CYBORG PERSPECTIVES: women and technology today

MENU :: OVERVIEW :: RESOURCES :: DISCUSSION :: TIMETABLE :: MANIFESTO :: MENU

WEEK :: TWO :: THREE :: FOUR :: FIVE :: SIX :: SEVEN :: EIGHT :: NINE :: TEN :: WEEK

taught by Ann Kaloski and Julie Palmer, Centre for Women's Studies, autumn term 2005.

WEEKS SEVEN, EIGHT and NINE
STUDENT DIRECTED SESSIONS

IMPORTANT: Please read these guidelines carefully, and follow them!

The student-directed sessions offer everyone the opportunity to devise a workshop, presentation of other class activity which will focus on a specific theme, argument, image or quotation from the 'manifesto'.

The aims of these sessions are:
a) to provide space in the module for everyone to follow their own interests
b) to enable everyone to develop skills in facilitating a session
c) to offer everyone the chance to widen their understanding of the 'manifesto' by participating in each others sessions.
d) to allow those whose course profile requires an assignment to explore provisional ideas for this with the whole class.

All student-directed sessions should be designed to stimulate debate. Once you have identified your particular topic, spend some time thinking about what you know, what you need to find out, what the important questions are, how much you can offer the class and what you would like them to explore with you.

You may present your work in any suitable way, for instance - as a short paper as a series of workshop exercises, as a debate between two people. You may work by yourself, or with someone else. Each person will have 50-55 minutes for their session.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE YOUR SESSION
Arrange a short turorial with Julie or Ann to discuss your topic.

ONE WEEK BEFORE YOUR SESSION
Offer your classmates a short worksheet outlining:
a) your provisional topic
b) how this relates to the concerns of the manifesto (you may, for instance, offer a quotation or two, or perhaps a paragraph of explanation
c) one or two key texts to read
d) your main question(s), if you have come up with any at this stage.
If you send this worksheet to Ann electronically, she will add it to this web site.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDENT-DIRECTED SESSIONS

What follows are some sample ideas to set you thinking. You may use or amend these, or come up with your own. Don't forget to follow the guidelines above, and to arrange a for a tutorial with Ann or Julie beforehand.

QUOTE:
'This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification.' p149.

QUESTION:
What kinds of new myths might be developed in the twenty-first century? Could you develop your own mythical / poltical/ ironical essay, both 'faithful' and 'blasphemous'?

QUOTE:
'Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore.' p153

QUESTION:
In what ways is 'miniaturization [. . . ] about power'? Whose power? What are the ambivalences in the power relationships when thinking about, for instance, cell phone cameras and CCTV surveillance?

QUOTE:
'Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.'p154

QUESTION:
Haraway's use of 'Third World Women' has been much criticised, although critics such as Chela Sandoval have found her inspiring. What do you see as the value and limitations of the Haraway's strategy of networking in 'Third World' women workers? You might wish to approach this using an example you are familiar with.

QUOTE:
' . . . a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.'p154

QUESTION:
Explore this notion, using a concrete example to test the valiency of Haraway's argument

QUOTE:
'It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective -- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other. For me - and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies - the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition - affinity, not identity.'p155

QUESTIONS:
There is a great deal here that you may wish to explore:
1. What is the usefulness or otherwise of a cyborg identity for feminist purposes? What are Haraway's arguments; how much do you agree with them, and what counter-arguments might you make?
2. How might 'affinity' work as a political strategy? How is it cyborgian?
3. How do Haraway's arguments work, or not, for those not directly included in her deliniation of 'us'?

QUOTE:
'Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's experience'.p156

QUESTION:
How might cyborgian epistemology challenge this?

QUOTE:
'Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? 'p178

QUESTION:
Consider the ways this idea is developed in real time in online virtual cities such as LambdaMOO, where computer users write their own body, homes, genders (there is a choice of 10) in text. Go to < telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888 > and type in "connect guest".

QUOTE:
'One is too few, and two is only one possibility'.p180

QUESTION:
How does Harway's idea of the cyborgs challenge dualistic thought? Offer a close textual reading of the 'manifesto'.

QUOTE:
'The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on idendfication.' p178

QUESTIONS:
1. Taking a science fiction text of your choice, offer a close textual reading of what such works have to offer cyborg theory.
2. You may, if you wish, like to explore what kinds of pleasure such readings afford, bearing in mind Katie King's comment.
3. How do Haraway's arguments work when applied to digital fiction, a genre she could hardly imagine in the 1980s.

QUOTE:
'The poetry and stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this dme that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. p175

QUESTION:
How do women in different cultures use writing and story-telling as a tool of power? Focussing on one or two specific examples, discuss Haraway's argument that such writing 'must not be about the Fall [. . . but about ] 'seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other'.

Any problems? Contact Ann Kaloski or Julie Palmer