University of Western Gender and Computerized Communications Technologies Essay

User Generated

Xrivapybpx

Writing

University of Western Ontario

Description

Research Paper Topics Choices:

Choose 1 of the following topics that most interests/inspires you and write a thoughtfully organized, position essay. A position essay requires you to formulate a thesis and to defend this thesis with reasonable argument and evidence. 

  • Create your own topic that is relevant to the course themes. Come up with your own topic, complete with argument, and let your passion guide you. Follow the instructions below.
  • Gender Performatives & Technology: Looking at AI and Gender: Four Proposals For Future Research (p. 8) there is a quote and a link made to Judith Butler's notion of Gender Performatives. The statement reveals a mutual shaping of gender and technology happening: "Gender relations can be thought of as materialised in technology, and masculinity and femininity in turn acquire their meaning and character through their enrolment and embeddedness in working machines." This mutual shaping seems to entrench binary and essentialist notions gender even firmer into us, but is there hope of reversing it and escaping it?  Are we trapped or can gender performatives free us? Is this the problem of living in a heavily established gender binary society that can only loosen up so far but not enough?  Offer your opinion on this issue and if we can move beyond it or not, and then support your position. 
  • Visibility & Vulnerability: Some of our authors have indicated that the internet produced valuable visibility for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals and some have also indicated the increased vulnerability and trauma that has resulted. I want you to follow their lead. I want you to pick a category of 2SLGBTQIA+ (i.e., sex, gender, or sexual minority, and feel free to also bring in intersections like race and disability too) and pick an internet platform (i.e., FB, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogs, etc.) and discuss the prior situation of visibility/invisibility of this category, the type of visibility produced by the internet presence/how they accomplished it, and then the vulnerability created by such presence, and how we can effectively address the vulnerability going forward and maybe prevent it (i.e., you need to offer up your ideas of concrete solutions). Be sure to answer after your discussion if, in your opinion, the visibility benefits outweighs the risks vulnerability brings and why. 
  • Sex Robots:  Watch the short video "The Ethics of Sex Robots |  Kate Devlin, Brooke Magnanti, Shahidha Bari, Alan Winfield" https://youtu.be/dZGh-hzzJQo  and I want you to discuss and weigh in on the points made by either Kate Devlin or Alan Winfield (He starts talking around 4:25) in relation to sex/relationship robots.  Basically i want you to discuss what your chosen philosopher says, and if you agree or not with them, and then why/why not. [Research on sex robots by ethicists is an emerging field and there are some great resources available.]
  • Gendered Technology and Science Fiction: Pick your favourite Sci-Fi film, book, graphic novel, etc., that has what you feel is gendered technology and discuss how it exemplifies gender stereotypes and which ones, and how this affects the relationship with other characters, and then what effect these stereotypes have on the ideas about gender of the reader/viewer. Think about ... did the technology need to be gendered?  is it okay to gender stereotype technology in Sci-Fi films and fiction?  Does it have negative affects?  Can it be positive for ideas about gender? Are there changes that could be made and if so what?  

Basic Instructions:

  • Ensure your paper has a title page with your name and student number on it. 
  • This is a formal academic paper, use proper grammar, punctuation, paragraphing, and good style. Try to avoid using contractions. You may use first-person pronouns when you are speaking of your positions, your beliefs or your arguments – I do want you to own those. 
  • Papers must be typed, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman Font, with margins set to 1 inch. The format for submission MUST be either PDF or Word document. Turnitin.com struggles with google docs or anything other than these two. 
  • The 2000-word count minimum does not include footnotes, endnotes, works cited, bibliography, or title page. This word count refers to essay content. 
  • The citation style – MLA, APA, Chicago – is up to you. Use the one you feel most comfortable with and/or need to practice and be consistent.  
  • For indented block quotes, do a single return above and below it, and then single space the quote itself. Indent at least one side to make it clear it is a block quote. 
  • Single returns between paragraphs – don’t leave giant gaps. 
  • The format your paper takes on is up to you – if you want to use headings or sections, etc. 
  • There is no set number of supports for any thesis – some papers it is 3, some it is 2, some it is 4. Do what feels best & strongest for your unique paper. 
  • When you can, consider and address counter arguments to your position. 
  • If you want me to check your thesis statement or an outline before you compose the essay, I will so long as you send it to me 4 days before the deadline. 

