"Interactivity is another name for shopping, as Christine Tamblyn put it, and hyper-real gender identity is what it sells."
"the three icons I have chosen to symbolize postmodern bodies (Dolly Parton in middle; on her right Elizabeth Taylor with Michael Jackson whimpering at her side; on her left, Jane Fonda as Barbarella) are all white, especially and paradoxically Michael Jackson."
from "cyberfeminism with a difference", online essay by Rosi Braidotti 
These three icons have some features in common: firstly, they inhabit a posthuman body, that is to say an artificially reconstructed body. The body in question here is far from a biological essence: it is a crossroad of intensive forces; it is a surface of inscriptions of social codes. Ever since the efforts by the poststructuralist generation to rethink a non-essentialized embodied self, we should all have grown accustomed to the loss of ontological security that accompanies the decline of the naturalistic paradigm. As Francis Barker puts it, the disappearance of the body is the apex of the historical process of its de-naturalization. The problem that lingers on is how to re-adjust our politics to this shift.
I would like to suggest that it is more adequate to speak of our body in terms of embodiment, that is to say of multiple bodies or sets of embodied positions. Embodiment means that we are situated subjects, capable of performing sets of (inter)actions which are--discontinuous in space and time. Embodied subjectivity is thus a paradox that rests simultaneously on the historical decline of mind/body distinctions and the proliferation of discourses about the body.
An important aspect of this situation is the omnipotence of the visual media. This is of special concern from a feminist perspective, because it tends to reinstate a hierarchy of bodily perception which over-privileges vision over other senses, especially touch and sound. The primacy of vision has been challenged by feminist theories. (Braidotti)
Cybermonsters of Postmodernity
A case study : Michael jackson's face and the artist john oswald's 'Plunderphonics' (sampling from Michael Jackson's 'Dangerous'.The History of Michael Jackson's Face
Wired re: John Oswald
In 1989, Oswald collected his experiments and pressed a thousand copies of the Plunderphonic CD, which he distributed free of charge to radio stations, libraries, musicians, and critics. Plunderphonic asked the musical question, How can we be sure the "original" artist, whose wishes are sacrosanct, did not derive anything from any other source? Oswald's stunning cover montage for Plunderphonic grafted Michael Jackson's head and leather jacket onto an otherwise naked, Caucasian, shapely, young, female body. According to Oswald's reading of US and Canadian copyright law, and some lawyers' interpretations, Oswald had thought that by not selling Plunderphonic he was legally in the clear. "I was fairly confident that what I was doing was not breaking the law, but I got a threatening letter from some record-industry lawyers saying that they considered what I was doing illegal," Oswald recalls.
Noting the "artistic alterations plastic surgeons have performed on the singer," Oswald asks, "Who owns Michael Jackson's face?" Would one of those surgeons sue Jackson over subsequent alterations? "Copyright protects against defacing one's creative endeavors, after all." (Wired)
official site
Tiger man Dennis Smith
A San Diego computer programmer who has spent £100,000 on tattoos and plastic surgery to turn himself into a 'tiger' wants a fur graft. Dennis Smith is tattooed from head to toe with orange and black stripes and his teeth have been filed to needle point. He has also had latex whiskers implanted and surgery to his lips so he has a permanent snarl. He now wants a surgeon to graft tiger fur on to his skin, like a perma-wig.
Mr Smith, who has changed his name by deed poll to Cat Man, said: "I have a collection of old tiger pelts from the days of hunting. I want these grafted on to me. It will cost another $100,000 but will be worth it. "When I have the coat of a tiger, I feel I will have reached my goal in life." His fingernails have been crafted into sharp talons while his hands have tattooed markings like a tiger's paws. He says he feels like a tiger. (news report)
Cyborgs and Science Fiction : The Postmodern Gothic
cyborgs 'r us : illustrated chronology of the cyborg in early cinema & on
h. r. giger's website
The Swiss surrealist Giger's popular art book, Necronomicon, has lead to the design of the alien creatures in Ridley Scott's Alien movies (Alien and Alien 3). Giger has also contributed in the movie Poltergeist II. He has revolutionized the look of science fiction forever with his unique biochemical style which depicts the synthesis of technology and biology as they may evolve with the influence of man. (from a fan site)
Feminist Science Fiction
*** feminist science fiction and fantasy :resources for the serious fan including online critical theory and many useful links
drag kings, muscle girls, sexual agents
the drag kings of club casanovaDRED of DRED Love Experience (TM) is just back from her world tour of Brazil, Denmark, Australia, and England, which included sell outs of her one woMan show "D.R.E.D. : Daring Reality Every Day - Exposures of A Multi-Spirited, Haitian-American, Gender-Illuminating WoMan! - And Then Some!" (c); and premiers of the award-winning film Venus Boyz
female 'others'
the hottentot venus is a 19th century example of a raced woman as monstrous other. Abjection in sci-fi is a legacy from 19th century colonialist discourses about monstrous races and deviant sexes.
