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.
WEEK SIX
CYBORG SUBJECTIVITIES: PATCHWORK GIRL
The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. 'Manifesto' p150.
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. 'Manifesto' p175.
This session has two main objectives: firstly to consider Jackson's PG as a model of cyborg subjectivity and also to become familiar with hypertext fiction and think about its specificities
KEY READING:
Shelley Jackson. 1995. Patchwork Girl: Or, a Modern Monster Watertown, Mass.: Eastgate Systems.
This is the hypertext piece. Available on CD-Rom from the library or CWS.
Shelley Jackson. 1997. 'Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl' http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/index_jackson.html
Jenny Sundén. 2003. 'What if Frankenstein('s Monster) was a Girl? Typing Female Machine Bodies in the Digital Age' Available: http://www.5thfeminist.lu.se/program/pdfs/sundenkeynote.pdf
EXERCISES:
1. Electronic hypertext might be new to you. Make some notes about your reading experience. How did you find PG? Was it easy or difficult to read? Where did you start and how did you decide when you had finished?
2. How does Jackson describe hypertext in Stitch Bitch? Collect some quotations.
Questions to think about:
Consider this quotation from Hayles:
'Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend towards cyborg subjectivity. Although this subject position may be evoked through the content of print texts, electronic hypertexts necessarily enact it through the specificity of the medium' (Hayles 2000, 13).
Did you feel that the text positioned you as a cyborg? What might this mean?
What kinds of meanings are produced by reading PG alongside the Cyborg Manifesto?
What kind of subjectivity does Jackson describe? Illustrate your answer with quotations from PG. What do the seams/scars signify in the text? How do they function in Jackson's model of subjectivity?
Jenny Sundén reconfigures Haraway's cyborg as a 'she-borg'. What difference does this make in her argument?
ADDITIONAL READING:
Rosi Braidotti. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Colombia University Press. Chapter 4: Re-figuring the Subject. (To contextualise the cyborg in feminist work about subjectivity)
Shelley Jackson http://www.ineradicablestain.com/ (Shelley Jackson's homepage)
N. Katherine Hayles. 2000. Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. Postmodern Culture 10(2) Available: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.100/10.2hayles.txt
N. Katherine Hayles. 2002. Writing Machines (for a more in depth consideration of hypertext fiction and its relationship with print fiction)
George P. Landow. 'Stitching Together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl' Available: http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/pg/pgmain.html
Janet Murray, 1998. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. (First steps in hypertext fiction).
Any problems? Contact Ann Kaloski or Julie Palmer