Reloading Cyberfeminism. - Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture - book review

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Katie Mondloch

Taken as a whole, Reload is concerned with what Flanagan and Booth call "women's cyberfiction," although certain "criticism" chapters stray beyond literature into digital art, film, computer games and the like. 1970s feminist science fiction, described by the editors as an intervention into the traditionally "masculine" genre, and the 1980s cyberpunk movement (itself heavily influenced by feminist science fiction), provide a useful context for considering women's cyberfiction. Cyberpunk's manic working through of destabilized Identities in representations of hacker culture has suggested to some critics a progressive understanding of sexual difference; Flanagan and Booth refute this interpretation, pointing out that the conclusions of cyberpunk novels and films generally reinscribe "traditional" gender identities and relations.

The women cyberfiction writers in Reload for the most part reject the trope of a disembodied consciousness (the user who "jacks in" to a virtual world and leaves the body or "meat" behind) as well as the utopian promise of virtual bodies (the "postgender" possibility of transcending the biological body) found in so much cyberculture fiction and criticism. In her introductory chapter Booth instructively points out that women's cyberfiction echoes certain "postmodernist" feminist theorists, such as Elizabeth Grosz or Judith Butler, by fore-grounding the material body's relationship to the construction of subjectivity. On the other hand, Booth acknowledges that gender identity is fairly stable in Reload's examples of cyberfiction. The fact that these seemingly paradoxical points are both valid observations regarding the disparate texts in Reload gives some Indication of the book's ambitious breadth even as it hints at the rather tenuous connection between the assembled texts.

Reading this massive book in its entirety reveals fascinating themes and stimulates a cross-fertilization of ideas. Fictional and theoretical speculation on the cyborg--often a specifically female cyborg--is recurrent. Haraway's by now canonical essay is referenced in nearly every criticism chapter, closely followed by numerous references to Katherine Hayles's (1999) and Allcuquere Rosanne Stone's (1991) writings on cyberculture and embodiment. There are several outstanding essays in this vein. In her reading of Marge Piercy's novel He. She and It. Heather Hicks's contribution to Reload reimagines the cyborg figure as completely bound up with the concept of work. Hicks' provocative essay challenges the reader to rethink certain cyberculture theorizations with more attention to material culture. Concerned with the body's status in cyberculture, Julie Doyle and Kate O'Riordan chart a fascinating history of medical imaging from the eighteenth century to the present in their essay "Virtually Visible: Female Cyberbodies and the Medical Imagination," persuasively demonstrating the gender binaries that these practices hold in place. Similarly interested in exploring binary formations, Dianne Currier's excellent essay proposes Deleuze and Guattari's model of the assemblage for thinking through technology in a non-binary way. Her thoughtful examination unearths binaries of mind/body and immaterial/material in even the most highly self-reflexive critical writing.