Syblogs
Syblogs.
In the last three decades or so, referring to the internet as a space that is somehow limitless, full of radical possibilities, an almost class-less space has become a trend of sorts. Especially after Donna Haraway's seminal essay 'The Cyborg Manifesto' - where the 'Cyborg' is an organism whose boundaries of 'human-ness' are blurred with his or her identities achieved via technology - imagining the internet to be a site that can allow for multiple identities, reworking and using fluid and unfixed gender identities and subverting one's notion of gender identity is a very powerful idea. In that vein, information networks are seen as sites for escape from the gender systems of everyday life, a Promised Land of sorts, one especially suited for women and 'feminine modes of communication'. At the same time, the general practice is to think of the Cyborg as an almost benign creature, akin to the fetishist notion of the female robot used in pop culture, which is paradoxically oversexualised and yet has no equipment for sexual intercourse. This notion of a ‘genderless Cyborg’ can be crystallized in Takashi Murakami’s sculpture Hiropon which depicts such a Cyborg: naked, lacking genitals and spurting copious amounts of breast milk; she is a fantasy, able to nurture without the threat of reproductive capacity.
This possessed space the Cyborg occupies in popular discourse is very similar to the position women Gothic writers were allotted in eighteenth and nineteenth century, where women writers encompassed the ‘female’ literary tradition of the time; a convenient label accorded them to contain them in, while simultaneously refusing any kind of radical edge to their writing. Today after many feminist critiques of their works we see Jane Austen as more than just a decorous spinster; she was a subversive and a complex thinker, Ann Radcliffe wrote more than just ‘ghost stories’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more than just an opium addicted invalid with ‘cocker
In the last three decades or so, referring to the internet as a space that is somehow limitless, full of radical possibilities, an almost class-less space has become a trend of sorts. Especially after Donna Haraway's seminal essay 'The Cyborg Manifesto' - where the 'Cyborg' is an organism whose boundaries of 'human-ness' are blurred with his or her identities achieved via technology - imagining the internet to be a site that can allow for multiple identities, reworking and using fluid and unfixed gender identities and subverting one's notion of gender identity is a very powerful idea. In that vein, information networks are seen as sites for escape from the gender systems of everyday life, a Promised Land of sorts, one especially suited for women and 'feminine modes of communication'. At the same time, the general practice is to think of the Cyborg as an almost benign creature, akin to the fetishist notion of the female robot used in pop culture, which is paradoxically oversexualised and yet has no equipment for sexual intercourse. This notion of a ‘genderless Cyborg’ can be crystallized in Takashi Murakami’s sculpture Hiropon which depicts such a Cyborg: naked, lacking genitals and spurting copious amounts of breast milk; she is a fantasy, able to nurture without the threat of reproductive capacity.
This possessed space the Cyborg occupies in popular discourse is very similar to the position women Gothic writers were allotted in eighteenth and nineteenth century, where women writers encompassed the ‘female’ literary tradition of the time; a convenient label accorded them to contain them in, while simultaneously refusing any kind of radical edge to their writing. Today after many feminist critiques of their works we see Jane Austen as more than just a decorous spinster; she was a subversive and a complex thinker, Ann Radcliffe wrote more than just ‘ghost stories’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more than just an opium addicted invalid with ‘cocker