Nikki Sullivan: “Somatechnics, or Monstrosity Unbound”, in: Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2006.
"For Firestone, then, the answer to the problem of ‘biology’ lay in the development of neutral technologies which would enable extra-uterine gestation. In freeing women from their biology such technologies would, Firestone argued, undermine the forms of social life organised around biological reproduction and thus make possible alternative forms of relations and relationality." 1 What about the online misogyny of social media? Rape threats, MRA, 4chan, red pill, incel? Donna Zuckerberg article about how social media has allowed misogyny to thrive: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/11/donna-zuckerberg-social-media-misoyny-violence-classical-antiquity-not-all-dead-white-men
"in accepting the implicit value system which associates women with biology, nature, the body, reproduction and immanence, and concluding that equality can only be achieved in and through the transcendence of such things, these writers reproduce, amongst other things, “the superiority of masculine values and occupations” (Gatens 1991: 2)." 1
"However, whilst for Firestone and her followers nature is the problem to which technology is the answer, for anti-technology radical feminists nature is what is most sacrosanct and technology, as the tool par excellence of patriarchal appropriation and oppression, is the problem." 2
"postmodern feminists have critiqued this either/or model and the logic that informs it, claiming instead that “there is no “real”, fixed, or essential technology” (Farquhar 1996: 5). Technologies, they argue, are heterogeneous in their histories, their uses, and their effects, and are thoroughly embedded in contextually specific cultural processes" 2
"Terry and Calvert make a similar point when they write: “technologies, as organized systems, produce a range of products, effects, representations, and artefacts, chief among them … what we could call technologies of gender, race, and sexuality” (1997: 5)." 2
"feminism’s task is less an outright refusal or naïve celebration of ‘Technology’, and more an ongoing detailed and nuanced analysis of the “difficult territories of compromise and ambivalence” (Munster 1999: 128) associated with the use, appropriation, extension, and/or subversion of specific practices and procedures in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts." 2
"Rather than championing the kind of (re)productionism that informs the politics of both anti-natalist equality feminism and anti-technology radical feminism, and that presupposes the pre-discursive existence of singular opposed entities (human/machine, nature/culture), Haraway deploys what we might think of as a diffractive optics to envision “a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others” (1992: 299)." 3
"The regenerative politics Haraway envisions, then, is neither simply opposed to, nor outside of the (re)productionist (utopian/dystopian) myths embraced by the feminists discussed earlier. Rather, there is a chiasmatic intertwining of Haraway’s monstrous offspring and the progeny of Firestone, Raymond, Allen, that diffracts, deconstructs and reconstructs, and in the process, generates “scary things, risky things, contingent things” (1992: 325)" 4
"Whilst perception, then, is conventionally “defined as access to truth” (1996: 275), it in fact, argues Alcoff, “represents sedimented contextual knowledges” (1996: 272)." Great quote - the idea that what we see can tell us the truth is false, really what we derive from looking is preconceived ideas of what was already there.
The monster is Frankenstein "what the monster heralds is a monstrous future, one which, as Derrida reminds us, “can only be surprising”: a future, he writes “that wouldn’t be monstrous wouldn’t be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared and prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant” (1992: 386)." 5
Shelley in Stitch Bitch: "The project of writing, the project of life, … is, to interrupt, unhinge, disable the processes by which the mind … substitutes an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self (2004)." 6
"hybrid ontology as (re)generative insofar as its transgresses the borders and boundaries of taxonomic logic, remapping ‘our social and bodily reality’ by articulating the transitory and shifting chiasmatic relations between bodies of flesh, bodies of knowledge, and social bodies." 7
"For Firestone, then, the answer to the problem of ‘biology’ lay in the development of neutral technologies which would enable extra-uterine gestation. In freeing women from their biology such technologies would, Firestone argued, undermine the forms of social life organised around biological reproduction and thus make possible alternative forms of relations and relationality." 1 What about the online misogyny of social media? Rape threats, MRA, 4chan, red pill, incel? Donna Zuckerberg article about how social media has allowed misogyny to thrive: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/11/donna-zuckerberg-social-media-misoyny-violence-classical-antiquity-not-all-dead-white-men
"in accepting the implicit value system which associates women with biology, nature, the body, reproduction and immanence, and concluding that equality can only be achieved in and through the transcendence of such things, these writers reproduce, amongst other things, “the superiority of masculine values and occupations” (Gatens 1991: 2)." 1
"However, whilst for Firestone and her followers nature is the problem to which technology is the answer, for anti-technology radical feminists nature is what is most sacrosanct and technology, as the tool par excellence of patriarchal appropriation and oppression, is the problem." 2
"postmodern feminists have critiqued this either/or model and the logic that informs it, claiming instead that “there is no “real”, fixed, or essential technology” (Farquhar 1996: 5). Technologies, they argue, are heterogeneous in their histories, their uses, and their effects, and are thoroughly embedded in contextually specific cultural processes" 2
"Terry and Calvert make a similar point when they write: “technologies, as organized systems, produce a range of products, effects, representations, and artefacts, chief among them … what we could call technologies of gender, race, and sexuality” (1997: 5)." 2
"feminism’s task is less an outright refusal or naïve celebration of ‘Technology’, and more an ongoing detailed and nuanced analysis of the “difficult territories of compromise and ambivalence” (Munster 1999: 128) associated with the use, appropriation, extension, and/or subversion of specific practices and procedures in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts." 2
"Rather than championing the kind of (re)productionism that informs the politics of both anti-natalist equality feminism and anti-technology radical feminism, and that presupposes the pre-discursive existence of singular opposed entities (human/machine, nature/culture), Haraway deploys what we might think of as a diffractive optics to envision “a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others” (1992: 299)." 3
"The regenerative politics Haraway envisions, then, is neither simply opposed to, nor outside of the (re)productionist (utopian/dystopian) myths embraced by the feminists discussed earlier. Rather, there is a chiasmatic intertwining of Haraway’s monstrous offspring and the progeny of Firestone, Raymond, Allen, that diffracts, deconstructs and reconstructs, and in the process, generates “scary things, risky things, contingent things” (1992: 325)" 4
"Whilst perception, then, is conventionally “defined as access to truth” (1996: 275), it in fact, argues Alcoff, “represents sedimented contextual knowledges” (1996: 272)." Great quote - the idea that what we see can tell us the truth is false, really what we derive from looking is preconceived ideas of what was already there.
The monster is Frankenstein "what the monster heralds is a monstrous future, one which, as Derrida reminds us, “can only be surprising”: a future, he writes “that wouldn’t be monstrous wouldn’t be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared and prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant” (1992: 386)." 5
Shelley in Stitch Bitch: "The project of writing, the project of life, … is, to interrupt, unhinge, disable the processes by which the mind … substitutes an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self (2004)." 6
"hybrid ontology as (re)generative insofar as its transgresses the borders and boundaries of taxonomic logic, remapping ‘our social and bodily reality’ by articulating the transitory and shifting chiasmatic relations between bodies of flesh, bodies of knowledge, and social bodies." 7
Comments
Post a Comment