Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. - book reviews

Edited by dint of Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti London: Z volumes 1996 249 pp./$22.50 (sb)

ANGELA WALL

I one time asked my students - undergraduates at a prominent engineering academy - to define how science, technology and tillage are commonly understood in the United States. During the course of the discussion, individual woman suggested that technology made life easier and more convenient. A male scholar countered immediately, saying that technology made us lazy. Traditionally, men have been positioned as those to whom technology is familiar; that a male scholar should be troubled by the laziness incurred from one side technology is surprising. What was it that he felt technology made him les inclined to do, given that in like manner often technology is celebrated precisely because it gives us the world at our fingertips? Alternatively, who did he think was made lazy by means of technology? Was "laziness" a euphemism for "too easy?" Technology no longer appears to be an effective barrier between the sexe I have the appearanceed to be engaged with a generation of technologically-educated women who find themselves "at home" with technology. on the contrary the current discussion among feminists working in science and technology points without the complex nature of women's relationships to emerging technologies.

Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert's collection of essays, advanceed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, presents a careful discussion of by what means women use current technologies and by what means this affects the perceived character of technology in women's lives. Implicit in this proces of usage is the simultaneous gendering of technology. The work invites readers to think about technology not simply as functional produces (machines, tools and gizmos), on the other hand as a system of interactions that affect social relations between men and women by dint of exploring how women interface with technology, these essays demonstrate that "men and women are situated differently in relation to technologies." Differences come up among women, ranging from who has access to technology, to "[to] what uses different women set machines." Terry and Calvert question for what cause [i]or[/i] reason men are readily associated with "high-end" technologies. Is it, they ask, because they are more "knowledgeable" or because they make them? still almost as many American women as men have cars and women make up a dramatically high percentage of the growing labor force in computer-based information management industries. progressed Lives questions the concept of technology and the "knowledgable user," and demonstrates that sole by closely examining and "processing" the everyday details of who earns to deploy technology can we assess technology's relationship to issues of sex race, class, nationality and sexuality.

The volume is broken down into three sections: "Digital Worlds," "Bodies" and "Home" This strategic breakdown illustrates where sexed uses of technology are particularly overdetermined and "interventions are key" In this collection, the interventions are a combination of theoretical remarks on the nature of sexed uses of technology, as well as visual media throws that involve explorations of the interface between sex and technology. In fact, the work is a selection of visual and textual work, film and video screenings and symposiums featured in an exhibition entertainered by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus in 1994-95 The collection gives ample space to the visual pieces included in the exhibition that demonstrate the artful ways in which technology and sex combine to produce a social a whole of practices that informs who realizes to use technology and who gains credited with technological innovations. Nina Wakeford gazes closely at the transgressive networking that takes place upon web pages designed by self-styl "Net chicks and geekgirls, cyberfeminists, Nerdgrrrl and digital Sojourners." Following cultural critics Sadie Plant and Laura Miller, Wakeford takes issue with the popular belief that the snare is a site of endles sexual harassment for female users. Her incorporation of interviews with women users stand over againsts many stereotypes, reminding us that we "ne to be alert to writing which ignores alternative discourses of women's experiences in on-line life, and unthinkingly mirrors the moral panics of widespread media publicity." This is just individual example of the ways in which this collection of essays closely scrutinizes commonly-held assumptions about the multiple ways women are positioned and also position themselves in relation to technology. Wakeford includes an invaluable resource page listing the addresses for all the sites discussed.

Evelynn Hammonds examines the contradictory formations that rise for popular consumption when scientific "findings" upon race are mediated through computerized morphing technology. Hammonds draws from early twentieth-century photographs used to illustrate the physical and therefore fundamental differences between the races. She compares of the like kind practices with a recent demonstration of morphing technologies featured in Time and Newsweek and explores what happens when biology is supplanted by dint of computer technology. What kind of citizenship is imagined or configured in the logic of these morphed images? What or whose nationality is being celebrated? What are the implications of physical sameness and by what mode do these relate to actual practices of privilege and power? B Ruby Rich presents a provocative account questioning whether technology will at any time be used in the service of women's exigencys While acknowledging that items of the like kind as the phone, fax and modem are necessities for many working women she also speculates upon what social structures might gaze like if technologies were really discloseed with women in mind. She cites in what manner Rosie the Riveter ads encouraged women to transfer their operating skills from domestic appliances to factory machines during WWII and give an inkling ofs a need for another similar campaign. Women ne more than regimen processors. What if a in fact inter-active computer/telephone system existed that sought to break women's isolation? Rich presents "an on-line bulletin board for input to libraries [not catalog access], in the way that that women who can't win out to attend library meetings could reckoner the ban-the-book efforts of women with greater leisure time or mobility." Other possibilities include on-line communication networks to precipitate care for the somewhat old shared resources for single mothers and web sites tracking deadbeat dads from state to state. by means of including essays like Rich's, Terry and Calvert compile a provocative and comprehensive collection of pieces that inspire the critical examination of existing representations of sex and technology while reminding us that technology tenders vast opportunities for women.