Lecture 9: Feminism, Narrative & Web 2.0

Activity in Pairs:
To Review your Reading

With a partner add this to your blog post:

• Explain two sections from Braidotti’s "Cyberfeminism with a Difference"
  
• Critically analyse Braidotti’s thinking (in your two sections)
• Define keywords which appear in your selections (such as postmodernity, post-human, irony)
• Fill in the exploratree form: http://www.exploratree.org.uk/c/?x=car38191958u406egg (1 per group)
• Include at least three links to resources that help explain or develop your interpretation (images/audio/video/reference)

Group One: Rachel and Andy P. - Introduction postmodernity
and Post-human bodies

Group Two: Max and Kieren - The politics of parody
The power of irony

Group Three: Amanda and Paul - Feminist visions on science fiction
The cyber imaginary




For Next Week:

• Read: "Born Digital: A poet in the forefront of the field explores what is—and is not—electronic literature" by Stephanie Strickland, found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182942
• Bring a born digital example from your field of interest (online architecture, pedagogy, design, holography etc…)

Lecture 8: Feminist Theory,Critical Thinking and Born Digital Fiction,Rachael Folds

The story starts with the line – “I was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time”. This immediate denial of his part to the proceeding story indicates to me that it must have been a woman’s fault as he essentially excuses all men from blame.
Braidotti when discussing post modernism describes the decline of the modernist hopes as:

“Symptomatic of these changes is urban space, especially in the inner city, which has been cleaned up and refigured through post-industrial metal and Plexiglas buildings, but it is only a veneer that covers up the putrefaction of the industrial space, marking the death of the modernist dream of urban civil society.”

The reader can feel the excitement of the character in visiting a structure that epitomises Braidotti’s description of what marks “the death of the modernist dream of urban civil society.”
This text on the whole, it is felt represents the male as being the all powerful and intelligent and when a man did not fit into this stereotype, he was then referred to as girl (whimpering like a schoolgirl) thus demeaning woman.
There were strong elements of male bravado, for example when the cabbie assumes that the problem Rick is dealing with must be “Girl Trouble” and his friend that picks him up(essentially saves him) had just spent the night with a glamour model. Also when Rick states that he “handed the driver two hundred quid from the wallet” gives the impression that even though he is unemployed he is still able to splash out great sums of money just to run a red light.
I feel this story further cements Braidotti’s view that there is an “ongoing struggle with language to produce affirmative representations of women” and in this short story females are degraded by consistently being referred to as:
1. Girls and not woman
2. Objects of desire - gorgeous Greek girl or mischievous little housewife or She had a spot on her chin the size of a dung beetle thus rendering her unattractive.
Even when he lands the job at the end, there is no reference to the Alexis being responsible for his good fortune, just a reference to her bedroom eyes, subjugating woman further.
With regards to visual imagery of women, the only image of a woman is that of a naked slim woman, which it is felt, was totally unnecessary.

Lecture 8: Feminist Theory, Critical Thinking and Born Digital Fiction, Maxine Armstrong

Rosi Braidotti’s “Cyberfeminism with a Difference”: http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm

Born digital fiction from We Tell Stories: http://wetellstories.co.uk/

The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming, is an adventure novel, based on John Buchan’s, The 39 Steps, which was first published in 1915. The story is told by following red markers across a map of Great Britain and is based on Google Maps. Extra features are provided by green markers which provide background information not directly connected to the story’s plot.
Braidotti’s call that we “need more complexity, multiplicity, simultaneity and we need to rethink gender, class and race in the pursuit of these multiple complex differences” does not figure much in this story. The characters are all familiar to the spy thriller genre that features a predictably male all-action hero.
Apart from the hero, Rick Blackwell, there is his girl, Alexis, ‘a gorgeous Greek girl’, who needs rescuing and so leads him into danger. Her father, Aristotle Vassilopoulos, who is both rich and powerful, runs a shipping company.
Although Alexis turns from being a damsel-in-distress into a femme-fatale she does not hold any power in the story, that remains in her fathers hands. Rick also makes it clear he is not in love with her.
Other female characters are described in overtly sexual terms. On the plane Rick sits next to a ‘mischievous little housewife from Manchester’, whilst the ‘very pretty possibly Eastern European girl’ had been making eyes at the hero. She is later found unconscious, laying naked on a bed.
The minor male characters include a bad guy who wears a pin-stripe suit with a ponytail, the tall, wiry, Greenmantle and the older mentor-figure who starts the game, Mr Jack Kalba. Rick’s mate, Danny, from college, is one of the ‘good ones’, trustworthy and helpful, we don’t get a physical description.