Unformatted Attachment Preview

A Manifesto for Cyborgs : Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s by Donna Haraway An Ironic Dream o f a Com m on Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faith­ ful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identifi­ cation. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions o f United States politics, including the politics o f socialist-feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialec­ tically, about the tension o f holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the center o f my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image o f the cyborg. T his e s s a y A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid o f machine and organism, a creature o f social reality as well as a creature o f fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international wom ­ en’s movements have constructed “ wom en’s experience,” as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This ex­ perience is a fiction and fact o f the most crucial, political kind. 65 66 Donna Haraway Liberation rests on the construction o f the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, o f oppression, and so o f possibility. The cyborg is a matter o f 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. Contemporary science fiction is full o f cyborgs — creatures si­ multaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambigu­ ously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full o f cyborgs, o f couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history o f sexuality. C yborg “sex” restores some o f the lovely replicative baroque o f ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). C yborg replica­ tion is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream o f cyborg colonization o f work, a dream that makes the nightmare ofTaylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3i, command-control-communicationintelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984s u .S . defense budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premoni­ tion o f cyborg politics, a very open field. B twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids o f machine and organism ; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image o f both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structur­ ing any possibility o f historical transformation. In the traditions o f “ Western” science and politics —the tradition o f racist, maledominant capitalism; the tradition o f progress; the tradition of the appropriation o f nature as resource for the productions o f culture, the tradition o f reproduction o f the self from the reflections o f the other—the relation between organism and machine has been * border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories o f production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay is 311 argument for pleasure in the confusion o f boundaries and for re' sponsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non' naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition o f imagining a won y the late /L Manifesto for Cyborgs 67 without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is out­ side salvation history. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender w orld; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal sym biosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropria­ tion o f all the powers o f the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense; a “ final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos o f the “ West’s ” escalating dominations o f abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the “ Western,” humanist sense depends on the myth o f original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task o f individual de­ velopment and o f history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both M arxism and psychoanalysis, in their con­ cepts o f labor and o f individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot o f original unity out o f which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama o f escalating domination o f woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step o f original unity, o f identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegiti­ mate promise that might lead to subversion o f its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, inti­ macy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. N o longer structured by the polarity o f public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution o f social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela­ tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those o f polar­ ity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes o f Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration o f the garden; i.e., through the fabrication o f a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream o f community on the model o f the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden o f Eden; it is not made o f mud and cannot dream o f returning to dust. Perhaps that is w hy I want to see i f 68 Donna Haraway cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse o f returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enem y. Cyborgs are not rev­ erent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary o f hol­ ism , but needy for connection —they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, o f course, is that they are the illegiti­ mate offspring o f militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. B u t illegitimate offspring are often ex­ ceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I to the science fiction o f cyborgs at the end o f this essay, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary break­ downs that make the following political fictional (political scien­ tific) analysis possible. B y the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads o f uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks — language, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation o f human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need o f such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure o f connection o f human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not ir­ rational denials o f human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recog­ nition o f connection across the discredited breach o f nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two cen­ turies have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects o f knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social sciences. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form o f child abuse. w ill return Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings o f human animalityThere is much room for radical political people to contest for the meanings o f the breached boundary.1 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is trans­ gressed. Far from signaling a walling o ff o f people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle o f marriage exchange. Manifesto for Cyborgs 69 The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organ­ ism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the specter o f the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature o f that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. N o w we are not so sure. Latetwentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, selfdeveloping and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determinism is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions o f machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play o f writing and reading the world.2 “ Textualization” o f everything in post-structuralist, post­ modernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist femi­ nists for its utopian disregard for lived relations o f domination that ground the “ play” o f arbitrary reading.3* It is certainly true *A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and theories o f “ post-modernism” is made by Frederick Jameson, who argues that post­ modernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention o f left politics from within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction o f critical distance. Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or against post-modernism, an essentially moralist move. M y position is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinvention, post-modernist critique, and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations o f white capitalist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent n ow : they normalized heterogeneity, e.g., into man and woman, white and black. “Advanced capitalism” and post-modernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write The Death of the Clinic. The clinic’s methods required bodies and w orks; we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations don’t work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management. Normalization gives way to automation, utter redundancy. Michel Foucault’s Birth o f the Clinic, History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish name a form of power at its moment o f implosion. The discourse o f biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language o f the spliced substantive; no noun is left whole by the multinationals. These are their names, listed from one issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Allergen, Hybritech, Compupro, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics Corp., Syntro, Codon, Repligen, 70 Donna Haraway that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (e.g., the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty o f what counts as nature — a source o f insight and a promise o f innocence—is under­ mined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization o f inter­ pretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding “ Western” epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, i.e., some version o f abstract existence, like the accounts o f tech­ nological determinism destroying “ m an” by the “ machine” or “ meaningful political action” by the “ text.” Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter o f survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldn’t w e?4 The third distinction is a subset o f the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences o f quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind o f popular scientific equivalent to the Harlequin romances as a marker o f radical change in Ameri­ can white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessential^ microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern ma­ chinery is an irreverant upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and tech­ nology are old partners in Western stories o f the origin o f civiliza­ tion, but miniaturization has changed our experience o f mecha­ nism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about pow er; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the tv sets o f the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the tv wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made o f sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electro­ magnetic waves, a section o f a spectrum. And these machines are eminently portable, mobile —a matter o f immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. Micro-Angelo from Scion Corp., Percom Data, Inter Systems, Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., Intertec. If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison house requires language poets, a kind o f cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical culture politics. ^ Manifesto for Cyborgs 71 The ubiquity and invisibility o f cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politi— [ cally as materially. They are about consciousness — or its simula­ tion.5 They are floating signifiers m oving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings o f the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs o f power very well, than by the militant labor o f older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defense jobs. Ultimately the “ hardest” science is about the realm o f greatest boundary confusion, the realm o f pure number, pure spirit, c 3i, cryptography, and the preservation o f potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshipers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream o f post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are “ no m ore” than the miniscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, “ no m ore” than the experi­ ence o f stress. The nimble little fingers o f “ O riental” women, the old fascination o f little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll houses, wom en’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account o f these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the un­ natural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita whose constructed unities will guide effective opposi­ tional strategies. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part o f needed political work. One o f m y premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dual­ isms o f mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materi­ alism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artifacts associated with “ high technology” and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man to The Death o f Nature,6 the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination o f technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another o f m y premises is that the need for unity o f people trying to resist worldwide intensifica­ tion o f domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift o f perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms o f power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies. 72 F Donna Haraway a cyborg world is about the final impo­ sition o f a grid o f control on the planet, about the final abstrac­ tion embodied in a Star War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation o f women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy o f war.7 From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid o f their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid o f permanently partial identities and contradictory stand­ points. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities un­ imaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. C yborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present po­ litical circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine l a g , the Livermore Action Group, as a kind o f cyborg society, dedicated to realisti­ cally converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools o f technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name o f the affinity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal o f one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.) ro m o n e p e r s p e c t i v e , Fractured Identities I to name one’s feminism by a single adjective—or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness o f exclusion through naming is acute. Identi­ ties seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition o f their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unityThere is nothing about being “ female” that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as “ being” female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific dis­ courses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class conscious­ ness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical ex­ perience o f the contradictory social realities o f patriarchy, colonial' ism, and capitalism. And who counts as “ us” in my own rhetoricWhich identities are available to ground such a potent political t has b e c o m e d i f f i c u l t A Manifesto for Cyborgs 73 jnyth called “ us,” and what could motivate enlistment in this col­ lectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the con­ cept o f woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix o f wom en’s domi­ nations o f each other. For me —and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle class, female, radi­ cal, North American, mid-adult bodies —the sources o f a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much o f the U.s. left and u.s. feminism has been a response to this kind o f crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition o f another response through coalition —affinity, not identity.8 Chela Sandoval, from a consideration o f specific historical mo­ ments in the formation o f the new political voice called women o f color, has theorized a hopeful model o f political identity called “oppositional consciousness,” born o f the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social cate­ gories o f race, sex, or class.9 “ Women o f color,” a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown o f all the signs o f Man in “ Western” traditions, constructs a kind o f post­ modernist identity out o f otherness and difference. This post­ modernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible post-modernisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack o f any essential criterion for iden­ tifying who is a woman o f color. She notes that the definition o f the group has been by conscious appropriation o f negation. For example, a Chicana or u.s. black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom o f a cascade o f negative identities, left out o f even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called “ women and blacks,” who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category “ wom an” negated all non-white women; “ black” negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no “she,” no singularity, but a sea o f differences among u.s. women who have affirmed their historical identity as u.s. women of color. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis o f natural identification, but only on the basis o f conscious coalition, o f affin­ ity, o f political kinship.10 Unlike the “ w om an” o f some streams o f the white wom en’s movement in the United States, there is no 74 Donna Haraway naturalization o f the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power o f oppositional conscious­ ness. Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out o f the worldwide development o f anti-colonialist discourse, i.e., discourse dissolving the “ West” and its highest product—the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; i.e., man, the author o f a cosmos called history. As orientalism is de­ constructed politically and semiotically, the identities o f the Occi­ dent destabilize, including those o f feminists.11 Sandoval argues that “ women o f color” have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects o f previous M arxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences o f the disorderly polyphony emerging from de­ colonization. Katie King has emphasized the limits o f identification and the political/poetic mechanics o f identification built into reading “ the poem,” that generative core o f cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from dif­ ferent “ moments” or “ conversations” in feminist practice to taxonomize the w om en’s movement to make one’s own political tenden­ cies appear to be the telos o f the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history to appear to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typi­ cal units called radical, liberal, and socialist feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistem ology.12 Taxonomies o f feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from offi­ cial women’s experience. And o f course, “ wom en’s culture,” lik® I women o f color, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals o f poetry, music, and certain forms o f aca­ demic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics o f race and culture in the u.s. wom en’s movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement o f King and Sandoval is learning hoW to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic ofappr0” priation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. struggle against unitythrough-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialist11’ humanism, positivism , essentialism, scientism, and other T he t h e o r e t i c a l and pra ctica l i fa Manifesto for Cyborgs 75 lamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. 1 think that radical and socialist/Marxist feminisms have also under­ mined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all “epistemologies” as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements o f people committed to changing the world, has been part o f the process showing the limits o f identification. The acid tools o f post-modernist theory and the constructive tools o f ontological discourse about revolu­ tionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests o f survival. We are excruciatingly conscious o f what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss o f innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence o f guilt with the naïveté o f innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist feminism look like? What kind o f politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions o f per­ sonal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective—and, ironically, socialist feminist? I do not know o f any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the domina­ tions o f “ race,” “gender,” “ sexuality,” and “class.” I also do not know o f any other time when the kind o f unity w e might help build could have been possible. None o f “ us” have any longer the symbolic or material capability o f dictating the shape o f reality to any o f “ them.” O r at least “ w e ” cannot claim innocence from prac­ ticing such dominations. White women, including socialist femi­ nists, discovered (i.e., were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence o f the category “ woman.” That consciousness changes the geography o f all previous categories ; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. C yborg feminists have to argue that “ w e” do not want any more natural matrix o f unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give latetwentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying o f identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. 16 Donna Haraway Both Marxist/socialist feminisms and radical feminisms have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category “ woman” and consciousness o f the social lives o f “ women.” Perhaps a sche­ matic caricature can highlight both kinds o f moves. Marxian social­ ism is rooted in an analysis o f wage labor which reveals class structure. The consequence o f the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point o f view which is necessary for changing the world. Labor is the humanizing activ­ ity that makes man; labor is an ontological category permitting the knowledge o f a subject, and so the knowledge o f subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies o f Marxism. The main achieve­ ment o f both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to ex­ pand the category o f labor to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view o f labor under capitalist patriarchy. In par­ ticular, women’s labor in the household and wom en’s activity as mothers generally, i.e., reproduction in the socialist feminist sense, entered theory on the authority o f analogy to the Marxian concept o f labor. The unity o f women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure o f “ labor.” Marxist/socialist feminism does not “ naturalize” unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing m ove is in the ontological structure o f labor or o f its analogue, w om en’s activity.13* The inheritance o f Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contri­ bution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility o f real women to build unities, rather than to natur­ alize them. *The central role o f object-relations versions o f psychoanalysis and related strong universalizing moves in discussing reproduction, caring work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline their authors re­ sistance to what I am calling post-modernism. For me, both the universal­ izing moves and the versions o f psychoanalysis make analysis o f “ womens place in the integrated circuit” difficult and lead to systematic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major aspects o f the construction o f gender and gendered social life. £ Manifesto for Cyborgs 77 version o f radical feminism is itself a caricature o f the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing ten­ dencies o f Western theories o f identity grounding action.14 It is factually and politically w rong to assimilate all o f the diverse • “moments” or “ conversations” in recent wom en’s politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology—includ­ ing their negations—erase or police difference. O nly one o f the effects o f M acKinnon’s theory is the rewriting o f the history o f the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production o f a theory o f experience, o f wom en’s identity, that is a kind o f apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale o f radical feminism achieves its end — the unity o f women —by enforcing the experience o f and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/socialist femi­ nist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some o f the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost o f radical reductionism. C atherine m a c k in n o n ’ s MacKinnon argues that radical feminism necessarily adopted a different analytical strategy from M arxism , looking first not at the structure o f class, but at the structure o f sex/gender and its genera­ tive relationship, men’s constitution and appropriation o f women sexually. Ironically, M acKinnon’s “ontology” constructs a non­ subject, a non-being. Another’s desire, not the self’s labor, is the origin o f “ wom an.” She therefore develops a theory o f conscious­ ness that enforces what can count as “ wom en’s” experience—any­ thing that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as “ wom en” can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form o f consciousness; i.e., the