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rhizomes.04 spring 2002

Thinking Through the Cybernetic Body: Popular Cybernetics and Feminism

Susanna Paasonen

[1] As discursive field, cyberfeminism appears as located between two mutually exclusive, or at least

contradicting articulations of embodiment. The prefix "cyber," drawing from both scientific and popular

investigations into cybernetics, refers to articulations of the body as a system of feedback loops and

autonomous responses, which owe to the Cartesian paradigm separating the body from the realm of

knowledge and the rational mind (cf. Judovitz 2001). Feminism, again, refers to the legacy of the

women's movement and feminist theory that have, since the 1960s, called for a politics of location in an

attempt to map anti-Cartesian forms of reason and embodiment. Radical feminist poet and theorist

Adrienne Rich (1995, 284) phrased the question in 1976: "cannot (women) begin, at least, to thinkthrough the body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized?" Radical feminism mapped the

female body and sexuality as terrain of power and knowledge, breaking the transparency of the "natural

body." During the past decades, studies on embodiment and power have become a central field of

interest, further adding to the feminist project of rethinking embodiment, markers of difference and

identity.

[2] Since the early 1990s, "cyber" has become something of a free-floating signifier for things to do with

computers and information networks, and cyberfeminism has surfaced as a discursive arena for

imagining and analyzing inter-connections of gender, new technology, and the Internet in particular.

Donna Haraway's widely quoted and referenced "Cyborg Manifesto" (orig. 1985) has inspired

researchers to rethink the boundaries of the human and the machine, "nature" and "artifice," but this

rethinking has not in all cases included critical engagement with the Cartesian legacy of cybernetics. In

what follows, I look at the apparent tensions between "cyber" and "feminism," moving between popular

representations of cybernetic bodies and feminist appropriations--as well as critiques--of cybernetics.

This enterprise involves an attempt to understand how "cyber" became used in discussions on gender

and embodiment before the first articulations of cyberfeminism (VNS Matrix's 1991 "Cyberfeminist

Manifesto for the 21st Century"; Plant 1995) and the wider cyberspace discourses of the 1990s.

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[3] Given that both the field of cybernetics (in its both academic and popular forms), and feminist

theorizing of technology and embodiment span several decades and branch out in various ways, neither

of the two can be thoroughly discussed in the confines of a single article. Therefore, I focus on some

rather iconic moments of representing and explaining the body in the 1960s and 1970s, from astronaut

cyborg figures to the television series The Bionic Woman, and Shulamith Firestone's visions of cybernetic

feminism. I believe that revisiting these discourses on technology and embodiment makes explicit the

need to rethink the uses of cybernetic figures in, and their implications for (cyber)feminist practices.

Enter popular cybernetics

[4] Generally speaking, cybernetics stands for the science of communications and automatic control in

both machines and organic systems, as outlined by Norbert Wiener (the 1948 Cybernetics, or, the

control in human and machine; the 1950 Human Use of Human Beings). Cybernetics has beenestablished as a field of scientific inquiry within engineering, computer science, medicine, anthropology,

sociology and psychology, but equally as representations, figurations and visualisations circulated in

popular media culture--that is, as popular cybernetics. Cybernetic research feeds into popular

cyberneticsas terminology, general principles, experiments and analogies: of these, analogies between

brains and computers as information-processing systems, the body as cybernetic system of feedback

loops and autonomous responses, and the centrality of homeostasis in cybernetic systems are among

the most common and well known. Cybernetics has been widely appropriated in science fiction (cf.

Hayles 1999), psycho-cybernetics self-improvement literature and consulting (cf. Maltz 1970; Andersen

1985), as well as popular overviews on new technology (Halacy 1965; Ceuzin 1965). Cybernetic

principles such as feedback, self-organization, or homeostasis, have been employed in writings on

media, from Marshall McLuhan and the video movement in the 1960s and 1970s, to the cyberpunk

fiction and cyberspace texts of the following decades.

[5] The concept of a cyborg, cybernetic organisms, was first introduced by Manfred E. Clynes in the 1960

article "Cyborgs and Space," co-written with Nathan S. Kline, which dealt with possible adaptations and

modifications of the human body for space travel. Clynes and Kline saw the challenges of space travel as

an invitation to participate in human evolution, making it possible for astronauts to adapt to alien

environments. Cybernetic self-regulating man-machine systems became the means to accomplish these

ends without altering human heredity. Cybernetic systems would operate in collaboration with the

body's autonomous controls so that astronauts would not need to consciously operate any gadgets,

"leaving man free to explore, to create, to think and to feel" (Clynes and Kline 1995, 29-31; also Gray

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1995, 47). The suggestions made by Clynes and Kline included primarily combinations of hypnosis, drugs

(psychic energizers, even amphetamines) and surgery for altering the bodily system (Clynes and Kline

1995, 31-33), although Clynes also suggested the possibility of mechanical devices being incorporated in

"the regulatory feedback chains--the homeostatic mechanism that keep us viable for such an

astonishingly long time" (Clynes in Halacy 1965, 8).