The whole story is narrated by Rick so we get to hear his views and concerns, but not any of the other characters. Although I enjoyed the way you could follow the game across the map, the story was quite predictable, as were the characters. As a story it has no depth, but then it does not try to be anything other than a thriller.

Lecture 8: Introduction to Feminist Theory

Log into googledocs and complete the activity listed here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfvwnr9_59dkcrr5f5

• Key Theorist: Donna Haraway - her term "god-trick" for the idea that we can be objective, i.e. "see all from nowhere" but we've learnt that we're all situated, becoming subjectivities.
• Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva develop the idea of “situated knowledge”: race, history, culture, gender, class, location all play important roles because knowledge is always constructed through who we are
• Haraway: “the crucial political action that women and people of other marginalized groups must take is to 'refigure the terms of that story', to re-narrate, to 'produce a female symbolic where the practice of making meanings is in relationship to each other, where you're not simply inheriting the name of the father again and again.’”
• Haraway's model = new forms of narrative do not simply subsume the old, but "widen the number and kinds of stories that get told and the actors who tell them."
• “Cyborg writing" as a form of oppositional consciousness.
• Critical literacy work is fundamental to critical engagement with larger structures of ideology & discourse, & to applying lived experience to an examination of relations of power
• Situated knowledge is postmodern, i.e. remains resolutely dynamic
  
  

The links you'll need:

Rosi Braidotti's paper is here: http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm

and I'd like you to choose one of the six born digital fictions from here: http://wetellstories.co.uk/

Any questions, remember to e-mail me: jlaccetti AT dmu.ac.uk

I'll look forward to reading your critical interpretations. Keep in mind these parts of the critical thinking process:


The image is from a presentation by University of British Columbia, Okanagan education professor Phil Balcaen. Have a read here for more information on critical thinking that adds to what we discussed in last week's lecture.

Lecture 7: Critical Thinking, Maxine Armstrong

Weiss, D. (1994) Feminist Philosophy and the Digital Culture

Dr Dennis Weiss is a Professor at York College in Pennsylvania, who has published a number of articles, lectures and conferences presentations (Weiss, 2007). He currently teaches critical thinking and philosophy and wrote this text for his course in feminist philosophy.

It is relevant to our discussion on the critical thinking of feminist theory and digital cultures, as it uses feminist theories to explore digital cultures.

The first half of this text is referenced but the second half has none, so it is difficult to judge how valid his opinions are or where they come from. It is also 14 years old so digital culture has hopefully moved on in the meantime.


Booth, A. and Flanagan, M. (eds) (2002) Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, MIT Press.

A collection of critical essays and fiction exploring how women relate to virtual technologies, so again highly relevant to our discussions. It even includes an extract from Correspondence by Sue Thomas.

Only the introduction is reproduced on the Amazon website but it does introduces feminist science fiction, which is a genre I have never heard of. The index lists a number of people who could be investigated further.


Luesebrink, M.C. and Coverley M.D. (2000) The Progressive Dinner Party

A selection of hypertext and hypermedia literature works by women, written in English by international writers. The theme is a progressive dinner party inspired by the project The Dinner Party by Judy Chicargo. Each place setting is a contributor to the hypertext world with a link to a piece of their work, the Glenn Miller soundtrack does get a little annoying after a while. The website does not appear to have been updated recently as many of the links are broken, but it does still provide a useful list of women who are worth following. Sue Thomas, with Teri Hoskin, is one of the place settings with Noon Quilt. Commentary is provided by N. Katherine Hayles and Talan Memmott.

I would have liked to have seen this website updated with the links repaired and more recent work. The broken links and poor displays from some of the work shows how quickly technology had moved on.

Lecture 7: Critical Thinking, Paul D. Found

The Feminist Theory Website

www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html

This website is basically a website whose intention is to “provide(s) research materials and information for students, activists, and scholars interested in women's conditions and struggles around the world.” It is basically a database of links to articles and individuals in the feminist movement.

Although the articles are arranged by theme, not all the links to them are active. There are however, links to external websites concerned with that theme. The links to individuals do provide biographical information and a bibliography.

The website is hosted by Virginia Tech University’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, so one would expect that the articles it lists are academically robust. It was created and is edited by Kristin Switala. She is also U.C. Foundation Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

I am not sure the site has been updated since 1999 though. This could well render much of the site out-of-date.

GenderIT.org

http://www.genderit.org

A website which aims to monitor international ICT policies which effect women. It aims to be a forum of knowledge sharing, to raise awareness and encourage activism and lobbying on issues of gender and ICT. It is a repository for resource links, journal articles and case studies concerned with women's, gender and social issues in connection with the internet.

