Reload Rethinking Women + Cyberculture

by Flanagan, Mary; Booth, Austin

• ISBN13: 9780262561501
• ISBN10: 0262561506
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-03
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reloadoffers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunkrs"s revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction--fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies--and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on womenrs"s lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

Author Biography

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Director of the Tiltfactor game research laboratory, and Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press).

Austin Booth is Director of Collections and Research Services at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Illustration Credits	ix
Editors and Contributors	x
Introduction	1	(24)
Austin Booth
Mary Flanagan
Austin Booth, Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction	25	(23)
Women Using Technology	42	(6)
Candas Jane Dorsey, (Learning About) Machine Sex (fiction) [1988]	48	(16)
Melissa Scott, Trouble and Her Friends [excerpt] (fiction) [1994]	64	(21)
Heather Hicks, Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the ``Human'' in Marge Piercy's He, She and It (criticism)	85	(22)
Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang (fiction) [1961]	107	(16)
Mary Rosenblum, Entrada (fiction) [1993]	123	(25)
Sarah Stein, A CyberRoom of One's Own (criticism)	148	(10)
Alison Adam, The Ethical Dimension of Cyberfeminism (criticism)	158	(17)
Sharon Cumberland, The Five Wives of Ibn Fadlan: Women's Collaborative Fiction on Antonio Banderis Web Sites (criticism)	175	(20)
Sue Thomas, Correspondence [excerpt] (fiction) [1991]	195	(14)
Jyanni Steffensen, Doing It Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity (criticism)	209	(30)
The Visual/Visible/Virtual Subject	234	(5)
Julie Doyle and Kate O'Riordan, Virtually Visible: Female Cyberbodies and the Medical Imagination (criticism)	239	(22)
C. L. Moore, No Woman Born (fiction) [1944]	261	(40)
Veronica Hollinger, (Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender (criticism)	301	(20)
Lisa Nakamura, After/Images of Identity: Gender, Technology, and Identity Politics (criticism)	321	(11)
Bernadette Wegenstein, Shooting up Heroines (criticism)	332	(23)
Rajani Sudan, Girl Erupted (criticism)	355	(19)
Catherine S. Ramirez, Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia E. Butler and Gloria Anzaldua (criticism)	374	(29)
Octavia E. Butler, Speech Sounds (fiction) [1983]	403	(12)
Amy Thomson, Virtual Girl [excerpt] (fiction) [1993]	415	(10)
Mary Flanagan, Hyperbodies, Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk, and Strategies of Resistance (criticism)	425	(36)
Bodies	456	(5)
Laura J Mixon, Proxies (excerpt] (fiction) [1998]	461	(8)
Thomas Foster, ``The Postproduction of the Human Heart'': Desire, Identification, and Virtual Embodiment in Feminist Narratives of Cyberspace (criticism)	469	(36)
Shariann Lewitt, A Real Girl (fiction) (1998]	505	(14)
Dianne Curner, Assembling Bodies in Cyberspace: Technologies, Bodies, and Sexual Difference (criticism)	519	(20)
Theresa M. Senft, Shockingly Tech-splicit; The Performance Politics of Orlan and Other Cyborgs (criticism)	539	(7)
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice B Sheldon), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (fiction) [1973]	546	(32)
Index	578