# data[].attributes.body
Females are always participators rather than bystanders in the aspect of technological innovation, however, their contribution to technological development is overlooked in the male-dominated society. If regarding women as ‘zeros’ and seeing men as ‘ones’ based on binarism, only in the mathematics field and digital space, the gender has the possibility to achieve equality because they are all basic binary numbers and required to work together, which is unachievable fantasy in the secular norm.

# data[].attributes.body
Probable

what is likely to happen,

widely used

Plausible Future

the space of scenario planning and foresight,

the space of what could happen;

exploring alternatives rather than predicting

Possible

should be scientifically possible,

should be a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario

(make things acceptable),

fantasy

Probable and Plausible

determined by government and industry

# data[].attributes.body
I thought I can use Speculative design as a tool to help me critically imagine the possible and plausible future, for instance, looking at speculative design and unsuspected design projects and processes to think about language (future language) also critique and consider the present (contemporary language).

# data[].attributes.body
Dreams are downgraded to hopes and as designers, what alternatives we could design for fixing the earth we live in?

Speculative design transforms my thought of seeing design as a tool used for problem-solving into regarding the design as a means of speculating how things could be.  Speculative design also makes me rethink the inbuilt optimism of design, does every big problem can be divided into small parts and solved step by step? If not, what we can do? Is changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior a problem in itself?

“Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality" and based on my understanding, this reality refers to today and the future that we want and don't want.

# data[].attributes.body
Speculative design is a means that thrives on imagination to speculate the possible future, which helps people redefine the relationship to reality and makes humans better understand the present and discuss the future. Also, it opens new perspectives on wicked problems, explores alternatives and shows different possibilities for the future.

# data[].attributes.body
p110-111

# data[].attributes.body
we are cyborgs and cyborgs are us

# data[].attributes.body
We are cyborgs and cyborgs are us

# data[].attributes.body
Robots not only can communicate in human code without becoming human beings but also can self-evolve and self-reproduction with their mechanical bodies and biological brains.

# data[].attributes.body
From this book, I learned that the technological revolution breaks materiality and creates a condition for the posthuman era, which changes the identity and body of the human. Virtual reality and artificial intelligence make human identity fluctuates between materiality and information pattern, and the posthuman perspective sees the body as an original prosthesis, which can be articulated with machines and eliminate demarcations between humans and robots.

I thought this perspective is similar to Haraway's that bodies can be interfaced with any component if proper code can be established for information in a common language.

# data[].attributes.body
We generate robots or virtual babies means giving them life in a way and they can freely communicate in a human code, self-evolve, and self-reproduce to inherit our genes.

# data[].attributes.body
"Robots are going to evolve in unique and peculiar ways, which are hard to predict. The main risk run by humans consists in turning the robotic difference into a stigma for new forms of racism, based on how far such a difference can be placed from the human norm. To osmose with the robot ontology, humans have to undergo a radical deconstruction of the human as a fixed notion, emphasizing instead its dynamic and constantly evolving side, and celebrating the differences inhabiting the human species itself.“

# data[].attributes.body
"Robots can communicate in a human code without being human; they can hold a mechanical body and a biological brain; they have been constructed from human knowledge and categories, and still, they transcend them both."

# data[].attributes.body
Probable

what is likely to happen,

widely used

Plausible Future

the space of scenario planning and foresight,

the space of what could happen;

exploring alternatives rather than predicting

Possible

should be scientifically possible,

should be a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario

(make things acceptable),

fantasy

Probable and Plausible

determined by government and industry

# data[].attributes.body
I thought I can use Speculative design as a tool to help me critically imagine the possible and plausible future, for instance, looking at speculative design and unsuspected design projects and processes to think about language (future language) also critique and consider the present (contemporary language).

# data[].attributes.body
Speculative design is a means that thrives on imagination to speculate the possible future, which helps people redefine the relationship to reality and makes humans better understand the present and discuss the future. Also, it opens new perspectives on wicked problems, explores alternatives and shows different possibilities for the future.

# data[].attributes.body
p110-111

# data[].attributes.body
Dreams are downgraded to hopes and as designers, what alternatives we could design for fixing the earth we live in?

Speculative design transforms my thought of seeing design as a tool used for problem-solving into regarding the design as a means of speculating how things could be.  Speculative design also makes me rethink the inbuilt optimism of design, does every big problem can be divided into small parts and solved step by step? If not, what we can do? Is changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior a problem in itself?

“Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality" and based on my understanding, this reality refers to today and the future that we want and don't want.

# data[].attributes.body
"Xenofeminism is about more than

digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks."

"Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. ‘Gender abolitionism’"

"Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics"

# data[].attributes.body
"XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds."

"XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist."

"XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world."

"Xenofeminism is a rationalism."

# data[].attributes.body
1. Life and flesh with digital technology
2. Cyber technoscience and genomic imaginaries

# data[].attributes.body
"The CyberFeminists were techno-utopian thinkers who saw technology as a way to dissolve sex and gender divisions. "

# data[].attributes.body
Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist but advocates sex diversity. In my perspective, gender diversity benefits to breaking the initial stereotype and reshaping a fresh inclusive gender culture, however, the differences of genders will inspire potential inequality.

# data[].attributes.body
In The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Cuboniks (2014) advocates xenofeminism is anti-naturalist, and xenofeminists refuse that biology and gender at birth define destiny and argue for gender equality, and they also insist on “xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist…Let a hundred sexes bloom!” rather than eliminating differences between genders. Also, further alienation will free females from unfair natural forms that patriarchy burdens on women. Different from these perspectives, Haraway (1991) claims that "the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world” and “we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. ” Therefore, the gender inequality will disappear once the concept of genderless is constituted, but how can we achieve genderless?

# data[].attributes.body
Feminism stress genderless, which asks to consider how can change the identification of nature from an impossible reality to a possible unreality? How can apply this identification in cyborgs and women? As a monster, can we create the meaning for another natural order?

# data[].attributes.body
This article helps me rough understand the history of Cyberfeminism.
During reading, I noted down some keywords chronologically.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Politics for Alienation

Laboria Cuboniks

Zero

0x00

Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.

0x01

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.

0x02

Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.

0x03

The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction.

0x04

Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism–because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself–and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.

Interrupt

0x05

The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. Whilst capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it.

0x06

Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of twenty-first century feminism–from the remnants of postmodern identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism–struggles to adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.

0x07

We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age–from sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images–the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world. Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from–and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends.

0x08

The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world’s poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages that have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.

Trap

0x09

XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so little. Without the labour of large-scale, collective social organisation, declaring one’s desire for global change is nothing more than wishful thinking. On the other hand, melancholy–so endemic to the left–teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species to be wept over and that blips of negation are the best we can hope for. At its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude, and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which too often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia, and–under the guise of being realistic–relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates.

0x0A

We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few–a violent particularity of exclusivity–ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin.

0x0B

A sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps) admirably expanded thresholds of ‘tolerance’, too often we are told to seek solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being ‘born’ this way, as if offering an excuse with nature’s blessing. All the while, the heteronormative centre chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and queer politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and doubt. The ‘given’ is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty, whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature’s shrine cracked, and new histories–bristling with futures–escaped the old order of ‘sex’. The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. The time has now come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won.

0x0C

If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation. Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate. These puritanical politics of shame–which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies–leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.

0x0D

What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’, ‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up. The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires.

Parity

0x0E

Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. ‘Gender abolitionism’ is not code for the eradication of what are currently considered ‘gendered’ traits from the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster–the notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine. But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in seeing the sexuate diversity of the world reduced. Let a hundred sexes bloom! ‘Gender abolitionism’ is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. ‘Race abolitionism’ expands into a similar formula–that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than than the color of one’s eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form: you’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited.

0x0F

Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects–the abolition of class, gender, and race–hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars–namely Eurocentric universalism–whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even–especially–when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this).

0x10

From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity. Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise self-reflection so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political bodies and something that can be appropriated against the numerous oppressions that transect with gender and sexuality. The universal is no blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose XF as a platform. The very process of construction is therefore understood to be a negentropic, iterative, and continual refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to emerge as an ‘invisible hand’ from apparent spontaneity; or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford.

Adjust

0x11

Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. ‘Nature’–understood here, as the unbounded arena of science–is all there is. And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and the non-scaleable; the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and Nature as an un-remakeable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.

0x12

This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim.

Carry

0x13

The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the visual in today’s online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation. But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past. Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality.

0x14

Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ and reciprocally, how a ‘we’ can be articulated. With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy–the coordinated writing of space.

0x15

From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere–the way of the commune–or bearing its burdens manyfold–the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.

0x16

From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of hormones–who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes–is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market pharmacies it let loose–together with a publicly accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow–was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from ‘gatekeeping’ institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of ‘gender hacking’ is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software–constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine?

0x17

From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or top-down impositions of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers.

Overflow

0x18

XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with ‘waiting’. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic parasite–one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery?

0x19

Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics–a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps.

0x1A

Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!

If nature is unjust, change nature!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map.

