The following post attempts to look at some of the arguments around cyberspace and gender. But before that, I would like to comment on the question that my co-blogger and I had posed in our introductory post regarding the boundaries of the cyborg and cyberspace. Quoting Donna Haraway in the 'Cyborg Manifesto' , “Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing 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.” The idea that is being put forward here and through her writings about the cyborg ‘myth’ is that the cyborg is the final abstraction with partial identities. Perhaps the cyborg is and can be the next leader of political revolution because it is through the cyborg that the idea that reality cannot be defined has taken shape. ‘We’ cannot dictate the shape of reality for ‘them’.
This takes us to the next set of ideas. I recently read about ‘cyborg feminists’ who say that, ‘'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage”. Very inspiring! but who are these cyborg feminists? Haraway has written extensively about cyborg and women. Her major argument is that cyborg can be used as a tool to combat the male/female binary and the patriarchal, capitalist structures of society. However while it is important to note the significance of the possibility of creating new forms which challenge traditional notions of both femininity and gender by virtue of the location of the cyborg within a post-gender world. A few questions remain unanswered: how does one take away the authorship of cyber-culture from male hands in order to create a feminine version of the cyberspace and the cyborg identity? Also are women able to control the machines, how do we explain gendering of technology in this context?
links: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
http://cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/haraway.html
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I think the very fact that these questions arise in the context of whether a post-gendered reality is possible in cyberspace answers the impossibility of it. We must not forget that the cyborgs that inhabit cyberspace derive an understanding, a consciousness from the real, world, which is infested with prejudices and binaries. It might be possible for the cyborg to transcend the boundaries of physicality but are we as cyborgs ready to transcends our prejudices of the mind?
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