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Bodies and Identities​ Is Online: Cyberspace, Digital Embodiment

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Bodies and Identities​ Is Online: Cyberspace, Digital Embodiment Bodies and Identities Is Online: ​ Cyberspace, digital embodiment, and the cyborg Doreen Zhao Wholly pervasive, technology is inevitable; it is something we find ourselves attracted to yet apprehensive of. As is technology inescapable, so are our bodies—anxieties about physical embodiment and its boundaries (including race and gender, and other intricacies) have always been urgent. Donna Haraway explores the boundaries—and the blurring of boundaries—between the machinic and the natural in her “Cyborg Manifesto”, which catalyzed a paradigm shift of techno-feminist discourse. Although her Manifesto was published in 1984, Haraway’s cyborg is all the more immediate today. As a study on the relationship between physical embodiment and technology, specifically cyberspaces, I created a digital zine, which focuses on the fragmentation of identity, embodiment represented through and as technology, and the general re-definition of female bodies and identities. The questions I sought to answer, and which I further examine in this paper, were: How do women’s interactions with cyberspace enact a Haraway-esque vision of cyborg femininity? How did the process of creating my digital zine explore these ideas, especially considering the practice of zinemaking and, through a digital form, its intersection with technology? On postmodern feminism and the cyborg “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” (Haraway 181). Haraway ends “A Cyborg Manifesto” by aligning herself with the figure of the cyborg, rather than the “goddess”. This is the essential foundation of her manifesto, which challenges and rejects liberal humanist and naturalist feminist ideas. As Haraway defines it, cyborg politics is established through “three crucial boundary breakdowns” (Haraway 151): the boundary between human and animal, animal-human (or organism) and machine, and physical and non-physical. Boundary-breaking is integral to the idea of the cyborg, as Barbara M. Kennedy emphasizes in her description of the “cyborg consciousness”: Cyberfeminism defines a specific cyborgian consciousness—a particular way of thinking which breaks down binary and oppositional discourses (see Haraway). A cyborg consciousness is one which is not defined within the parameters of a fixed subjectivity or identity; this cyborg consciousness has arisen out of the literal ideas of boundary crossing found in cyborg mythologies. (Kennedy 283) Through this idea of the cyborgian consciousness, the “body” is re-constructed as something hybrid, fragmented, and both real and abstract. The significance of this redefining of the body is very much specific to women—“Posthumanism is, I argue, particularly relevant to women and girls, whose bodies have generally functioned as a sign of their ‘otherness’” (Flanagan 41). The “otherness” of women’s bodies is central to their experiences and formations of identity; therefore, cyborg feminism, which breaks down the limits of the body and explores the possibilities of technology in relation to the body, is an ideology specific to women. Interacting with cyberspace The proliferation of online spaces has enacted an abstraction of embodiment. The representation of the “self” online, or the “avatar” moving through cyberspace, acts as both a technological body and technological extension of the body. This is in itself a blurring of what the idea of the self can be—through cyberspace, the body is much more than its physical limits. The horizons of what one occupies as a body, and an identity, are widened—perhaps even infinitely. The implications of a physical body, including those that are gendered and otherwise coded, fall away given the possibilities that cyberspace offers. The fragmentation of identity that occurs in online spaces further breaks down the idea of both a biological body and a singular subjectivity. In cyberspace, there is no singular form of identity—self-representation is continuous and repetitive in different, separate spheres, breaking down any unified sense of what one’s identity is, and deconstructing especially the connection between identity and physical embodiment. This follows cyborg ideology, which emphasizes thinking of the “body” as inclusive of mechanical extensions and as a fluid form. Further, the interaction with cyberspace is truly an enactment of Haraway’s cyborg, which delights in the breach of boundaries as a political movement: “In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics… the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination” (Haraway 150). Engaging with embodiment through cyberspace encourages the rejection of these “traditions”—including the tyrannies of gender, hegemony, capitalism, and imperialism—through its infinite possibilities, and embraces becoming something new altogether. Today, it is in the arena of cyberspace that the idea of the cyborg is advanced. Digitizing zinemaking Zinemaking has a long tradition as a DIY, inherently political art, with its roots in feminist movements such as the Riot Grrrl movement in the early to mid-nineties. A crucial function of zinemaking is the construction of identity involved; zines act as “autobiographical ‘text-objects’” (Stockburger ii) that are a material and embodied representative of a performance of the self. Digital zines move this process online, inserting technology and its possibilities into the formation of identity—through this, digital zinemaking is very much a valid medium through which to explore the ideas of cyborg feminism. If zines are a material form of embodiment, digital zines are representative of the possibilities of cyberspace in redefining body and identity. Technology allows for multimedia creativity; the zinemaker can expand beyond just writing and hand-drawn art, utilizing digital and new media. In this way, creating a zine in cyberspace and as a cyberspace itself opens up an indefinable realm of possibilities through which to construct identities. The fragmentation of self that is an essential part of cyborgian consciousness is also explored through digital zines. Collaging, or assembling different forms in various ways, is an important practice to zinemaking—this is the literal fragmentation of images. Digitizing the creation of collages uses this fragmentation to explore the similar fracturing of the body and of representations of identity that is part of cyborg feminism—here, the medium is the message. Through the process of creating my digital zine, I sought to question and express the idea of the body, and how it may be redefined through technology. As creative and expressive processes tend to do, it both answered questions (some of which were even personal, and emotional) for me and revealed more. However, it is exactly the abstraction of this idea that exemplifies what I examine in this paper—interaction with cyberspace enacts Haraway’s cyborg through a radicalization of what the “body” and what the “self” really mean. The question of how to move forward in the inescapably virtual and technological worlds of today is not one that seems to have a simple answer—through my project, I only attempt to grapple with it. But, realizing Donna Haraway’s dream of the cyborg may be, if not immediate, then certainly imminent. Works Cited Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge, ​ ​ 2007. Bissell, Laura. The Female Body, Technology and Performance: Performing a ​ Feminist Praxis, University of Glasgow (United Kingdom), Ann Arbor, ​ 2011. ProQuest, ​ ​ https://ezproxy.bu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.b u.edu/docview/1314568295?accountid=9676. Cresser, Frances, et al. “Women’s Experiences of on-Line e-Zine Publication.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 4, July 2001, pp. 457–473, doi:10.1177/016344301023004003. Flanagan, Victoria. “Girl Parts: The Female Body, Subjectivity and Technology in Posthuman Young Adult Fiction.” Feminist Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 39–53, doi:10.1177/1464700110390596. Stockburger, Ingrid Z. Making Zines, Making Selves: Identity Construction in DIY ​ Autobiography, Georgetown University, Ann Arbor, 2011. ProQuest, ​ ​ ​ https://ezproxy.bu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.b u.edu/docview/867672843?accountid=9676. Terry, Jennifer, and Calvert, Melodie. Processed Lives : Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. Routledge, 1997. .
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