[a revised and expanded version of a paper written for the "Subject(s) of Technology: Feminism Constructivism and Identity" Workshop, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK, June 1995; to appear in "Appropriating Technology," Ron Eglash, Julian Bleecker, Jennifer L. Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Rayvon Fouche, eds., U. Minnesota Press]
You're born naked and the rest is drag... Look at me, I'm you.
-- RuPaul
In 1979, Janice Raymond published her book The Transsexual Empire, portraying male-to-female transsexuality as an anti-feminist phenomenon which reinforced old stereotypes and constituted male appropriation of the female body and of what power women had gained through political struggle. In 1991, Sandy Stone published her essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," calling for a more fluid understanding of gender, and for transsexuals more openly to claim their status as belonging fully to neither of the two conventional categories. I was tempted to continue this sequence by titling my own essay "Return of the Dread I," but as with jokes, any title requiring that much explaining is probably not wise.
It would, however, be apt. Feminist theory of recent years, particularly the constructivist thread - along with the deconstructive impulse in related fields and the self-exploratory writings of many kinds of border-dwellers - has contributed much to the dissolution of formerly sacrosanct boundaries, or has at least weakened their hold on our thinking. I have in mind especially Donna Haraway's writing on cyborg bodies, Judith Butler's conception of gender as performance, and Gloria Anzaldúa's reflections on hybrid identities. The hallowed distinctions between human and machine, between humans of different genders and races, and between self and other are all utterly complexified. Difference is not erased, but rendered problematic, disqualified as an easy basis for thought. And the Cartesian individual, the coherent modernist "I," has been replaced by the "subject," with all the structuralist presumptions that bolstered the individual's hermetic perimeter vanishing along with it.
Or have they? The Call for Papers of the conference for which the first version of this essay was written contained a set of questions that are wonderful provocations to thought on the implications of moving in the direction I am describing.[1] I find myself wondering, however, whether constructivism has had as deep an impact as those questions suggest. It is no doubt wise to ponder the ramifications for feminism's political project of kicking loose many of the props on which moral judgment has traditionally rested, but meanwhile I'd like to take a look at how many of those props have actually been dislodged.
There are good reasons to think that rendering identity fluid may assist those who have historically been subordinated by social structures, but then again social structures seem to have a way of reinsinuating themselves. This essay attempts to trace that process in the case of several interrelated examples, located at the nexus of technology and identity. In each, I hope to demonstrate that although it takes a great deal of "work" for these structures to persist (especially when they face moving targets), and their eventual survival is by no means assured, they are proving resilient thus far. The examples I discuss will include the following:
Transgendered persons - the act of crossing from one gender category to another challenges the foundation of anyone's membership in either, at the very same time it accentuates the continuing significance of the categories themselves. It exemplifies the performative nature of gender (sometimes quite self-consciously, as in the quote I opened with from RuPaul) yet delineates the restricted range within which performance occurs. And the opprobrium that often greets cross-gendered behavior seems based at least partly on fear of and resistance to the dissolution of a whole series of traditional boundaries defining gender, sexuality, and bodily integrity. Moreover, those transgendered persons who make use of medical procedures to alter their bodies physically are quite literally constructing a new identity via technology.Virtual identities - in the online communities made possible by contemporary computing and telecommunication technologies, identity becomes fluid in ways not readily matched in "real life." When the presentation of self occurs entirely through textual means, all kinds of impersonation and gender-bending are apt to, and do, occur. Yet this setting for identity-play continues to be characterized by misogynist incidents that seem to reflect the power relations prevailing in the offline world.
Cyborg identities - in Donna Haraway's compelling vision, the increasingly permeable boundary between human and machine yields unpredictability, "potent fusions and dangerous possibilities" as people and technology become symbiotic. Yet the increase in fluidity on a local scale, as technology contributes to subjecthood, may well be counteracted on a larger scale, as people themselves become absorbed as components of a larger, subsuming, social "technology."
In each case, while conceptualizing gender as a performance and technology as a polysemic practice provides one valuable perspective, crucial aspects are overlooked if that perspective is not complemented with acknowledgment of the continuing power of the constraints on those performances. Clearly these examples also bear on constructivist understandings of identity, as well as on border disputes of various kinds. I will address those topics more specifically after discussing the examples.
The range of transgendered experience (including, for example, persons who cross-dress occasionally for recreational or professional purposes, persons who live full-time as members of the non-birth gender, persons who live part-time in both genders, and persons who live full-time as androgynous members of a "third gender"; each occurring with or without permanent alterations to the body via the medical technologies of Hormone Replacement Therapy and/or Sex-Reassignment Surgery) is significant both in itself, and for what it reveals about gender identity among the non-transgendered. In their book Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, Kessler and McKenna write that we all unconsciously ascribe a gender to those we encounter by relying on the same visible and behavioral signs transgendered persons (TGs) employ deliberately in order to encourage ascription to themselves of their gender of choice.
Judith Butler has argued (most notably in Gender Trouble) that our manner of speaking, dressing, moving and desiring is not an expression of some essential core of female or male identity; instead, those very signifiers themselves produce the identity that they are often taken to reflect. It is our performing in accordance with prevailing expectations for members of one or another category, and the recognition of that performance by some audience, that actually establishes our membership in the category. In effect, we are all drag artists - some of us are just more aware of it than others. As the (aware and acknowledged) drag artist RuPaul says, we have no gender identity at birth; that identity is created by how we behave, for TGs and non-TGs alike. Butler suggests that drag, as a form of parody, has the potential to raise awareness of the performative character of gender, thereby destabilizing and denaturalizing the accepted categories of gender. (I will mention shortly some hindrances to the realization of that subversive potential.)
In one sense, TG identity is the perfect illustration of gender as performance. What could more clearly demonstrate the absence of any necessary link between biological sex and social gender identity than the existence of persons whose social identity is opposite their gender of birth? What could more effectively dramatize the enacted nature of gender categories than a deliberate crossing from one category to the other, via adopted behaviors and technological alterations to the body?
