The Art and Science of Everything

A short presentation on the topic of gender and notions of skill in HCI, with many references I would probably like to look at at some point.

If you’re reading this and you’re not me, then welcome! I’m sorry this blog is largely notes to myself right now, but shortly will become far more coherent regarding the themes spewed about.

Recommended book:

radical equations
Math Literacy and Civil Rights
by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

From Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body:
- “a political judgement of any technology is difficult to render in the bastract. Technologies always have multiple effects” (146).
- “corporeal feminism” is described by Elizabeth Grosz as “an understanding of corporeality that is compatible wtih feminist struggles to undermine patriarchal structures and to form self-defined terms and representations” (157). not a bad starting definition of what feminist metaphors of hci should strive for. Grosz refigures “the body so that it moves from the periphery to teh center of analysis, so that it can now be understood as the very ’stuff’ of subjectivity” (157).

I propose the framework of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory as a way of conceptualizing gender – feminism’s central locus of concern – as neither a function of biology nor a total social construction, but instead as a co-construction of social actors and sexual characteristics. Avoiding essentializing biological definitions of woman, however, I instead argue that the metaphors our culture lives by, entailed by women’s reproductive capacities make it impossible to a bipolar gender system.

Castells describes research in HCI that uses EEGs to adapt interfaces to the mental states of the user — the organic recombinant in our cyborg fantasy.(73) This very literal interpretations of Haraway’s cyborg manifest in directing HCI research entails the same genderedness.

However, there is power in Haraway’s metaphor to emphasize multiple, situated identities making up our individual wholes. The computing technology of MUDs serves as one example of an environment in which Haraway’s cyborg can make temporary retreats from the embodied actors in the gender network, experimenting and elucidating the many layers and textures of personality that can, in different situations, become natural to them.

Turkle, “Life on Screen”
MUDing as a space to explore alternate gender identities, “form of consciounsess raising” (214)
“MUDs and the virtual personae one adopts within them are objects-to-think-with for reflecting on the social construction of gender” (213). obj-to-think-with becomes sort of like a cyborg composition, and yet, in the current culture of virtual reality, there is always an out and almost always a clear recognition of which part of the cyborg composition is “reality.” (Fundamentally disabling anonymity on the internet would probably threaten this.) But I don’t want to trivialize this cyborg experience. Case, the married 34-year old Turkle interviews, describes experiencing emotional pain in relation to some of his MUDing experiences — “the kind of learning that comes from hard times” (213). Describes the repression of the willful

But this experimentation is only possible because virtual space is virtual, not “real.” As one 13-year old who sexually experiments in internet chat rooms made clear to Sherry Turkle, “she feels safe because she can always just ‘disconnect’” (227). ( Turkle describes a married 41-year old who was thrilled at the opportunity for sexual experimentation offered by MUDs. “I really am monogamous,” he explained. “I’m really not interested in something outside my marriage. But being able to have, you know, a Tiny romance is kind of cool.” Another MUDders wife was hurt by her husband’s participation in MUD romance, though she explicitly placed MUDs outside the realm of “real life.” The irreality of virtual worlds is nothing more than a cultural agreement, subject to slippage over time. Certainly the tension between real life hurt feelings and the trivialization of virtual experiences as unreal point to a crumbling wall at best. But if embodiment is fundamental to sex and sex one element in the actor-network that constructs gender, the meat of the body will never truly become vapor lest we , though such disappearance of the body is a prominent trope in cyberpunk fantasies, rooted in Norbert Wiener’s “Human Use of Human Beings.” (Synners) [But we don’t really have a way of dealing with animal/machine/man hybrids. My imagination cannot conceive of a robot interacting with a human. But what if a robot has a human heart implanted in it? Then I think, if that heart can actually function, it is a human. And that is a genderless being. With stem cell cloning, the continual production of such genderless beings is imaginable. But this is not a victory for feminism. This is simply rendering the issue moot.]

Experience matters - “To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience” (212).

[Case] picks up [the expression ‘aspects of self’ eagerly, for MUDding reminds him of how Hindu gods could have different aspects or subpersonalities, all the while having a whole self.” -> cyborg a la Chela Sandoval

“There is a chance to discover…gender is constructed” (223). genuine feminist possibility in HCI. Only by having a theory of alternatives can you actually consider yourself off exercising choice. (There go the feminists, ruining people’s lives by confusing issues and overwhelming us with choices again.)

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

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

As Squires points out,

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

My sketched possible thesis, but gonna read a few more articles before committing to starting to write:
Cyberfeminism’s hope for the ontological upheavals of in the network enabled future is unlikely to subvert the gender paradigms which, by the power of metaphor, entail many of the inequalities and expectations that shape gendered experiences today.

I. While cyborgs offer to blur the boundaries between man, woman, and animal, a cybernetic organism by definition is integrated with an individual’s embodiment.
- donna haraway, cyborg manifesto, potential to delete gender

III. Reproduction of gender system in the ontology of technology
- balsamo: inscriptions of gender in cyberpunk technology,

III. Reproduction as metaphor, femininity as entailments
- Virginia Valian argues, the metphors of reproduction serve as our culture’s most powerful signifier of femininity.
- as long as women are the sole holders of biological reproduction and incubation, even distributing the ability through artificial means across genders

IV. Cyberspace as embodiment neutral?
- balsamo: VR embodiment repressed, all you get in canonical embodiment experience when it comes to perspective, cinemantic “eye”

V. Cyberspace as an extension of embodied social practice
- turkle: tinymoos and gender trouble
- while muds don’t bind people to adhering to certain gender identity, they still exist in a very real cultural consciousness. if people react against it, they still react against hegemonic cultural beliefs of gender identity and entailment.

VI. Provide a space to experiment with alternate embodiments. But can’t get beyong drag-like characterizations of embodiments experimented with.
- laurel: VR as embodiment extension
- drag culture? doesn’t extend embodiment in the permanent, difficult to deal with ways. Drag kings don’t get morning wood and drag queens don’t get monthly periods or the chemical fluctuations that make the hormonal nature of emotion see very believable.
- problems of semiotics was it? when did we and tim discuss the fact that even if you learned a language, having never had the experience of it, you would never be native. linguistics theory.

another cyberculture reading list

Judith Squires - Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberculture
Sherry Turkle - Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality (In: Druckrey, Timothy: Electronic Culture. Technology and Visual Representation. Aperture, Romford, 1996.)
Chela Sandoval - Methodology of the Oppressed (book); New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed (in the Cybercultures Reader); summary of her work might be adequate to my purposes

Lorde, Audre: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In: Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, Trumansberg New York, 1984.

In answer to previous post…

One answer to the continually shifting ontologies might be varying cyborg configurations and thus, in some, varying agencies and accountabilities we allow to exist outside of our bodies, sort of in reference to the beginning of the Human / Machine paper with that AI researcher woman’s work just as one possibility of this.

Ontologie of domination:
master/slave
male/female
science/nature
pattern/noise
knowledge/chaos
…
?

dialog/direct manipulation?