Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures - Alison Adam
From Women, Science, and Technology reader:
discusses feminist research projects in AI and comp ling, but I didn't read this part
Cyberculture:
appeals to male youth, "To 'jack in' to 'cyberspace' sppears to offer a way of transcending the mere 'meat' of the body, once again signalling the male retreat from bodies and places where bodies exist" (339).
Body Free Existence:
interesting stuff but only skimmed it...use of birth metaphors in manhattan project, "obsessive male desire to outdo women in creative ability can only too easily lead to tragic consequences" (341). "pregnant phallus" idea.
Cyberspace as escape:
alternative to drug culture, "since VR and related info tech offer endless supply of new experiences without toxic risks of drugs" - does this hold? if so, links to counterculture drug use, expansion of experience, transcending embodied cognition and understanding?
VR has an 'infinity of possibility...it's just an open world where your mind is the only limitation" - Jaron Lanier. How does one act on this world? Seems childish, escapist, unwanting of any responsibility.
Jennifer Light (1995): computer-mediated communications on internet may offer alternative courses of action for women. However, lots of evidence that gendered interactions and power dynamics exist in the online world as well. To me, unclear how network social capital gets translated into physical world social capital, until physical world becomes subsumed to cyber world. Rather than different courses for women, Haraway proposes that cyborg offers liberatory potential by diluting and "trangressing" boundaries of identity. But Anne Balsamo argues that the roles and patterns of meat-space get rewritten in virtual spaces and in the technological interventions humans seek and/or have imposed on them.
Critique of Sadie Plant for her ungrounded coupling of cyberfeminism to cyberpunk without any acknowledgement of the role of politics. "universalizing tendency" to ignore that gender isn't the only category of impact, and also that gender, race, class affect even anonymous online interactions, as well as access to the tools of entering the cyberworld at all. The naivete she is accused of reminds me a little of counterculture universalization, eschewing of politics, etc. (346)
Women have traditiionally been assigned the role of caring for bodies, leaving men free to lie the life of the mind. (350) (cites another source...Lloyd 1984, Rose 1994)
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