On the other hand, what could more eloquently attest to the persistence of the categories than the fact that after tremendous exertions to break free of the category initially ascribed to them, most transsexuals (TGs who live full-time in the new gender and undergo hormonal therapy and perhaps surgery) adopt a new identity which is the most consonant possible with ordinary membership in the new category? After a lifetime of not belonging, rather than challenge the basis of membership, many wish simply to fit in, and strive to obscure their origins. The most commonly heard explanation of why one pursues gender reassignment, despite the obstacles and drawbacks, is fundamentally essentialist: "I've always felt as though I had the wrong body for my mind; I just knew I was really a [girl/boy], and finally my body matches."
Consider this comment, posted to alt.transgendered (an Internet discussion group for TG issues) by a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual who is clearly conversant with constructivist understandings of gender:
The implication of gender-as-construct is, to coin a phrase, the perestroika of gender. That is, if gender is viewed as a construct, then it should be possible to deconstruct, reconstruct or whatever.And that is flatly opposite my experience. That is, I spent twenty or more years trying my flat-out damnedest to construct myself as male. I had no success in doing so, and despite the (sometimes very severe) penalties of "changing my sex" (that is, changing my body to match the gender that I feel I am), I've come to the conclusion that it is my only option. This may not be true for others, for all I know. All I can say is that it is certainly true for me. (Lewis 1994)
For all the conceptual arguments about the potential of TG identity to set gender categories adrift, it isn't subjectively experienced as being cut loose from the moorings, at least not in this case. Janice Raymond has a point when she says MTF transsexuality tends to reinforce fixed notions of femaleness and femininity. But I differ when she locates the source of this tendency in the transgendered themselves. Just as "normal" folks acquire their gender identity through the reception and interpretation of their performance by an audience of Others, so too is the new identity of an MTF a collective construction. And the audience most often has a rather constricting idea of what qualifies as female. Here is another comment posted to alt.transgendered, by an MTF who decidedly favors less strictly drawn distinctions between genders, yet finds it necessary to act in opposition to that preference:
What do I have to do to be accepted and treated as a woman - parrot every damn thing, from hand gestures to posture to voice? Sadly enough...yes. Even amongst feminists who decry stereotypes, I cannot be accepted as a woman unless they rely on age-old cues, from wardrobe to voice to body language. And I can accept that, even as I shout out against such seemingly superficial indications. Right now, as I find myself becoming angrier and more depressed over not being accepted as a woman by society, I am willing to do what it takes to gain that acceptance, no matter how grudgingly given. I can express my feminist ideals and work to make society less dependent on gender roles...but until my own gender is no longer an issue for society, I must make some accommodations. Note the stress - I MUST. The alternative is death. And I am not the sort of person who would kill myself. But neither can I continue living the lie that I am male. (Mitchell 1994)
Although the situation of a full-time MTF is quite different from that of a drag artist, it still bears on Butler's hopes for parodic performances. Parody depends on audience reaction. If an MTF is recognized as such, but is perceived as a "failed" woman rather than as a successful demonstration of the arbitrariness of gender categories, there is no parody. And if the MTF is not recognized as a transsexual, but "passes" as an ordinary woman, there is again no parody, and no challenge to the existing gender regime. Butler's hopes for such a challenge cannot be fulfilled in the absence of an audience prepared to confirm possible instances of parody, for a parody that no one realizes is one is no parody at all.
What, then, are we to make of the increasing mainstream familiarity with and acceptance of artists such as RuPaul - does this indicate the rapid growth of just such an audience as is needed for parodic gender performance to succeed in destabilizing received notions of gender? Perhaps, but the latent gender carnival in RuPaul's act is easily contained, and kept merely latent, so long as the act is appreciated as an act. As long as RuPaul's "look at me, I'm you" stance is disregarded, and viewers continue to believe that the act's being an act distinguishes it from their own everyday behavior, the disruptive elements can be recuperated. The separation of the "act" from "normal life" renders it a ritual that, through releasing dangerous tendencies in a sanctioned manner, facilitates the continuation of our accustomed ways. I would suggest RuPaul's popularity does not at all indicate that an audience responsive to parody in Butler's sense already exists.
Pending the arrival of such an audience, the pervasive cultural commitment to fixed gender categories threatens to render Butler's intended means for bringing about change ineffective. Those means are dependent on the very conditions Butler hopes they will bring about. Unless both actor and audience are prepared to forgo fixed preconceptions, it's difficult to see how any sort of performance could be fully appreciated as parodic. Recall the comments of the two transsexuals quoted above: the first MTF experiences her own gender as thoroughly fixed, and the second finds it impossible to put her own more fluid understanding into practice, precisely because of audience opposition.
In Gender Trouble, Butler says little about constraints on the enactment of gender (audience reaction being one example), and has been misread by some as suggesting that the performance is entirely unrestricted, limited only by one's own whims and imagination. Constraints do indeed exist: although the gendered subject positions that may be assumed are social constructions with innumerable possible forms, and do vary across cultures and time periods, within any one time and place they are fairly rigid, as Butler recognizes. She does take pains to distance herself from the "what gender shall I be today?" reading in the preface to her next book, Bodies That Matter. There she points out that the "I" in that question must already be gendered - and thus incapable of asking it.
Janice Raymond, on the other hand, seems completely unmindful of constraints placed on identity construction by the expectations of the surrounding culture. That is one problem with her blaming MTFs themselves for any tendency of MTF transsexuality to reinforce destructive models of womanhood. Moreover, a post-transition retreat into anonymous and hyperconventional femininity is far from universal among MTFs. Some, to the contrary, remain highly visible and vehemently opposed to gender conventionality. I've already mentioned Sandy Stone (who was singled out in Raymond's book as an egregious example of male invasion of female space for her significant role at an all-woman record company) and her "Posttranssexual Manifesto," urging transsexuals not to seek social acceptance by vanishing meekly into their adopted gender, but rather to assert proudly their status as neither exactly male nor female. Similarly, in her book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, Kate Bornstein explicitly relies on a constructivist view of gender to advocate remaining apart from the conventional roles.