[6] According to Clynes, "the main idea was to liberate man from constraints as he flies into space--that's

a kind of freedom--but it seemed necessary to give him bodily freedom to exist in another part of the

universe without the constraints that having evolved on earth made him subject to." (Gray 1995, 47.)

Having evolved on Earth, one's body is conditioned in certain ways and can be reconditioned to better

correspond to external conditions: meanwhile, "the self" assumedly remains the same. The individual is

represented as if separate from, although tied to, its "vessel," the body, and through scientific progress,

"the self" can be freed from the body and its immanence.[7] Clynes' and Klines' 1960 article evoke interest both in the media and within NASA: Life magazine

featured an article based on their ideas on the possibilities of cyborgs, and NASA commissioned an

entire study on cyborgs (Gray 1995, 47). Cyborg fantasies were part and parcel of the more general

enthusiasm concerning space and astronautics, as fuelled by the contemporary quests by Soviets and

Americans to "conquer space." Space opened up as a new frontier previously familiar from science

fiction but now reachable by human kind. As pointed out by Donna Haraway (1989, 137), space has

been figured and imagined of as the future of man, "escape from the bounded globe into an anti-

ecosystem called, simply, space." This view is exemplified in Paul Ceuzin's (1965, 4), introduction to a

popular French overview on astronautics, which attaches space travel to subversion in the history of

humanity. Ceuzin declares that: "[o]ur century will remain in history as the one that will have seen the

first human escape from the terrestrial prison," and continues, that "[astronautics] is already

transforming our mentality and [--] tomorrow it will perhaps transform it morally and physically. We are

thus living the largest human revolution; it remains to be seen if, in spite of our weaknesses and

limitations, we will be able to triumph it." (Ceuzin 1965, 5.) The earth and the body are both depicted as

prisons from which man must liberate himself and aim towards transcendence, freedom from the

surroundings, and optimization of one's bodily mechanism. In his foreword to D.S. Halacy's popular

overview on cybernetic organism, the appropriately titled Cyborg--Evolution of the Superman, Clynes

reproduces the same discourse:

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A new frontier is opening which allows us renewed hope. The new frontier is not merely space, but

more profoundly the relationship between 'inner space' to 'outer space'--a bridge being built between

mind and matter, beginning in our time and extending into the future. [--]

A new word was created in 1960 to describe a new concept for man's venture into space: Become a

spaceman; live in space as at home--if possible, better than home! Do not take into space earth's

hindrances and encumbrances. Be a free spirit in space, weightless and not weighted down by the

limitations of terrestrial ancestry. (Clynes in Halacy 1965, 7.)

Being a spaceman, a superman implies freedom to transcend confines such as situatedness and

embodiment, and to make oneself at home in space, immaterial and weightless. As Mary Russo (1995,

26) points out, such images of "freedom as limitless space, transcendence, individualism, and upward

mobility of various kinds" have been central to modernism and liberation discourses, which tend to

reproduce the body/mind -split. Following Donna Haraway (1992, 297), such formulations arerepresentative of productionism which comes down "to the story line that 'man makes everything,

including himself, out of the world that can only be resource and potency to his project and active

agency'. This productionism is about man the tool-maker and -user, whose highest technical production

is himself; i.e., the story line of phallogocentrism."

[8] The 1970s in particular saw numerous visualizations of popular cybernetics, literary, cinematic, and

televisual alike. In many of them, bionics and cyborgs signified a discursive terrain for articulating novel

possibilities of the human: with cybernetics, men were able to rebuild themselves as "better, stronger,

faster," as the opening sequence of the popular cyborg television series, The Six Million Dollar Man

(1973-1978), declared. However, as Lynn Spigel points out in her studies on media and space frenzy of

the 1960s, these dreams of novelty became articulated in highly racialized and gendered terms: the

most visible agents of space exploration were white male engineers, on whose expertise the expeditions

were based. White men were equipped for conquering "the new frontier" while popular representations

focused on women as the wives of astronauts, or occasionally as "sexy robots" (Spigel 2001, 125-128).

