From: cyberdiva <radhik-AT-bgnet.bgsu.edu>
Subject: [cybersociology] Call for Papers: Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 08:14:30 -0400


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>Subject: [cybersociology] Call for Papers: Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols
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>CYBERFEMINISM, Next Protocols : CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A BOOK
>
> The OLD BOYS NETWORK calls for contributions to its new editorial
>project, provisionally titled: CYBERFEMINISM, Next Protocols - a BOOK
>with new and controversial approaches to Cyberfeminism. Why? We are in
>need of a book which reflects the actual (and future) state of the art of
>thinking about, and inventing, the digital medium in its capacity to
>subvert cultural practices which a cyberfeminist perspective can provide.
> Verena Kuni (Germany), Claudia Reiche (Germany), Yvonne Volkart
>(Switzerland), and Faith Wilding (USA), as the editorial group are
>looking for feminist modes of accessing, queering, transgressing,
>rethinking or using information based technologies--electronic
>communication (including command and control), word or image processing,
>every form of virtuality and simulation, biotechnologies, body politics...
> To start the discussion, the OLD BOYS NETWORK offers an outline of some
>utopian reflections on contemporary Cyberfeminisms, which indicate our
>special fields of interest, and may suggest debate topics.
> With the publishers of Autonomedia Books (New York) we hope to create a
>network of contributions to be published in 2000/2001. We
>wish to consider a broad variety of texts, as well as non-textual projects,
>from experimental to theoretical, activist, poetic, polemical, fragmentary,
>philosophical, and the like. If you call yourself a woman and are
>interested in the communicating and debating potential of this
>CYBERFEMINIST project you are invited to submit proposals. New,
>unpublished work is preferred.
> Please email your proposals: 300-500 words, in English by the 30th
>October, 1999 to the OLD BOYS NETWORK. Contact: boys-AT-obn.org Visit:
>http://www.obn.org. Please include your full name, postal address,
>telephone, email address, and a two line biography in your proposal.
>READ.ME FIRST:invitation to contribute to cyberfeminism. next protocols 1.0
> Old Boys Network (Ed.) CYBERFEMINISM Next Protocols
> THE OLD BOYS NETWORK is especially interested in texts which address the
>following: <Paradoxes of the digital medium>
> How do we judge the changes that the medium of the computer has
>introduced in a historical way? And in the way it has changed how we
>understand and use history? What are the every-day embodied conditions of
>women's lives as they are being altered by the new technologies and
>communications networks? What are new forms of oppression and of
>liberation? Has the digital medium--starting with the undecisiveness of
>the Turing test, and in its latest form when calculation-tasks have become
>autonomous data processing--taken the place of the subject? Can you tell:
>Where do you or the machine 'end'? <Paradoxes of the body>
> ...there is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact
>that the body is what it is capable of doing, and what any body is
>capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture."
>(Elizabeth Grosz)
> What is the experience of gender and femininity in the virtual medium?
>How do we describe these strange new bodies, these body doubles of
>virtuality and flesh? What are the effects of the biotech revolution on
>social constructions of gender, and on women? The manufacture and control
>of fertility/infertility and the medicalization of women's body processes
>are vital subjects for cyberfeminist scrutiny, critique, and activism. We
>need to examine the increasingly close links between medical and military
>technologies and the implications of these for women.
> <Paradoxes of the cross-breed: Net-condition>
> Cyberfeminism is not simply an evolution of historical feminism created
>as a more adequate answer to meet the changed conditions of the
>Information Age. Cyberfeminism can perhaps best be described as a
>feminist intervention into these new conditions, and an exploration of
>how they challenge the political and social conditions of feminism. What
>is the net-condition of women? What could cyberfeminist subversions and
>uses of the net consist of? What are the possibilities of the so-called
>networked body or the body on-line? In thinking beyond gender and gender
>discourses we find ourselves in the territory of the post-human, the
>cyborg, or the hyper-cyborg, the territory of the monstrous and the
>unrepresentable. With the advent of advanced biotechnology and genetic
>mapping, the field of teratology has acquired whole new meanings in
>medical and agricultural realms. How do things look in the physical and
>non-physical realms of virtual teratology?READ.ME: IF/ELSE
>invitation to contribute to cyberfeminism. next protocols 1.0
>IF you would like to know more about the ideas THE OLD BOYS NETWORK
>isconcerned with while going deeper into next protocols THEN read this
>alternative invitation: Old Boys Network (Ed.) CYBERFEMINISM: Next
>Protocols IF
> Cyberfeminism" is a powerful label for some vague ideas.....
> Can a word express a widespread intimation of something not yet
>articulated? Yes, condensations of some vague ideas have been a part of
>every genuine invention; for example, the digital computer emerged
>independently and in different places at about the same historic moment.
>Since about 1992 this has also been the case with CYBERFEMINISM. Yet the
>success story of this word seems unprecedented. As technical as the media
>named above, CYBERFEMINISM indicates a diffusion through the hitherto
>thinkable and possible--a permeable membrane.
