Mohawk Ed (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} writerpunk) wrote,@ 2004-05-19 10:04:00 |
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rebirth of the cyberqueer
{More working on my paper via the internet -- hopefully all of this blathering will add up to something useful...}
Though not as "old" as the cyborg, the notion and identity the cyberqueer has been equally contested. The cyberqueer first appears ten years after "The Cyborg Manifesto" in Donald Morton's essay "Birth of the Cyberqueer" in 1995, which tracks a postmodern ideological and economic shift from the gay and lesbian identities of the 1970s and 1980s to the ostensibly more inclusive and radical queer identities of the 1990s. Morton describes, "In the domain of sexuality, the new space of queer theory is a postgay, postlesbian space. Ludic (post)modernism, which promotes the localizing of cultural phenomena, discourages any effort to render these developments systematically coherent and intelligible" (369). In the least, the word queer and the identity of queer is a reappropriation of a pejorative. He writes, "[T]he reappearance of queer today is given a local 'explanation'...as an oppressed minority's positive reunderstanding of a once negative word, as the adoption of an umbrella to encompass the concerns of both female and male homosexuals and bisexuals, or as the embracing of the latest fashion over an older, square style by the hip youth generation" (369). At the most, queer is a transforming, ratifying, often perverse, and "teledildonic" (a word coined by Howard Rheingold) marker and meaning-maker.
Morton, however, is critical and suspect of the reemergence of queer and hopes to call attention to the redefinition of queer in relation to and in terms of history, social theory, textuality, materialism, capitalism, and activism. He says at length in his introduction: "I argue here that explanations relying on trends, styles, and the sexual subject's 'voluntary' intentions trivialize the issue of queerness for the purpose of occluding the ideological significance of the return of the queer. In other words, queer studies -- as a superseder of the older and presumably outmoded Enlightenment-inspired gay and lesbian studies -- participates in the contemporary shift brought about by ludic away from historical materialism. This idealism comes to light when the return of the queer is historicized as part of a systematic development connected to the appearance in late capitalism of such notions as virtual realities, cyberpunk, cybersex, teletheory. The return of the queer today is actually the (techno)birth of the cyberqueer" (369).
Morton extends the definition of the cyberqueer and of queer theory believing that both -- "like ludic (post)modernism -- can be critically and historically understood as part of the confluence of elements that constitute late, multinational capitalism, sharing fundamental features in particular with hyperspace, cyberspace, and cyberpunk of technoculture" (375).
For Morton, cyberqueers and queer theory hopes to build not "a differently ordered utopia" but "a nonconditioned and nonordered atopia" (375). Morton critiques contemporary queer theory as attempting to situate queers in non-space, in lack of space; it is a paradox that must be attended to and resolved in order for queer theory to be intelligble and useful. Morton further describes the paradox, the atopic queer space, as "an ever-expanding region of sensuous pleasure" that ignores "the historical constraints need places on pleasure" (375). He is deeply concerned that the cyberqueer is ahistorical, atavistic, too anti-assimilationist, amaterial, too local, and too disconnected. He says, "Cybercized queer theory, with its roots in the anarchtic skepticism of Nietzsche, envisions a decentered, Interneted, normless society (if that is not a contradition in terms)" (375), which is oppositional and perhaps counterproductive to materialist left theory, to the gay (and lesbian) movement, that tied its social idealism to "conceptual understandings of material and historical conditions and believed in a politics that was theoretically grounded" (375).
Morton reminds cyberqueers of Haraway's remark and caution that the world was inexorably shifting from "all work to all play, a deadly game" (161). Both Morton and Haraway raise questions and red flags about the egalitarianism of technology, about issues of access, about the resources required to be part of the circuit, and about to whom and where access is granted. Morton forcefully challenges cyberqueers, their theory, and their technology to ground themselves in the material. In 1995, he declaims, "Cyberspace is a bourgeois designer space in which privileged Western or Westernized subjects fantasize that instead of being chosen by history, they choose their own histories. By manipulating the machines, the user-subjects write virtual histories according to their desires and seek to evade present historical conditions" (375). In fact, he continues, "The association with cyberspace (entry to which is literally not open to all) allies queer idealism with the self-interested individualistic idealism of the bourgeois subject" (375). He wishes cyberqueers to let go of their atopic idealism for materialist critique that "investigates how associations themselves (positive or negative) are produced and coonects questions of sexual practices not to morality but to the politics of class and other grounds of oppression and to ideology, of which morality is one expression" (378).