According to Spigel, the space race, "provided a popular spectacle through which Americans could view

the future in terms of the past and still feel as if they were going somewhere," and helped the whites to

secure their power "through the control and colonization of space," as well as shaping the culture's

imaginary geography of the universe" (Spigel 2001, 133, 145). These ideas of simultaneous

transformation and reinforcement of the status quo become quite evident in the series Six Million Dollar

Manand its spin-off, The Bionic Woman(1976-1978), which were both based on Martin Caidin's novel

Cyborg(1972)

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Imagining the super(wo)man

[9] Martin Caidin's Cyborgdepicts the construction of the former astronaut, Colonel Steve Austin as the

world's first cyborg. Inspired by cyborg research, the novel relies on Norbert Wiener's analogies

between the human nervous and muscular systems and artificial feedback mechanisms, as well as the

possibilities of integrating them--both illustrating these principles and developing them further in the

sphere of science fiction. In addition to the term cyborg, it celebrates the idea of bionics as a cutting-

edge field of cybernetics: in D.S. Halacy's (1965, 41) definition, bionics stands for "a further realization

by biologist and engineer that in many ways man could be equated with machine and vice versa."

Cyborg reiterates such principles and equations, as did the later television series with their

representations of bionic embodiments. These rationalized understandings of embodiment are explicit

in a paragraph, where Doctor Wells explains the functioning of bionic limbs that are integrated into the

body of his patient, Steve Austin:Your brain sends down it signal in the form of electrical impulses. These travel through the nerve

networks of your body. While your arm remained a stump [--] the signals terminated where the limb

was severed. But now the wires in your bionic limb are connected directly--fused, as I said--with those of

the stump. They have literally became a single unit. And the elements of the bionics limb have been

programmed to respond in direct proportion to the electrical signal that is sent out by your brain. They

are also programmed to respond in the same manner as did your entire arm. This is the computer

aspect of the bionics system. It's basically the same for man or machine." (Caidin 1972, 134-135.)

Austin's reconstructed body is discussed in terms of "cables and wires" that "carry messages of

awareness and pressure and feel, and, of necessity, pain" and his brain is defined as "the most

extraordinary computer ever known" (Caidin 1972, 119, 131). In the pilot episode of the television

series, Colonel Austin is offered the over 800 page manual of his bionic arm, and its operations are

explained in some detail, simultaneously also providing user guides to Austin's own body. As a

prototypical cyborg, Austin both embodies and exemplifies cybernetic understandings of human

embodiment, which fundamentally reproduce the Cartesian legacy of framing the body as a "dissected

corpse, whose mechanical logic is associated with the artifice of automata" (Judovitz 2001, 71).

[10] Picking Colonel Austin as the ideal specimen of "a new breed," a "kind of superbeing" (Caidin 1972,

63-64) has explicit eugenic undertones. Austin embodies ideals of hegemonic masculinity (rationality,

physical strength, heterosexual appeal, technical skills, intelligence, courage) in a Caucasian figure, and

he is chosen as the test subject due to his exceptional abilities that are highlighted throughout the

novel. Austin is an experienced test pilot, the youngest ever astronaut to walk on the surface of the

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moon, who "stood six feet, one inch tall, with eyes deep blue; a lean, muscled frame, almost rangy; a

laugh filled with warmth; and an animal attraction about him," considered among the astronauts as

"close to genius." With masters degrees in aerodynamics, astronautical engineering and history, and an

undefined Ph.D. degree, he is also star athlete in most sports. As doctor Oscar Goldman summarises,

Austin is a man "so unusual, extraordinary [--] Physically an outstanding specimen. A great athlete. An

advanced student of the military arts." (Caidin 1972, 59, 123-124.) With bionic additions, his athletic

skills become not only superb, but superhuman(Caidin 1972, 152, 160-161).

[11] Steve Austin is a perfect representative of the white race: male, heterosexual, North-American,

rational and superior in physical and mental performance, a man who has conquered space. Technology

steps in as means to make him into representative of a new breedthat combines the best specimen of

human kind with the best of cutting-edge technological research and development. This convergence

reads as explicit reproduction of white mastery and use of technology in supporting the hegemony ofwhite masculinity--especially in the context of gender, race and the space race (cf. Spigel 2001).

[12] In 1975, Lindsay Wagner made a guest appearance in The Six Million Dollar Man as Austin's

childhood sweetheart and tennis professional Jaime Sommers, with whom Austin falls in love. Sommers

is Austins' ideal heterosexual partner--white, athletic, blonde, and feminine, but their romance is

violently ruptured as she nearly dies in a sky-diving accident, suffering the loss of three limbs and an ear.

Austin convinces OSI to rebuilt her as the worlds first female cyborg with a bionic arm, legs, and an ear

that enables her to hear distant things. Austin and Sommers are now truly "made for each other," as his

mother jokes, and the couple plans to marry. During this happy engagement period they are

continuously seen running at amazing speed, on and off-track, smiling at each other and leaping over

fences, tractors, and other obstacles. Yet, to paraphrase the opening sequence of the series, Austin is

quite obviously "better, stronger, faster" of the two. While Sommers appears to be the female

equivalent of Austin, and his "natural" love-interest, she is also situated as his inferior in performance. In

spite of her technological prowess, Sommers remains a representative of "the weaker sex."