Nevertheless, although I think Raymond seriously exaggerates, TG identity does contain an element of seeking movement within an established - and largely misogynist - structure while leaving the structure itself intact. The continuing power of a materially and discursively institutionalized gender regime, and its mutually reinforcing relationship with (at least some) TG practices, is a necessary consideration in any understanding of TG phenomena; at this point, calls like Stone's and Bornstein's to transcend gender are hopeful appeals more than depictions of predominant practice.
The term "Computer-Mediated Communication" (CMC) is often used to refer to the new modes of interaction made possible by the contemporary merging of computing and telecommunication technologies: email, discussion groups, chat lines, etc. And through these new types of communication are formed new types of community. One of the striking characteristics of online communities is the fluidity of members' identities. With communicants unable to see or hear each other, and the presentation of self limited in most cases to typewritten text, far less is known about the identity of a "speaker" than in face-to-face encounters. Advocates of CMC often express an expectation that the relative absence of status cues will render online forums more democratic than prior public spaces. For instance, one devotee writes:
One of the greatest strengths of email is its ability to break down socio-economic, racial, and other traditional barriers to the sharing and production of knowledge. You, for example, have no way of knowing if I am a janitor or a university president or an illegal alien - we can simply communicate on the basis of our ideas, not on any preconceived notions of what should be expected (or not expected) from one another (cited in Herring 1996, p. 478).
Of course, even without physical cues, most texts written by janitors, university presidents, and illegal aliens might well remain distinguishable on a stylistic basic. Nonetheless, there do seem to be grounds to hope that computer networks will prove amenable to fuller participation by persons historically underrepresented in other forums for public speech.
Regarding equal participation of women, these hopes are largely yet to be fulfilled. Although some significant exceptions do exist (see Bromley 1995a, Chapter 4), and some current trends are encouraging, online communities continue by and large to be characterized by a scarcity of women's voices, and - all too frequently - outright harassment of those women who are visibly active.[2]
But none of this is markedly different from what we're all familiar with in the offline world. What is novel are the opportunities CMC presents not only to limit the visibility of one's identity, but to present alternative, and perhaps entirely fictional, identities. When all anyone knows about you is what you choose to call yourself, and what you type, you can pretend to be anyone or anything. Of course, some performances of assumed identity are more convincing than others, but the fact that even a handful have been thoroughly convincing lends the entire online world a fun-house air of "you never know what's real and how deep the layers of illusion run" - or indeed what "real" itself means. Cyberspace is the ultimate enactment of constructivist notions of identity. And as such, it illustrates both the potential and the limitations of those notions.
An amusing demonstration of the slippery nature of identity on the Net occurred when Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of novels, decided it would be entertaining to drop in at alt.fan.douglas-adams, the discussion group dedicated to his work (New York Times 1994, p.13). Since it would be so easy and tempting for any fun-seeker with a modem to claim in that particular forum to be Douglas Adams, it was of course assumed that the person announcing himself as Douglas Adams was in fact not. And nothing Mr. Adams could say persuaded anyone that he was. His own conviction nonetheless unshaken, Mr. Adams wrote "I will not get involved in any pointless debates about who I am. I know who I am, and if you have a problem with that, then it stays your problem." (The uncertainty did, however, become his problem when another person purporting to be Douglas Adams began sending abusive email to various members of the group, and Mr. Adams wished to convince the recipients that the sender was not actually Douglas Adams.)
In a strikingly similar incident, here is an excerpt from an interview in which Garrett Wang, the actor who plays Harry Kim in the "Star Trek: Voyager" television series, was asked whether he ever participates in the Trek-related Internet discussion groups:
Yes I do, I'm on America Online. I go into the Bridge a lot. During my first foray online, earlier this year, I was trying to think of a funny, distinctive screen name. My girlfriend was with me, and she said, "Why don't you type in `Ensign Kim', that's kind of funny." So I type it in, and I get this message "Name already being used." (Laughs.) So I try "Ensign Harry Kim." That's gone too. "Harry Kim." Gone. I tried every combination of my character's name; my girlfriend finally said, "How about trying `The Real Kim'?" And that works. So I jump in, I go "Hello." They didn't think I was the real Kim. Someone said, "So why `The Real Kim'? Are you Garrett or something?" I go, "As a matter of fact yes, I am." And the people were like "Naaaah." No one in the chat room believed me - it was like, "Nice try, fake boy."... So I tried to prove I was the real Kim. They asked me all these questions. They got really technical; one guy said, "Tell me exactly how many cc's of this drug were used by the doctor in the pilot episode. And how many varieties of tomato soup does Paris have to choose from?" I was like, "Ummmm..." And he wrote, "I'm WAITING. If you were Garrett, you would KNOW this." So I ran and checked my script and typed in the answers, and he says, "That was too easy." People didn't start believing it was me until I did a convention in Minneapolis when I met one of the women with whom I'd been chatting online. (Frost 1995)
What I particularly enjoy about Garrett Wang's narrative are his indications that (1) to be Garrett is synonymous with performing as Garrett, and (2) despite a highly accurate performance (as we might expect), since there was - and could be - no "original" to compare the performance to, his identity remained unresolved until a chance encounter in the offline world provided a corroborative anchor. Both points strongly recall Judith Butler's notion of gender identity, which she says is also established only through being performed, and via a performance that lacks an original, i.e., which claims merely to reflect an innate identity, but in fact itself produces the illusory existence of that essential identity.[3] As she says, gender "is a production which...postures as an imitation" (1990, p. 138). But in the case of gender, unlike the question of whether Garrett is Garrett, there is no "offline world" which can offer corroboration.
