Ryan Griffis : www.yougenics.net/griffis
a book review
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, a subRosa project edited by Maria
Fernandez, Faith Wilding, Michelle M. Wright, Autonomedia 2003
"Mesa says that many of the women she worked with in the clean rooms
are dead, gone before their time. 'I alone know of ten women who worked
with me who are no longer here. It's more than just a coincidence.'"
Ioffee, Karina, "The Clean Room Paradox," El Andar Magazine, Fall/Winter
2001
"Well the bosses think they're pretty clever with their doubletalk,
and that we're just a bunch of dumb aliens. But it takes two to use a see-saw.
What we're gradually figuring out here is how to use their own logic against
them."
Indian microelectronics worker quoted in Prema Murthy's "Mythic Hybrid" 2002
http://turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html
"First-," "Second-" and "Third-Wave." It is interesting that the same metaphor has been used to describe social-technological paradigms as well as historical movements in feminism. Feminism may not often be associated with technological developments in the popular imagination, but there is a record of linkages between the trajectories of gender consciousness and technology. Take the development of the "new feminism" following World War II. As it's often written, this movement's "roots lay in the broad social changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of a new economy based on mass consumption." (Griffith, Robert, Major Problems in American History, D.C. Heath, 1992) There is a web of events and ideas that is understood to have intersected with those developments, creating that "Second Wave" of feminism: the civil rights movements; the student activism of the "New Left"; French theory; anti-war activism; consciousness raising efforts; books like Our Bodies, Ourselves. Such connections between gender and technology are most certainly not a strictly historical phenomenon. So, what are the connections, entrenched and emerging, between current forms of feminism and new technologies like the two biggies: information and biological technologies? Enter "cyberfeminism."
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, a new book project by the subRosa
collective, looks forward into the present conditions of feminism, technology
and collaboration. Establishing itself as a performative engagement with
(international) cyberfeminism - the name given to various recent forms
of gender awareness that are also active in new technologies - the book
takes on the task of theorizing as well as documenting what feminism could
look like in the Information Age. While some have mythologized the "cyber" as
a break with history, Domain Errors! positions cyberfeminism within a continuum
of gendered struggles, pointing out that women's struggles have continued
in, and out of, the digital e-conomy. As one of the book's contributors,
Susanna Paasonen, outlines in "The Women Question," the haste
to capture every virtual market has led to a reinforcement of "common
knowledge" about what constitutes Women as a homogenous group. And
this reliance on stereotypes and truisms (women like curves over straight
lines and prefer pink) is hardly a benign, or even misguided, template
for content and aesthetics online: "The attempts to increase the percentage
of female internet users by producing women-specific services can contribute
to the reproduction of gender stereotypes, and a naturalization of the
status quo." (p. 106) Such marketing assumes, indeed reproduces, women
as an Other to technology, a passive, feminine consumer contrasted to the
normalized, masculine creator/user.
Recognizing the exclusionary practices of earlier forms of feminism, including
early cyberfeminism, Domain Errors! is rigorously focused on widening the
base for gender awareness. As two of the editors point out, "the lives
of white women and women of color are mutually reliant." (p. 25) The
same high tech industry that keeps many women out of prominent positions
in corporations employs women of color in both the "first-" and "third-world" in
hazardous working environments. For subRosa and their collaborators, cyberfeminism
must make the symbolic and literal jump across the borders that separate
women, whether they are racial, economic or geographic.
But it is important to point out that Domain Errors!, while much pleasure
is to be found within its pages, is far from a utopian, "We Are the
World" chorus sung by the privileged on behalf of those without access.
subRosa is proposing, indeed practicing, a multi-centered feminist approach
that represents challenges to dominant culture from positions only now
starting to gain a wider, if reluctant audience. Feminism, along with many
other liberation movements, has often, and accurately, been criticized
for its own exclusionary practices. The previous waves of feminism have
rightly been questioned for neglecting the situations of women outside
of the dominant, white affluent mainstream, just as the "New Left" student
groups were justly called on their neglect of women's struggles. Oppression
has managed to get through the firewall of cyberspace, and race does indeed
shape our experience of the digital. " Racism and Cyberfeminism in
the Integrated Circuit," the first section of the book views these
issues through the representation of race in the film "The Matrix," (Lisa
Nakamura) through the "digital divide" (Michelle Wright) to a
conversation between two Indian women with different attachments to technology
(Rhadika Gajjala/Annapurna Mamidipudi) and the conditions of difference
in Moscow (Irina Aristarkhova).