[13] However, Sommer's body soon begins to reject her new bionic limbs. After series of painful

headaches, she suffers massive cerebral hemorrhage and dies on the operation table--only to be

resurrected a year later to star in her own series, The Bionic Woman, where she has a cover job as a

school teacher at an air base and is recurrently shown together with both children and animals. In 1977,

she even teamed up with a bionic canine, named Maximilian.

[14] During the mid-1970s, the Bionic Woman was a female heroine marketed to children in yearbooks,

lunch boxes and as action dolls. Her athletic and merry figure represented optimism in terms of

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technological progress and the ability of cybernetics to change the world for better (Wilson 1995, 243;

cf. Gough-Yates 2001). In addition, she embodied both the cybernetic understanding of body as a

system that can be reconstructed and rewired with technology, and hegemonic understandings of the

appropriately raced and gendered body with decidedly feminine characteristics. Jaime Sommers may

have been physically stronger than non-bionic males, but her femininity expressed itself as care, nurture

and empathy (towards children in particular)--and, as the second episode of her series, "Angel of Mercy"

(1976) was eager to point out, she had a strong aversion not only towards violence but also needles and

snakes which rendered her nauseous, almost hysterical.

[15] Sommers was both fully bionic and female in the sense of being feminine and heterosexual--and

thus she guarded the unity of embodiment, desire and sexual practices even with bionic rearrangements

(cf. Butler 1990). As a figure of popular culture, the bionic woman offered visualizations of technological

embodiment and frameworks for considering the role of cybernetic technologies. However, the seriesalso illustrates Anne Balsamo's notion that new technologies should not be too readily connected to

novel ways of interpreting the self and the world, for "[i]t is just as likely that these new technologies

will be used primarily to tell old stories--stories that reproduce, in high-tech guise, traditional narratives

about the gendered, race-marked body" (Balsamo 1996, 132; also Braidotti 1996). Along with other

contemporary fictions dealing with life-like robots (e.g. The Stepford Wives, 1975; Westworld, 1974;

Futureworld, 1976), the series simultaneously blurred the boundaries of organic and machine bodies,

and reinforced those of gender as a hierarchical, binary system of differences that can be decoded from

the body.

[16] By the early 1970s, "cyber" had entered into the general vocabulary and popular cybernetics had

been formed as a field of representations concerning the boundaries and the nature of the human.

These representations resorted to ongoing scientific research (as in the case of NASA-funded cyborg

research, and, more currently, Alife and AI). However, popular cybernetics should also be understood as

building upon, and feeding itself. Individual texts both draw from, and add to popular cybernetics as sets

of concepts, figures and analogies that may be quite detached from research. Visualizations and

adaptations of cybernetic themes have formed a landscape for imagining the possibilities of new

technology, of freeing man from confines set by evolution and embodiment. In the 1970s, "cyber" came

to signify the possibilities as well as dangers of technology in various fields of culture, feminist studies

included. Given that fictions concerning reconstructions of the human body have long made use of the

figure of woman as machine, such investigations into the body-politics of cybernetics were greatly

needed.[1]

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Feminist articulations of "cyber"

[17] In her 1970 The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone outlined the need for, and possibilities of

cybernetic socialist feminism. The book envisions an alternative form of cybersociety brought forth by

increased computerization, automation and the developments in high technology. In addition to the

obvious affinities to cyber terminology, Firestone relies on mechanistic understandings of the body as

object to be controlled and known, belief in rationality and reason, as well as social planning and the

organization of society with the aid of technology and science--themes central to contemporaneous

cybernetic social theories (Mki-Kulmala 1998).

[18] According to Firestone, as part of the current social, cultural and political system a cybersociety

would be both patriarchal and classist, and add to the marginalization and oppression of women,

whereas the alternative one would be based on female control of technology, ecological responsibility,

and a radical redefinition of the society (labor, family, love, leisure) both on the level of production andreproduction. (Firestone 1970, 230-231.) Such a post-heteronormative cybersociety would mean public

computer centers, extensive use of contraception and reproduction technologies which would free

women from the confines of childbearing.

[19] The dialectic of sex in her book title refers both to a revolutionary process leading towards a future

society, and the underlying gender dynamics that have structured society from prehistory to the

present. Firestone anchors women's oppression firmly in biology and nature: women's reproductive

capacity is the cause for the original division of labor, "oppression that goes back beyond recorded

history to the animal kingdom itself" (Firestone 1970, 2). Consequently, reproduction and female

embodiment become the cause for gendered division of labor, and the fundamental gender dualism is

seen to spring from sex and biology (Squires 2000, 366; Haraway 1991, 10). Technology, again, steps in

as means for overcoming the tyranny of embodiment and biology. As science and technology move

toward uncovering the laws of nature, it becomes possible to fight nature: through control over

technology, women can restore the ownership of their own bodies. This, again, asks for a rethinking of

the very categories of nature and culture. (Firestone 1970, 2, 11, 226.)

