FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES
ON
WEB FICTION
2004

Patchwork Bodies
Shelley Jackson

key texts

Shelley Jackson Patchwork Girl: Or, a Modern Monster Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. CDROM available in web room. details.

Shelly Jackson My Body: A Wunderkammer

This week we explore some of the work by Shelley Jackson, one of the most exciting 'new media' artists/ writers. My Body is fairly simple, and probably the best to start with, while Patchwork Girl is more of a challenge. This latter work is becoming rather canonical, but we wont let that put us off! It does address key issues within feminist and postmodern theory, and is quite absorbing once you start reading/ browsing.

Try to be disciplined and read Shelley's texts before the critical pieces, then return once you've taken in some of the theory.

secondary reading

Shelley Jackson's website Ineradicable Stain

George P Landow Stiching together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl"

Jenny Sunden What if Frankenstein(‘s Monster) was a Girl? Typing Female Machine Bodies in the Digital Age 2003.

N Katherine Hayles 'Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis', Postmodern Culture 10:2, 2000.
________Writing Machines MIT Press, 2002.

Carolyn Guertin short piece from Queen Bees and the Hum of the Hives

Mary Shelley Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus [1818]various editions.

Frank Baum Patchwork Girl of Oz Dover Publications, 1990.

interviews

Mark Amerika 'Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author As Cyborg-Femme Narrator: An interview with Shelley Jackson" Amerika On-Line 7.

Megan Lynch A conversation with Shelley Jackson

related artistic texts

Caitlin Fisher These Waves of Girls

related theoretical material

Theresa M. Senft Introduction: Performing the digital body: A ghost story 17:nd.

Carolyn Guertin Three-Dimensional Woman

before the session
• read both key texts as carefully as you can
• read at least two critical pieces.
• decide on a word or term that impresses you about one or both of Jackson's texts, and come to class prepared to offer a 5 minute presentation around that term. You can be as creative or as traditional as you like (and the two are not mutually exclusive!) but be as sharp and provocative as you can. You may want to link your term to other texts from the module, and beyond.
  suggestions:
  • body
  • words
  • reading
  • sewing
  • memory
  • identity
  • gender
  • hype
  • add you own . . .

Some questions to think about that may help:

• What is it like reading these texts. Try to compare the reading process with your engagement with Holes, Linings, Threads. Have you 'moved on'? Is the reading experience different, and why?
• Jenny Sunden (2003) suggests that Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl embodies woman as fully monstrous. What does she mean? What kinds of meanings might be produced by reading PG alongside 'The Cyborg Manifesto'?
• What are the similarities and differences between 'patchwork' and 'weaving' as metaphors for women's creativity or lives or identies?
• 'Patchwork Girl does not fit the idea of transparent, dissolving language that leaves the reader with a seamless illusion of reality. It rather treats language as material, even corporeal, to the point where it is no longer possible (or even meaningful) to tell the difference between the creation of texts and the creation of bodies: "I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt, as the old women in town do night after night [...] and their strokes grow thicker than machinery and tight enough to score deep creases in the cloth. I have looked with reciprocal coolness their way, not wandering what stories joined the fragments in their workbaskets."'(Sunden, 2003).
  OR
  'You could say all bodies are written bodies, all lives pieces of writing.'
  Compare Jackson's use of language (especially in PG) to that of Winterson in The Powerbook. Where do the differences and similarities reside?
• What do you make of the term 'assemblage'? How does it work as a metaphor AND as the physical form of the texts.
• Did you 'enjoy' either of these pieces?
• What might your own version of My Body look like?
• Compare the personal websites of Jackson and Winterson.
• Consider this comment by George Landow: 'Sooner or later all information technologies, we recall, have always convinced those who use them both that these technologies are natural and that they provide ways to describe the human mind and self. At the early stage of a digital information regime, Patchwork Girl permits us to use hypertext as powerful speculative tool (sic) that reveals new things about ourselves while at the same time retaining the sense of strangeness, of novelty.'