The quandary experienced by Garrett Wang and Douglas Adams dramatizes the flip side of the difficulty discussed earlier, that of an audience failing to recognize a parody as such. Here we have, on the other hand, an audience insisting on seeing as parody what is not.
Identity slippage in online environments has many manifestations; among them, gender-bending has a prominent place. Adopting a gender other than one's own is particularly common on what are known as MUDs. A MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon, is roughly speaking a CMC version of role-playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons." A MUD is a program running on a network-accessible computer. Users at any location may connect to the MUD, establish a pseudonymous character for themselves, and communicate with whoever else is connected at the same time. Over time, the interactions among the regular visitors to a MUD establish a specific and fairly elaborate culture.
When one first establishes a character to "play" - a virtual identity - it is necessary to specify various attributes of the character, which are made available to the other players. Gender is usually one of the required attributes, along with a name and a brief description. Many participants choose not to play their "real life" gender; the phenomenon of men playing female characters is especially common. Although it is difficult to know how many unobtrusive virtual MTFs have quietly joined MUD society, enough MTFs behave in an overstated and sexually assertive manner that "one is advised by the common wisdom to assume that any flirtatious female-presenting players are, in real life, males" (Curtis 1997, p. 149); "if you meet a character named `FabulousHotBabe', she is almost certainly a he in real life" (Bruckman 1993).
Beyond simply allowing a choice between female and male, many MUDs further destabilize gender by diverging from a binary framework altogether:
Players can also choose to be plural (appearing to be a kind of "colony" creature: "ChupChups leave the room, closing the door behind them"), or to use one of several sets of gender-neutral pronouns (e.g., "s/he," "him/her," or "e," "em," and "eir"). (Curtis 1997, p. 146)
So it seems constructivist treatments of gender identity are established practice online, and are even deliberately supported by the programmed infrastructure of CMC. But old ways die hard:
Although some online gender-benders are motivated simply by playfulness and curiosity about how they would be treated, observers familiar with MUD culture believe conspicuously different treatment of female characters is at the root of most cross-gender play: "Female characters are often besieged with attention... Unwanted attention and sexual advances create an uncomfortable atmosphere for women in MUDs, just as they do in real life" (Bruckman 1993). Apart from outright harassment, the special attention can also involve unsolicited assistance. Curtis offers the following as a typical incident:
One reported seeing two newcomers arrive at the same time, one male-presenting and one female-presenting. The other players in the room struck up conversations with the putative female and offered to show her around but completely ignored the putative male, who was left to his own devices. (p. 150)
To a real-life man for whom sexually oriented verbal harassment isn't associated with a threat of physical violence, the unwanted advances are not much of a deterrent, while the unsolicited assistance can be an attractive novelty - particularly as any condescending or patronizing attitudes which might otherwise be distasteful are based on incorrect assumptions about who he "really" is; the joke is on the patronizer. Much MTF play is apparently based on such an outlook. Conversely, the same online treatment can be deeply offensive to real-life women; much of what FTM play occurs is apparently motivated by a wish to avoid such treatment. Women choose to present as male or neuter in MUDs for much the same reason they commonly choose to do so in U.S. phone books by listing their first initial and last name only.
Given these dynamics, despite cross-gender MUD play sounding as though it could potentially destabilize the binary gender regime, it in fact seems to be a manifestation of that very structure. Allucquère Rosanne Stone has written about a similar outcome (Stone 1993) in the case of "Habitat," the first graphic virtual community. (Elaborating on the text-only environment of MUDs, participants in Habitat are represented visually by cartoon figures.) The Habitat software was created by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, and the first full-scale implementation was carried out by Fujitsu in Japan. Stone argues that MTF play is very common on Habitat, for much the same reasons it is on MUDs. Stone also reports that Morningstar and Farmer were quite interested in the possibility of rethinking gender in an environment unencumbered by conventional expectations, but were overruled by Fujitsu:
when Fujitsu bought the program, Chip and Randy said: "Why don't we have more than two genders? Let's have a broad spectrum. Let's make it possible to occupy more than two positions in the spectrum of gender." And Fujitsu said: "Well...we don't really want to take that kind of risk in a business situation." So, consequently we only have two genders in Habitat.
Here the very cultural constraints that the technology might have offered an escape from, themselves prevent the expression of that potential. And as we have seen, where the malleability of online identity is preserved, it is in no way guaranteed to foster more equitable relations, in either virtual or real life. In fact, we oughtn't be surprised if existing structures regulating social life manage to shape online life in their own image, fixing what is now malleable so as best to perpetuate themselves.
On the other hand, online malleability is in no way guaranteed not to destabilize existing structures, either; it yet may. Two rather notorious incidents in online life illustrate the slipperiness of meaning in this realm, and the difficulty of exercising interpretation.[4] One coincidentally took place on the MUD operated by Pavel Curtis (after he wrote the paper referred to above), and involved one character perpetrating a sexual assault on two others. To what extent it is best understood as harmless playacting, and to what extent as a genuine assault, is not at all clear, and becomes less clear the more we explore the reactions of the affected persons. This incident is wonderfully described, in all its ambiguity and at length, in a Village Voice article by Julian Dibbell (Dibbell 1993).
The other incident took place on the network operated by CompuServe, a commercial provider offering discussion groups and email service. A male psychiatrist took on the fictional identity of a disabled woman - in a setting where participants communicated as themselves and fictional identities were as yet unheard of - and over an extended period established close relationships with a number of women. By all accounts, the women found their contact with "Joan" tremendously supportive and helpful. When the ruse was discovered, some of Joan's correspondents felt it had been essentially harmless, while others were outraged and felt grievously violated; we can again see how slippery meaning is online. This incident, too, has been described and explored at length, by Lindsy Van Gelder (1996), and - from a rather different perspective - by Allucquère Rosanne Stone (1995, Chapter 3).