This link gives a general overview of why this is important:

http://www.genderit.org/en/policy_makers/whygender.htm

Association of Progressive Communication

http://www.apc.org/

"The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is a global network of civil society organisations whose mission is to empower and support organisations, social movements and individuals in and through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs)." It is a non-profit organisation based in the US.

http://www.apc.org/en/home/gender

The APC not only covers gender/feminist/women's issues, but also culture, media, technology and open source software, among others. It provides news, a blog, reports and papers, and a newsletter and so on. The content is kept very up-to-date.

There is also an interesting link provided, which is a guide to evaluating the use of ICT on the basis of gender:

http://www.apcwomen.org/gem/

Also of note is that the content is available via CreativeCommons License.

Lecture 7 "Critical Thinking": Kieren Boddy

Feminist Theory Websites

1) The Feminist Theory Website, the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
at Virginia Tech University, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html

This website was created and maintained by a Dr. Kristin Switala, a Professor at the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech, USA. It was the first website to appear in the google search of the term "Feminist Theory". It is a trustworthy website, in my opinion, because it was created by an academic at an accredited University and has reputable contributions by other academics.

Unlike some websites that opt to inform the user everything, in the authors words, what the subject is all about, Dr. Swatala only uses the briefest of paragraphs relating to the Feminist Theory and the different fields in Feminism as a cue for the 5425 bibliographical entries, 0593 links to Internet sites, and 0684 paragraphs giving information. It is quite different from what I am used to, but easy to follow, if you know how to use a bibliography to find academic texts and text books.

This though makes a lot of work for the reader who may just want a 'quick quote' for a simple understanding of the theory, but it is an extremely good website for finding references in the field. Unfortunately, it seems that the website rarely updates as it was in 1999 the website was last copyrighted. 

2)Feminism and Women Studies, http://feminism.eserver.org/

The Feminism and Women Studies webpage is an online resource for researchers into the subject and is ran by people associated with the Carnegie Mellon University Womens Centre. The website is a greater resource than one that is just about feminist theory, which in my opinion makes it a better website in that it gives more background information about the subject than just the theory as I feel that to have an understanding of a subject, you must know some detail about the circumstances in which the theory applies to. 

As the website was created by members of the Carnegie Mellon University, ones who knew about the subject (they where Masters Students who operated the site for four years) and it cites information and courses from other universties with similar courses, such as one from the university in 1). All this tells me that it is a worthy resource for the subject, even though compared to the whole, there is a small amount to do with feminist theory. 

It is easy to navigate the website as it has been represented in a hierarchical fasion of overarching concepts within the subject which then forks off depending on how many articles and theories are available within those concepts. That said, the few articles about feminist theory where quite old, compared to the rest of the content within the site. 

3) http://www.ladiesagainstfeminism.com/artman/publish/

Would the use of a male dominated search engine resource affect the validity in my findings into the subject???

Lecture 8: Feminism and Cyberfeminism

Rosi Braidotti Nomadic Subjects
Luce Irigaray This Sex Which is Not One
Rosi Braidotti Cyberfeminism with a Difference


Irigaray

Paul: Irigaray seemed almost entirely about "dicks" and "vaginas."

Jess: it's about "bodies."

Andy: First chapter of Irigaray (on Alice) "skirts" the issue.

"Irigaray questions the assumption that female sexuality is dependent upon male sexuality. She asks and attempts to answer, such questions as, Where is female sexuality located if it always refers back to the penis? Where does female pleasure reside? What is female desire and what does it look like, if it looks like anything at all? And why does Freud insist that the penis is the only true sex organ?"

Homosexuality for Irigaray is not sexual but economic.

"Irigaray says that in this phallogocentric model, the kind of sexuality that gets privileged is one based on looking because the one sexual organ, the penis, is visible. So the Freudian model of sexuality, which privileges the penis, is based on the visual; it is scopophilic.

They (girls) notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis. (Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, "Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes", pg.177.)

Male sexuality is based on having a penis, which is privileged because it can be seen; it is visible (and larger); therefore, it is superior. In contrast, a woman's sexual organ(s) cannot be seen; therefore it is inferior and becomes equated with having nothing. In other words, male sexuality is based on having a penis, female sexuality is based on having nothing. This system sets up the simple binary opposition of penis/nothing.

According to Freud, since women have nothing, women are always trying to get a penis for themselves in order to fill the lack: " A little girl . . . makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it" (Ibid, pg. 177). Freud theorizes that women do one or a combination of the following three things in order to fulfill the desire to have a penis:

1. She will try to acquire the penis for herself by having a baby, especially a male baby.

But now the girl's libido slips into a new position by means - there is no other way of putting it - of the equation "penis=child." She gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child (Ibid, p. 180-81).

This desire has its roots in the Oedipus Complex, when the female child yearns to have a baby by her father to make up for her lack of a penis. This "wish" is repressed and redirected to having a baby with a man other than her father.

