She's def. very interesting although it can be a bit much sometimes to learn from someone who is so immersed in things like these where that level of common discourse becomes completely removed and there's just this raw passion burning. It makes it a bit much, as an outsider, to try to relate specifically with the themes and materials. But she's def. smart and well versed ... I could've used a different approach to the material perhaps. I cannot remember the exact name of the course though ... "Aliens and Other Peoples"? Something along those lines.
― dean! (deangulberry), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 01:50 (twenty-two years ago)
An idea I heard recently that is à propos: like Non-Anthropocentric Environmental Ethics is a basis for right and wrong action concerning the environment which is not grounded solely in human concerns, non-anthropocentric personhood theory of value can help to lay down ethical and legal precedents for dealing with robots, cyborgs, animals and tomorrow's possible posthuman, transgenic and artificially superintelligent species. Non-anthropocentric personhood theorists! I like the sound of that.
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 10 February 2004 02:40 (twenty-two years ago)
two months pass...
twenty years pass...
I'd like to add near the top of that list, Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto'http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
― Spencer Chow (spencermfi)
love haraway so much.
i was just looking through an old book by Allocquere Rosanne "Sandy" Stone, _The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age_. it's from, IDK, 1995 or something. and it's just interesting, it evokes a lot of thoughts in me about how much has changed since 1995.
first off, i have to say that for me, at least, "cyberfeminism" is a bit of a chimera. i _didn't_ see gender non-conformity modeled for me in healthy ways on the internet. i was talking with a friend about the same age as me about it. there was a usenet group in 1992 called alt.transgendered, which is a _very_ early use of the word (hence the alternate title). by the time i got on the internet in september of '93, it was, as far as i can tell (usenet history is _not_ very easily accessible - the Digital Transgender Archive exists, but what's missing is the context, the ability to read it as we engaged with Usenet back then, nn or tin or whatever) - it was, as far as I can tell, overrun by chasers and narratives that reduced gender non-conformity to sexual fetishism. I do think that sexuality has a _place_ in gender non-conforming narratives (as does Stone, at least from my reading of "The Empire Strikes Back") - it's these totalizing, reductionist narratives that left me feeling excluded.
I'd contrast that with my experience with alt.sex.bondage, which was basically healthy and destigmatizing. It was possible, I think, for digital narratives to challenge societal prejudices - my experience of the Internet basically since its inception was that it was basically patriarchal, that its modes of engagement were basically patriarchal. The Internet, I think, has never really adequately responded to the issue raised by Julian Dibble in "A Rape in Cyberspace". There was that famous saying, "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", but I never took it that way. People took Internet personae as artificial and false in a way that I didn't. A lot of cis women I knew on the Internet back then weren't "out" as women back then, because of the way they'd get treated if they showed up with a "woman's" name. I knew where the "gay" newsgroup was - it was soc.motss. Security through obscurity. If they said "gay" they'd get bullied and harassed by every variety of bigot, even back when the Internet was non-commercial.
And that's what interests me about these early narratives, this idea of the revolutionary promise of technology, because in fact in a lot of ways what came out was the opposite. At the same time, I do have to recognize that the Internet _did_ play a key role in my own gender liberation experience. At the same time the dominant narrative of the Internet is, if anything, even more vehemently patriarchal. Any kind of queer feminist liberation, I think, requires the material liberation of the Internet - and that liberation needs to be intersectional, I believe. I don't believe that queer and feminist liberation is truly possible without also decentering whiteness. I mean I have no fucking idea how to do that, but I do believe it needs to happen.
Oh yeah also Born in Flames, great fucking film.
― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, 10 March 2025 22:34 (one year ago)
haha yeah that's a great illustration actually
some version of queer and feminist liberation that also includes, like, not yelling at low-wage workers in stores and farmers markets, that's honestly the only sort of queer feminist liberation i can get behind
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 11 March 2025 00:20 (one year ago)