self-knowledge o f a selfwho-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this radical feminism still has the epistemological status o f labor, i.e., the point from which analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence o f the structure o f sex/gender. In the realm o f knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be 78 Donna Haraway constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alien­ ated in the violent separation o f the laborer from his product. MacKinnon’s radical theory o f experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the author­ ity o f any other wom en’s political speech and action. It is a totaliza­ tion producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing —feminists’ consciousness o f the non-existence o f women, except as products o f men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version o f identity can firm ly ground w om en’s unity. But in solving the problem o f the contradictions o f any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine o f experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure o f poly vocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, M acKinnon’s intentional erasure o f all difference through the device o f the “essential” non­ existence o f women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a réinscrip­ tion o f history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities o f women named by socialist feminists as forms o f labor only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had differ­ ent tones o f meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labor, one in sex, both calling the consequences o f domination and ignor­ ance o f social and personal reality “ false consciousness.” Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argu­ ment o f any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points o f view have tended to embrace the status o f a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the “ Western” author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms o f domina­ tion by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no struc­ tural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction o f the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure o f m y caricature looks like this: /L Manifesto for Cyborgs 79 Socialist Feminism — structure o f class//wage labor//alienation labor, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race Radical Feminism — structure o f gender//sexual appropriation//objectification sex, by analogy labor, by extension reproduction, by addition race In another context, the French theorist Julia Kristeva claimed women appeared as a historical group after World War n, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects o f knowledge and as historical actors, “ race” did not always exist, “ class” has a histori­ cal genesis, and “ homosexuals” are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system o f the family o f man —and so the essence of wom an—breaks up at the same moment that networks o f con­ nection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. “Advanced capitalism” is inadequate to convey the structure o f this historical moment. In the “ Western” sense, the end o f man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty o f producing essentialist theory that suppressed w om en’s particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices o f white humanism and through searching for a single ground o f domination to secure our revolutionary voice. N o w we have less excuse. But in the con­ sciousness o f our failures, w e risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task o f making partial, real con­ nection. Some differences are playful; some are poles o f w orld historical systems o f domination. “ Epistem ology” is about know ­ ing the difference. The Informatics o f Dom ination I at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture o f possible unity, a picture in­ debted to socialist and feminist principles o f design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance o f rearrangements in worldwide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature o f class, race, and gender in an emerging system o f w orld n t h is a t t e m p t 80 Donna Haraway order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by indus­ trial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an or­ ganic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system— from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the follow­ ing chart o f transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical domi­ nations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination: Representation Bourgeois novel, realism Organism Depth, integrity Heat Biology as clinical practice Physiology Small group Perfection Eugenics Decadence, M a g ic M o u n ta in Hygiene Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division o f labor Functional specialization Reproduction Organic sex role specialization Biological determinism Community ecology Racial chain o f being Scientific management in home/factory Family/Market/Factory Family wage Public/Private Nature/Culture Cooperation Freud Sex Labor Mind World War n White Capitalist Patriarchy Simulation Science fiction, post-modernism Biotic component Surface, boundary Noise Biology as inscription Communications engineering Subsystem Optimization Population control Obsolescence, F u tu re S h o ck Stress Management Immunology, a i d s Ergonomics/cybernetics o f labor Modular construction Replication Optimal genetic strategies Evolutionary inertia, constraints Ecosystem Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism Global factory/Electronic cottage Women in the Integrated Circuit Comparable worth Cyborg citizenship Fields o f difference Communications enhancement Lacan Genetic engineering Robotics Artificial Intelligence Star Wars Informatics o f Domination T h is list suggests several interesting things .15 First, the obje on the right-hand side cannot be coded as “ natural,” a realization A Manifesto for Cyborgs 81 that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that “ g o d ” is dead; so is the “ goddess.” In relation to objects like biotic com­ ponents, one must think not in terms o f essential properties, but in terms o f strategies o f design, boundary constraints, rates o f flows, systems logics, costs o f lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind o f reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function o f the system environment. Ideologies o f sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on the notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like orga­ nisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmask­ ing the irrationalism. Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms o f frequencies o f parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is “ irrational” to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called “ex­ perimental ethnography” in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play o f writing. At the level o f ideology, we see translations o f racism and colonialism into languages o f develop­ ment and underdevelopment, rates and constraints o f moderniza­ tion. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought o f in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no “ natural” architectures con­ strain system design. The financial districts in all the w orld’s cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact o f “ late capitalism.” The entire universe o f objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories o f the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on bound­ ary conditions and interfaces, on rates o f flow across boundaries — and not on the integrity o f natural objects. “ Integrity” or “ sin­ cerity” o f the Western self gives w ay to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to w om ­ en’s capacities to give birth to new human beings will be devel­ oped in the languages o f population control and maximization o f goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strate­ gies will be formulated in terms o f rates, costs o f constraints, 82 Donna Haraway degrees o f freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes o f operation are probabilistic, statistical. N o objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be inter­ faced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Ex­ change in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that M arx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds o f components in this universe is stress —communications breakdown.16 The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field o f operations. o f scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since World War ii prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dual­ isms ordering discourse in “ the West” since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been “ techno-digested.” The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of wom en is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informat­ ics o f domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself—all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infi­ nite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others —consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-fem inist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems o f myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind o f disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and per­ sonal self. This is the self feminists must code. T his k i n d of a n a l y s i s Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the cru­ cial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide. Technologies and sci­ entific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, Manifesto for Cyborgs 83 , aS frozen moments, o f the fluid social interactions constituting ¿ern> but should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, • strument and concept, historical systems o f social relations and historical anatomies o f possible bodies, including objects o f know ledge- Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies gre constructed by a common m ove—the translation o f the world into a problem o f coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogene­ ity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation o f the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feed­ back controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory o f language and control ; the key operation is deter­ mining the rates, directions, and probabilities o f flow o f a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differ­ entially permeable to information. Information is just that kind o f quantifiable element (unit, basis o f unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effec­ tive communication). The biggest threat to such power is inter­ ruption o f communication. A ny system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals o f this technology can be condensed into the metaphor c 3i, command-control-communication-intelli­ gence, the m ilitary’s symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation o f the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into problems o f genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.17 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects o f knowledge, giving w ay to biotic components, i.e., special kinds o f informa­ tion processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility o f the concept o f the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars o f the privilege o f coding and recognition systems as objects o f knowledge, as constructions o f bodily reality for us. 84 Donna Haraway Biology is here a kind o f cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind o f intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes aw ry; its communication processes break dow n; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity —for animalrights activists at least as much as for guardians o f human purity. G ay men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users are the “ privileged” victims o f an awful immune-system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion o f boundaries and moral pollution. But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure o f the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. Mod­ ern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfarestate apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication o f our imaginations, labor-control systems, medical constructions o f our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division o f labor, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon elec­ tronics. Microelectronics is the technical basis o f simulacra, i.e., of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations o f labor into robotics and word processing; sex into genetic engineering and reproduc­ tive technologies; and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproduction. Biology as a powerful engineering science for re­ designing materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas o f fermentation, agriculture, and energy. Communications sciences and biology are constructions o f natural-technical objects o f knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The “ multinational” material organization o f the production and rept°" duction o f daily life and the symbolic organization o f the produc­ tion and reproduction o f culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images o f base and super' structure, public and private, or material and ideal never seeme more feeble. I have used Rachel Grossman’s image o f women in the mt grated circuit to name the situation o f women in a world so in 1 fr Manifesto for Cyborgs 85 irately restructured through the social relations o f science and technology.18 I use the odd circumlocution, “ the social relations o f science and technology,” to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should jjso indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources o f power, that we need fresh sources o f analysis and political action.19 Some o f the rearrangements o f race, sex, and class rooted in hightech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics. The H om ework Econom y he “ new in d u st ria l r e v o lu t io n ” is producing a n e w worldwide working class. The extreme mobility o f capital and the emerging international division o f labor are intertwined with the emergence o f new collectivities, and the weakening o f familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have be­ come newly vulnerable to permanent jo b loss, and women are not disappearing from the jo b rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in third-world countries are the preferred labor force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many wom en’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monog­ amy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms o f traditional community, a high likelihood o f loneli­ ness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity o f women in Silicon Valley structures a micro­ cosm o f conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, educa­ tion, language. Richard Gordon has called this new situation the homework economy.20 Although he includes the phenomenon o f literal home­ work emerging in connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends “ hom ework econom y” to name a restructuring o f w ork that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men 86 Donna Haraway or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulner­ able; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and o ff the paid jo b that make a mockery o f a limited w ork day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out o f place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to largescale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas o f high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places o f women are crucial —and need to be analyzed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations. The hom ework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technolo­ gies. The successs o f the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jo b s is tied to the power o f the new com­ munications technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences o f the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss o f the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character o f their own jobs, which are becoming capitalintensive, e.g., office w ork and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also re­ lated to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification o f demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization o f poverty —generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the home­ w ork economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that wom en’s wage will not be matched by a male income for the support o f children —has become an urgent focus. The causes o f various women-headed households are a function o f race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing general­ ity is a ground for coalitions o f women on many issues. Tha® women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function o f thctf enforced status as mothers is hardly new ; the kind o f integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economylS new. The particular pressure, for example, on u.s. black women, w ho