In the March 30 2003 issue of the New York Times Style supplement, a fashion spread set in a wandering circus troupe. Scale, race, exoticism and animality are at work in a commodification of difference. Note the huge leash and tiny, obviously male dog.
some contemporary artists mentioned by Braidotti
writing marks an intransitive sort of becoming, i.e.: the kind of becoming that intensifies one's level of joyful creativity and pleasure. (Braidotti)
for examples of writing/artwork see :
Laurie Anderson's home page,
Jenny Holzer's online artwork 'ada',
Kathy Acker's 'requium' online (her last published writing, an opera libretto)
and Barbara Kreuger's ad-copy influenced posters
Cindy Sherman's more recent film stills
Surgically modified performance artist Orlan : Orlan's official site and agallery of images
other cyber art links
Prosthetics
"Cyborgs - if by that we mean bionically and computer/prosthetically enhanced bodies - are among us now, and many are elderly. Grosz's 'uncertain future' is almost certainly the future of our own bodies, including the maintenance regimes necessary to keep the elderly cyborgs functioning (and others whose bodies intersect with prosthetic technology). Like finicky home computers, the feeding pumps, dialysis units and colostomy systems crash and break down, and very little training or support exists for the cyborgs, health care workers or domestic companions who keep them operating... people who are low on the rungs of social power including the infirm, recent immigrants, elderly wives, HIV+ companions and middle-aged daughters (often with jobs and dependent children of their own, the so-called 'sandwich' generation). Where does this daily grind of plugging, unplugging, washing, sterilizing and calibrating life-support systems fit on the cyber-theory continuum?" (Judith Doyle, "keyboards and controllers : (c)literacy in the finger-moves of digitalia).feeding pumps and 'access devices' (tubes).
NOTE : we are unable to find any pictures online of how to use feeding pump equipment
Nowhere are the inequities of access to prosthetic, surgical and bio-technologies more apparent than in war zones. See International Campaign to Ban Landmines
"Cyber-teratology" - Braidotti's project & methodology
seminar notes by Judith Doyle for
"Race, Gender and Digital Technology"
Professor Barbara Crow, York University
for my mother, who is to be found in my work
cyber : a Greek word meaning "steersman"
teratology : the causes and biological processes leading to abnormal development and birth defects
Braidotti describes her project as 1) a cartographic practice of critical theory and 2) a quest for new styles for non-unitary, nomadic subjects. Admitting problems with the linearity of the book form, she calls her book 'web-like', non-linear, and a pact of tolerance for complexity with her readers, whom she hopes will manipulate it with the "techno-intimacy" they enact with CD-Roms and web sites.
She asks an epistemological/aesthetic question - how does one invent new structures of thought? Is scientific rationality suitable to express new subjectivities? Is artistic creativity any better? Will mythos or logos leap across the Po-Mo void?
Her response is to bring Delueze's ideas of philosophical nomadism to the discussion. The nomadic or rhizomatic mode speaks about transitions and processes, not fixed points (passing through discourses, building footbridges, representing boundary and in-between zones). "Difference" is both the problem and the solution. (a dandelion is an example of a rhizome, with roots all across the network, rather than centralized).
cartography of the postmodern gothic
Dislocations of identity are induced by fast rates of change. Drawing on psychoanlysis and semiotics, Braidotti maps the cyber-monsters of high-tech societies, then, "figures" them in light of philosophical nomadism and its central concepts of embodiment, materialism and sexual difference. Cyber-monsters reveal the deep-seated anxieties of the dominant "Majority subject", but also reveal patterns of subversive becoming-minoritarian. There is hope for the new monsters, who, though commodified, are emerging in their own right as alternative, resisting and empowering subjects.
cybermonsters of late postmodernity
In this age of proliferating differences, devalued others - woman, ethnic, racialized, earth/nature - return with a vengance. The modern subject constructed himself through what he excluded as much as his sense of agency. This "phallologocentricism" works by organizing differences in a hierarchical scale calibrated by the measure of what Delueze calls "the Majority subject". In a process of "metaphysical cannibalism" (Braidotti), the dominant subject feeds on its structurally-excluded others. Difference is translated into a language of monstrosity. Difference as perjoration is strategic and illuminates asymetrical power relations.