> Two masterpieces in male western cultural tradition: the woman" and the
>machine", worshipped in endless - mostly male - fantasies of mechanical
>women-automata or as female robots or cyborgs have in the meantime met
>elsewhere under strange new conditions: Not only the male authors of
>these subjects have disappeared from the stage of history, but
>authorship, stage and history may themselves have disappeared, or at
>least have changed their recognizable forms... Cyberfeminism" does not
>indicate the necessary return of the repressed" in the male psyche of
>history, but a feed-back loop in a space-time named post-human.
> Like IF, the basic element of programming languages for case
>differentiation and ramification - Cyberfeminism" indicates an operation.
>The feed-back loop: if x then a else b" sets an unpredictable future for
>the machine's actions. Who would seriously trust such autonomous
>operations? Since the war-decision programming of the 40s, almost
>everybody (preferably without knowing) trusts IF-THEN commands as a means
>to prophesy the immediate future. Reported errors will already have
>predicted the unknown message, as a message is the transmission of
>certain calculable probabilities. Metaphorically (and incorrectly)
>spoken, a feminist bet could engage in the finding of some less
>predictable errors - one step beyond coding - in order to trigger a
>change in the immediate future of the machine's universe. Making a mess
>of the message? Count differently? Change the alphabet? Calculate faster?
>Rearm the hardware to devices capable of all of the first four rules of
>arithmetic? Transmit viruses? Put the data of your genetic fingerprint in
>an Artificial Life environment to parody literary origin myths? Live new
>or ambiguous genders? The potential of this situation has not yet been
>realized in relation to patriarchally coded cultural systems: yet posing
>unresolvable decision problems, like the halting problem, sometimes
>turning into infinite feedback- loops ... ELSE IF
> Cyberfeminism is a simulation....
> What will we have been wanting to say? We: some sort of strange new
>feminists, trying to work out this question theoretically and politically
>with the foreseen result of changing or even demolishing feminism", or
>ourselves" in the way we conceive feminism" and ourselves" now. So:
>Cyborg Feminisms? Cyberfeminism? With a Difference? Weaving automatic
>Feminism like Jaquard's loom? Tinkering with split or second selves? We
>think: IF you don't make your bets, THEN rien ne va plus... or worse:
>continues in a way called progress.
> For IF the bet on what becomes reality is made by women with machines
>(they'll both win), THEN history can be deciphered in the mode of future
>perfect - and what will perhaps still be called women" continues tosimulate.
> At least that's what we are working with: the utopian space opened up
>between the meaning and the letter, between the different lectures and
>practices, between desires and facts - that is working in a zone of
>passage between informational noise and modes of simulation. Coming out
>of the vague. ELSE IF Cyberfeminism is not a teleology ...
> If ideal and final concepts of history in cyberfeminist visions are not
>supported, there'll be alternatives to statements like the following :
>...as machines get more autonomous, so do the women." or It's not
>happening because people are trying to make it happen - or even because
>feminist politics are driving these changes (...), but changes are
>occurring almost as an automatic process. (...) It's beautifully
>effortless, it's an automatic process!" (Sadie Plant) Why should
>cyberfeminism identify with philosophies of history that lead to any kind
>of historic fulfillment? No genuine simulation under the sign of women"
>would corrupt its open structure, like proposing quite a thermodynamic
>end of history as a law of nature. ELSE IF Gender is not obsolete...
> Despite suggestions that one should put hope in a "monstrous world
>without gender" (Donna Haraway) why not stick to the intimate
>monstrosities of sexual difference in an analytical, critical as well as
>an utopian sense? Assuming that the borders between humans and
>information processing machines, as between the physical and the
>non-physical world and some other identity granting convictions will have
>been shifting or down for quite a while - all this does not necessarily
>trigger wishes of getting rid of gender, including the most interesting
>monstrous female sex - the vanishing point probably even of the
>perspective construction of a world without gender". So - if gender is
>not obsolete, there is a stake in reformulating it under contemporary
>conditions. How? Cyberfeminism encloses "Fem" in its very center -"fem"
>that promising syllable which hints at gender, yet exceeds and eludes it.
> ELSE IF Cyberfeminism is a monster....
> We think: Cyberfeminism is a monster born of net-condition and cultural
>traditions; a hybrid concept of the strange new bodies of genetechnology
>and the new forms of simulation in the age of virtuality. If gender is
>not obsolete, but in process of changing, then how to describe these
>monstrous new sensibilities, identities, bodies - literally,
>conceptually, politically...? How to perceive and create the new skin of
>the hybrid new existences, both physical and non-physical? As we live in
>a time of crass power consolidation through pancapitalism, as the
>gendered power formations and dominating structures are being spread to
>all corners of the earth by this globalization, and as information
>technologies are profoundly changing lives, all this can trigger  women"
>to muster all their knowledge and cunning to find ways of creating active
>nodes of subversion and alternative processes on however tiny a scale. If
>cyberfemininsts use the Net as a strategy and a medium for political,
>cultural, and social action within decentralized information and
>communication networks, what could the monstrous consequences be? THEN
> send your proposal to the OLD BOYS NETWORK!
>
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