have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domestic servi fi Manifesto for Cyborgs 87 and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for continued enforced black poverty with em­ ployment. Teenage women in industrializing areas o f the third world increasingly find themselves the sole or major source o f a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problematic. These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics o f gender and race. Within the framework o f three major stages o f capitalism (com­ mercial/early industrial, monopoly, multinational) —tied to nation­ alism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jam eson’s three dominant aesthetic periods o f realism, modernism, and post­ modernism— I would argue that specific forms o f families dialecti­ cally relate to forms o f capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms o f these families might be schematized as (i) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology o f sepa­ rate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-Am erican bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the fam ily wage, with a flower­ ing o f a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around World War 1; and (3) the “ fam ily” o f the hom ework economy with its o x y moronic structure o f women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion o f gender itself. This is the context in which the projections for worldwide struc­ tural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture o f the hom ework economy. As robotics and related technologies put men out o f work in “ developed” countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jo b s in third-world “develop­ ment,” and as the automated office becomes the rule even in laborsurplus countries, the feminization o f w ork intensifies. B lack women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment (“ feminization” ) o f black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the w age economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situa­ tions o f white and black women. M any more wom en and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-gender 88 Donna Haraway and race alliances on issues o f basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just nice. also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for subsistence worldwide. Rae Lessor Blum berg estimates that wom en produce about fifty per cent of the w orld’s subsistence food.21 * Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilities to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolu­ tion technologies interact with other high-tech industrial produc­ tion to alter gender divisions o f labor and differential gender migra­ tion patterns. T h e n ew t e c h n o l o g ie s T he new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of “ privatization” that Ros Petchesky has analyzed, in which mili­ tarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensi­ fied definitions o f corporate property as private synergistically interact.22 The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication o f “ public life” for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming o f a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic expense o f most people, but especially o f women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized television seem crucial to production o f modern forms o f “ private life.” The culture o f video games is heavily oriented to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare. H igh-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction o f the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. M ore than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities o f electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. The new technologies affect the social relations o f both sexuality and o f reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties o f sexuality and instrumentality, o f views o f the body as a kind o f private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are de­ *T he conjunction o f the Green Revolution’s social relations with biotec ' nologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on land in £ third world increasingly intense, a i d ’ s estimates (New York Times, 14 Octot> 1984) used at the 1984 World Food Day are that in Africa, women produce about 90 per cent o f rural food supplies, about 60-80 per cent in Asia, an provide 40 per cent o f agricultural labor in the Near East and Latin AmericaBlum berg charges that world organizations’ agricultural politics, as wel Manifesto for Cyborgs 89 scribed nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic o f domination o f male and female gender roles.23 These sociobiological stories depend on high-tech view o f the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Am ong the many transformations o f re­ productive situations is the medical one, where w om en’s bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both “ visualization” and “intervention.” O f course, who controls the interpretation o f bod­ ily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon o f wom en’s claiming their bodies in the 1970s; that hand-craft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation o f reality in the practices o f cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies o f visualization recall the important cultural practice o f hunting with the camera and the deeply predatory nature o f a photographic consciousness.24 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations o f per­ sonal and social possibility. Another critical aspect o f the social relations o f the new tech­ nologies is the reformulation o f expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical w ork force. A major social and political danger is the formation o f a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses o f women and men o f all ethnic groups, but especially people o f color, confined to a home­ work economy, illiteracy o f several varieties, and general redun­ dancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive appara­ tuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappear­ ance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production o f science and technology that constructs scientifictechnical discourses, processes, and objects.25 This issue is only one aspect o f inquiry into the possibility o f a feminist science, but it is important. What kind o f constitutive role in the production o f knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? H ow can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind o f those o f multinationals and national governments in the third world, gener­ ally ignore fundamental issues in the sexual division o f labor. The present tragedy o f famine in Africa might owe as much to male supremacy as to capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More accurately, capitalism and racism are usually structurally male dominant. Donna Haraway 90 political accountability can be constructed to tie wom en together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways o f developing feminist science/technology politics in alli­ ance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups? M any scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the hightech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science.26 Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women o f color, are coming to be fairly numerous? Women in the Integrated Circuit L the picture o f wom en’s historical locations in f advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been re­ structured partly through the social relations o f science and tech­ nology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize wom­ en’s lives by the distinction o f public and private domains —sug­ gested by images o f the division o f working-class life into factory and home, o f bourgeois life into market and home, and o f gender existence into personal and political realms —it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms o f these di­ chotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion o f spaces and identities and the permeability o f boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. “ N etw orking” is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy —weaving is for opposi­ tional cyborgs. e t m e s u m m a r iz e The only w ay to characterize the informatics o f domination is as a massive intensification o f insecurity and cultural impoverish­ ment, with common failure o f subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much o f this picture interweaves with the social relations o f science and technology, the urgency o f a socialistfeminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. Thei
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer

View attached explanation and answer. Let me know if you have any questions.

1

Gender and Computerized Communications Technologies
Name
Institution Affiliation
Course Name
Instructor
Date

2

Gender and Computerized Communications Technologies
Overview
Gender-technology interactions are becoming increasingly essential when considering
gender equity, given the growing role of technology in communication and learning in civilization.
Gender scholars have proven that technologies usage and development are gendered, and scientific
inclinations are dependent on gender preconceptions in societies regarding new tech. Butler (1990)
claimed gender itself is constantly flexible and rarely static. It is crucial that feminist academics
based on this concept examine the concepts of gender as it has traditionally been or has now been
characterized and how they might be reinterpreted and modified via the influence of more
prevalent communication technology. The impact of new electronic communications technologies
on the contemporary formulation of gender classifications is vital to consider. The spotlight should
be placed on the consequences of computer-mediated communication as a promising platform for
the transformation of interpersonal as well as social gender and identification concepts.
Although numerous authors have addressed the topic of studying gender and identification
in the context of technology, most have not considered into perspective the existing and
prospective implications of contemporary computer-based communications technologies.
Haraway (1985), who’s fascinating "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in writing on the prospects of
gender relations is heavily referenced, had focused exclusively on technologies that enabled a
tangible replication of the embodiment rather than the digital fabrication of contemporary
computer text-based communication techniques. The reason is that technology tends to be
considered as industrial machines, work instruments, forgetting other advancements that influence
the majority of ordinary life (Wajcman, 2010). However, as the frequency and relevance of digital
technology increases, a digital gap has grown along the lines of earlier societal divisions. In other

3

words, the new technologies favored individuals with higher access to other advantages than those
with fewer resources. These computerized gaps could intensify existing social imbalances because
new advancements continue providing prospects for accessing relevant data as well as access to
commerce literacy, work prospects, health information and data about governmental initiatives as
a necessary tool for partaking in a functioning democracy. The gender divide is amongst the most
persistent in technology inequities. Research has highlighted a range of circumstances in which
women trail behind men in technological possession and advancement. For instance, men possess
and utilize computers and the online world more than women, devote more time digitally, take
more technical lessons and develop technological capabilities more (Dixon et al., 2014).
The idea in this article is to investigate not only how women and men definitions have
changed in this new communications context but also how they are focusing on a women's
perspective for the evaluation of modern computer-aided communications technology. This is not
to imply that the descriptor "woman" is not any more significant or valuable in the context of
discourse about gender and technology or that gender is not or cannot be seen as a component in
studying the usage and implementations of information technology. Instead, it is argued that it is
unnecessary to establish a singular center from which women's encounters with technologies and
communications networks can be seen and that such a fixation would increase inequality, not
expose it and remove it. A hitherto deterministic view of the impact of new technology on society
and especially its impact on women could entail re-thinking alongside new theoretical viewpoints
on the moving frontiers of gender categories.
Concept of Technological Determinism and Gender
The idea of technological determinism has also become a subject of scientific writing,
which is important to the general interpretation of technologies politics. According to Hess (2015),

4

technological determinism is the concept of a society-led invention taking on its independent
existence. The main idea is that technology comprises the foundation of societal existence and that
technical development is the single most fundamental premise of society's transformation. Dafoe
(2015) argued that technological determinism could be characterized as perspectives that highlight
the independence of technical development and the shape of society in technology. The two biggest
issues that afflict some scholars with the concept of technological determinism are that individuals
can explain historical transformation causally, address the complicated communication of possible
causes, and consider technology as an endogenous parameter rather than examining how society
also influences technological pathways (Hess, 2015).
For many years researchers of critical theory and postmodernism have dealt with the real
and prospective consequences of science and technology for societal structures. Their concern is
in degrading relationships and identities on the unpredictable characteristics of technologies and
their functionality. Their work is often regarded as an element of technological, scientific
pragmatism. According to Royakkers et al. (2018), information, connectivity, and digital
technology are omnipresent in society. Digitalization permeates every element of human life, and
technology squeezes in human beings, understands more people and learns to function very much
like humans. Designated as an intimate technological revolution, technology tends to dominate –
and so systemically distort– the substance of technological discourses through structure control by
computer professionals. Digitalization of society strains human limits and gives many options, but
also confronts the moral limits. From a...


Anonymous
Great content here. Definitely a returning customer.

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Related Tags