[20] Firestone's ideas can be--and they have been--critiqued as a utopian science fiction narrative,

illustration of ultra-rationalism, technological optimism or determinism.[2]Certainly her model readily

assumes that changes in the system of production and reproduction will do away with gender as a

regulatory system of bodies, gender, desire and individual intelligibility (cf. Butler 2000, 75). Firestone

sees power as patriarchal and oppressive, and does not account for its productivity, which leads into the

idea that once the social and cultural conditions and practices (such as those of co-habitation) change,

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people will be liberated and free from the confines of normative heterosexuality, and power will be

radically redefined in terms of gender, age, class and race. Furthermore, Firestone builds on cybernetic

principles of bodies (as well as societies) as systems that can be known and controlled. The body

becomes articulated as other, a system that the self can "operate" and master like other natural objects.

[21] As Donna Haraway argues, Firestone's lacking vision of a feminist body-politic leads her into

"reducing social relations to natural objects, with the logical consequence of seeing technical control as

a solution. [--] That is, she accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social

relations. In this context, liberation remains subject to supposedly natural determinism, which can be

avoided in an escalating logic of counterdomination." (Haraway 1991, 10.) The Dialectic of Sexstands in

clear opposition to many major contemporary radical feminist texts (e.g. Rich 1976/1995; Daly

1978/1990) in its arguments for overcoming gender with the aid of technology, and positioning nature

as the cause for gendered, raced and classed relations of power. Taking up and reproducing thecybernetic discourse of the body as prison of the mind that can be reworked to better suit the needs of

the environment, Firestone also turns a blind eye to anti-Cartesian takes on embodied subjectivity.

[22] Thinking against the Cartesian legacy, Adrienne Rich (1995, 284) points out that "[w]e are neither

'inner' nor 'outer' constructed; our skin is alive with signals; our lives and our deaths are inseparable

from the release or blockage of our thinking bodies," and argues for a need to think not outside the

female body and thus produce old forms of thinking, but through the body in its full complexity and

political significance. This process is of particular importance to women, who have "tended either to

becomeour bodies--or to try to exist in spite of them" since the "female body has been both territory

and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited and assembly-line turning out life" (Rich 1995, 282-285).

[23] Rich, like Firestone, describes processes through which women have become used as tools and

machines of reproduction, but does not credit this to biology or female capacity for reproduction.

Rather, the oppression of women is based on the integration of reproductive capacities in an order of

male political control and economic power (Liljestrm 2000, 258). Feminist body politics, in Rich's

formulation, includes women taking over tools of reproduction: not shifting reproduction to the terrain

of technoscience, but opening reproduction, sexuality, and parenting up for redefinition. Contrary to the

Cartesian paradigm that separates minds and bodies, souls and mechanical systems, reason and

experience, Rich aims to outline alternative starting points: "Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim

it. To reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body in particular living human individual, a

woman." (Rich 1986, 213.) As Marianne Liljestrm (2000, 268) points out, Rich defines the body as a

crossing of material and symbolic forces, as a discursive location inscribed with multiple codes of power.

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[24] In her call for embodied knowledge and feminist ethics, Rich, like several other radical feminist

writers, argues against the Cartesian legacy and refuses to mark the body as other (cf. Braidotti

1993;.Gallop 1988). Firestone, again, refers to cybernetic, Cartesian-influenced formulations of body as

perfectible machine: the self as "ghost in the machine, the centralized fountain-keeper, sole agent and

administrator of the mechanized functions of the body" (Judovitz 2001, 78). While these stances appear

to be mutually exclusive, "cyber" and feminism have been bridged together within cyberfeminism since

the 1990s. Cyberfeminism has provided spaces for articulating connections between women and

computer technology. However, the tensions between mechanistic and anti-Cartesian feminist stances

have not been solved.

Cyborg figurations and the notion of skin

[25] Like Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway argues for feminist incorporations and appropriations of

technology and overcoming the dualities of nature and culture, organic and inorganic, female and male.She uses the figuration of cyborg as feminist appropriation of military and NASA funded research

projects as a boundary figure that refuses origin stories of fullness or "seductions to organic wholeness"

(Haraway 1991, 150). Unlike Firestone's dialectic model, Haraway's manifesto does not depict a state of

future possibilities, but conceptualizes the contemporary situation with its convergence of human,

animal, and machine, reading it is as a possibility for feminist politics of difference. Yet, like Firestone's

model, the cyborg figuration is utopian.