However, Morton's worldview and world-making are decidedly disenchanted and dystopic (and perhaps a product of early cyberculture). He sees a Boolean either/or between immaterial queer idealism and materialist, leftist, social idealism rather than a more collaborative both/and. Morton fails to entertain the possibility and potential that play need not be without purpose, that the cyborg's slipperiness or fracturedness need not be chaotic and meaningnless, that desire and need are not mutually exclusive, that the cyberqueer can be more than just a trendy word. What does it mean to be "chosen by history"? Don't subjects, in a sense, always choose, record, remember, revise their own histories? And given that today's technologies (mobile phones, personal data assistants, hearing aids, onboard navigation, MP3 players, wireless internet) insert, implant, intervene nearly continuously and simultaneously working as part of, extensions of, or in concert with minds and bodies, is it really possible to "evade present historical conditions"? Afterall, Haraway points out, "The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (150). The cyberqueer is a kin condensation.
The optimism, albeit cautious and realistic, and utopian idealism of Haraway and Miyake must be chanted like a mantra and advanced with every technological advancement. Cyberspace, which is now almost a concurrent and indistinguishable dimension to analog space, must be a place or many places where cyborgs, queer and otherwise, can thrive. Cyberspace and cyberqueer citizenship is ludic and at times ludicrous but it is also lyrical, legitimate, life-changing, and life-giving. Much of recent queer and cyberqueer studies focuses the bounty of cyberspace, the construction of space, of public and private space, the annealing of communities digitally and geographically, and the play and presentation of identities on- and offline. Indeed, the cyber has been taken for granted because it can no longer be ignored or divorced from everday life, and the exigence, the desire now is to steer technology and humanity in the bright direction.
For example, in 2000, Nina Wakeford's simply titled essay "Cyberqueer" further elucidates and cultivates the optimism of the cyborg and the promised land of cyberspace. The message of cyberspace is that "anyone who has not yet encountered the worlds of cyberspace cannot know the wonders which await them: the realization of global community! the remaking of queer identity! the discovery of whichever subculture of a subculture you inhabit, there will be a Web page, or discussion group, or real-time chat room just for your kind!" (403-404). Granted, Wakeford like others are careful not to proscribe cyberspace as a panacea for all queer issues; she is fully aware and conscientiously requires cyberqueers to remain "broadly sympathetic" and collectively optimistic, but to not forget "one key proviso: access" (404). She further cautions that cyberqueer studies must continue to recognize the "economic and political conditions which are inevitiably intertwined with the social and cultural features" (413) of cyberqueerness and cyberqueer representations as well as the dangers of queer radicalism being subsumed by commercialism and consumerism. But hope memes eternal. Cyberspace is a queer space, though not necessarily unique to queers, that draws many lifelines between the material queer world and the online queer world. Adding her lines to the queer web, Wakeford weaves, "[E]ntering cyberspace can be compared to arriving in an existing place where not only will we feel at home, but we are even the 'natural' majority" (404).
It is no accident that cyborgs, cyberqueers, and cyberspace share in common a prediliction for difference, multiplication, amalgamation, and punctuated stability in the midst of protean instability. Cyborgs and cyberqueers are made up of overlapping identities and respresentations. Cyberspace is also made up of overlapping online spaces populated with information highways, discussion forums, electronic message boards, sites, peer-to-peer sharing, shared databases, not to mention sites, sights, voices, and sounds. The popular understanding and imagining of cyberspace is monolithic, "a singular, dense and impenetrable space -- a huge world populated by hackers and the like" (Wakeford 404) when it actually is "a multifaceted, multilayered, and very segmented place" (Wakeford 405). Cyborgs defy perfect unities. Cyborgs are brothers and sisters, defined by kin, kind, or cable, to cyberqueers. Cyberqueers laugh at fixed identities. Cyberspace is no different -- "cyberspaces, whether queered or not, resist an orderly cartography" (Wakeford 405).