# data[].attributes.body
The Xenofeminist Manifesto | Laboria Cuboniks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‘We Are the Future Cunt’: CyberFeminism in the 90s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The CyberFeminists were a group of angry and hilarious techno-utopian thinkers who emerged in the early 90s, and saw technology as a way to dissolve sex and gender divisions.

# data[].attributes.body
In my opinion, the cyberfeminism movement is brave and excited but without comprehensive and reasonable strategies, the promise of being free from sexism was empty.

# data[].attributes.body
From the narrative from these members of VNS Matrix, I read out the inequality for females in the digital world:

1. The technological environment is a masculinist space without critique.

2. computers were mostly in service to the patriarchal overlords.

3. Women were excluded from the game culture in the early nineties.

# data[].attributes.body
How could feminism enter cyber and become flesh?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
​Image via Virginia Barratt.

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

VNS Matrix emerged from the cyberswamp during one Australian summer in 1991, on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent.

In the heady early years of the World Wide Web, four Australian women- Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt-made fierce and funny feminist art under the name VNS Matrix. They were part of a cultural movement called ​Cyberfeminism, which peaked in the early 1990s and dissipated sometime between the bursting of the dot com bubble and the coming of Y2K.

VNS Matrix worked in a wide variety of media: computer games, video installations, events, texts, and billboards. In their iconic " ​Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," they called themselves the "virus of the new world disorder," and "terminators of the moral codes." With this irreverent, but keenly political language, they articulated a feminist aesthetic of slimy, unpretty, vigilantly nose-thumbing technological anarchy.

They coded. They built websites. They hung out in chat rooms and text-based online communities like ​LambdaMOO. They told stories through interactive code and experiences like the CD-ROM game All New Gen, in which a female protagonist fought to defeat a military-industrial data environment called "Big Daddy Mainframe." They believed the web could be a space for fluid creative experimentation, a place to transform and create in collaboration with a global community of like-minded artists.

Over twenty years later, in the many feminist conversations happening online, groups like VNS Matrix and their compatriots in the Cyberfeminist trenches are not frequently cited. They should be. Their spirit of joyful subversion is more relevant, more cannily timely, more totally necessary today than it has ever been.​

While putting together my story for ​Motherboard about Cyberfeminism, I began an email correspondence with the members of VNS Matrix. They were hugely generous, opening up their archives and sharing first-person stories about their experiences as pioneering woman artists in the early Internet age. We decided to put all of the material together into a history of VNS Matrix, told in their own words.

Together, we share this history with the Cyberfeminists past, present, and future.

​

Virginia Barratt: There is a narrative arc to the genesis of VNS Matrix which goes something like this: "The VNS Matrix emerged from the cyberswamp during a southern Australian summer circa 1991, on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent."

Francesca da Rimini: Our group formed over 20 years ago, and it really was another world, another lifetime.

Virginia Barratt: We were living in Adelaide at the time. I was EO of the ​Australian Network for Art and Technology, a position Francesca had just left to move onto other works and projects. Julianne and Josie were both studying and making art and performance. We were all involved in a mess of generative creative production.

Josephine Starrs: Australia was avant-garde in the new media art scene, and Australians are generally early adopters of new technologies, perhaps due to physical distance. Australian female artists are also innovators and are not afraid to critique the establishment. That irreverence and humour could perhaps be the influence of our Indigenous culture, and the Irish convict culture?

Virginia Barratt: Francesca had been involved in a project of Australian Network for Art and Technology to connect artists with machines, facilitating artist access to institutions and their resources, specifically computers and software.

This kind of access was unprecedented, since computers were not personal and certainly not ubiquitous. It was the mission of ANAT to create connections between art and science. The outcomes were surprising and not-so-surprising, in terms of production-artists intervening in the processes of technological production-and socio-cultural interventions, as the machines were mostly in service to the patriarchal overlords of commerce, science, educational institutions. Access by women was limited and usually mediated by a male "tech." The idea of "play" and "creative production" or simply "research" with no outcomes that were necessarily useful in terms of capitalism were anathema to the tech industries.

Josephine Starrs: VNS Matrix predated the 2000's trend for game-art in the art world. We began by making up playful narratives around our female protagonist All New Gen and her DNA sluts. This was 1990, way before Lara Croft, when the idea of a female hero in a computer game was unheard of. We created art installations that included game stills for light boxes, narrative sound and video works, and interactive art.

Virginia Barratt: The technological landscape was very dry, cartesian, reverent. It was uncritical and overwhelmingly male-dominated. It was a masculinist space, coded as such, and the gatekeepers of the code (cultural and logos) maintained control of the productions of technology.

Francesca da Rimini: In the early 1990s, informational capitalism hadn't quite taken root. The internet was far less regulated, far less commodified. More of a maul and a maw than a mall. There seemed to be endless possibilities, it was a field of immanence, of becoming. And it was slow, low-res, glitch. Before 'glitch' became a cultural movement. But it's easy to be nostalgic for that time.

Virginia Barratt: It was into this environment that VNS Matrix was spawned. We entered into the cultural space circuitously, imagining a feminist approach to the production of pornography-this was our starting point, and the way we generated an aesthetics of slime, moving quickly into a machine-slime symbiosis, as antithetical to the brittle beige fleshless gutless realm of technological production. A stream of consciousness writing session which was more like an exudation of slime and viscera morphing through critical, feminist, pornographic texts birthed the "Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century."

By the latter part of 1991 the manifesto was the centerpiece of a large billboard image of the same name, framed by cybercunts, in a field of genetic material morphing into new representations of women, gender and sexuality in technospace, both primordial, ancient and futuristic, fantastical and active, not passive objects. The blasphemous text was badass and complex, hot, wet and mind-bending, in service to a feminism that was multiple.

Virginia Barratt: At the same time that we portmanteau'ed cyber and feminism, ​Sadie Plant was working on developing a curriculum around the same name in another part of the world-simultaneous synapse firings across the matrix of slime. One of her students was on holiday in Australia and happened across the billboard, on the side of the Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney, took a photo, framed it and presented it to Sadie. A connection was forged, flesh met. This is one understanding of how feminism entered cyber and the word became flesh.

Francesca da Rimini: The cyberfeminist community was crazy, wild, political, passionate. Deeply fun. It was lived politics and generated abiding friendships and networks. There was a whole lotta love. I guess it was very Euro, but then there were some powerful women in Canada and The States. Like Jamaican-Canadian digital artist Camille Turner. And Carmin Karasic from the ​Electronic Disturbance Theatre.

EDT did one of the first Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) actions-Floodnet-circa 1998, way before Anonymous, in solidarity with the Mexican Zapatistas. Their action provoked the US military into retaliating against the DDoS participants by launching hostile Java applets back to their computers, crashing them. I know, I was online in New York participating in the DDoS at the time. The military's involvement only came to light later.

Virginia Barratt: We honored the lineage of Cyberfeminism-naturally ​Donna Haraway with her cyborg/goddess dichotomy was one of our sheroes. Others who were working in the field at the time were people like ​Brenda Laurel, ​Sherri Turkle, ​Allucquere Roseanne Stone.

Irreverence, agency, power, sexuality, intensities, guerilla feminism, porn, humour, music. Post-punk/still punk. The abject and subversion of the clean and proper body. These were some of the hallmarks of our productive approaches, influences and methods.

Josephine Starrs: It appeared that few women were playing computer games in the early nineties. One reason for this is that the games industry ignored women and girls for more than a decade, fearing that if girls joined the fun, the boys would be unhappy about losing their exclusive boy-zone.

So VNS Matrix had fun making our own art games for public exhibition, hacking the game engines, slashing the dominant game narratives and critiquing the content of game culture with humor.

From the enormous positive responses and feedback we received from young women artists and gamers from both in Australia and internationally, it was obvious that many women were really annoyed with being actively excluded from game culture, which was obviously becoming a huge cultural force.

Virginia Barratt: What happened to cyberfeminism? Why did the movement die out? What happened, of course, was that the narratives around liberation from racism, sexism and so on in the brave new virtual world were promises which were empty. New strategies needed to be developed for battling rampant bullying, bigotry, hatespeech and so on. Cyberfeminisms deployed multifariously and the idea of a *movement* was no longer relevant.

Francesca da Rimini: I think the political and cultural ideas that this movement inspired continue to evolve and shapeshift. Check out the ​Bloodbath collaboration with a roller derby team for example. That could be read as a cyberfeminist intervention. Chicks, machines, extreme sports. Or the growth of female hacker clubs, workshops and events like ​G.hack and ​Genderchangers. In the global South there are many projects fostering a critical socially-engaged technological literacy, and women are driving and participating in many of these. Such projects don't need to be labelled "cyberfeminist," but they embody some of the cyberfeminist ethos and attitude.

Virginia Barratt: I think VNS Matrix was doing a job. And in a cultural space that was coded as heavily masculinist, our job as female-identified people, and as feminists, was to overthrow the gatekeepers in order to access a powerful new technology which had huge implications for domination and control by the patriarchy and by capitalist systems. We did what we had to do at the time. Then our job was done. Leave the definitions to someone else.

