In 2001 Cyberfeminist Art Collective from America, SubRosa, came to Singapore to collaborate with three Singapore-based researchers, one also an artist: Adeline Kueh, Margaret Tan and Irina Aristarkhova, on a project for the Next Five Minutes tactical media festival in Amsterdam. Singaporean node was about mapping stem lines (especially in how it effects women through embryonic stem cell research) and other types of global trade in the life sciences sector, where Singapore is one of the leading players. While we hosted our American guests (later in the year we were hosted by them in Chicago and had a meeting in Amsterdam), we did not really have an opportunity to reflect upon this project from the point of view of such feminist solidarity model. This dialogue today is an attempt to map our experience using comparative feminist studies / feminist solidarity model that Chandra Mohanty suggests as a useful strategy for feminist pedagogy. We hope to extend it to cyberfeminist practice and theory.
Upload file with a dialogue or read further:
In 2001 Cyberfeminist Art Collective from America, SubRosa, came to Singapore to collaborate with three Singapore-based researchers, one also an artist: Adeline Kueh, Margaret Tan and Irina Aristarkhova, on a project for the Next Five Minutes tactical media festival in Amsterdam. Singaporean node was about mapping stem lines (especially in how it effects women through embryonic stem cell research) and other types of global trade in the life sciences sector, where Singapore is one of the leading players. While we hosted our American guests (later in the year we were hosted by them in Chicago and had a meeting in Amsterdam), we did not really have an opportunity to reflect upon this project from the point of view of such feminist solidarity model. This dialogue today is an attempt to map our experience using comparative feminist studies / feminist solidarity model that Chandra Mohanty suggests as a useful strategy for feminist pedagogy. We hope to extend it to cyberfeminist practice and theory.
Marge: Who is feminism for?
Irina: When SubRosa came to Singapore, differences among the members (in terms of class, race, etc.) seemed often leveled off by the way in which Singapore was approached as a location, from the point of view of an American tourist. For me the idea of an American expectation of Singapore became associated with one phrase that I heard rather often, and I felt that it was hard to work with it or against it. This phrase, allegedly attributed to William Gibson, the author of noted cyberpunk novels, is that Singapore is “Disneyland with death penalty”.
Marge: This is very typical.
Irina: Your question: who is feminism for? Should it be discussed every time even before we cross borders?
Marge: Let’s start in the beginning. Feminism is very varied, and we each take different attitude and position.
Irina: So, is feminism for oneself then, depending on who one is?
Marge: I feel it has to begin with oneself. In relation to collaboration the challenge is to negotiate each other’s forms of feminism and our expectations of each other, our feminist strategy, methodology, and practice.
Irina: Why to collaborate with “other” women to start with? What is it for - To spread the “message”? In this case, Singapore was chosen as a biotechnological hub plus as a place to meet and share knowledge.
Marge: We looked specifically at embryonic technology, stem cell research, Singapore as a supplier to America.
Irina: Let’s see what this means. Rather than being a cheaper supplier, Singapore is a sophisticated producer and seller of bio-technological materials to America and other countries that often do not develop sufficient amounts of stem cell lines due to regulation and legal limitations. For Singapore it is a strategic niche, and of course, we feel it is important to analyze this in terms of gender and technology.
Singapore, South Korea, and other countries in the region are, arguably, as technologically advanced as or superior to our collaborators’ home country, and potentially it might become a point of tension. Do you think that often our Western collaborators find it difficult to acknowledge this technical advancement? After all, speaking in terms of gender and technology, Singapore has more women in technological sector, more female students, more female employees, and more computer literacy across various economic classes of population than the US.
Marge: There might be acknowledgment of the technical advancement but always with a “but”. This “but” can take many forms – what is the digital divide, the loss of freedom of expression, surveillance. They tend to skip over these advancements without a second look at how it is achieved by the people, women included. So they are more interested in looking for and at the negative aspects.