The best analogy for cyberspace(s) is still the near-infinite web: full of connections, nodes, all of which shift and reconnect, some of which dead-end, but save for the glittering pattern of silk the rest is emptiness, nothiness, oddly shaped stained-glass-like negative space. It is this connectedness and connectiveness that is the strength of cyberspaces. After all, silk pound for pound is stronger and more tensile than steel. It is in this strength that cyberqueer citizens and cyberqueer spaces are useful, malleable, and resourceful for the mobilization of queer activity and politics. Wakeford says, "Cyberqueer spaces are constantly reconstituted as points of resistance against the dominant assumption of the normality of heterosexuality" (408); cyberqueer spaces are also "necessarily embedded within both institutional and cultural practices, and are a means by which the lesbian/gay/transgendered/queer self can be read into the politics of representation and activisim confronting homophobia" (408).
Cyborg manifesto begets cyberqueer manifesto begets cyberspace manifesto. The cyber politic and aesthetic is "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity" (Haraway 151); it is "wary of holism, but needy for connection" and possesses a "natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party" (Haraway 151). Cyber citizenship is defined by the continued invitation of technology and communication into lived lives, by the digital sharing and archiving of stories, dreams, plans, and fantasies, by the formation of queer spaces, metaphorically and literally, by the engendering of communities across boundaries, and by progressive actions on- and offline. Wakeford says, "The cultural and political stakes of maintaining a cyberqueer presence are heightened still further given the extensive attention directed at new information and communication technology in terms of public policy and economic prosperity. Increasingly participation in on-line worlds is being signalled as a desirable component of citizenship on both a local and global scale. If citizenship is to be reconfigured in this way, then attention must be paid to the means by which cyberqueer will intervene in the redefinitions, whilst simultaneously facing the challenge of facilitating the equal participation of those who do not have access to computer mediated spaces" (409).
It is in the blended and rebounded categories of human and machine, in the permutations of cyberqueer identities, and the vastness and variability of cyberspaces that challenges to heteronormativity are met head (and heart and hands) on and won, that the "grids of power" are dismantled or made more Charlotte's web-like, and that true coalitions can be made. In other words, cyberqueer and cyberspaces "might be used strategically, both continuing to subvert the assumed superiority of heterosexuality within the politics of representation, and by making evident the silences and those silenced by the new computer-aided logic of global accumulation" (Wakeford 409).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Stanford University. 18 May 2004. <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/hps/haraway/cyborgmanifesto.html>.
Morton, David. "Birth of the Cyberqueer." Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA). 110.3 May 1995: 369-381.
Wakeford, Nina. "Cyberqueer." The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge (2000): 403-415.
{More working on my paper via the internet -- hopefully all of this blathering will add up to something useful...}
Though not as "old" as the cyborg, the notion and identity the cyberqueer has been equally contested. The cyberqueer first appears ten years after "The Cyborg Manifesto" in Donald Morton's essay "Birth of the Cyberqueer" in 1995, which tracks a postmodern ideological and economic shift from the gay and lesbian identities of the 1970s and 1980s to the ostensibly more inclusive and radical queer identities of the 1990s. Morton describes, "In the domain of sexuality, the new space of queer theory is a postgay, postlesbian space. Ludic (post)modernism, which promotes the localizing of cultural phenomena, discourages any effort to render these developments systematically coherent and intelligible" (369). In the least, the word queer and the identity of queer is a reappropriation of a pejorative. He writes, "[T]he reappearance of queer today is given a local 'explanation'...as an oppressed minority's positive reunderstanding of a once negative word, as the adoption of an umbrella to encompass the concerns of both female and male homosexuals and bisexuals, or as the embracing of the latest fashion over an older, square style by the hip youth generation" (369). At the most, queer is a transforming, ratifying, often perverse, and "teledildonic" (a word coined by Howard Rheingold) marker and meaning-maker.
Morton, however, is critical and suspect of the reemergence of queer and hopes to call attention to the redefinition of queer in relation to and in terms of history, social theory, textuality, materialism, capitalism, and activism. He says at length in his introduction: "I argue here that explanations relying on trends, styles, and the sexual subject's 'voluntary' intentions trivialize the issue of queerness for the purpose of occluding the ideological significance of the return of the queer. In other words, queer studies -- as a superseder of the older and presumably outmoded Enlightenment-inspired gay and lesbian studies -- participates in the contemporary shift brought about by ludic away from historical materialism. This idealism comes to light when the return of the queer is historicized as part of a systematic development connected to the appearance in late capitalism of such notions as virtual realities, cyberpunk, cybersex, teletheory. The return of the queer today is actually the (techno)birth of the cyberqueer" (369).