2. She will find or attempt to find a husband who is like her father, whom she believes is capable of giving it (the penis) to her. In fact, Freud believes that in certain cases newly married women "wish to castrate the young husband and keep his penis" (Ibid, p.72).

3. She will try to procure the masculine rights and privileges that the penis represents:

The hope of someday obtaining a penis in spite of everything and so of becoming like a man may persist to an incredibly late age and may become a motive for the strangest and otherwise unaccountable actions. Or again, a process may set in which might be described as a "denial," ....Thus a girl may refuse to accept the fact of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man. (Ibid, pg. 178)

According to Freud, if a woman acts like a man, i.e., rational, logic, etc, she is in essence denying the `fact of her castration' and is neurotic.

Therefore, according to Irigaray's reading of Freud, in the Freudian paradigm, female desire is always the desire for a penis to fill the lack or nothingness. Male desire, on the other hand, is to get back to the mother's body, to have sexual relations with his mother as is evidenced in the Oedipus complex. The result is that male and female desire look different; the female attempts to fill her desire by getting a penis, and the male attempts to fill his desire by having sex with a female other than his mother.

Braidotti

Nomadic Subjectivity:

Andy: it is not a migrant but a nomadic as the fact you are constantly going.

how about in a feminist framework:

Andy: you are doing something rather than trying to become an outward goal that we get there, it is an evolving thing.

"The practice of "as-if", for Braidotti, is a "technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past in order to trace paths of transformation of our lives here and now."(p.6) Braidotti also understands "as-if" as "the affirmation of fluid boundaries, a practice of the intervals, of the interfaces, and the interstices." While grounded in postmodernist theory of repetition, parody, pastiche, etc., Braidotti is insistent that for "as-if" to be useful, it must be grounded in deliberate agency and lived experience. Postmodern subversions and parody "can be politically empowering on the condition of being sustained by a critical consciousness that aims at engendering transformations and changes." (p.7)

What makes a pastiche useful?

Andy: changes contexts. And, that context is lived experience.

Paul: but we shouldn't just do something different but something better...

But, there are no value-judgements in pomo...


What's wrong with "identity?:

Paul - it's static
Andy - identity is defined by whats round you while nomadism is defined by what you are

""desire to leave behind the linear mode of intellectual thinking, the teleologically ordained style of argumentation that most of us have been trained to respect and emulate" (29)

Braidotti - Cyberfeminism

Paul: Braidotti is saying that the visual is purely a masculine preserve and the female way to interact with things is a more sensory/audio/feel/touch language rather than looking at things. Because looking at things objectifies things.

Andy: Science fiction is good as it allows for alternative perspectives

Paul: see ikon gallery's set up on the future using *trashy* sci-fi (planets of the apes future). For Braidotti it's a way of imagining other ways of looking at things

Andy: alternative views openes it up to alternative organisations and societies etc...

Andy: in sci-fi you get entirely female societies

Jess: Is a single gender society better then?

Paul: are there roles in society better performed by women?

Jess: argghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

Paul: but there are lots of ways of being "male"

Andy: it comes down to being a person, not a gender.

Jess: what about "being"....how about "becoming."

"The central point remains: there is a credibility gap between the promises of Virtual Reality and cyberspace and the quality of what it delivers. It consequently seems to me that, in the short range, this new technological frontier will intensify the gender-gap and increase the polarisation between the sexes. We are back to the war metaphor, but its location is the real world, not the hyperspace of abstract masculinity. And its protagonists are no computer images, but the real social agents of postin dustrial urban landscapes.
The most effective strategy remains for women to use technology in order to disengage our collective imagination from the phallus and its accessory values: money, exclusion and domination, nationalism, iconic femininity and systematic violence."

Web 2.0 and Feminism

The web is platform.
Paul: people can change their identities etc... online, nothing is static.
Paul: there isn't a sense that the "now" has any sense of permanence.

Paul: is there an ideological stance in feminism today? Or is it universal?

Andy: a difference acknowledged today between everyone is the same and everyone is different.

Jess: Context is crucial.



Feminist Manifesto:

Paul: defining it as feminism is limiting

Jess: by why is it important today that we think about gender?


Andy: (from blog post) "A "male" writer could be interpreted as "female" and vice versa. Writing without signifiers becomes androgynous. If all writing is androgynous and all users are reduced to text, then all users are androgynous. With a lack of signifiers, things other than gender can also be disregarded (age, race, etc)."

Andy: but gender isn't one or the other, so why don't we disregard it?

Andy: we exist on a gender spectrum.

Paul: "there is no gender spectrum."

Jess: but that implies there is a beginning and an end

Jess: read Judith Butler Gender Butler