Later, the field became itself more fully, and was able to address the layered political aspects of the cultural conditions of the information technology field-but at the time we just needed to be fast and fierce and overthrow the gatekeepers. We had to break the safe.

Francesca da Rimini: Cyberfeminism is one of many feminisms, and feminism has not gone away.

This story is part of a series on rediscovering feminist histories on the web. Read part one, "We Are the Future Cunt: Cyberfeminism in the 90s."

ORIGINAL REPORTING ON EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS IN YOUR INBOX.

By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
​Image via Virginia Barratt. VNS Matrix emerged from the cyberswamp during one Australian summer in 1991, on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent. In the heady early years of the World Wide Web, four Australian women- Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt-made fierce and funny feminist art under the name VNS Matrix.

# data[].attributes.body
“Lots of computer technophiles… jack into the machine and want to forget about the body to reject the meat of the body. In our work we’re not finished with the body, the body is an important site for feminists.”
-  Josephine Starrs, 1992

# data[].attributes.body
Haraway sees freedom in technology and the connection between humans and machines so she believes in cyborgs. If we are cyborgs, all concepts about gender, race, materiality, consciousness, identity. will disappear with our preconditioned misconception.

# data[].attributes.body
In Zeroes + Ones (p.59), Plant associates Donna Haraway with VNS Matrix and explains that when they write “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix,” they mean both the womb—matrix is Latin—and “the abstract networks of communication…increasingly assembling themselves.”

# data[].attributes.body
We can translate sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies by microelectronic, as Haraway mentions, the organism has been translated into issues of genetic coding and read-out, and biology can be a kind of cryptographic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cyberfeminism resisted easy definition and, as the manifesto showed, there were multiple iterations and conflicting notions of what it was-and was not. By 1997, the movement was running into trouble. Haraway and Butler's texts had called for the dissolution of gender and racial hierarchies, but it was increasingly clear that cyberfeminism had failed to address race at all.

What's more, the notion that the internet could be employed as a categorically liberated space proved to be too optimistic. It was following the Cyberfeminist International in Kassel that Wilding mounted an important critique of the movement. "The Net is not a utopia of nongender," she wrote in Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism. "It is already socially inscribed with regard to bodies, sex, age, economics, social class, and race."

The cyberfeminists, Wilding claimed, had failed to actively interrogate the biases entrenched in cyberspace. "Being bad grrls on the internet is not by itself going to challenge the status quo," she went on. "Cyberfeminism presents itself as inclusive, but the cyberfeminist writings assume an educated, white, upper-middle-class, English speaking, culturally sophisticated readership," Wilding and Maria Fernandez wrote in the book Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices.

The movement's advocates may have been bold and brazen, but while purporting to move beyond hierarchal divisions, Wilding felt that they had, unwittingly, reinstated them. She extended her practice to explore the intersection of feminism with other technologies beyond the internet, such as biotechnology-the next frontier for gender discrimination. She founded subRosa, an art collective that critiqued the racial and gender biases in assisted fertility and genetic engineering.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Cyberfeminists Worked to Liberate Women through the Internet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cyberfeminism resisted easy definition and, as the manifesto showed, there were multiple iterations and conflicting notions of what it was-and was not. By 1997, the movement was running into trouble. Haraway and Butler's texts had called for the dissolution of gender and racial hierarchies, but it was increasingly clear that cyberfeminism had failed to address race at all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
NET ART ANTHOLOGY: A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NET ART ANTHOLOGY: A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century was a project in multiple media that gave vivid expression to the emerging political position of cyberfeminism, which saw new technology as an opportunity to disrupt society's patriarchal norms, and to have fun doing it. The manifesto was authored in...

# data[].attributes.body
"The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they."

"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

# data[].attributes.body
"We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender."

# data[].attributes.body
"The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense."

# data[].attributes.body
Posthuman

# data[].attributes.body
Metaverse

# data[].attributes.body
Feminism

# data[].attributes.body
From this article, I saw the possibility of changing ingrained gender-based thinking by a single glyph.

However, I was confused about how can make sure the reader can understand and communicate smoothly after changing more glyphs or generating a new language.

# data[].attributes.body
Females are passive readers and receivers rather than positive creators or participators, which leads to limited information and resources available to them and results in unfairness.

The content related to females is around beauty and child which is worthless for their personal development as well as hides the issues of gender inequality.

# data[].attributes.body
Women are seen as reproductive tools

Females are called 'the manynamed,' 'the thousand-named' . . . 'the myriad-named' and their contribution to technological development is overlooked.

In the electronics industry, female workers represent the group with the worst incomes and monotonous labor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the integrated Circuit

This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs-creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics-the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other-the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.[1]

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self-untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature.[2] The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as Star Wars.

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection-they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks-language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.[3] The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. [4]'Textualization' of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading.[5] It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature-a source of insight and promise of innocence-is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances[6] as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile-a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.

The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness-or its simulation.[7] They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the 'hardest' science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, 'no more' than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of 'Oriental' women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll's houses, women's enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail[8] whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional-Man (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidly.)[9]

Fractured Identities

It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective-or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other. For me-and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies-the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition-affinity, not identity.[10]

Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of colour, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. 'Women of color', a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in 'Western' traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms.

Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called 'women and blacks', who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category 'woman' negated all non-white women; 'black' negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no 'she', no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.[11] Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of the white women's movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness.

Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the 'West' and its highest product-the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists.[12] Sandoval argues that 'women of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization.

Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.[13] Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's experience. And of course, 'women's culture', like women of colour, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.

The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities.

It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naiveté of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective-and, ironically, socialist-feminist?

I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us' have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of 'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.

Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category 'woman' and conscious-ness of the social lives of 'women'. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.

In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women's labour in the household and women's activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of 'labour'. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not 'naturalize' unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its analogue, women's activity.[14] The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them.

Catherine MacKinnon's (1982, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action.[15] It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse 'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology-including their negations-erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon's theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of women's identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end-the unity of women-by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon's theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.

MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analytical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitution and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology' constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as 'women's' experience-anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.

Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemological status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product.

MacKinnon's radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women's political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing-feminists' consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women's unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-existence of women is not reassuring.

In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality 'false consciousness'.

Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the 'Western' author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this:

socialist feminism - structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race

radical feminism - structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification

sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race

In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed women appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth.[16] Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not always exist, 'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man-and so the essence of woman-breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. 'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women's particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference.

The Informatics of Domination

In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system-from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination:

Organics of Domination

Informatics of Domination

Representation

Simulation

Bourgeois novel, realism

Science fiction, postmodernism

Organism

Biotic Component

Depth, integrity

Surface, boundary

Biology as clinical practice

Biology as inscription

Physiology

Communications engineering

Perfection

Optimization

Eugenics

Population Control

Decadence, Magic Mountain

Obsolescence, Future Shock

Hygiene

Stress Management

Microbiology, tuberculosis

Immunology, AIDS

Organic division of labour

Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour

Functional specialization

Modular construction

Reproduction

Replication

Organic sex role specialization

Optimal genetic strategies

Biological determinism

Evolutionary inertia, constraints

Community ecology

Ecosystem

Racial chain of being

Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism

Scientific management in home/factory

Global factory/Electronic cottage

Family/Market/Factory

Women in the Integrated Circuit

Family wage

Comparable worth

Public/Private

Cyborg citizenship

Nature/Culture

fields of difference

Co-operation

Communications enhancement

Sex

Genetic engineering

Mind

Artificial Intelligence

Second World War

Star Wars

White Capitalist Patriarchy

Informatics of Domination

This list suggests several interesting things.[17] First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as 'natural', a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It's not just that 'god' is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism.

Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is 'irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called 'experimental ethnography' in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural' architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all the world's cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of 'late capitalism'. The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies.

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries-and not on the integrity of natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress-communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.

This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West' since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been 'techno-digested'. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself-all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others-consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move-th e translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.

In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-control communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory.

In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.[18] In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity-for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay men and intravenous drug users are the 'privileged' victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987).

But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproduction. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentation, agriculture, and energy. Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The 'multinational' material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feasible.

I have used Rachel Grossman's (1980) image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology.[19] I used the odd circumlocution, the social relations of science and technology, to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984). Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.

The 'Homework Economy' Outside 'The Home'

The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language.

Richard Gordon has called this new situation the 'homework economy'.[20] Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connection with electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework economy' to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to some arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial-and need to be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations.

The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men's unionized jobs is deaf to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive; for example, office work and nursing.

The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of poverty-generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children-has become an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domestic service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for continued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas of the Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problematic. These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of gender and race.

Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, multinational)-tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism-I would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the 'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself.

This is the context in which the projections for world-wide structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture of the homework economy. As robotics and related technologies put men out of work in 'developed' countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World 'development', and as the automated office becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment ('feminization') of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situations of white and black women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just mice.

The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the world's subsistence food.[21] Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilities to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisions of labour and differential gender migration patterns.

The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of 'privatization' that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact.[22] The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televisions seem crucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange-and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's largest single industries.

The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles.[23] These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women's bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both 'visualization' and 'intervention'. Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women's claiming their bodies in the 1970S; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of visualization recall the important cultural practice of handing with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness.[24] Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility.

Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.[25]

This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with and-military science facility conversion action groups? Many scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science.[26] Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous?

Women in The Integrated Circuit

Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the distinction of public and private domains-suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms-it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy-weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.

So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination and trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of 'identification', of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.

Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home sweat-shops, home-based businesses and telecom-muting, electronic cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence.

Market: Women's continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the competitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of informal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer; intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extreme mobility (abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; inter-penetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption.

Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour, but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational categories for many white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies on women's work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the working classes; development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time, over time, no time); homework and out work; increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in cash-dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour 'marginal' or 'feminized'.

State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupational mobility for women of colour; growing privatization of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies.

School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public education at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in dissenting and radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society.

Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and 'stress' phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical implications of women's unrealized, potential control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of health in environments pervaded by high technology products and processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensified struggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of popular health movements as a major form of American politics.

Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle.

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. There is much now being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collective struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU's District 925,27 should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial unions.

The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be ultimately depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women's relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness and people's complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women's points of view, is often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology' versus 'manipulated false consciousness', but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.

There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is not transparently clear, and we lack sufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts-Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological-to clarify even 'our' experience are rudimentary.

I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position-a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's impact on US national science-education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women's movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats.

The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science.

Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity

I want to conclude with a myth about identity and boundaries which might inform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda Mclntyre.[28] These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring conceptions of bodily boundaries and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body imagery is to world view, and so to political language. French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.[29] American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations-and perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.[30] They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? I look briefly at two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.

Earlier I suggested that 'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography', Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female and feminized, are supposed to regard as the enemy preventing their solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for division, competition, and exploitation in the same industries. 'Women of colour' are the preferred labour force for the science-based industries, the real women for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the 'cheap' female labour so attractive to the multinationals.

Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the 'oral primitive', literacy is a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black women as well as men through a history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and writing. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently to the erosion of that distinction in 'postmodernist' theories attacking the phallogocentrism of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and perfect name.[31] Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this time that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.

The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentric origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies-technologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics-that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.

Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo 'bastard' race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's.[32] Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language-a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga's language is not 'whole'; it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moraga's body, affirms it as the body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of 'original illiteracy' of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man.

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. 'We' did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts'.

From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in 'our' privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival.

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics-rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a 'western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing.[33] These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies.[34] Survival is the stakes in this play of readings.

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals-in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love, and confusion.

One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices.[35] Anne McCaffrey's pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated-given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized-reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable wholeness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group of texts, feminist science fiction.

The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on identification. Students facing Joanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader's search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the story of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization to subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly until her 'true' gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes of an African sorceress pitting her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival ( Wild Seed), of time warps that bring a modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth ( Kindred), and of the illegitimate insights into identity and community of an adopted cross-species child who came to know the enemy as self ( Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam's first and repudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the transformation of humanity through genetic exchange with extra-terrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earth's habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender.

Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIntyre's Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is 'simply' human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time sense that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicating experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and intimacy even in this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal stands also for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense; it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse in the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This is a conjunction with a long history that many 'First World' feminists have tried to repress, including myself in my readings of Superluminal before being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different location in the world system's informatics of domination made her acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including women's science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre's role as writer of the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV's Star Trek series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal.

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases-all crucial to establishing modern identity.[36] The evolutionary and behavioral sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life. But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination-in order to act potently.

One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Bibliography

Athanasiou, Tom. 1987. "High-Tech Politics: The Case of Artifical Intelligence." Socialist Review 92: 7-35.

Bambara, Toni Cade. 1981. The Salt Eaters. New York: Vintage/Random House.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Trans. P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitch man. New York: Semiotext[e].

Bird, Elizabeth. 1984. "Green Revolution Imperialism, I and II." Papers delivered to the History of Consciousness Board, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bleier, Ruth. 1984. Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Themes on Women. New York: Pergamon.

Blumberg, Rae Lessor. 1981. Stratification: Socioeconomic and Sexual Inequality. Boston: Little, Brown.

---. 1983. "A General Theory of Sex Stratification and Its Application to Positions of Women in Today's World Economy." Paper delivered to the Sociology Board of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Burke, Carolyn. 1981. "Irigaray through the Looking Glass." Feminist Studies 7 (2): 288-306.

Burr, Sara G. 1982. "Women and Work." In The Women's Annual, 1981, ed. Barbara K. Haber. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Busch, Lawrence, and William Lacy. 1983. Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Butler-Evans, Elliott. 1987. "Race, Gender and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Production of Ideology in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker." PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz.

Butler, Octavia. 1979. Survivor. New York: Signet.

---. 1984. Mind of My Mind. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

---. 2001. Wild Seed. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

---. 2003. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press.

Carby, Hazel. 1987. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press.

Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1955. Motherlines. New York: Berkeley.

Christian, Barbara. 1985. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press.

Clifford, James. 1985. "On Ethnographic Allegory." In The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

---. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Cohn, Carol. 1987a. "Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 43 (5): 17-24.

---. 1987b. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Signs 12 (4): 687-718.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1982. "Third World Women in America." In The Women's Annual, 1981, ed. Barbara K. Haber. Boston: G. K. Hall.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.

---, ed. 1986. Feminist Approaches to Science. New York: Pergamon Press.

Daston, Lorraine, and Katherin Park. N.d. "Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France." Unpublished manuscript.

Delany, Samuel R. 1979. Tales of Nevèrÿon. New York: Bantam Books. de Lauretis, Teresa. 1985. "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender." Semiotica 54: 11-31.

---. 1986. "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts." In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. T. de Lauretis, 1-19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. de Waal, Frans. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. New York: Harper and Row.

D'Onofrio-Flores, Pamela, and Sheila M. Pfafflin, eds. 1982. ScientificTechnological Change and the Role of Women in Development. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

---. 1970. Natural Symbols. London: Cresset Press.

DuBois, Page. 1982. Centaurs and Amazons. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Duchen, Claire. 1986. Feminism in France from May '68 to Mitterand. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Edwards, Paul. 1985. "Border Wars: The Science and Politics of Artificial Intelligence." Radical America (19) 6: 39-52.

Enloe, Cynthia. 1983a. "Women Textile Workers in the Militarization of Southeast Asia." In Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983, 407-25.

---. 1983b. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives. Boston: South End Press.

Epstein, Barbara. 1993. Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the Seventies and Eighties. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Evans, Mari, ed. 1984. Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1985. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. New York: Basic Books.

Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory. 1980. 1 (1): special issue on Francophone feminisms.

Fernandez-Kelly, Maria Patricia. 1983. For We Are Sold, I and My People. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Fisher, Dexter, ed. 1980. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Flax, Jane. 1983. "Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious:

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics." In Harding and Hintikka 1983, 245-82.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Smith. New York: Vintage.

---. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Vintage.

---. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans.

Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Fraser, Kathleen. 1984. Something. Even Human Voices. In the Foreground, a Lake. Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey St. Press.

Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies. 1980. Volume 1.

---. 1983. Volume 3.

Fuentes, Annette, and Barbara Ehrenreich. 1983. Women in the Global Factory. Boston: South End Press.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1985. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes." In "Race," Writing and Difference (special issue), Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 1-20.

Giddings, Paula. 1985. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. Toronto: Bantam Books.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Gordon, Linda. 1988. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960. New York: Viking Penguin.

Gordon, Richard. 1983. "The Computerization of Daily Life, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Homework Economy." Presented at the Silicon Valley Workshop Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz.

---, and Linda Kimball. 1985. "High-Technology, Employment and the Challenges of Education." Silicon Valley Research Project, Working Paper, no. 1.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton.

Gregory, Judith, and Karen Nussbaum. 1982. "Race against Time: Automation of the Office." Office: Technology and People 1: 197-236.

Griffin, Susan. 1978. Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper and Row.

Grossman, Rachel. 1980. "Women's Place in the Integrated Circuit." Radical America 14 (1): 29-50.

Haas, Violet, and Carolyn Perucci, eds. 1984. Women in Scientific and Engineering Professions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hacker, Sally. 1981. "The Culture of Engineering: Women, Workplace, and Machine." Women's Studies International Quarterly 4 (3): 341-53.

---. 1984. "Doing It the Hard Way: Ethnographic Studies in the Agri business and Engineering Classroom." Presented at the California American Studies Association, Pomona.

---, and Liza Bovit. 1981. "Agriculture to Agribusiness: Technical Imperatives and Changing Roles." Presented at the Society for the History of Technology, Milwaukee.

Haraway, Donna J. 1979. "The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology." Radical History Review 20: 206-37.

---. 1983. "Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society." Studies in History of Biology 6: 129-219.

---. 1984. "Class, Race, Sex, Scientific Objects of Knowledge: A Socialist-Feminist Perspective on the Social Construction of Productive Knowledge and Some Political Consequences." In Haas and Perucci 1984, 212-29.

---. 1984-85. "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36." Social Text 11: 20-64.

---. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.

Harding, Sandra. 1978. "What Causes Gender Privilege and Class Privilege?" Presented at the American Philosophical Association.