Although the interpretation of such events is obviously difficult, it does seem to me that with so many online phenomena tending to reinforce rather than undermine the existing forms of gender regulation, optimism for CMC must be cautious, at best.
Like many others, I have found Donna Haraway's image of the cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") a very powerful figure through which to explore the fancies and fixations of present intellectual and political culture(s). I would hope to follow Haraway's example of seeking the subversive possibilities latent in the encounter between new technologies and contemporary cultural forms. But, under the present circumstances, I also wonder about the difficulties of realizing those more promising possibilities. I wonder about how effectively existing social relations may promote certain new possibilities and foreclose others.
MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of the field of cybernetics some 50 years ago, called it "the science of communication and control." (He derived the term "cybernetics" from the Greek word for helmsman.) The basic idea is to study systems of various kinds - mechanical, biological, social - through the similarities in how they are controlled. Cybernetics views any control mechanism, whether it is controlling voltage levels, hormone levels, or employment levels, as a matter of communication, as a collection of messages exchanged among the various elements of a system. A study of how a system controls its behavior then becomes simply a study of the information content of these messages. Systems as diverse as an electrical circuit, a human body, or an entire population, are reduced to abstractions representing their internal information flow, so that the mathematics of information science can be applied equally to each of them. Systems having analogous patterns of internal communication are, in effect, seen as identical. All for the purpose of better understanding mechanisms of control.
Now Wiener himself was very conscious of the dangers of treating machines as humans, and eloquently criticized reckless reliance on technology in situations demanding human judgment. He warned as well against treating humans as machines, assailing the crass instrumentalism of regarding people as manipulable and disposable components of some encompassing system. For these efforts, and for his rejection of Defense Department research support, Wiener's name has become synonymous with social responsibility in the scientific community. But his successors have often been less troubled by such concerns.
The term "cyborg" clearly has connotations very unlike those of its precursor, "cybernetic." As developed by Haraway and others, the fusing of mechanical and organic embodied by the cyborg, the symbiosis of technology and biology, has come to represent border-crossings, unanticipated juxtapositions with unpredictable results, refusal of fixed identities, and transgressive behavior of all sorts. Cybernetics itself could hardly be more antithetical. It is - in the interest of control - precisely about predictability, rule-governed behavior, and stable identities. Here there is no open-ended proliferation of possibilities. Cybernetic control does depend on a peculiar form of autonomy, but one that is thoroughly subordinated to predetermined, top-down goals.
An example may help. The classic illustration of cybernetic principles is the use of feedback as a control mechanism. A system utilizes feedback when information regarding the effects of its action is "fed back" through some sensory apparatus and influences its future actions. Wiener offers the example of a motorized anti-aircraft gun which swings more or less freely depending on the temperature. Since moving the gun to a desired position will require different amounts of force under different conditions, it is customary, he says, to build in a feedback mechanism that senses the gun's actual motion and adjusts the motor accordingly. Wiener says something equivalent happens when a person drives a car: the amount of force it takes to steer varies with the car's speed, its weight, road conditions, etc. People actually steer by observing the car's movement, and making repeated incremental adjustments to maintain the desired direction of travel. In both cases, there's a limited sort of autonomy. Drivers don't rigidly follow an exhaustive set of rules for exactly how far to turn the steering wheel under what conditions, nor do motorized guns. Both systems self-sufficiently modify their own behavior so as to achieve the desired result. This autonomy is strictly in service of predetermined goals. There is self-direction, but only in the interest of ensuring more, not less, stability.
That is what cybernetics is about. Stability and adherence to preselected goals. And in certain domains, that is highly desirable. I appreciate the fact that my local electric company's power distribution equipment knows, without human intervention, how to maintain a constant voltage at my wall socket no matter how many kilowatts my neighbors are using, and I am glad that my body's temperature regulators are autonomous enough to unleash my sweat glands when I'm out for a run in August, yet won't spontaneously do so when I'm standing at a bus stop in January. But I am much less enamored of this kind of control mechanism being applied in my own area of professional training: educational policy.
Consider the introduction of site-based management, currently one very popular component of "school restructuring" in the U.S. This is a form of limited autonomy. And in some contexts, wonderful opportunities might come of it. But by and large, in the present climate of increased demands on schools, shrinking resources, and greater business involvement, it will most often put local actors in the role of overseeing their school's accommodation to external pressures - thus ensuring that they take the blame for a situation created by more powerful actors. Exactly how the school cuts costs, or supplies the local labor market, or promotes "us" at the expense of "them," is the prerogative of the site-based managers, but that it will do so is not really in question. Just see what happens if the site managers decide to abolish standardized tests, or adopt heterogeneous grouping, or devote all spare resources to arts programs. As with the other cybernetic control mechanisms mentioned, there is increased latitude regarding the details of performing a given mission, but only in the interest of greater efficiency in the completion of that mission.
A related example is provided by the institution where I pursued my own graduate studies, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When I departed, the faculty were in the midst of planning for something called "Quality Reinvestment." That is a euphemism for choosing which programs to target for elimination in the likely event of budget cuts - cuts made even more likely by a policy of reducing student enrollment. The way it works is each department sends representatives to a committee charged with deciding how to make cuts in its portion of the university. The committee has no say over the total amount of funding that would be cut within its area, only over how to distribute the pain. The agenda, the size of the cuts, has been set at the top, and the local managers have just enough autonomy to choose which programs are of sufficient quality to justify continued investment. (And just enough autonomy to take the blame for carrying out an agenda essentially forced upon them.) The terminology isn't the only aspect that resembles corporate thinking. "Quality Reinvestment" is intended to create a leaner, meaner firm, through selling off unproductive assets (i.e., departments that don't attract research money), and abandoning less lucrative customers (i.e., high school graduates with lower GPAs).