[26] Haraway's cyborg figuration is something that, following Angela Bammer (1991, 4, 155), may be

identified as a partial vision, which can "provide a sufficiently open space into which to project the

possibility of as yet unchartable change." Like other figurations, the cyborg stands for "a politically

informed account of an alternative subjectivity," feminist forms of knowledge "that are not caught in a

mimetic relationship to dominant scientific discourses" (Braidotti 1994, 1, 75) and disrupt "the

teleological evolution of both humans and machines, nature and culture. Figurations are like myths with

seams in--or myths turned inside out. They are unnatural, irrational and very partial." (Kember 1998,

118.) Thus figurations unavoidably fail, if read literally rather than figuratively: as fantasies of

overcoming the body through the use of technology, as science fiction tales of humanity made machine,

or unlimited possibilities of gender-switching and identity play (cf. van Lenning 1997, 138-139; Klein

1999, 202, 208).

[27] In cyberfeminist texts, Firestone's utopian futures are relatively seldom acknowledged, while

Haraway's cyborg manifesto has become something of an iconic reference--or, as Nathalie Magnan put

it during the 2001 Very Cyberfeminist International, a "holy text." Firestone's cybernetic visions may be

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accused of uncritical embrace of Cartesian principles, but this is considerably less so with Haraway's

cyborg figuration. Nevertheless, one may ask, to what degree are cyborgs open to feminist

appropriations, to being uprooted from their military and techno-scientific contexts?

[28] Writing on the centrality of science fiction in the U.S., Sharona Ben-Tov (1995, 143) argues that the

wide appeal of Haraway's figuration is owed to the lure of technologization as cultural fantasy that

"depends on believing that the world really lends itself to complete definition and control by science

and technology." In Ben-Tov's reading, the cyborg manifesto does not have the rhetorical power to

subvert the ideology on which it is built, or to fully overcome the underlying objectifying understandings

of embodiment. She argues that "Haraway's image of the skin is a passive shell between the Cartesian

self and the object world. Cyborg embodiment means installing devices in the shell, augmenting it with

machines that 'can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves'." However, "[m]achines

don't blur the boundary of the self; they just extend it." (Ben-Tov 1995, 144, 146.) According to Ben-Tov,Haraway simultaneously reproduces the liberatory rhetoric of science fiction and technological

utopianism that she aims to confront.

[29] Although Ben-Tov's reading can be criticized for being too literal and not giving full credit to the

cyborg as figuration--its strategic nature in negotiating ground for articulations of feminist subjectivity--

it should be noted that the cyberdiscourse which Haraway employs in the manifesto has force that

feminist appropriation may not be able to subvert. Cyborg imageries figure embodiment in ways similar

than Shulamith Firestone, as a rationalized system that can be known, controlled and improved as to

liberate people from biology. Once the body becomes construed in such a mechanical vein, it is quite

difficult to reverse this logic for outlining alternative forms of human-machine connections. Such friction

between cyberdiscourse and the project of "thinking through the body" has become more explicit in the

later appropriations of the cyborg figuration than it was in the speculative manifesto.

[30] In cyberfeminist texts of the 1990s, the appeal of cyberdiscourse, enthusiastic towards the

possibilities of computer technology, often anti-political in its articulations of cyberspace as alternative

realm and tied into ideas of transcending the body (Adam 1997, 20-21) tended to override feminist

concerns for anti-Cartesian reasoning and body politics. As information networks became articulated as

a cyberspace, a parallel reality "on the other side of the screen" where old identifications and

subjectivities were said to collapse (Plant 1995, 54; Plant 1997, 213), or as spaces of transformation and

identity factories (Stone 1996, 180-181)--only to quote some of the best known authors identified with

cyberfeminism--identity and embodiment became conceptually separated, and, in many cases, the

previous was simply left behind.

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[31] The figure of cyberspace owes equally to popular cybernetics and the inter-connected fantasies of

space, exploration, and freedom. As Constance Penley (1997, 22) points out, "'space' remains one of the

major sites for utopian thinking" in the U.S., and "'going to space' is still one of the most important ways

we represent our relation to science, technology, and the future." To paraphrase Penley (1997, 15-16),

fictions such as Cyborgand Bionic Womanrepresent a similar utopian stance towards the possibilities of

technological progress. As texts of popular cybernetics, they both humanize high technology and

provide a vocabulary for discussing it. In bionic fictions, progress through technology is tied with NASA in

the shape of a male astronaut protagonist, yet in them, the act of "going into space" (technological

progress, humanized science, future of man) takes place on the surface of the earth, and the human

bodybecomes the space to explore and modify. Spaces of progress and adventure, then, open up on

various level with references to cybernetics: as the outer space of astronautics, the inner spaces of

bodies and minds, and the terrain of cyberspace.[32] Freedom from bodily constraints, various means of transcending material conditions, have been a

recurrent theme in cyberdiscourse since the 1950s: bodies have been subject to manipulation, their

automatic functions have been simulated with machines, bodies have been replicated and replaced by

machine ones, and finally the body, as "meat," has been left behind in cyberspace fantasies.