Irina: And I think, furthermore, when we pointed out the ways in which women benefited from these advancements (especially here where science and technology are privileged disciplines for both genders – this is a fact, even with many “ifs” and “buts”), we are often looked down upon as not understanding enough about issues of class, race and our own position of privilege. Therefore we are naïve and uncritical, not versed in ideas superior to our understanding and experience. While many of these ideas were actually developed by women of color and non-Western women (whom I mentioned in my introduction), and adopted by white feminists! Or let’s go further and suggest that probably there is a problem in dealing with the Other who says she is happy? How do I deal with the Other who might not need my type of feminism? Is it a false consciousness? Is she simply stupid or has not visited enough smart conferences, read smart books or seen important shows?
Marge: This is a question I ask myself. In my own research and art work I deal with this. As a practice, I need to keep this in mind. It is a difficult process.
Irina: What are some of your strategies in addressing this question?
Marge: I need to address my own limitations of my understanding of the Other. The first step is to be aware that I can be presumptuous and catch myself being like that.
Irina: What might be helpful, especially in collaboration, is to follow your advice and as much as possible analyze why we even have an urge to collaborate with this or that specific group of people. What is it that attracts me to this collaboration, apart from available funding or supposed goodness of all forms of collaboration. I find that we often repress problems within such collaborations just to see what can happen next.
Marge: Yes, we avoid the pain.
Irina: Do you think we tried to play “nice” in our collaboration with SubRosa?
Marge: I tend to hold back to see what potentials are and what can result. It is very fragile.
Irina: Have you ever felt skeptical about predominantly white women’s desire to spread a specifically framed “developmental” framework for “gender agenda” around the world, especially in the so-called developing countries?
Marge: For me, it’s more the issue of how it is done. Agendas can change and/or be made flexible, therefore the methodology for me is very important, whether people push their ways of doing things. For example, women here have already been negotiating with the government here. And they engage with the government differently to get things done, compared to the US. It is slow and painful, it is a frustrating oftentimes, but things do change and get done. Sometimes I do observe that certain forms of feminism take on a more oppositional strategy to the state, while claiming periphery and marginal position. How useful is this strategy in the context of Singapore? I see the different strategies developed by women here, the negotiation process and I witness their long term effects because of the nature of the local political system. So to me, methodology is important – one that doesn’t impose one particular method but is sensitive to local context.
Irina: Only after living in the US I understand that indeed American feminisms are local in the way in which they lobby or operate within that cultural and political setting. It is ironic that what was developed there, often being transported to other countries using private money, George Soros and his foundation is one example (like I observed in Eastern Europe through direct translations of textbooks in Gender Studies as a ‘feminist canon’). I think we can actually look for solidarities if we give ourselves time and space to practice this comparative feminist studies model.
Marge: One interesting thing about strategy and methodology is appropriation. It is very common, and it is not about good or bad, right or wrong. For me what is important is appropriation with acknowledgment. I appropriate many Western feminists thoughts but I try to do it in a way that is my own. Plus I acknowledge them.
Irina: I still want to go back to talk about technological advancement in Singapore, and the way in which in a few of the countries in this region women seem to benefit from this advancement. What ways, from your point of view, without denying negative aspects, women benefit from technology now?
Marge: Immediate benefit is networking. And definitely, if you look at the larger context of survival, it certainly places me in the labour demographic that is needed. Someone who knows a little bit on how to use the computer, IT issues, mobility, access.
Irina: What did you feel was the most productive part of SubRosa’s visit to Singapore and your collaboration in this bio-technological research?
Marge: They came with a topic in mind, with which at that time I was not so engaged, in the first place. But I felt that after going through research and discussion together it made me more curious. And of course, I would call what we have established, friendship.
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It seems as if we cannot proceed to discuss differences without being afraid to fall into a trap of dualisms and essentialisms, such as East / West, privileged / less privileged, First World / Third World, and so on. Even though much of contemporary feminist thought that claims activism and alternative identities borrows heavily from knowledges situated outside of the white middle class female experience, namely, from Angela Davis, Cheila Sandoval, bell hooks, authors of the collection “This Bridge Called My Back”, Chandra Mohanty, Vandana Shiva, not to mention indigenous knowledges and practices from all over the world, we seem to focus a lot on trying to achieve sameness of frameworks and methodologies when approaching gender and technology across various contexts. In my short paper for Proceedings, I stated how some of this relates to gender and technology, and to what someone the day before yesterday called here at ISEA “Santa Cruz” tradition (with Donna Haraway’s pioneering work as the main point of reference).
