Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture
Edited by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth
2002, MIT Press, Cambridge MA USA
http://mitpress.mit.edu
581 pp., paperback, $29.95
ISBN 0-262-56150
Reviewed by Michael
R. Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
Many computer technologists are female, like interface designers
Kristee Rosendahl, Joy Mountford and Annette Wagner, hired guns passing
through various Silicon Valley concerns. Even more digital document
designers, artists and educators are female. Yet both industrial and
literary arenas of cyberspace usually remain characterized as boys'
clubs. Feminism and cyberculture--the latter a contemporary realm incorporating
both science fiction and real computers--have often been seen as mutually
isolated and exclusive. Stereotypically, male computer software engineers
internalize their stresses by neglecting the body, living on junk food
and bad habits: 'man, if my brain were hooked up to my computer, I could
program all day and night' For women, to ignore a body where pregnancy
and childbirth is possible, and menstruation cycles for many decades,
is more obviously foolish or impossible. Film theorist Vivian Sobchak
once skewered the magazine MONDO 2000's laddish elation at disembodied
jacking in to a post-'meat' existence by noting that her recent car
accident had caused her significant, lingering pain and discomfort,
resulting in a body that could not be denied.
In Reload, editors Flanagan and Booth have assembled a counter-canon
to the hegemonic male cybersphere. The collection pairs science fiction
concerned with interface of female human and machine with critical essays
that examine that fiction or artworks embodying similar concerns. This
book would be welcome in a college course on the cultures of cyberspace.
Essays and fictions are grouped together into three sections. The section
Women Using Technology includes Sharon Cumberland's appreciation off
fan-generated fiction starring actor Antonio Banderas' on several women's
websites. In the section called The Visual/Visible/Virtual Subject,
Julie Doyle and Kate O' Riordan discuss the Stanford Visible Female
Project, a digitized information database which proves to be merely
the female pelvis; the authors situate this omission in a long tradition
of sexist medical illustrations and representations. Mary Flanagan's
essay 'Hyperbodies, Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk
and Strategies of Resistance' cites players' varying relationships to
game avatars like tomb raider Lara Croft. It serves as a good bridge
to the third and final section, Bodies, which zeroes in on issues of
sexual difference.
Visual artists are discussed in Reload along with fiction authors. Char
Davies' VRML-and-SoftImage worlds 'Osmose' and 'Ephemere' appear to
the viewer to have grown organically in their powerful workstations.
Rosalind Brodsky inserts herself and her parents digitally in various
provocative historical and mass-media moments. Orlan sculpts her face
with plastic surgery into quotes of iconic women--Leonardo's Mona Lisa,
Botticelli's Venus--from western art history. Though all the essays
are worthwhile counterpoint to the fictional worlds among them, some
creak a bit. They investigate gender and identity, determined and indeterminate
sexualities, even issues of race, yet at moments they feel affectless,
as if the citation of oppressive constructions is sufficient to dismantle
them. Creative cyberworks may be crying out more for their fiery John
Berger than for their zero-degree Roland Barthes. Where is the bell
hooks of cyberspace?
The science fiction in Reload , all by female authors, is not all contemporary
writing. Included are germane works by C.L. Moore (1944), Ann McCaffrey
(1961), James Tiptree Jr. (pen name of Alice Sheldon, 1973) and Octavia
E. Butler (1983). Some of the 1990s stories feel predictable, conveying
images already seen from popular dystopian fictions peopled with resistant,
inventive tank girls. Yet among several memorable S F visions here,
the book's most powerful story for this reviewer was 'Entrada', by Mary
Rosenbloom, from 1993. This story of a domestic servant's personal triumph
within a not-necessarily-distant oppressive economic system shows the
classic power of science fiction to memorably paint both desirable and
undesirable futures. The genre carries fiction's ability to illuminate
the daily and extreme lives of individuals, and this specific genre's
ability to create alternative worlds based upon the continuation of
certain societal trends and tendencies. A century ago discussion groups
for Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward supposedly energized
the U.S. Labor movement and the ensuing Progressive era. May feminist
theory and science fiction together fuel contemporary demands for the
equitable, the just and the surprisingly possible.