Cyberfeminism

Cyberfeminism is based on the idea that, in conjunction with technology it's possible to construct your identity, your sexuality, even your gender, just as you please.  "Cyberfeminism," says Sadie Plant, director of the Center for Research into Cybernetic Culture at Warwick University in England, is "an alliance between women, machinery, and new technology.  There's a longstanding relationship between information technology and women's liberation.  The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century.  Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.  That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusion of animal and machine.

Women for generations were told that they were "naturally" weak, submissive, over-emotional and incapable of abstract thought.  That it was "in their nature" to be mothers rather than corporate raiders, to prefer parlor games to particle physics.  If all these things are natural, they're unchangeable.

Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals -- in short domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.  Chief among these dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated.  The cyborg further displaces the nature-versus-culture opposition since it is clear in this age of body technologies that the given-ness of the female body is a constructed artifact of various systems.

Postmodernism seems to call for a pluralism, a self that exists in multiples of all of America's diversity.  We find ourselves subjects of several realms; the unified simplicity of what it means to be a man or woman gone forever. This is perhaps the intersection of feminism and postmodernism.  High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in two intriguing ways.  It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.  It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.  Through the use of technology as the means or context for human hybridization, cyborgs come to represent unfamiliar "otherness," one that challenges the denotative stability of human identity. In this way, cyborgs offer a particularly appropriate emblem of postmodern identity, since cyborgs identity is predicated on transgressed boundaries.

If women (and men) aren't natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed.  Cyborgs alert us to the way in which identity depends on notions of "the other" that are arbitrary, shifting, and ultimately unstable. Ultimately, the cyborg challenges feminism to search for ways to study the body as it is at once both a cultural construction and a material fact of human life.

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