---. 1983. "Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?" In Harding and Hintikka 1983, 311-24.

---. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

---, and Merrill Hintikka, eds. 1983. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Reidel.

Hartsock, Nancy. 1983a. "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism." In Harding and Hintikka 1983, 283-310.

---. 1983b. Money, Sex, and Power. New York: Longman.

---. 1987. "Rethinking Modernism: Minority and Majority Theories." Cultural Critique 7: 187-206.

Hogness, Erik Rusten. 1983. "Why Stress? A Look at the Making of Stress, 1936-56." Unpublished manuscript.

hooks, bell. 1981. Ain't I a Woman. Boston: South End Press.

---. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1981. The Woman That Never Evolved. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hubbard, Ruth, and Marian Lowe, eds. 1979. Genes and Gender. Vol. 2, Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender. Staten Island, N.Y.: Gordian Press.

Hubbard, Ruth, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, eds. 1979. Women Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing.

Hull, Gloria, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press.

International Fund for Agricultural Development. 1985. IFAD Experience Relating to Rural Women, 1977-84. Rome: IFAD, 37.

Irigaray, Luce. 1977. Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

---. 1979. Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Jaggar, Alison. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld.

Jameson, Frederic. 1984. "Post-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review 146: 53-92.

Kahn, Douglas, and Diane Neumaier, eds. 1985. Cultures in Contention. Seattle: Real Comet Press.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1983. A Feeling for the Organism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

---. 1985. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

King, Katie. 1984. "The Pleasure of Repetition and the Limits of Identification in Feminist Science Fiction: Reimaginations of the Body after the Cyborg." Presented at the California American Studies Association, Pomona.

---. 1986. "The Situation of Lesbianism as Feminism's Magical Sign: Contests for Meaning and the U.S. Women's Movement, 1968-72." Communication 1: 65-92.

---. 1987a. "Canons without Innocence." PhD diss., University of Cal ifornia, Santa Cruz.

---. 1987b. "The Passing Dreams of Choice: Audre Lorde and the Apparatus of Literary Production." Unpublished manuscript (book pro spectus).

Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1976. The Woman Warrior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Klein, Hilary. 1989. "Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature." Feminist Studies 15 (2): 255-78.

Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford: Per gamon Press.

---, and Michael Mulkay, eds. 1983. Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Kramarae, Cheris, and Paula Treichler. 1985. A Feminist Dictionary. Bos ton: Pandora Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1984. Les Microbes: guerre et paix, suivi des irréductions. Paris: Métailié.

---, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Lerner, Gerda, ed. 1973. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum.

Lewontin, R. C., Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin. 1984. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. New York: Pantheon Books.

Lorde, Audrey. 1982. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press.

---. 1984. Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press.

Lowe, Lisa. 1986. "French Literary Orientalism: The Representation of "Others" in the Texts of Montesquieu, Flaubert, and Kristeva." PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz.

Mackey, Nathaniel. 1984. "Review." Sulfur 2: 200-205.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1982. "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory." Signs 7 (3): 515-44.

---. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Voices. 1984. Feminist Review 17: special issue.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.

Markoff, John, and Lenny Siegel. 1983. "Military Micros." Presented at Silicon Valley Research Project Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1980. New French Feminisms. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

McCaffery, Anne. 1969. The Ship Who Sang. New York: Ballantine.

---. 1978. Dinosaur Planet. New York: Ballantine Books.

McIntyre, Vonda. 1983. Superluminal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

---. 1978. Dreamsnake. New York: Dell Books.

Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper and Row.

Microelectronics Group. 1980. Microelectronics: Capitalist Technology and the Working Class. London: CSE Books.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse." Boundary 2, 3 (12/13): 333-58.

Moraga, Cherríe. 1983. Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca paso por sus labios. Boston: South End Press.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press.

Morgan, Robin, ed. 1984. Sisterhood Is Global. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday.

Nash, June, and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, eds. 1983. Women and Men and the International Division of Labor. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nash, Roderick. 1979. "The Exporting and Importing of Nature: NatureAppreciation as a Commodity, 1850-1980." Perspectives in American History 3: 517-60.

National Science Foundation. 1988. Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. Washington, D.C.: NSF.

New York Times. 1984. "Focus of U.N. Food Day Tomorrow: Women." October 14.

O'Brien, Mary. 1981. The Politics of Reproduction. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Workers in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen.

Park, Katherine, and Lorraine J. Daston. 1981. "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England." Past and Present 92: 20-54.

Perloff, Marjorie. 1984. "Dirty Language and Scramble Systems." Sulfur 11: 178-83.

Petschesky, Rosalind. 1981. "Abortion, Anti-feminism, and the Rise of the New Right." Feminist Studies 7 (2): 206-46.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Coward. 1982. The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences. New York: Pantheon Books.

Preston, Douglas. 1984. "Shooting in Paradise." Natural History 93 (12): 14-19.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1983. "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century." In Smith 1983, 356-68.

Reskin, Barbara F., and Heidi Hartmann, eds. 1986. Women's Work, Men's Work. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.

Rich, Adrienne. 1978. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W. W. Norton.

Rose, Hilary. 1983. "Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences." Signs 9 (1): 73-90.

Rose, Stephen. 1986. The American Profile Poster: Who Owns What, Who Makes How Much, Who Works, Where, and Who Lives with Whom? New York: Pantheon Books.

Rossiter, Margaret. 1982. Women Scientists in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rothschild, Joan, ed. 1983. Machina ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology. New York: Pergamon Press.

Russ, Joanna. 1975. The Female Man. New York: Bantam Books.

---. 1983a. Adventures of Alix. New York: Timescape.

---. 1983b. How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sachs, Carolyn. 1983. The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Sandoval, Chela. N.d. Yours in Struggle: Women Respond to Racism, a Report to the National Women's Studies Association. Oakland: Center for Third World Organizing.

---. 1984. "Dis-illusionment and the Poetry of the Future: the Making of Oppositional Consciousness. " PhD qualifying essay, University of California at Santa Cruz.

Schiebinger, Londa. 1987. "The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay." Signs 12 (2): 305-32.

Science Policy Research Unit. 1982. Microelectronics and Women's Employment in Britain. Sussex: University of Sussex.

Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.

Smith, Dorothy. 1974. "Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology." Sociological Inquiry 44.

---. 1979. "A Sociology of Women." In The Prism of Sex. Ed. J. Sherman and E. T. Beck. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sofia [Sofoulis], Zoë. 1984. "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism." Diacritics 14 (2): 47-59.

Sofoulis, Zoë. N.d. [1983?] "Lacklein." Unpublished manuscript.

Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Dell.

Stacey, Judith. 1987. "Sexism by a Subtler Name? Postindustrial Con ditions and the Postfeminist Consciousness." Socialist Review 96: 7-28.

Stallard, Karin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Holly Sklar. 1983. Poverty in the American Dream. Boston: South End Press.

Sturgeon, Noel. 1986. "Feminism, Anarchism, and Non-Violent Direct Action Politics." PhD qualifying essay, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sussman, Vic. 1986. "Personal Tech: Technology Lends a Hand." Washington Post Magazine, 9 November, 45-56.

Tiptree, James Jr. 1978a. Star Songs of an Old Primate. New York: Del Rey. ---. 1978b. Up the Walls of the World. New York: Berkeley.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Treichler, Paula. 1987. "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse:

An Epidemic of Signification." October 43: 31-70.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1986-87a. "Introduction," and "Difference: 'A Special Third World Women Issue.'" Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 8: 3-38.

---, ed. 1986-87b. She, the Inappropriate/d Other.Discourse 8 (Winter).

Varley, John. 1979. Titan. New York: Berkeley.

---. 1981. Wizard. New York: Berkeley. ---. 1984. Demon. New York: Berkeley.

Weisenbaum, Joseph. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Wilford, John Noble. 1986. "Pilot's Helmet Helps Interpret High-Speed World." New York Times, July 1: 21, 24.

Wilfred, Denis. 1982. "Capital and Agriculture, a Review of Marxian Problematics." Studies in Political Economy 7: 127-54.

Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics Out of Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

---. 1980. "Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109 (1): 121-36.

---. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winograd, Terry, and Fernando Flores. 1986. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing.

Wittig, Monique. 1973 [1975]. The Lesbian Body. Trans. David LeVay. New York: Avon.

Women and Poverty special issue. 1984. Signs 10 (2).

Wright, Susan. 1982. "Recombinant DNA: The Status of Hazards and Controls." Environment 24 (6): 12-20, 51-53.

---. 1986. "Recombinant DNA Technology and Its Social Transformation, 1972-82." Osiris (2 nd series) 2: 303-60.

Young, Robert M. 1979. "Interpreting the Production of Science." New Scientist 29 (March): 1026-28.

---, and Les Levidow, eds. 1981, 1985. Science, Technology and the Labour Process. 2 vols. London: CSE and Free Association Books.

Yoxen, Edward. 1983. The Gene Business. New York: Harper & Row.

Zimmerman, Jan, ed. 1983. The Technology Woman: Interfacing with Tomorrow. New York: Praeger.

[1] See Zoe Sofoulis (n.d.).