In this vein, our panel is not about reclaiming any kind of subaltern or forgotten, repressed experience of non-Western women in relation to technology. Rather, we are interested in terminologies, methodologies and strategies that could be developed with treating the concept of situated knowledge and locating cyberfeminism seriously. We also understand that if knowledge is indeed situated and located, it is often cannot and may be, should not be reconciled or understood under some common frame of reference, especially if this frame of reference has a propensity to claim itself as a world standard. Which, however, does not mean that situated knowledge cannot be intelligible and shared. Following from examples above that inspired the discussion of cultural, race and class difference within feminism, it is exactly those differences that will produce new strategies and inform new pathways for our work.
One possible way on naming our panel’s methodological direction is striving towards what in relation to pedagogy Chandra Mohanty calls “comparative feminist model or feminist solidarity model” (“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anti-Capitalist Struggles, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Winter 2003, Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 499).
]]>Comparative Feminist Studies Model is the Feminist Solidarity Model, according to Mohanty, because it “allows us to frame agency and resistance across the borders of nation and culture”, through analyzing and understanding “connection and disconnection” between activist women’s movements around the globe.
This is a powerful framework that speaks to many of our problems with one-sided feminist agenda. However, I feel we need to strengthen Mohanty’s call for comparative methodology by insisting on comparative terminology / epistemology too. Thus, my suggestions to deepen Mohanty’s framework:
Her main issues include “sex work, militarization, environmental justice, the prison / industrial complex and human rights”. These terms are heavily implicated in Mohanty’s framing of the issues coming from her own context and universalizing it (for example, the term “sex work” that is widely used in India might work differently in Eastern Europe, where “sex exploitation: or sex trade” or “sex trafficking” are much more prevalent approaches; or human rights is obviously the way in which many Western developmental funding agencies work when approaching Third World gender issues; while these terms are rarely used in the US itself, even when applied to prostitution or sex trafficking within the Western world). It has been often shown that the terms of this comparative feminist studies / feminist solidarity model need to be developed in the process of comparison and solidarity, and not be pre-emptied by the agenda set in advance, how Mohanty seems to proceed.
The problem, therefore, is still lack of practicing situated knowledge especially in how it is defined through major terminological frameworks and how it frames our own perceptions of ‘gender’ and ‘technology’. We need to acknowledge our reliance on culturally and historically different epistemologies while seeking alternatives to dominant discourses on gender and technology – where what constitutes “gender” and “technology” in their own right, is as much not assumed, as “woman” or “feminism”.
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Dear Hyla and others,
I have started thinking more about my talk at our panel, and in terms of location I am thinking about comparative analysis of American and Russian cyberfeminist examples, locating specific conceptual concerns. Or, the concerns might be similar, but approached and understood differently. I gave a talk last year on the history of Russian women and technology. Together with Boryana's ideas from Berlin and my earlier discussions with Andrea and Jana from Germany, it will be the basis for my paper. Andrea and Jana wrote master's thesis in Berlin on Russian cyberfeminism, in a way, re-inventing it, I would think. Very interesting work. I know that 'locating' is always met with resistance especially in new media circles, while we are trying to become global and international. Differences are interesting and productive for me, not restrictive or essentializing. Thankfully, new media studies and art are also moving towards appreciating differences more and more, actually doing interesting research on that. Last MediaArtHistories conference in Berlin was a good start.
1. We focus on our individual projects' relation to the concepts of location. For example, SubRosa's Can U See Us Now, at www.canuseeusnow.refugia.net and International Markets of Flesh at www.cyberfeminism.net/projects/doc/imf.html.