Morton extends the definition of the cyberqueer and of queer theory believing that both -- "like ludic (post)modernism -- can be critically and historically understood as part of the confluence of elements that constitute late, multinational capitalism, sharing fundamental features in particular with hyperspace, cyberspace, and cyberpunk of technoculture" (375).
For Morton, cyberqueers and queer theory hopes to build not "a differently ordered utopia" but "a nonconditioned and nonordered atopia" (375). Morton critiques contemporary queer theory as attempting to situate queers in non-space, in lack of space; it is a paradox that must be attended to and resolved in order for queer theory to be intelligble and useful. Morton further describes the paradox, the atopic queer space, as "an ever-expanding region of sensuous pleasure" that ignores "the historical constraints need places on pleasure" (375). He is deeply concerned that the cyberqueer is ahistorical, atavistic, too anti-assimilationist, amaterial, too local, and too disconnected. He says, "Cybercized queer theory, with its roots in the anarchtic skepticism of Nietzsche, envisions a decentered, Interneted, normless society (if that is not a contradition in terms)" (375), which is oppositional and perhaps counterproductive to materialist left theory, to the gay (and lesbian) movement, that tied its social idealism to "conceptual understandings of material and historical conditions and believed in a politics that was theoretically grounded" (375).
Morton reminds cyberqueers of Haraway's remark and caution that the world was inexorably shifting from "all work to all play, a deadly game" (161). Both Morton and Haraway raise questions and red flags about the egalitarianism of technology, about issues of access, about the resources required to be part of the circuit, and about to whom and where access is granted. Morton forcefully challenges cyberqueers, their theory, and their technology to ground themselves in the material. In 1995, he declaims, "Cyberspace is a bourgeois designer space in which privileged Western or Westernized subjects fantasize that instead of being chosen by history, they choose their own histories. By manipulating the machines, the user-subjects write virtual histories according to their desires and seek to evade present historical conditions" (375). In fact, he continues, "The association with cyberspace (entry to which is literally not open to all) allies queer idealism with the self-interested individualistic idealism of the bourgeois subject" (375). He wishes cyberqueers to let go of their atopic idealism for materialist critique that "investigates how associations themselves (positive or negative) are produced and coonects questions of sexual practices not to morality but to the politics of class and other grounds of oppression and to ideology, of which morality is one expression" (378).
However, Morton's worldview and world-making are decidedly disenchanted and dystopic (and perhaps a product of early cyberculture). He sees a Boolean either/or between immaterial queer idealism and materialist, leftist, social idealism rather than a more collaborative both/and. Morton fails to entertain the possibility and potential that play need not be without purpose, that the cyborg's slipperiness or fracturedness need not be chaotic and meaningnless, that desire and need are not mutually exclusive, that the cyberqueer can be more than just a trendy word. What does it mean to be "chosen by history"? Don't subjects, in a sense, always choose, record, remember, revise their own histories? And given that today's technologies (mobile phones, personal data assistants, hearing aids, onboard navigation, MP3 players, wireless internet) insert, implant, intervene nearly continuously and simultaneously working as part of, extensions of, or in concert with minds and bodies, is it really possible to "evade present historical conditions"? Afterall, Haraway points out, "The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (150). The cyberqueer is a kin condensation.
The optimism, albeit cautious and realistic, and utopian idealism of Haraway and Miyake must be chanted like a mantra and advanced with every technological advancement. Cyberspace, which is now almost a concurrent and indistinguishable dimension to analog space, must be a place or many places where cyborgs, queer and otherwise, can thrive. Cyberspace and cyberqueer citizenship is ludic and at times ludicrous but it is also lyrical, legitimate, life-changing, and life-giving. Much of recent queer and cyberqueer studies focuses the bounty of cyberspace, the construction of space, of public and private space, the annealing of communities digitally and geographically, and the play and presentation of identities on- and offline. Indeed, the cyber has been taken for granted because it can no longer be ignored or divorced from everday life, and the exigence, the desire now is to steer technology and humanity in the bright direction.