[2] See Hilary Klein 1989.

[3] Useful references to left and/or feminist radical science movements and theory and to biological/biotechnical issues include Bleier 1984, 1986; Harding 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Gould 1981; Hubbard et al. 1979; Keller 1985; Lewontin et al. 1984. See also Radical Science Journal (which became Science as Culture in 1987): 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ; and Science for the People, 897 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

[4] Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology and politics include Cowan 1983, 1986; Rothschild 1983; Traweek 1988; Young and Levidow 1981, 1985; Weisenbaum 1976; Winner 1977, 1986; Zimmerman 1983; Athanasiou 1987; Cohn 1987a, 1987b; Winograd and Flores 1986; Edwards 1985. Global Electronics Newsletter, 867 West Dana Street, #204, Mountain View, California 94041; Processed World, 55 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94104; ISIS, Women's International Information and Communication Service, P.O. Box 50 (Cornavin), 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland; and Via Santa Maria Dell'Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy. Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that do not continue the liberal mystification that all started with Thomas Kuhn include Knorr-Cetina 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Young 1979. The 1984 Directory of the Network for the Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organization lists a wide range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis, available from NESSTO, P.O. Box 11442, Stanford, California 94305.

[5] A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and the-ories of "postmodernism" is made by Fredric Jameson (1984), who argues that postmodernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction of critical distance. Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or against postmodernism, an essentially moralist move. My position is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinvention, most modernist critique, and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations of white capitalist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they normalized heterogeneity, into man and woman, white and black, for example. "Advanced Capitalism" and postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write The Death of the Clinic. The clinic's methods required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations don't work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management. Normalization gives way to automation, utter redundancy. Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic (1963), History of Sexuality (1976), and Discipline and Punish (1975) name a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language of the spliced substantive; no noun is left whole by the multinationals. These are their names, listed from one issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Allergen, Hybritech, Compupro, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics Corp., Syntro, Codon, Repligen, Micro/Angelo from Scion Corp., Percom Data, Inter Systems, Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., Intertec. If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics. For cyborg poetry see Perloff 1984; Fraser 1984. For feminist modernist/postmodernist cyborg writing, see HOW(ever), 971 Corbett Avenue, San Francisco, California 94131

[6] The U.S. equivalent of Mills and Boon.

[7] Baudrillard 1983 and Jameson 1984 (page 66) point out that Plato's definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original, i.e., the world of advanced capitalism, of pure exchange. See Discourse 9 (Spring/Summer 1987) for a special issue on technology (cybernetics, ecology, and the postmodern imagination).

[8] A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guards andarrested antinuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County Jail in California in the early 1980s.

[9] For ethnographic accounts and political evaluations, see Epstein1993; Sturgeon 1986. Without explicit irony, adopting the spaceship earth/whole earth logo of the planet photographed from space, set off by the slogan "Love Your Mother," the May 1987 Mothers and Others Day action at the nuclear weapons testing facility in Nevada nonetheless took account of the tragic contradictions of views of the earth. Demonstrators applied for official permits to be on the land from officers of the Western Shoshone tribe, whose territory was invaded by the U.S. government when it built the nuclear weapons test ground in the 1950s. Arrested for trespassing, the demonstrators argued that the police and weapons facility personnel, without authorization from the proper officials, were the trespassers. One affinity group at the women's action called themselves the Surrogate Others; and in solidarity with the creatures forced to tunnel in the same ground with the bomb, they enacted a cyborgian emergence from the constructed body of a large, nonheterosexual desert worm. I was a member of that affinity group.

[10] Powerful developments of coalition politics emerge from "ThirdWorld" speakers, speaking from nowhere, the displaced center of the universe, earth: "We live on the third planet from the sun"- Sun Poem by Jamaican writer Edward Kamau Braithwaite, review by Mackey 1984. Contributors to Smith 1983 ironically subvert naturalized identities precisely while constructing a place from which to speak called home. See especially Reagon (in Smith 1983, 356-68); Trinh T. Minh-ha 1986-87a, b.

[11] See hooks 1981, 1984; Hull et al. 1982. Toni Cade Bambara (1981) wrote an extraordinary novel in which the women of color theater group the Seven Sisters explores a form of unity. See analysis by Butler-Evans 1987.

[12] On orientalism in feminist works and elsewhere, see Lowe 1986; Said 1978; Mohanty 1984; Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (1984).

[13] Katie King (1986, 1987a) has developed a theoretically sensitive treatment of the workings of feminist taxonomies as genealogies of power in feminist idealogy and polemic. King examines Jaggar's (1983) problematic example of taxonomizing feminisms to make a little machine producing the desired final position. My caricature here of socialist and radical feminism is also an example.

[14] The central role of object relations versions of psychoanalysis andrelated strong universalizing moves in discussing reproduction, caring work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline their authors' resistance to what I am calling postmodernism. For me, both the universalizing moves and these versions of psychoanalysis make analysis of "women's place in the integrated circuit" difficult and lead to systematic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major aspects of the construction of gender and gendered social life. The feminist standpoint argument has been developed by Flax 1983; Harding 1986; Harding and Hintikka 1983; Hartsock 1983a, 1983b; O'Brien 1981; H. Rose 1983; Smith 1974, 1979. For rethinking theories of feminist materialism and feminist standpoints in response to criticism, see Harding 1986, 163-96; Hartsock 1987; and S. Rose 1986.

[15] I make an argumentative category error in "modifying" MacKin-non's positions with the qualifier "radical," thereby generating my own reductive critique of extremely hetergeneous writing, which does explicitly use that label, by my taxonomically interested argument about writing, which does not use the modifier and which brooks no limits and thereby adds to the various dreams of a common, in the sense of univocal, language for feminism. My category error was occasioned by an assignment to write from a particular taxonomic position that itself has a heterogeneous history, socialist-feminism, for Socialist Review, published in SR as "The Cyborg Manifesto." A critique indebted to MacKinnon, but without the reductionism and with an elegant feminist account of Foucault's paradoxical conservatism on sexual violence (rape), is de Lauretis 1985 (see also 1986, 1-19). A theoretically elegant feminist social-historical examination of family violence, which insists on women's, men's, and children's complex agency without losing sight of the material structures of male domination, race, and class, is Gordon 1988.

[16] See Kristeva 1984.

[17] This chart was published in 1985 in the "Cyborg Manifesto." My previous efforts to understand biology as a cybernetic command-control discourse and organisms as "natural-technical objects of knowledge" were Haraway 1979, 1983, 1984. A later version, with a shifted argument, appears in Haraway 1989.

[18] For progressive analyses and action on the biotechnology debates,see GeneWatch, a Bulletin of the Committee for Responsible Genetics, 5 Doane St., 4 th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02109; Genetic Screening Study Group (formerly the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wright 1982, 1986; Yoxen 1983.

[19] Starting references for "women in the integrated circuit": D'Ono -frio-Flores and Pfafflin 1982; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Fuentes and Ehrenreich 1983; Grossman 1980; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; A. Ong 1987; Science Policy Research Unit 1982.

[20] For the "homework economy outside the home" and related argu-ments, see Gordon 1983; Gordon and Kimball 1985; Stacey 1987; Reskin and Hartmann 1986; Women and Poverty 1984; S. Rose 1986; Collins 1982; Burr 1982; Gregory and Nussbaum 1982; Piven and Coward 1982; Microelectronics Group 1980; Stallard et al. 1983, which includes a useful organization and resource list.

[21] The conjunction of the Green Revolution's social relations with biotechnologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on land in the Third World increasingly intense. AID's estimates (New York Times, 14 October 1984) used at the 1984 World Food Day are that in Africa, women produce about 90 per cent of rural food supplies, about 60-80 per cent in Asia, and provide 40 per cent of agricultural labour in the Near East and Latin America. Blumberg charges that world organizations' agricultural politics, as well as those of multinationals and national governments in the Third World, generally ignore fundamental issues in the sexual division of labour. The present tragedy of famine in Africa might owe as much to male supremacy as to capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More accurately, capitalism and racism are usually structurally male dominant. See also Blumberg (1981); Hacker (1984); Hacker and Bovit (1981); Busch and Lacy (1983); Wilfred (1982); Sachs (1983); International Fund for Agricultural Development (1985); Bird (1984).

[22] See also Enloe 1983a, 1983b.

[23] For a feminist version of this logic, see Hrdy 1981. For an analysis of scientific women's storytelling practices, especially in relation to sociobiology in evolutionary debates around child abuse and infanticide, see Haraway 1989.

[24] For the moment of transition of hunting with guns to hunting with cameras in the construction of popular meanings of nature for an American urban immigrant public, see Haraway 1984-85, 1989; Nash 1979; Sontag 1977; Preston 1984.

[25] For guidance for thinking about the political/cultural/racial implications of the history of women doing science in the United States, see Haas and Perucci 1984; Hacker 1981; Keller 1983; National Science Foundation 1988; Rossiter 1982; Schiebinger 1987; Haraway 1989.

[26] See Markoff and Siegel 1983. High Technology Professionals for Peace and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility are promising organizations.

