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

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Katie Mondloch

Like many anthologies, Reload's greatest strength lays in its component parts. While Flanagan and Booth have done a commendable job of assembling an absorbing selection of texts, their introductory essays are unfortunately not as rewarding. Both introductory chapters lack focus, covering vast amounts of literature with cursory detail and too little in the way of explanation as to how the criticism and fiction selections constitute a meaningful relationship. Reload is most rewarding when sampled at random without following the, sometimes willful, juxtapositions the editors have constructed. The fact that the fiction and criticism chapters aren't clearly labeled is also frustrating. Since this book is such a wonderful resource, particularly for pedagogical purposes, it is lamentable that the selections do not have headings with the original publication information or, at the very least, the original publication date. (The interested reader can search for this information in the book's "Acknowledgments" section, however.)

In its entirety, Reload is a fruitful compilation of hard to find writings by leading and upcoming writers concerned with women, fiction and cyberculture. Reload opens up a much-needed cultural imaginary beyond the male hacker or gender-free cyberspace paradigms, and it is an ideal resource for both expert and novice readers interested in cyberculture, science fiction and feminism. In Reload, Catherine Ramirez theorizes that science fiction's tendency toward dis-recognition and estrangement makes the genre a compelling site for feminist interventions. Ramirez challenges us to understand other literature that possesses these distancing qualities as "science fiction" and hence capable of disrupting established orders. It is with this theory in mind that the selected essays in Reload can be said to cohere and to inspire us to "reload"--to rethink women and cyberculture.

* KATIE MONDLOCH is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is writing a dissertation on screen--reliant media installation art from the mid-1960s to the present.