Is there Postlife after Postfeminism? Tropes of Technics and Life in Cyberfeminism

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 29, 1999, Pages 119-129

  Munster, Anna ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0346543589     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649993371     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. This point is really developed throughout Foucault's work but is elaborated in detail in the text, 'Afterword: the Subject and Power' in Herbet L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 1982, pp. 208-26.
2. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Memory and Counter-Practice (Cornell University Press) Ithaca and New York, 1977, pp. 139-64.
3. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancee (Verso) London, 1988, pp. 61-3.
4. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1986.
5. Among the better known examples of the technology as enemy approach would be J. Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Polity) Cambridge, 1991. The notion of a feminist alliance with technology is the subject of the rest of this paper.
6. See F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, preface, sect. 6, W. Kaufman and RJ. Hollingdale (trans.) (Vintage Books) New York, 1969, p. 20.
7. I am here joining Foucault's concept of genealogy with that of Gilles Deleuze in, Nietzsche and Philosophy, H. Tomlinson (trans.) (Althone) London, 1983, pp. 3-35.
8. Donna Haraway, 'Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985, pp. 65-108; rpr. Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 1-42.
9. Donna Haraway, 'Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985, pp. 65-108; rpr. Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 1-42.
10. Rosi Braidotti, 'Cyberfeminism with a Difference'. http://www.let.ruu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/ braidotl.htm, 1996.
11. 'geekgirl interviews sadie plant', geekgirl. (1), http://www.geckgirl.com.au, 1995.
12. Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (Spinifex) Melbourne, 1995.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.) (Athlone) London, 1988, p. 90.
14. An interesting article about the growth of surveillance via data is M. Nixon, 'Dataveillance', 21c, no. 2, 1996, pp. 30-6.
15. Zoë Sofoulis, 'Contested Zones: Futurity and Technological Art', Leonardo, vol. 29, no. 1, 1996, pp. 59-66.
16. This point is made by Alison Caddick, 'Making Babies, Making Sense: Reproductive Technologies, Postmodernity and the Ambiguities of Feminism' in P. Komesaroff (ed.), Troubled Bodies (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, 1995, pp. 142-167.
17. Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Fourth Estate) UK, 1997, pp. 130-44.
18. Sadie Plant, 'The Virtual Complexity of Culture' in George Robertson, Melinda Mash et al. (eds), FutureNatural (Routledge) London and New York, 1996, pp. 212-14.
19. See H. Moravec, Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press) Cambridge, MA, 1988. Moravec and this kind of AI paradigm come under feminist scrutiny in the book by Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (Routledge) London and New York, 1998.
20. See H. Moravec, Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press) Cambridge, MA, 1988. Moravec and this kind of AI paradigm come under feminist scrutiny in the book by Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (Routledge) London and New York, 1998.
21. See M. Kestigan, 'I, Rodney', 21c, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48-51.
22. M. Kestigan, 'I, Rodney', p. 50.
23. S. Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, p. 144.
24. S. Plant, 'The Virtual Complexity of Culture', George Robertson, Melinda Mash et al. (eds), FutureNatural (Routledge) London and New York, 1996.
25. Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1994, p. 18.
26. Frances Dyson, 'Gasping at the New Life of Technology' in Martin Thomas (ed.), Uncertain Ground (AGNSW/Power Publications) Sydney, forthcoming.
27. This is quite different from the newer studies of non-organic or inert matter which are also emerging within physics and which suggest that there is a specific form of life at work in complex physical systems such as non-organic molecules. The difference lies in the desire to accord these some specificity due to their materiality. See, for example, Manuel de Landa, 'Nonorganic Life' in Jonathon Crarey and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (Zone Books) New York, 1992, pp. 129-67.
28. N. Katherine Hayles, 'Narratives of Artificial Life', George Robertson et al. (eds), FutureNatural (Routledge) London and New York, 1996, p. 151.
29. This is illustrated in further detail in Allequere Roseanne Stone, 'Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures' in Micheal Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press) Cambridge, MA and London, 1994, pp. 81-118.
30. Emmeche, Garden in the Machine, p. 51.
31. Hayles, 'Narratives of Artificial Life . . .', p. 147.
32. One of the only critical but non-reactive readings of 'cyberculture' can be found in Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life (Routledge) London and New York, 1997.
33. S. Plant, Zeros and Ones: Women and the New Technoculture, pp. 3-4.
34. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 190.
35. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press) New York, 1994, p. 105.
36. Zoë Sofia, 'Cyberfeminism: The World, the Flesh, and the Woman-Machine Relationship', paper delivered at Australian Council for Computers in Education, Perth, 9-13 July 1995.