[28] See King 1984. An abbreviated list of feminist science fiction underlying themes of this essay: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Kindred, Survivor; Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines; Samuel R. Delany, the Nevèrÿon series; Anne McCaffery, The Ship Who Sang, Dino saur Planet; Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake; Joanna Russ, Adventures of Alix, The Female Man; James Tiptree Jr., Star Songs of an Old Primate, Up the Walls of the World; John Varley, Titan, Wizard, Demon.

[29] French feminisms contribute to cyborg heteroglossia: Burke 1981; Irigaray 1977, 1979; Marks and de Courtivron 1980; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1981 (Autumn); Wittig 1973; Duchen 1986. For English translation of some currents of Francophone feminism, see Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory (1980).

[30] But all these poets are very complex, not least in their treatment ofthemes of lying and erotic, decentered collective and personal identities: Griffin 1978; Lorde 1984; Rich 1978.

[31] See Derrida 1976 (especially part II); Lévi-Strauss 1973 (especially "The Writing Lesson"); Gates 1985; Kahn and Neumaier 1985; Ong 1982; Kramarae and Treichler 1985.

[32] The sharp relation of women of color to writing as theme and pol-itics can be approached through the program for "The Black Woman and the Diaspora: Hidden Connections and Extended Acknowledgments," An International Literary Conference, Michigan State University, October 1985; Evans 1984; Christian 1985; Carby 1987; Fisher 1980; Frontiers 1980, 1983; Kingston 1976; Lerner 1973; Giddings 1985; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Morgan 1984. Anglophone European and Euro-American women have also crafted special relations to their writing as a potent sign: Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Russ 1983.

[33] The convention of ideologically taming militarized high technology by publicizing its applications to speech and motion problems of the disabled/differently abled takes on a special irony in monotheistic, patriarchal, and frequently anti-Semitic culture when computer-generated speech allows a boy with no voice to chant the Haftorah at his bar mitzvah. See Sussman 1986. Making the always context-relative social definitions of "ableness" particularly clear, military high-tech has a way of making human beings disabled by definition, a perverse aspect of much automated battlefield and Star Wars research and development. See Wilford 1986.

[34] See A. Ong 1987.

[35] James Clifford (1985, 1988) argues persuasively for recognition of continuous reinvention, the stubborn nondisappearance of those "marked" by Western imperializing practices.

[36] See Du Bois 1982; Daston and Mark n.d.; Park and Daston 1981. The noun monster shares its root with the verb to demonstrate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donna Haraway A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century 1991

# data[].attributes.body
When I research memes, Flowers's ceramic works attracted me, she crafting virtual objects into physical form, speaks to the nature of reality and whether our digital life is as important as our “real” life. It inspires me to consider how I can transform physical objects into virtual form and how to document and archive the information from real life to cyberspace in a novel way.

# data[].attributes.body
I thought that the male-dominated culture dripped into emojis reflects gender biases in the tech world.

It made me realise that biases in communication nowadays are more damaging than before due to technological development, for instance, gender-biased decisions are happening in hidden algorithms, programming, and machine learning, which also make me consider whether the computer itself is sexist.

Additionally, as a designer, do I have possible to use machine learning, pattern recognition, and predictive programming to introduce positive change?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hey! Did you know that 68 percent of the people who work at Apple are dudes? That tech darlings like Uber have rampant sexism problems? And that only 4 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women?

And who would have thought it: That male-dominated culture seems to have dripped into something as innocent as your iPhone's emoji suggestions.

If you type in leadership roles like "ceo," "cfo" or "cto" using the default keyboard in iOS, the emoji it suggests will be the default male in a suit, Mashable noticed Friday-even if you include a gendered context word like "she's" in the sentence you're composing.

Men, men, men! Just like you'd see in Silicon Valley.

Some caveats: We're not entirely sure how Apple's predictive text suggestions work, particularly when it comes to emoji, which were added as options only last year. The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Predictive text supposedly learns from your own texting habits, though it's possible that it also pulls in some aggregate data from other users to make better suggestions.

There may also be a technical reason this is happening. Emoji are created using a standard called Unicode. A man's face is generated using the code U+1F468, while a female is generated with U+1F469. Because the code for a female character is a number higher than the code for a male, it's possible that the dude comes up by default. (See that? She's already a step behind.)

Whatever the case, a number of Mashable staffers tried typing in the terms and confirmed that the emoji worked the same way by default for acronyms like "CFO" on their iPhones. You may see something different depending on your autofill or predictive text settings.

In all fairness to Apple, iOS has generally been ahead of the competition when it comes to diverse emoji. It proposed female emoji variations for a few new professions last year, and if you type in one of them-firefighter, say-you'll get an emoji prediction for each gender:

Note also that the female businesswoman emoji sometimes is suggested alongside her male counterpart: Capitalize "CEO" rather than using all lowercase and she will appear (not that anyone texts with Caps Lock on).

The female businesswoman also appears when you use iOS 10's "emoji replacement" option, which highlights key words that can be replaced by the iconic little characters. Better yet, she's even displayed ahead of that doofy guy with the mustache:

So, no, this isn't a crisis per se for gender equality, but it does speak to how teeny biases can be communicated in everyday scenarios. Egregious? No. But worth considering in some layer of the massive dirt pie that is Big Tech's sexism problems? Absolutely.
Thanks for the tip, Shelby Simon! Freia Lobo contributed reporting.
Related Video: The 3 best things about the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Type 'ceo' into your iPhone keyboard for a sexist surprise

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hey! Did you know that 68 percent of the people who work at Apple are dudes? That tech darlings like Uber have rampant sexism problems? And that only 4 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women? And who would have thought it: That male-dominated culture seems to have dripped into something as innocent as your iPhone's emoji suggestions.

# data[].attributes.body
Metaverse looks like parallel worlds without any connection with the physical world, however, technologies connect them closely. Similarly, digital babies seem irrelevant to us but when we encode them with our genes, they are inseparable from us.

# data[].attributes.body
New Language and Code

# data[].attributes.body
Coding it with our genes (personality, knowledge, memory...)

# data[].attributes.body
Who I can be
Where I can go
What I can do

# data[].attributes.body
Our Future Generations

# data[].attributes.body
Ourselves

# data[].attributes.body
gender-blind
ignore the gender, everyone can get birth to their own children.

# data[].attributes.body
Digital Body

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What’s Mother’s Day if you’ve been born in a machine and raised by robots?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the future some humans may be born without either a mother or father as we now know them, and with no other humans around to bring them up.

# data[].attributes.body
Machine

# data[].attributes.body
"A pregnancy in which one woman (the genetic mother) provides the egg, which is fertilized, and another woman (the surrogate mother) carries the fetus and gives birth to the child." Black's Law Dictionary 1674 (10th ed. 2014).

# data[].attributes.body
"A pregnancy in which a woman provides her own egg, which is fertilized by artificial insemination, and carries the fetus and gives birth to a child for another person." Black's Law Dictionary 1674 (10th ed. 2014).

# data[].attributes.body
Another Person's Body

# data[].attributes.body
Own Body

# data[].attributes.body
Woman's Body

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Apple's iOS10 update introduced predictive emoji in 2016, most users were charmed by its somewhat helpful-and often entertaining-image-for-word swap suggestions. But Sarah Gephart, a partner in Brooklyn's MGMT. design firm, noticed something curious straight away. If a text included the term "CEO," the iOS always suggested a white male emoji as a visual synonym.

Gephart wasn't alone in her discovery. The website Mashable posted a story about the unfortunate bias in early 2017, and by the end of the year Apple had addressed the situation. Now predictive emoji offers icons of both genders as a swap for CEO.

That may have ended the PR crises for Apple, but for Gephart, a partner at MGMT. design, it inspired a new independent project. Towards the end of 2017, she began working on what she calls a "hypothetical hack": a unisex glyph that iOS could suggest every time a user began typing a gendered pronoun. Instead of the binary-enforcing "he" or "she," the machine could suggest a new symbol, designed by MGMT., that would represent neither, or both.

In an excellent blog post outlining the project, Gephart writes, "Biases in communication today are almost more damaging than they were in the past because gender-biased decisions are happening in hidden algorithms, programming, and machine learning." The suggested emoji to replace CEO was an example of how the highly male-dominated tech world reinforces basic, outdated social assumptions in ways so subtle they make it into the design of our iPhone software. A brand new symbol, thought Gephart, would serve as a necessary corrective.

"As designers, we don't write policy papers-we work with type and design things, and this is how we can try to effect change," Cheng says in a recent interview. "The written word is part of the social fabric's most basic communication, and if you chip away at even the smaller aspects of it, you can try to affect the broader picture."

In other words, the mighty often manifests in the small. But is it possible for a single glyph to help change centuries of ingrained gender-based thinking? The pair make a convincing case.

In a talk at the 2018 Typographics conference held at Cooper Union in New York, MGMT. presented a new gender fluid character as part of a studio-wide research project. But first Gephart provided background on four historic glyphs and abbreviations to explain their thinking and design process. How and why have other characters throughout history originated and evolved?