2. One of the possible topics to discuss is the problems of activist or (tactical media) art in a museum or a gallery space, as Hyla mentions specifically in relation to the audience's expectations. An example for our further discussion would be "The Interventionists" exhibition that happened in Mass MoCa. One can read about it more at http://www.massmoca.org/press_releases/04_2004/04_05_04.html
3. Focus on two projects for SubRosa work and how they address technology, location and the body!
http://cyberfemin.janakorb.de/baba/english/engespr.html
"We need to avoid speaking too generally I believe, making rather sweeping conclusions based on a few personal observations / comments and the fact that few of us travel now. There is nothing
wrong with such generalizations in a conversation and as establishing a common ground among ourselves privately, but there is a problem if we present it without more careful research and very specific references (period, law, country, class, place, what evidence we have,
art works, how to interpret them and why, etc.).
...
Speaking very specifically about our own work, histories and contexts (like in Berlin we made statements based on our own work in cyberfeminist direction and what evidence / facts / histories we have been using so far) would also avoid to always positioning oneself as opposite (not only different) to some generalized other.
I am also curious about this 'reflexive' moment of treating ourselve as 'different' - this usually happens when we travel, since most of the time, we ourselves are 'majority' in our own contexts (ethnically or in terms of location - being in the capital city, or in terms of class / opportunities).
Just to start a conversation, I can refer to an excellent research by Ann Hibner Koblitz published as "Science, Women and the Russian Intelligentzia: The Generation of the 1860s" (IBIS, Vol. 79, Nov. 2, June 1988, pp. 208-226). It is about the connection between politics, women and science in 19th century Russia.
To a large extent, this text for me that says a lot about sources and strategies of women's achievements in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia in avant-garde art, in science (like Sophia Kovalevskaya), as well as in Soviet art and technology.
I am posting here our preliminary 'Locating Cyberfeminism' Panel proposal for ISEA2008 to take place in Singapore. Click here to read more:
]]> Panel is proposed for:"In the light of the centrality of location as a critical problematic
and possibility, this theme seeks to examine how the specificities of
location mediate and are mediated by both old and new technologies of
information, communication and experience. We invite academic
research, design and artistic explorations that explore the
possibilities and problems of addressing location through media
technologies. We are especially keen on works that address the complex
historical, cultural, socio-political and economic contexts that
affect location-specific interactions with such technologies." - from
the theme description "Locating Media" at http://isea2008.org/page/27/.
Panel Proposal "Locating Cyberfeminism".
Panel description:
"Locating Cyberfeminim" panel seeks to present a varied set of
cyberfeminist theories and practices by situating them within specific
political, technological and cultural contexts. While proposing papers
that address issues of cultural difference within cyberfeminist art
and aesthetics, this panel also attempts to widen the possibility of
what constitues cyberfeminism as such. It could be enabled through
being inclusive of projects, theories and practices that take place
geographically and / or conceptually outside of what could be
simplified as Western cyberfeminist trope. This trope often finds its
origins in the writings of Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant and art works
by VNS Matrix, among others. While acknowledging their immense
influence on today's discussions on women, art and technology, this
panel seeks to 'locate' them within specific histories of Western
(often white and middle-class) feminism thus opening up spaces for
other histories and genealogies which could be inlcuded as
cyberfeminist as well. Panel presentations will focus on examples from
Eastern and Central Europe (Boryana Rossa, Mare Tralla), Asia
(Margaret Tan, Irina Aristarkhova) and the US (Hyla Willis, Irina
Aristarkhova). Without dividing too neatly Western and non-Western
locations all presentations aim at contributing 'other cyberfeminisms'
as potentially revealing politics of location and histories of
cultural difference within this growing field."
Panel Presenters:
Boryana Rossa (Bulgaria, USA)
Mare Tralla (Estonia, UK)
Margaret Tan (Singapore)
Hyla Willis (USA)
Irina Aristarkhova (Russia, USA)
Dear Fatima,
Thank you for your nuanced and considered note. Please note again that
I am not speaking for anyone else but myself, certainly not as a "voice
of Sarai". I don't think nuance is the privilege or preserve of any
group, nor does it depend on education or decorum. Instead, it's a
certain warmth and hospitality, and a willingness to listen carefully,
and to be considered in one's responses. Essentially, it is about
coming to the conversation in good faith, with love and with
thoughtfulness-- not with the intention to sabotage dialogue or shout
down others. Most of all, if it becomes obvious that a reply has been
dashed off in a couple of seconds and, moreover, five or seven of those
replies are sent in the course of a single day, then I feel that this
wastes my time and makes it difficult to find the mails on the list that
are more carefully thought out.