The women's movement, postcolonial subjectivities, fundamentalisms, nationalisms, environmentalisms and other formations have critiqued and created potent images of "threatening alien others". Braidotti maps critical discourses that are both "symptoms and responses" to the crisis in classical philosophical discourse : linguistics, ethnology, biology, anthropology, and others : have divided up the labour of struggling with what to do with "human nature", analyzing perjorative, pathologized 'others' who are boundary markers of modernity.
Opposition is no longer dialectical. Contrary to the expectations of the classical left, "differences" have been turned into marketable, tradable, consumable 'others' in late post-industrial societies, for example, in fashion and the neo-colonial romantic appropriation of 'difference' in pop culture and "world music". People do not circulate nearly as freely as goods and commodities.
Whiteness, the colour of ghosts and zombies, is... a major factor in regulating access.
Capitalism is vampirism, sucking value from pre-existing formations, but in killing them endowing them with eternal life (Massumi). The media industry is a "serious, never-ending, forever dead source of capital; a spectral economy of the eternal return". (Braidotti)
There is a paradox (or schizophrenia) : on the one hand, globalization of economic and cultural processes result in conformism in lifestyle, telecommunications and consumerism. On the other hand, it results in marginalization and the resurgence of local, ethnic and cultural differences. Technology is a major factor here.
Technologies are intrinsic to this discussion; key are issues of access and participation (barely 20% of world households have electricity). One must wonder about the "democratic" let alone "revolutionary" potential of the electronic frontier (gender, age and ethnicity are axes of negative differentiation).
The so-called "global" economy is in fact a highly localized and situated phenomenon that consists in packaging and marketing differences as consumable goods (what Braidotti usefully calls "glocal"). "Glocal" power both blurs and upholds boundaries between home and elsewhere, calling for new types of power analysis. Conceptual creativity is needed because of the decline of legal economies and the rise of structural illegality (capital as cocaine) and exploitation, alongside the difficulty of upholding copyright law. These features exist in an extensive web of what Foucault calls "bio-power" (diffuse, all-pervading survellance and over-regulation). Keeping track of "zigzagging" itineraries is critical theory's harsh task, which continually bumps up against dialectical habits of thought.
postmodern gothic
The monstrous, mutant and downright freakish have gained widespread currency in post-industrial cultures. The eviction of freaks from their highly-policed territories has licensed their commodification as the subject matter of pop culture, where video drugs compete with pharmeceutical ones. The visual dimension of contemporary technology defines its all-pervading power (Foucault's panoptic eye).
Feminism is passionately, parodically and paradoxically involved with the cybermonstrous universe. The 1990s saw a re-appropriation by feminists of bad girls, gender trouble, the "strange, outlawed and alien" who were rejected by 1980s feminists in their fear of being marginalized from the mainstream.
contemporary science fiction
Sci-fi, as unpretentious "low culture", offers a testing ground for Delueze's work on culture, embodiment and becoming, and a breeding ground to explore what Haraway calls "the promise of monsters".
Braidotti argues for the relevance of Deleuze's theories of becoming in reading science fiction books and films, while challenging his idea of "sexually-undifferentiated becomings" by pointing to gender-specific patterns in sci-fi.
Following de Lauretis and Foucault, Braidotti proposes that sci-fi has moved beyond the utopia-distopia split, to "heterotopia" - mutually undermining meaning systems that point to the dissolution of the unitary subject. Put more simply, contemporary sci-fi reflects our sense of estrangement within the fast rate of changes now. It defamiliarizes the here and now, rather than dreaming of possible futures. A "post-nuclear sensibility" is in the work of authors including Martin Amis, Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. In scenarios of extinction, we contemplate our own death.
Consumer commodities represent both the promise of enjoyment and its deferral, the "ghostly presence-absense of fulfillment". Post-industrial subjectivity is about consumerism, the constant management of 'crisis' and contradicitions. Winners put money on the line; losers put their bodies. Cyborgs are the images of movie stars, and also the exploited underpaid bodies of labourers.
"Philosophy takes place in the world: it is co-extensive with the cartographic practice that consists in taking stock of the social imaginary, the social positions it sustains and the desires it sponsors. On all these scores, therefore, I can only conclude that science fiction is a highly philosophical genre." (Braidotti, 189)
feminist sci-fi
Sci-fi roots are in 19th century Gothic literature, with its unusual surplus of women travellers, adventurers and murderesses. Most Gothic heroes are wicked. Feminist sci-fi is technophilic, distanced from feminist traditions of opposition to biotechnology (i.e. Gena Corea's 'the mother machine'). Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) envisioned a Marxist utopia where technology would relieve the drudgery of paid work. Feminist sci-fi challenges notions of 'woman' and 'man', opening up new transgendered possibilities (i.e. Le Guin). Contemporary 'monstrous others' blur the lines between organic and inorganic, technophobic and technophilic, through metamorphoses and mutations.
