects” that are simply not present at all do not have this strategy. In short, the readings bring up the frustrations of the absence of varieties of genders, races/ ethnicities, sexualities, and bodies in everyday discourses.