Theories of the emancipating potential of emerging information (IT) and biological
technologies have subsided over the last few years, yet we still face policy
and rhetoric that represents technological development as a cure-all for
social ills. The "digital divide" can be filled with fiber optics,
more upgrades and a "computer in every classroom." For techno-futurists,
including many feminists, the gendered and racialized body would be supplanted
by the virtual and the techno-human hybrid. But, as Domain Errors!, suggests,
the cyborg body is often a desire of "those categorized as the norm
in previous colonial and eugenic taxonomies." While the language of
race has been strategically disowned in scientific and technocratic communities,
Maria Fernandez reminds us that beliefs based on notions of racial differences
still largely influence social dynamics. Racial ideology may be, as Fernandez
suggests, part of a plastic memory imprinted within our cognitive systems
through "legitimating performances" - an ideological set of habits
that are not so easy to recognize, let alone transform.
The combination of IT and biotech has created a technological paradigm -
termed the "Biotech Century" by Jeremy Rifkin - that encompasses
everything from agriculture to reproductive medicine. These technological
developments have had, and will no doubt continue to have, profound effects
on how women's (racial) bodies are viewed and treated. The imaging technologies
that can see to harvest eggs from female donors are, as Lucia Sommer points
out, somehow incapable of seeing "the unpaid or underpaid labor of
postcolonial workers" that are comprised largely of women. (p.128) "The
Female Flesh Commodities Lab," the second and middle section of Domain
Errors!, takes an active look at developments in bio- and reproductive
technologies - including the history, and current practice, of eugenics
(Emily de Araujo/Lucia Sommer), a look at how the assisted reproduction
technologies (ART) industry has appropriated the rhetoric of "a woman's
right to choose," (subRosa) and explorations of the meanings of these
technologies for sexual and familial identity (Faith Wilding, Pattie Belle
Hastings, Tania Kupczak, Amelia Jones).
While theoretical critiques are crucial to the project of cyberfeminism,
Domain Errors! is more than a new treatise on feminism and critical theory.
The old dictum than the "personal is political" is rigorously
performed here, but the identities that constitute the personal have been
expanded and activated, as has the definition of the political. While the
book's third and last section header, "Research! Action! Embodiment!
Conviviality!" best expresses this performative intention, all three
of the book's sections combine theory, anecdote, documentation and poetic
projects. Poetic and visual projects, like those by Lucia Sommer, Christina
Hung and Hyla Willis, accompany critical and documentary texts. Terry Kapsalis
and Claire Pentecost team up to deliver an extraordinary photo-accompanied
essay on the eerily eugenics-inspired American Girl doll phenomenon. There
is also the welcome discussion and documentation of artists projects, including
subRosa's "Sex and Gender Ed in the Biotech Century" and Nell
Tenhaaf's CUSeeMe projects, that provide visual as well as contextual references
from the artists. This is not just theory informing practice - it is theory
from practice. Conviviality and embodiment are given as methodologies for
resisting the alienation and unproductive competitiveness often found in
the technological and cultural sectors.
If the current path of technological creation and use is to be diverted -
to the benefit of more, instead of less, of the global population - then
we need to develop new methodologies and networks for research and development
with those that have been excluded and silenced by the vacuum of the global
clean rooms. While many point to open source programming as a move towards
utopia, we can't assume that such changes to software structures and intellectual
property are enough. Social systems of contestation, implemented in all
domains of life are necessary to challenge the desire for political dominance,
and the stability it seems to represent. Domain Errors! provides one example
of what a cyberfeminist methodology and network might look like, and asks
for more. For subRosa and their collaborators, cyberfeminism can hardly
be based strictly in the ether of cyberspace, but must activate the spaces
of play, work, and physicality, especially those that remain invisible
to, yet affected by, the e-conomy.