Furthermore, while gender, along with other embodied differences and the materiality of bodies, tends

to disappear in abstracted cybernetic models, the varying representations of virtual embodiments in

cyberspace tend to be clearly gendered and heterosexualized (Springer 1996; Balsamo 1996; Braidotti

1996). There is something of an obsession towards embodiment in cyberdiscourse--embodiment

constantly becomes "an other" that needs to be controlled and objectified, rendered open to

manipulation and altering. The tendency to think of bodies as something that one has, rather than

something one is and does, leaves unnoticed that bodies are not capsules that "we" inhabit, but our

very beings. Identity categories are inscribed in our bodies, read and performed: thus bodies are "the

transparent enabling power and 'zero-degree' of our agency" and yet opaque, "within our agency, yes,

but certainly in excess to our volition" (Sobchack 1999, 48).

[33] The issue of skin, addressed by Ben-Tov in her critique of Haraway, may be central in re-thinking the

relations of individuals, bodies and technology. In her Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed (2000, 46-47)

argues that a feminist body politic should go beyond Adrienne Rich's focus on "my body," that is, "the

equation between lived experience, the privatised realm of 'the my', and particularity," since "my body"

is possible in its particularity "only through encountering other bodies, 'your body', 'her body and so

on." This involves thinking of bodies in relation to others, marks of gender, race, and age, and seeing

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particular bodies as carrying "traces of the differences that are registered in the bodies of others "

(Ahmed 2000, 44, emphasis in the original). For Ahmed, the project is one of thinking through the skin,

rather than the body: skin does not simply stand for a surface of signs (color, wrinkles, hair, etc.) but for

boundaries that are assumed to contain subjects "inside" while keeping others "outside." In other

words, skin signifies a mechanism for social differentiation(Ahmed 2000, 44-45.).

[34] This conceptual shift enables a consideration of some bodies as more visible and marked than

others, bodies coming to matter through the skin, and people becoming situated in relation to each

other (through proximity and distance). Skin becomes readable as a kind of interface that is nevertheless

fully material (cf. Tikka 1996). Furthermore, thinking of the materializations of bodies as "systems of

meaning," helps to bridge the possible conceptual gaps between the body as lived, and the body as

signs, and also provides a stance for analyzing understandings of the body as a (cybernetic) system and

object.Epilogue: Us versus Them--Who?

[35] Cyberfeminism becomes often articulated against "feminism" which signifies the "second wave" of

the 1970s, and is understood as homogenizing, essentializing, and anti-technology. Accusing feminism of

reductionism, cyberfeminist articulations postulate the "second wave" feminism as a version of

gynocentrism and cultural-feminism where women and nature are allies against the masculinist culture

of technology and control. As Faith Wilding (1998) has noted, cyberfeminists tend to depict 1970s

feminism as monumental, essentialist, anti-technology as well as anti-sex, while there may be little

understanding of the history of feminist theory and practice. And, paradoxically, "cyberfeminism has

already adopted many of the strategies of avant-garde feminist movements," such as separatism and

women-only groups (Wilding 1998, 7). Any closer reading of feminist texts of the 1970s and 1980s

reveals a wide array of takes on technology, from Mary Daly's anti-technological views to Shulamith

Firestone's embrace of high technology and computing, and feminist uses and critiques of technology in

fields such as cinema studies and photography (cf. Penley 1988; Spence 1995). Certainly there has never

been such a thing as "a feminist definition of technology," but rather multiple feminist takes on and

critiques of different technologies, as well as attempts to appropriate them and alter their meanings.

Here the question concerns processes of signification, tactics of representation and the uses of

technology (how it is made to signify), rather than its assumed, unchanging essence.

[36] Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich in particular reappear as generic representatives of cultural-feminist

essentialism both in terms of the category of women and the nature of technology. Rosalind Gill and

Keith Grint (1995, 4-5), for example, discuss eco-feminist alliances between women and nature as

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essentialism that is unable to deal with change and celebrates traditional ideas of femininity as female

specificity. This essentialism, represented by Rich, Daly and Susan Griffin respectively, is discussed as

persistent essentialism and "flawed as a theoretical perspective and disempowering as a political one"

(Gill and Grint 1995, 4-5, 12, 14). The historical, political and theoretical contexts of their writing are not

analyzed: thus attempts to acknowledge embodiment and embodied (sexual) differences stand for

essentialism that the authors aim to overcome with critical constructivism.

