The Art and Science of Everything

Formerly thoughts on gender and technology, I'm expanding this as a place to just generally geek out on gender, technology, design, cognition, perception, and culture. The title should not be considered hubris, but instead enthusiasm.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

reading squires' thoughts on "fabulous, flexible feminism" as promised by cyberfeminists:
What remains remarkably absent from the cyborg conceptions of Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, and Sadie Plant is an actual research program proposing pieces of work that would reify the theories of liberation they point to.

For Firestone, it's going to the steady march of technology to free women of the burden of reproduction and to deskill and destabilize patriarchs. For Haraway, cyborgs are a metaphor that she calls us to play a role in guiding (quote about women in the valley or something) but she never actually directs us or cautions us with tools we can use in guiding technological production towards her dream. Plant simply sees the white male youth generated cyberpunk culture as liberating to a totalized, essentialized, historically wily woman just as it is. (I think it's cracked up, to be honest.)

As Squires points out,
"the appropriation of the cyborg for the mapping of possible feminist futures has the potential to be a subversive act. But let us not imagine that persuasive rhetoric alone is sufficient to shift the distribution of power" (370).

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