So I disagree with you *completely* that such qualities would be found
only among "elites at Sarai". These are protocols that one finds with
many people on the street, regardless of their background and access to
privilege. In fact, as you well know, on the Indian street, it is often
the rich and privileged who tend to shout louder, for they fear no
reprisal. Right wing nationalists can feel secure in the knowledge that
they have the support of the state behind them. I would not be
surprised if, in monitoring this list, there would be members who would
not hesitate to report anyone they considered to be "anti-national" to
the authorities. This is the kind of insecurity that shadows our
conversations here--the question of what kinds of statements might
involve violent reprisals or legal censure, and so on; this is the
fragility of the discussions that have been built up on this list over
the course of five or so short years.
Yes indeed, one is dedicated here to the vibrancy, variousness and
quirkiness of the street--with the caveat that all our members are at
least privileged enough to have access to the internet. (Some write so
often that they must almost certainly have their own full-time dedicated
broadband.) Yet, it only takes a few goondas to suppress and drown out
all the many conversations, trying to fill the space with only their own
voices. In such instances, to renew our conversations, our whispering
faith in each other, it may be necessary to shut out the bullies for a
while. This would not be to pretend that those bullies don't exist;
merely it would be to acknowledge that they don't have anything new to
say. We have heard that shtick before.
But again: my mail was addressed only to those who already felt the same
way as me, and who wanted a practical and efficient solution. We have
very different positions on this question even at Sarai; some agree with
me, some most certainly don't. Those who have the time and energy to
stay tuned to the bullying and the threatening and the chanting of
shlokas and spells must please do so. I can even say I admire your
Gandhian equanimity. I, on the other hand, have other things to do, and
I can't afford to spend my time fighting an endless war of attrition, in
the trenches, with little or no gain from day to day, on the Line of
Discursive Control (LODC), here on the reader list.
Warmly,
Vivek
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10am 18 November, Conference Hall 2, House of World Cultures, Berlin.
Rebooting Cyberfeminism, a Roundtable discussion, will address ways of evaluating the histories and impact of cyberfeminism on current and future contributions to media art, technology practices, and activism in electronic (and Real) spaces. We invite virtual and/or physical participation and comments from all those interested. We are initiating an open discussion on a variety of topics including "Histories of Cyberfeminism," and "Genealogy of Art Groups".
One might argue that cyberfeminism has been slow in incorporating non-Western conceptions of gender/sexual difference and science/technology, both in art and in theory, and when it does incorporate them, both art works and theory have the “West” as standard and “other” as alternative (exotic) or subaltern (exploited) modes of relation to technology. Even if it is true, this situation is not different from the field as a whole, where Western genealogies are often presented as separate in origin from the rest of the world (starting from a point in Greek, or Roman, or Renaissance, or Film history), and often serve as a standard in the development of this new field. This panel (like a conference as a whole) is also an attempt to come to terms with such “history” and present the methodological and aesthetic problems of this limited approach.
First of all, one would need to clarify why we discuss the issue of “histories” and not one history. Just as in the case of “women’s histories,” which are still to be written and being written, cyberfeminist histories would acknowledge that often Western European-based history of art, science and technology, consciously or unconsciously confuses the lack of information on and communication with non-Western European sources with their absence, or even unimportance for its own methodology and, hence, - conclusions.
Second, this “ignorance” of sources leads – as we hope - to an attitude of curiosity and learning, coming from an understanding that indeed, attitudes to technology, science and the machine are not simply “born” from the Western origins and sources, but “made” within a complex set of colonial, imperial, trading, linguistic and other global histories. A simple gap in our mutual knowledges of each other’s contexts might be a fruitful resource for research and collaborative work. Thus, this panel invites explorations into our cyberfeminist ‘gaps’.