So that is what cybernetics looks like in educational institutions: adherence to handed-down goals through self-imposed measures. But what about cyborgs - does their hybrid nature free them from the constraints of their cybernetic ancestry? Maybe. We'll have to see. But there is reason for pessimism here, as well.
Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner," based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was re-released in 1992, in a new "director's cut." The setting is a dystopic near-future Los Angeles, characterized by an enormous gulf between a relative few living in protected high-tech luxury, and the neglected remainder, living in a semi-chaos saturated with incessant advertisements promising escape and oblivion. The story concerns "replicants," manufactured life forms barely distinguishable from humans, designed to perform useful services but displaying an occasional penchant for insurrection. The replicants would seem to qualify as cyborgs: they are human in their appearance and emotional responses; they are cybernetic in having preprogrammed goals and implanted memories; and their dangerous unpredictability is quintessentially cyborg. Two pivotal characters in the film are Rachel, a replicant who had been led to believe she was human, and discovers early in the narrative that she is not, and Deckard, a law enforcement official commissioned to hunt down and "retire" renegade replicants. Deckard displays little enthusiasm, apparently having tired of life as a hired gun, and once pressured into accepting his current assignment, is grimly efficient as he inexorably tracks down his targets. He is, however, touched by Rachel's trauma, and the two establish an illicit relationship. (Any optimism over the state of gender relations in the world to come is undermined by the fact that their "romance" is proclaimed by an act of what can only be described as sexual assault.) The final scene of the recut version strongly suggests that Deckard is himself a replicant, even though we have assumed throughout that he was human, as apparently did he.
Now it seems to me that despite his cyborg nature, Deckard's life is by no means characterized by unpredictability and transgression. The cybernetic quality of self-sufficiently pursuing goals set by others predominates. Worse yet, even under the presumption that Deckard were human, and had not been mechanically preprogrammed to assassinate replicants, it wouldn't have mattered - he was still just as trapped, just as lacking in options. I don't know which is more unsettling, the suggestion that none of us can be sure we're not machines instructed to believe we're human, or the suggestion that it would make no difference if we were.
The operation of power in this setting is quite consistent with the mode of social control that Michel Foucault has identified as originating with Bentham's "Panopticon," and eventually spreading throughout the institutions of modern society. Direct, top-down coercion is rarely exercised. Instead the social and technical environment itself shapes behavior such that individuals come to regulate themselves. It is all rather cybernetic, and looks to me very much like site-based management, and UW's "Quality Reinvestment," and the increasingly popular management tool of "quality circles," in which workers are recruited to supervise themselves. All of these phenomena can be viewed, I think, as part of a broad trend towards internalized forms of social control. As the designers of anti-aircraft guns and power distribution grids have long known, a bit of autonomous self-regulation, within carefully constrained domains, goes a long way toward making a system stable, predictable, and generally easy to manage. It works not just for control of mechanical systems, but social ones as well.
I'd like to conclude with some comments on how these examples illustrate constructivist understandings of identity, as well as border disputes of various kinds.
Let me begin by considering the significance of the term "transgendered," which is of rather recent extraction. It has been adopted and promoted by the transgendered themselves, as a preferred alternative to a collection of terms applied to various transgendered folks by the medical community: transsexual, primary transsexual, secondary transsexual, marginal transsexual, transvestite, fetishistic transvestite, and so on, ad nauseum. The explicit agenda behind adoption of the term entails (a) a voicing of unity intended to supersede the analytical slicing that has heretofore prevailed, (b) the replacement of a series of somewhat pejorative terms with one designed to be TG-positive, and (c) most significant for our purposes here, a deliberate act of naming oneself, establishing a new identity in so doing.
This agenda is in many ways parallel to that pursued by the gay/lesbian community some twenty years earlier, with the promotion of "Gay" as a substitute for "homosexual"; that term also was meant as a non-pejorative replacement for a medically oriented one. And its adoption also coincided with a political movement to secure better treatment for the community's members. What had at one time predominantly been seen as a moral depravity had already shifted to the slightly more sympathetic category of "mental illness," as evidenced by its inclusion in the DSM ("Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" for mental health practitioners). With the success of the Gay Rights movement in having homosexuality removed from the DSM in the early 1970s, a major step was taken toward shifting public understandings again, from "illness" to a matter of simply having a different orientation. Similarly, the increasing use of "transgendered" coincides with an effort to have various TG categories removed from the current DSM.[5] Of course "transgendered" also tends to mask differences within the TG community, much as "Gay" masked significant internal differences, later addressed with the terminology "lesbian/gay/bisexual" (LGB). Further, the current usage of "queer," as an umbrella identity for lesbian, gays, bisexuals and TGs, does the same.
All these cases demonstrate constructivist approaches to identity. Teresa de Lauretis emphasizes the way people assign meaning to their experiences by interpreting them via some discursive formation or other (see de Lauretis 1986, 1990). Gender (or any other social characteristic) is thus denaturalized since one's self-consciousness depends on which discursive formation is joined; being biologically female does not lead directly to a feminine consciousness - nor to a feminist one. It matters which form of discourse is available and joined. But neither is gender a meaningless category, an accidental by-product of discourse selection: a gendered identity is deliberately assumed as a position from which to act politically, which describes exactly the practices I've been discussing.