She began with the ampersand. Despite its origins in first-century Roman times, the character didn't have a name until the early 19th-century, when it was still considered the 27th and final letter of the alphabet. For school children reciting their ABCs, it would have been confusing to end with "X, Y, Z, and." (And what?) Instead the students said, "and per se and"-meaning, "X, Y, Z, and (by itself) and." Over time, "and per se and" ran together into the word we use today: ampersand.

Another example Gephart pointed to is the title "Ms.," which was first proposed in 1901 as an alternate for Miss or Mrs., but didn't catch on in popular usage until the 1970s when it became the title of Gloria Steinem's influential feminist magazine. "Miss was a hint to your marital status, and was considered inferior to the social standing of a Mrs.," Gephart tells us. "But marital status is really nobody's business, as a part of your formal title in a business setting." As common usage often slurred the pronunciation of both Miss and Mrs. together into Miz, anyway, it was not a difficult swap linguistically. Ideologically, on the other hand, it was easier for some people to adjust to than others.

Then there's Prince's unpronounceable hybrid male/female symbol, introduced in 1993 as a text character to stand in for his new name when he became the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Partly a sly name change on Prince's part to get out of a contract with his record label Warner Brothers, the symbol also reinforced the performer's image as someone unafraid to play with gender. It came to be known as the Love Symbol, though many called it the Ankh, a word that it slightly resembles. The symbol merges the signs for both male and female, plus an unrelated curly swoop.

The fourth and final influence on Gephart's project was a curious glitch that happened last fall: an iOS error related to Apple's cloud-based synchronization for predictive text. A bug on iPhones running iOS10 or 11 caused a typed "I" to be auto-replaced by a capital letter "A" and a mysterious unicode character of six stacked horizontal bars. The odd thing was that people accepted the strange character combination as "I." "As the hundreds of millions of people who use iPhones experienced the glitch together, it began to enforce a new letter in the alphabet," Gephart writes in her blog post. "Once we collectively decided we didn't need 'I,' we adapted and moved on. Our machines dictated a new language for us, and we ran with it."

Armed with this research, Gephart began a steady evolutionary process of working through the visual possibilities for a new gender-neutral symbol. "I like to think of this as benign and positive radicalism," she says. "I wanted to make the he/she look nice but also be something easy to say. I also didn't want to create a glyph from nothing so that it looked unfamiliar, like something from another planet." Instead she blended recognizable letterforms, beginning with a combination of the words he and she. Gephart tried to preserve the flow of handwritten text as she also considered the glyph's use in the gender fluid community. She wondered, "Was a static glyph adequate to represent frequent change?"

The result is a character that encompasses not only he and she, but also gender fluid pronoun options like Ne, Ve, E, Ze, or They, all of which can be seen abstractly represented in the final form.

Gephart finished off her exploration by imagining how the final iteration of this stage of the glyph in development might look when typeset in different fonts such as Helvetica, Bodoni, and Cooper Black. "We would like to get it added to Unicode, possibly, and from there into an iOS update," Gephart says at the end of our conversation.

"Prince's glyph took effort for users (they had to load it onto their computers from a floppy disk!) but [this symbol] could be simple," Gephart adds. "It could work like Bitmoji, where you just add it to your keyboard if you choose to use it. What it represents is the hard part. When you answer one question, you open up three more. We've reached a good state with this project to pause and keep thinking. It's really an open-ended question of how type represents gender and what that means."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MGMT.'s Hypothetical, Typographical Hack on Gendered Pronouns

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Apple's iOS10 update introduced predictive emoji in 2016, most users were charmed by its somewhat helpful-and often entertaining-image-for-word swap suggestions. But Sarah Gephart, a partner in Brooklyn's MGMT. design firm, noticed something curious straight away. If a text included the term "C

# data[].attributes.body
Transgender Language

# data[].attributes.body
Natural Gender Language

# data[].attributes.body
Gender Language

# data[].attributes.body
Genderless Language

# data[].attributes.body
New Language and Code

# data[].attributes.body
Because my initial imagination is using a kind of new language that can break the regional restriction and achieve free-barrier communication on the metaverse to generate a new culture, however, from reading, I once more realized that the online language is actually difficult to separate from "real" language and I might need to pay some attention to the balance between these two languages.

# data[].attributes.body
"Memes are not deposits of exclusionary knowledge and archaic references — at least, they’re not just that. They don’t just name things; they also do the work of creating and collapsing contexts. They don’t reproduce a world but bring one into being."

But that doesn’t mean we should split memeified online language off from “real” language, or that offline speech should be taken as an effectively stabilizing counterpart to the fluidity of online speech. To think of the world without online language is to think of it without the letter “e”.

# data[].attributes.body
“Garden of Memes” introduces contemporary artists who embody their own world of work using the methodology of imitation and cloning under the theme of “memes,” the digital generation’s visual characters. A meme is easy to make, easy to share, and intuitive for anyone to recognize, but they are somewhat meaningless. It has become a symbol of the changing world in the digital image communication era and a type of everyday conceptualism. This attitude to overthrow realistic norms and to break down the cultural and artistic classes, in fact, resembles the legacy of Dadaism and pop art in contemporary art. “Garden of Memes” focuses on the way contemporary artists repossess images through revelation and imagination in an era with platforms where anyone can easily create images and communicate with each other. This attempt will be an opportunity to look at how the artistic language of those who freely cross the boundaries of everyday life without being bound by art forms or aesthetic rhetoric gains uniqueness in the post-Internet era, while also looking at the impact of meme politics on contemporary visual culture.

# data[].attributes.body
TZUSOO translates the famous paradox "Schrödinger’s Cat" into the reality of her own life, creating a digital baby in virtual space which is able to freely determine the sex, skin colour and other characteristics or to dispense with all specifications so as to avoid stereotyping.

Her work not only makes me reflect on gender and origin but also inspires me to consider the gendered language, gender identity and gendered culture in the metaverse and think about the relationship among gender, technologies, language and cultures.

I like the idea of creating digital babies in virtual space, however, the aim of this project is to avoid stereotyping and I am not sure 'freely determining the sex and skin colour' is a good way to solve the problem because I thought that the behaviour of choosing gender and skin colour itself hides the risk of stereotyping.

# data[].attributes.body
Tzusoo's digital baby reminds me of surrogacy, because digital baby is not given birth from a physical body or even human body, and regarding reproduction, I think of the book called The Handmaid's Tale, this book tells the story of compelling women to keep reproducing even when it’s become increasingly difficult for them to do so, which makes me deeply feel the inequality of gender and status.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Schrödinger's Baby(2019/20), TZUSOO alludes to the popular thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger proposed a scenario in which a cat is locked in a box with an unstable radioactive atom that could potentially begin to emit radiation and release a toxic gas. However, there is no way to say with certainty when or indeed whether this will happen without opening the box. The result is a paradox, with Schrödinger asserting that the cat enters a state of superposition that makes it impossible to say whether it is alive or dead.

The South Korean artist translates this famous paradox into the reality of her own life, creating a digital baby in virtual space. Based on her inner grappling with potential motherhood, TZUSOO bought the digital model of a developing embryo, refining it according to her own ideas. She is free to determine the sex, skin colour and other characteristics or to dispense with all specifications so as to avoid stereotyping. In Schrödinger's Baby, TZUSOO thus discuss core aspects of her work including reflection on gender and origin for which she also draws on her personal experience as a South Korean artist in Europe. Being a digital native herself, TZUSOO often uses virtual technology applications in her work, creating avatars that operate in dreamlike settings oscillating between devastated landscape and hyperreality. This contrast of utopia and dystopia may also be seen to refer to all-embracing digitisation and its development. The future is not imaginable and it is not possible to foresee how the further development of artificial intelligence will play out and which ethical questions will need to be discussed in the course of this transhumanist discourse. For example, what will the possibility of digital surrogate motherhood entail and what responsibility do we have for the avatars we create or indeed they for us? TZUSOO's works raise many questions connected with the current uncertainty of rapid digital development. We have long since reached the end of thinking in terms of linear progress and we now find ourselves in a world of exponential digital development. The experiment is therefore already in full swing, and in this digital world humanity is facing questions that we will only be able to answer when the future has become the present and we have opened the box.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Schrödinger's Baby(2019/20), TZUSOO alludes to the popular thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger proposed a scenario in which a cat is locked in a box with an unstable radioactive atom that could potentially begin to emit radiation and release a toxic gas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The record of life is inscribed and passed on to the next generation in various forms. The posterity imagines the past by analyzing evidence found in records collate with the standards of their time and adds new life to the record. The act of recording may be the inherited nature of human beings which rises from the obligation and desire for continuous life. "Land of Symbols" presents hieroglyphs on life made by five artists in crafts. The letters resemble the parts of a plant while embracing the meanings of life; "Circulation and Connection," "Foundation and Support," "Balance and Mediation," "Solidarity and Blooming," and "Connotation and Fruition." The repetitive movements of artist hands reveal unique characteristics of materials (soil, metal, glass, fiber, paper) in the letters. As viewers decode the five hieroglyphs, the letters will obtain the new life and deliver the message of the present.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The record of life is inscribed and passed on to the next generation in various forms. The posterity imagines the past by analyzing evidence found in records collate with the standards of their time and adds new life to the record.