Response: Haraway, Plant, and Turkle

This week I am responding to Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Chapter 8, “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Chapter 9, “Virtuality and its Discontents” by Sherry Turkle, and “Ada Lovelace and the Loom of Life” by Sadie Plant in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production.

This week’s prompt is:
What political potential might radical feminists (or radicals of any stripe for that matter) find in the new media forms that are absent in the mass media world of the decades immediately following the Second World War?

It seems that, for the writers we read this week, the primary political potential in new digital media lies in the ability to dissociate oneself from traditional labels and categories that have, historically, been used as justification for disenfranchisement or disempowerment: gender, race, class, etc. The anonymity of the internet would allow members of these groups to express their ideas and creativity apart from these restrictive classifications. Cyberspace represents for these writers a deconstruction of artificial, repressive social categories.

This is certainly so for Haraway. She rejoices in the fluid nature of the cyborg: “[Cyborgs] are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation” (153). The cyborg, according to Haraway, distills human interaction down to pure consciousness. This, she says, “changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century,” because it blurs all sorts of constructed boundaries—not only race, class, gender, and so on, but also human-animal, or material-immaterial (149). As a feminist, she sees this blurring of boundaries as a deconstruction of artificial conceptions of femininity: “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested scientific discourses and other social practices” (155). Modern electronic media will change women’s experience by allowing them modes of expression previously denied to them due to such socially-imposed constructions.

Plant gives a more historical view of the way the development of electronic media has influenced and involved women. She details the relation between computers and textiles, a craft generally associated with women, and discusses the history of women and computers, beginning with Ada Lovelace and continuing through twentieth-century women computer programmers. While her argument may be less theoretical than Haraway’s, she makes a case for computers and electronic media as an achievement of women as well as men. She marks an important place for them in a field which, today, is often associated with males, thus emphasizing their capacity to partake in a traditionally “masculine” discipline. She does not attempt to argue that women are somehow innately suited for computer work, as Freud tried to argue that women are innately suited for textiles. Rather, she indicates that women were allowed entry to the world of programming because it was considered menial, like weaving (p. 262). Once allowed entry, they excelled in ways that would be influential in the development of contemporary electronic media. Plant sets forth women’s historical involvement with the development of computers as a testament to their ability to excel in traditionally male industries, thereby undermining the assertions of Freud and others that women cannot think analytically.

While Turkle focuses less on women and more on middle-class young adults, she, like Haraway, discusses the empowerment offered by internet’s deconstruction of accepted social categories and norms. In the world of MUDs, people’s ability to recreate themselves as they desire offers them a sense of empowerment they may not feel in their real life. Although she seems wary of the conflation of simulation and reality, she does remark the greater level of participation exhibited by members of cyber-communities. Like Haraway, Turkle affirms that the disassociation of self from embodiment is empowering. She does offer a caveat: “The challenge is to integrate some meaningful personal responsibility in virtual environments. Virtual environments are valuable as places where we can acknowledge our inner diversity. But we still want an authentic experience of self” (p. 254). Haraway does not seem to share this concern for authenticity—she rejoices at the way cyberspace blurs all boundaries. Turkle, on the other hand, only values the empowerment of cyberspace to the extent that it does not replace simulation for reality. While she may also appreciate cyberspace’s capacity to deconstruct borders, it is useless to her if it results in an inability to discern or an apathy towards reality.