Stuart Hall writes similarly of communal identity. There are two ways, he says, to think of the cultural identity from which any person speaks. One is as a people's stable, unchanging, "true self," which exists prior to being expressed, and can be excavated and then represented through the various arts. The other, which Hall advocates, is cultural identity as constituted within representation, actually produced in the act of expressing it. Identity, in this perspective, is not fixed at all, but continually recreated in each act of representation. Meaning is thus never finished or complete, similar to Derrida's constant deferral of meaning. But where Derrida leaves us with infinite postponement, Hall directs our attention to the temporary stops that occur whenever one speaks:
Meaning, in any specific instance, depends on the contingent and arbitrary stop - the necessary and temporary `break' in the infinite semiosis of language. This does not detract from [Derrida's] original insight. It only threatens to do so if we mistake the `cut' of identity - this positioning, which makes meaning possible - as a natural and permanent, rather than an arbitrary and contingent `ending'. Whereas, I understand every such position as `strategic'. (Hall 1989, p. 74)
This provisional assumption, for strategic purposes, of a position - constituted by representation - from which to speak is precisely, it seems to me, what de Lauretis is talking about when she speaks of gender identity being neither a fixed consequence of biology nor a meaningless by-product of wordplay, but a deliberately chosen position - formed via discourse - from which to act politically. It is also what Butler is describing in her formulation of gender as a performance, but a not entirely unconstrained one. And it is what queer folks of all sorts - online and off - are engaged in when they name their communities and themselves.
The question that remains is how effective these strategic actions will prove to be, and that is, of course, unanswerable as of yet. One note of wariness I wish to introduce derives from the continued strength within these communities of the sentiment in favor of gaining acceptance via looking just like "normal" people. That aspect of transgenderism which gravitates toward blending unnoticed into the gender of choice, leaving the structure of gender unaltered, and that facet of LGB identity which stresses how much same-sex partnerships are like opposite-sex ones, are uneasy adjuncts to queer identity.
More broadly, although gender identity is indeed a social construction, the desire to blend in is just one of many existing constraints on that construction; gender may be an indeterminate ongoing production, but that production tends to occur in particular ways. As noted earlier, in the discussion of TG identity, audience reaction is another powerful constraint. The Foucauldian, self-regulatory mode of social control, mentioned in the discussion of cyborg identity, is yet another: Susan Bordo, in writing about our culture's preoccupation with slenderness in female bodies, has suggested the currently enforced ideal has less to do with thinness per se, than with the degree of firmness, the extent to which the body is under control. Muscular bulk is okay, and even promoted in certain contexts, but bodily excess, out-of-control bulges, are absolutely prohibited. Fleshiness is seen as reflecting moral and spiritual inadequacy, a lack of self-control. Extreme forms of self-regulation, such as the various eating disorders, can obviously be expected to arise under such a regime (Bordo 1990).
Male subjectivity can also involve internalized forms of social control. The hierarchies of corporate and military organizations are largely sustained by rungs upon rungs of men who are living out a particular, class-linked notion of what it means to be male: more than anything else, for this class stratum, it means self-regulation. At all levels of management, it means internalizing the norms of the organization, and acting autonomously to safeguard its interests within one's area of responsibility. These complex systems are managed most efficiently and stably, again, not by direct, top-down imposition, but via internalized forms of social control - via cybernetics, essentially.
What about the potential of new technologies to undermine these constraints on the construction of gender? Claudia Springer has written about the representation of cyborg characters in film and other popular media. Since the opportunity to imagine a world unlike our own is pivotal to the very idea of science fiction, one might hope that we would see in this genre, even if nowhere else, examples of gender identities constructed so as to bypass the constraining assumptions so familiar to us. Indeed, some SF authors do fully utilize that opportunity, but Springer's analysis of cyborg representations in SF finds that present and hypothetical advances in technology are by and large used to amplify gender difference rather than reduce it:
While popular culture texts enthusiastically explore boundary breakdowns between humans and computers, gender boundaries are treated less flexibly. Cyberbodies, in fact, tend to appear masculine or feminine to an exaggerated degree. We find giant pumped-up pectoral muscles on the males and enormous breasts on the females; or, in the case of Neon Rose, cliched flower imagery meant to represent female consciousness adrift in the computer matrix. Cyborg imagery has not so far realized the ungendered ideal theorized by Donna Haraway. (Springer 1991, pp. 308-09)
Finally, some related thoughts on borders and contested border-crossings. It seems to me much of the opprobrium attached to transgendered behavior has to do with anger and/or disgust over the transgression of boundaries of one sort or another. The metaphorical borders between female and male - as well as those between real and pretend, and between human and machine - may be decreasingly well defined, but despite (and perhaps precisely because of) this trend, no less effort is devoted to policing them. And crossing them continues to be viewed from all sides in normative terms resembling those applied to the crossing of national borders, whether it be as a blow for freedom, or a foreign incursion, or a manifestation of social degeneration.
Blurring of the distinction, so fundamental to our culture, between female and male is obviously one site of fierce reaction. The demarcation between heterosexual and homosexual is another: if the grounds for determining a person's sex are unclear, so are the grounds for determining their sexual orientation. This can be troubling even for the transgendered themselves. Here's another posting to alt.transgendered:
Question: If I am a F-M TS and my sexual preference is women, does that make me a lesbian now and a heterosexual later (after GRS/SRS), or what?I really do want to know what you think! This question is posing some identity problems for me. I do not know where I fit into the scheme of things... HELP me in finding my niche in life, if only temporarily.[6]
Although TGs come in all sexual orientations, public perceptions have linked transgendered behavior strongly with homosexuality. Perhaps the highly visible (though numerically modest) overlap between groups, in the form of drag queens, is responsible; whatever the reason, homophobia seems itself to be a major component of transiphobia, particularly among men. If that's so, then another set of sacrosanct boundaries threatened by the existence of TGs are those around the heterosexual male body: sexual penetration is seen as inappropriate for heterosexual men, and discomfort with the idea may contribute (sensibly or otherwise) to their reaction to MTF TGs, as they may equate vaginal intercourse as experienced by post-operative MTF transsexuals with penetration of a male body, as in homosexual male sex. That would, incidentally, be consistent with the TG folklore that women are more accepting than (heterosexual) men of MTFs.