[37] Certainly eco-feminist definitions of gender, power and technology are not encouraging in terms of

female technological agency and they may work to (re)produce assumptions of women as nurturing and

holistic. However, it should be also noted that accusations of essentialism tend to erase contexts of

these specific articulations, along with the differences between essentialisms. [3] Teresa de Lauretis

(1989, 6-8) points out how poststructural theory in particular often becomes depicted as the anti-thesis

for essentialism, as the "new and much improved" version of feminist theory--or, as she ironicallyremarks, as the "dark horse and winner of the feminist theory contest" (de Lauretis 1989, 7). Feminist

theory becomes narrated as a tale of progress while feminist texts are situated in what de Lauretis

(1989, 10) calls a reductive opposition. Such formulations, which often bypass historical and political

contexts, fail to acknowledge the importance of existing feminist work and their figurations of gender

and society.

[38] Overviews on feminist critiques of technology may produce narrative trajectories from the denial to

the embrace of technology, from alliances with nature to those with culture, from essentialism to

constructionism (or, to personify, from the discourse represented by Mary Daly to that represented by

Donna Haraway). This narrative may also be posed in somewhat modernist terms as one of progress and

increasing theoretical sophistication (cf. Ahmed 1998, 70). The coexistence of different paradigms of

thinking, their varying aims and tactics, again, cannot be accounted for in such a model where feminisms

lose their plurality and become articulated as tales of progress, encompassing antagonistic--or even

dialectical--struggles (Butler 1997, 1-2; de Lauretis 1995, 15; de Lauretis 1989, 3-10).

[39] While there is little doubt that crucial paradigmatic shifts have taken place within feminist

theorizing in the ways of conceptualising power, difference and the varying locations of women, the

inter-connections of race, sexuality, class, and age, and in the increase of inter-disciplinary work and

criticism of epistemological foundations (Sandoval 2000; Brooks 1998), I am more skeptical towards the

totalizing representation of feminist theory as radically divided into "before" and "after." Following Lynn

Spigel (2001, 361, 370), simplifications of the past take place in order to affirm the present, implicitly

suggesting the "'progress' of contemporary culture" and its "hip attitudes." Such enlightenment thinking

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involves a recontextualization of the past "in order to believe in the progress of the present," and it

includes as much forgetting as it does remembering (Spigel 2001, 362).

[40] I believe it crucial to account for the connections as well as differences, if one is to formulate a

critical and conceptual stance for cyberfeminist investigations into gendered bodies and technology.

When thinking in terms of oppositions (us and them, before and after, then and now) a certain othering

and willful forgetting takes place. This may disable us from seeing the degree to which novelty is

articulated in terms of the old, and the ways in which central questions concerning embodiment, power,

or technology have been previously articulated and debated.

Notes

[1] Mary Daly is, of course, well known for her work on robotitude and alienation. See Daly 1990;

Halberstam 1998; I have discussed Daly's work in relation to popular cybernetics and The StepfordWives in Paasonen 2001.

[2] Most recurrent criticism concerns Firestone's belief in technological progress and her views on

reproduction technology (Woodward 2000, 66; discussed in Franklin 1999). Firestone's views on gender,

technology, and cybernetic socialism have been left with less attention (see Squires 2000, 366;

Halberstam 1998, 476; Paasonen 2000).

[3]Fuss 1989, 4. Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar (1995) address essentialism and constructivism in their

article," aiming to point out the failures of eco-feminist stance towards technology, as well as those

within constructivist feminist theories, since, according to Grint and Woolgar, anti-essentialist takes on

gender and technology tend to resort to essentialist claims concerning sexism and patriarchy. Dismissing

both essentialism and anti-essentialism as inconsistent and insufficient, they pose post-essentialism as

the means to account for the contingent and textual 'nature' of both gender and technology. While their

discussion on the different meanings of essentialism is interesting, and while I agree with many of their

notions, the essay refers to feminism as a general term, and, doing this, performs a unifying move.

While some feminist authors and their views are specifically addressed, they become representative of

"feminism" in general. Meanwhile, feminist discussions of essentialism (Braidotti 1994; Fuss 1989; de

Lauretis 1989; Butler 1990; Haraway 1991) are not addressed, which leads into an illusion that these

debates have not taken place. As the discursive arena is cleared from feminist theorization, the two

male authors are left with the space to scrutinize feminist writings on technology and to practice

Foucauldian power/knowledge in which feminism becomes defined and understood, then put in its

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place and revealed as lacking. Politics of location, or situated knowledge, in this context, appear not to

be an issue.

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