For example, in 2000, Nina Wakeford's simply titled essay "Cyberqueer" further elucidates and cultivates the optimism of the cyborg and the promised land of cyberspace. The message of cyberspace is that "anyone who has not yet encountered the worlds of cyberspace cannot know the wonders which await them: the realization of global community! the remaking of queer identity! the discovery of whichever subculture of a subculture you inhabit, there will be a Web page, or discussion group, or real-time chat room just for your kind!" (403-404). Granted, Wakeford like others are careful not to proscribe cyberspace as a panacea for all queer issues; she is fully aware and conscientiously requires cyberqueers to remain "broadly sympathetic" and collectively optimistic, but to not forget "one key proviso: access" (404). She further cautions that cyberqueer studies must continue to recognize the "economic and political conditions which are inevitiably intertwined with the social and cultural features" (413) of cyberqueerness and cyberqueer representations as well as the dangers of queer radicalism being subsumed by commercialism and consumerism. But hope memes eternal. Cyberspace is a queer space, though not necessarily unique to queers, that draws many lifelines between the material queer world and the online queer world. Adding her lines to the queer web, Wakeford weaves, "[E]ntering cyberspace can be compared to arriving in an existing place where not only will we feel at home, but we are even the 'natural' majority" (404).
It is no accident that cyborgs, cyberqueers, and cyberspace share in common a prediliction for difference, multiplication, amalgamation, and punctuated stability in the midst of protean instability. Cyborgs and cyberqueers are made up of overlapping identities and respresentations. Cyberspace is also made up of overlapping online spaces populated with information highways, discussion forums, electronic message boards, sites, peer-to-peer sharing, shared databases, not to mention sites, sights, voices, and sounds. The popular understanding and imagining of cyberspace is monolithic, "a singular, dense and impenetrable space -- a huge world populated by hackers and the like" (Wakeford 404) when it actually is "a multifaceted, multilayered, and very segmented place" (Wakeford 405). Cyborgs defy perfect unities. Cyborgs are brothers and sisters, defined by kin, kind, or cable, to cyberqueers. Cyberqueers laugh at fixed identities. Cyberspace is no different -- "cyberspaces, whether queered or not, resist an orderly cartography" (Wakeford 405).
The best analogy for cyberspace(s) is still the near-infinite web: full of connections, nodes, all of which shift and reconnect, some of which dead-end, but save for the glittering pattern of silk the rest is emptiness, nothiness, oddly shaped stained-glass-like negative space. It is this connectedness and connectiveness that is the strength of cyberspaces. After all, silk pound for pound is stronger and more tensile than steel. It is in this strength that cyberqueer citizens and cyberqueer spaces are useful, malleable, and resourceful for the mobilization of queer activity and politics. Wakeford says, "Cyberqueer spaces are constantly reconstituted as points of resistance against the dominant assumption of the normality of heterosexuality" (408); cyberqueer spaces are also "necessarily embedded within both institutional and cultural practices, and are a means by which the lesbian/gay/transgendered/queer self can be read into the politics of representation and activisim confronting homophobia" (408).
Cyborg manifesto begets cyberqueer manifesto begets cyberspace manifesto. The cyber politic and aesthetic is "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity" (Haraway 151); it is "wary of holism, but needy for connection" and possesses a "natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party" (Haraway 151). Cyber citizenship is defined by the continued invitation of technology and communication into lived lives, by the digital sharing and archiving of stories, dreams, plans, and fantasies, by the formation of queer spaces, metaphorically and literally, by the engendering of communities across boundaries, and by progressive actions on- and offline. Wakeford says, "The cultural and political stakes of maintaining a cyberqueer presence are heightened still further given the extensive attention directed at new information and communication technology in terms of public policy and economic prosperity. Increasingly participation in on-line worlds is being signalled as a desirable component of citizenship on both a local and global scale. If citizenship is to be reconfigured in this way, then attention must be paid to the means by which cyberqueer will intervene in the redefinitions, whilst simultaneously facing the challenge of facilitating the equal participation of those who do not have access to computer mediated spaces" (409).
It is in the blended and rebounded categories of human and machine, in the permutations of cyberqueer identities, and the vastness and variability of cyberspaces that challenges to heteronormativity are met head (and heart and hands) on and won, that the "grids of power" are dismantled or made more Charlotte's web-like, and that true coalitions can be made. In other words, cyberqueer and cyberspaces "might be used strategically, both continuing to subvert the assumed superiority of heterosexuality within the politics of representation, and by making evident the silences and those silenced by the new computer-aided logic of global accumulation" (Wakeford 409).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Stanford University. 18 May 2004. <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/hps/haraway/cyborgmanifesto.html>.
Morton, David. "Birth of the Cyberqueer." Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA). 110.3 May 1995: 369-381.
Wakeford, Nina. "Cyberqueer." The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge (2000): 403-415.