Hormone Replacement Therapy and Sex-Reassignment Surgery involve also a blurring of the boundaries between human and technology, and between self and not-self. Consider an FTM's penis, laboriously constructed from abdominal skin grafts in a series of surgical procedures - to what extent is that an integral part of his body, and to what extent a technological artifact? What if we add silicone implants for testicles? Or how about a removable rigid rod to enable vaginal intercourse? Is the rod a body part while it's inserted, and not during the time it spends in a box? How "natural" are an MTF's breasts, induced by swallowing tablets of laboratory-synthesized estrogen - are they human or technological?
Clearly these distinctions have become scarcely tenable, if at all. Yet enormous regulatory effort is devoted to trying to sustain them. The distinction between self and not-self seems to have a special significance these days, causing consternation of all kinds. One apparent source is the AIDS epidemic - AIDS is itself a case of confusion over the boundary between self and not-self. The immune system's job is to enforce that boundary, to recognize foreign presences within the body and eliminate them. Under the interference of the HIV virus, the immune system ceases to define the boundary, which eventually dissolves. AIDS itself does not directly injure anyone; it does render the body unable to expel "foreign" entities which are injurious. ("Foreign" appears in quotes this time because although these entities would certainly have been foreign before HIV infection, their status now is unclear. Since the immune system operationally defines foreignness by its response, without the response who's to say?)
Whatever else it is, AIDS is a trope for boundary confusion in general. And as such it provides a wrenchingly tangible way to talk about a diffuse presence in the contemporary world. Donna Haraway discerns a parallel between developments in immunology and developments in warfare (cited in Treichler 1988, p. 59). In both fields the talk used to be of battles over territory, confrontations between well-defined adversaries, and is now all about C3I: command, control, communications and intelligence. It's information flow, coding and messages and efforts at interception and dissembling. The question of who has the most guns fades into the question of who's on what side. (Boundaries.) And how you know. (Boundary confusion.)
In "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," Haraway ponders the progressive breakdown of three hallowed distinctions: those between humans and animals, between humans and machines, and between the physical and non-physical. As human and non-human biology become more fully disclosed, and expressed alike in mechanistic terms; as machines become more mobile and autonomous; as physical devices cease to have moving parts and function instead via an invisible flow of coded signals - the categories collapse. But the result is not some seamless new unity, one big happy fusion. The transgression of boundaries signifies not a stable, joint identity, but rather an ever-shifting array of identities. It's a time of "potent fusions and dangerous possibilities...but a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies" (p. 71).
Yet I wonder. The possibilities are doubtlessly there, but how likely are they to be fulfilled?
By detaching the cyborg model from its present institutional context, into the realm of phantasy, [Haraway's] discussion can help us to analyse its manifestation in popular culture. Yet that detachment can also lead us away from confronting the social impotence that makes the phantasy appealing. (Levidow and Robins 1989, p. 175)
Why should regulatory structures be any less successful at colonizing our bodily practices under these new circumstances than they have been under the old? They have proven adaptable in the past. Perhaps this time they can be outmaneuvered, but the examples I've considered provide me scarce confidence.
The question of the extent to which new technologies are recruited into ongoing social conflicts, and co-opted into furthering the interests of the already powerful, is a somewhat paradoxical one. Context matters; the meaning and impact of a technology vary with who is using it and toward what ends (i.e., which existing discursive structures the technology is assimilated into). Yet I would not want to imply that technology is neutral, equally applicable to any ends whatsoever. As Langdon Winner argues, technological artifacts do carry politics (Winner 1986, Chapter 2); any given technology could be more easily utilized toward some ends than others. So in speaking of these matters we face something of a double bind.
Elsewhere I have discussed the difficulties of simultaneously addressing both considerations (Bromley 1997). Here I have focused more on one than the other, emphasizing the way dominant practices around gender seem to funnel the uses of new technologies so as to recreate those oppressive practices (though perhaps in a somewhat different form), even though one might reasonably expect these technologies to establish all sorts of new possibilities. It is a rather pessimistic statement - I am essentially saying that although it remains to be seen, I suspect dominant structures are going to prevail, by and large. For all the playful spaces opened up by new technologies for hybrid entities, the results all too often seem to end up remarkably unplayful. For all the ways conventional boundaries appear threatened at this time (particularly by constructivist understandings of identity), before we worry too much about the consequences of those boundaries evaporating, let's take note of the fact that they may also be re-established with a vengeance.
What, in the end, is so different about the new information technologies? Older media for identity formation and affiliative activity (print, telephone, even face-to-face contact) also can and have supported identity slippage.[7] How are the newer technologies and the possibilities they create fundamentally different?
In part, my point is that they're not so different. Or rather that what differences these technologies do potentially offer may remain unfulfilled, as the surrounding social conditions - being similar to the context for prior media - threaten to render their likely uses largely parallel to those of the older media. Thus my concern that the claims for the transformative and democratizing potential of the new information technologies may come to appear little more than overblown hype.
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Bromley, Hank (1995b), "Gender Dynamics Online: What's New about the New Communication Technologies?", Feminist Collections 16:2 (Winter).
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[1]Among them, "Does Relativism/strong constructivism lead to Moral and Political Quietism?" "Can constructivists construct a principled way to intervene in the world?" "Does the `turn to discourse' imply non-action?" "What is the basis for political action in feminism?"
[2]Bromley 1995b contains a brief overview and citations for further reading on both the underrepresentation of women in online communications and the harassment they often face.
[3]recalling also the notion of the "simulacrum," as developed by Baudrillard (1988)
[4]Both are discussed briefly in Bromley 1995b.
[5]Parts of the TG community are opposed to this effort, as those TGs who seek hormone therapy may depend on the DSM entry to obtain insurance coverage for medication, lab tests, counseling, and related costs.
[6]I have been unable to contact the author of this posting. Although newsgroup postings are publicly accessible to anyone interested, without specific clearance from the author of this message to use her name, I thought it best to present the excerpt anonymously.
[7]Thank you to Belle Gironda for posing this formulation of the question.