extra-uterine births
Braidotti enumerates features of the monstrous : changes of scale (aggrandizement and dwarfness in freak shows since the 19th century), machine-made humans (Frankenstein, Metropolis), alien insemination (Cronenberg's the Fly), machine-woman copulation and high-tech birth (Terminator 2), cloning, male birth (Alien), feminization and sex change (Psycho), and hybrid morphologies (becoming animal/insect). (192-195)
the material/maternal feminine as monster
The "monstrosity of the female" links to religious taboos about decay and incest, and is depicted as the monstrous womb (Alien) and the lesbian vampire. Beneath these images lies anxiety about the failure of men to maintain paternal authority (Cronenberg's films). The images speak of dangers that threaten postmodern or "soft" patriarchy.
Deleuze would identify this as the fear of the Majority-subject, who sees the monstrous feminized Other of sci-fi as a threat to his patriarchal power. Only in his eyes are others' differences flattened into a generalized category of 'difference', a perjorative status to a masculine, white, heterosexist norm.
Abjection in sci-fi is a legacy from 19th century discourses about monstrous races and deviant sexes. The monstrous, feminized amazon of sci-fi discloses fear of reproduction without men and gynocracy. The monstrous female has turned into the monstrous feminist.
Writers including Cate Sandilands have detected, in what she calls "erotophobia", "the channeling of desire into narrow reproductive acts (that) mark, erroneously, the possibility of immortality in the threatening darkness of death". (Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist)
The monstrous is the counterpart and counterpoint to the emphasis that dominant post-industrial culture has placed on the construction of clean, healthy, fit, white, decent, law-abiding, heterosexual and forever-young bodies. Techniques such as plastic surgery for disciplining and perfecting the body also help it supercede its natural state. In the monstrous we find a return of the repressed, the queer, aging, diseased, homeless, raced, and leaky body.
Multiculturalism and the critique of Orientalism and racism have contributed to a rethinking of practices around monstrous bodies.
Monsters and freaks are metamorphic creatures. Their "catastrophic event" has already taken place. They survive and cope. Freaks exemplify the virtual catastrophe by embodying it. The effect is cathartic, erotic and deeply emotional. (scrambling the code with detachable organs).
In her discussion of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', Braidotti finds a flawed book, riven with a subtext - the "activity of writing is doomed to failure and basically unfulfilling." The monster Frankenstein is "a most imperfect writing machine". Writing is eroticized like an agony of longing, a "delirium of self-legitimation", a "bachelor machine". This is a prototype for a contemporary sensibility in literature and art (Braidotti collapses fiction, film and visual art under the rubric of authorship).
Blurring the boundaries between Mother and Daughter, and re-writing the mother/daughter relationship is a project of feminist authorship, for example, in the 1980s, in ecriture feminine and Irigaray's paradigm of the "politics of sexual difference". Psychiatrist Melanie Klein reconfigured this discussion to include within feminist concerns a "bad attitude" of daughters to mothers, including aggressive and hostile emotions.
Braidotti declares, "I do not share in either the rejection of the mother, or in the denigration of the material/maternal feminine which it entails. This does not mean I'm thrown back into the murky depths of uterine essentialism". (205)
In 1990s writing and art, we can detect what Hal Foster has called "traumatic realism" (see for example, the trajectory of Cindy Sherman's work from her early self-embodiment in film stills, to her recent monstrous self-depictions). The last frontier of this representational approach is the corpse, an attraction for the forensic, the scarred and scared witness.
There is a "quasi-isomorphic" relationship between the technological tool and the maternal body. She reproduces the future within a regime of high-tech commodification. With a misogynist twist, women are blamed for the crisis of identity in postmodernity.
In times of war, women have been called upon to save humanity, but have seldom drawn any real benefits from these episodes of heroism; women's participation needs to be negotiated and not taken for granted. Rather than inverting the dialect of the sexes (making women heroes), Braidotti believes the tensions of the end-of-century crisis of values should explode within feminism, bringing its paradoxes to the fore.
One site for examining these tensions is in (dis)ability issues, and access to and the maintenance regimes of prosthetics.
In late postmodernity, various brands of nihilism are circulating. This has to do with the media economy of the spectral, where images live on forever, a "ghastly, ghostly economy of vampiric consumption". Braidotti counters this with a call for a sustainable definition of the self to "disintoxicate" us, a culture of affirmation and joy. "The metaphoric company of monsters - those existential aristocrats who have already undergone the mutation - can provide not only a solace, but also an ethical model." (211)