In the West, cyberfeminism has often been influenced by the ideas of socialist feminism and post-modernism. Some focused more on the critique of women’s disempowerment in relation to new media and technologies, particularly reproductive and bio-technologies, and use of female labor and female body in the “new technological” age; while others celebrated technological possibilities of morphing hybrid identities, with introduction of playful subjectivity, when male-female, machine-human, West/East, North/South, straight and homosexual binaries become porous, fluid and deliberately confused. And a tension between these two approaches often works as a catalyst for cyberfeminist debate and discussion: when one blames another for not being activist or “decentered” enough in their creative and theoretical engagements with new media. While these debates are useful in interrogating various theoretical methodologies and artistic practices, within this panel we will try to critically explore specific cases of media art, scientific and medical technologies, communications technologies (Internet, web, blog, email networking, etc.), food production and distribution technologies, farming knowledge etc. to excavate more histories of women’s development and uses of such technologies in art, community and science. We hope that looking at these examples will foster our discussion on the development of aesthetics and politics of cyberfeminist histories we can learn from.
Examples of such case studies might include, but not be limited, to:
- Sarai “Cybermohalla” Project (http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla)
- Vandana Shiva’s farm (http://www.navdanya.org/about/founder-message.htm)
- Emily Jacir’s video installation “Crossing Surda (A Record of Going to and from Work)” (http://www.daratalfunun.org/main/activit/curentl/febo6/emily/emily06.html)
- the Zapatista Women’s brigades (http://www.caferebelion.com/newlinks.html)
- Women on Waves (www.womenonwaves.org)
- Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices. A subRosa anthology, Autonomedia, 2003 (http://www.refugia.net/domainerrors/index.html)
- Soviet histories of women artists working with technology
"Genealogy of Art Groups" (Please address your ideas / comments to Faith Wilding at faithwilding@cs.com)
Genealogy of Artist/Activist Collaborations
and Art Groups
A recent exhibition “Cyberfem. Feminisms on the Electronic Landscape,” (Espai d’Art Contemporani, Castellon, Spain, 20 October–21 January, 2006/07, curated by Ana Martinez-Collado), brought together a diverse group of works by cyberfeminist artists from many parts of the world (including artists Dora Garcia, Ana Navarette, Olia Lialina, Kristin Lucas, Eva Wohlgemut, Lynn Hershmann, Shu Lea Cheang, Dora Garcia, Prema Murthy, OBN, Deb King, Salome Cuesta, Coco Fusco, subRosa and many others). According to the curator, the exhibition was “conceived as an expanded territory, a hybrid space of creation and activism constructed using new digital technologies. …Speaking of (cyber) feminism today—feminism, Internet, art and activism—is to speak of experimental creation, communication, interactivity, research and association. Internet is now consolidated as a space of visibilisation of women from a multifaceted plurality of directions.” It would be interesting to discuss and examine this statement.
Since the utopian (and specifically Western) moment of CF’s founding, it has been critiqued for tending to separate itself from earlier (Western) histories of feminism, and especially from the feminist activism and theory that fueled the second wave women’s liberation movement and the feminist art movement. Cyberfeminism, many tech-savvy women hoped, could perhaps leave behind the vexing feminist concerns with female essentialism, sexism, racism, and crippling gender roles, to explore a new world of post-human bodies without borders, digital machines, virtual networking, and pleasurable play with communications and imaging technologies. CF has also been criticized for its neglect of concerns about racism, sexism, and difference on the Internet. (See for example, “Surfing the Waves of Feminism: Cyberfeminism and its others” Susanna Paasonen, labrys, estudos feministas / études féministes janeiro / julho 2005 - janvier /juillet 2005; and “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” Faith Wilding,
Ironically, while an important part of Haraway’s cyborg manifesto concerns itself with women’s lives in “the integrated circuit of global production,” and discusses the painful effects of the “feminization of labor,” and the contingent and precarious nature of the lives of millions of female and male workers in the global factories and border zones all over the world, this has not been the focus of much cyberfeminist theorizing and activism among (Western) artists and academic feminists to date.
So it is important to ask: What possibilities for “thinking (and doing) things differently” have been opened up by cyberfeminism and women in net culture? Maria Fernandez has written: “A starting point for developing change could be the revaluation of the old dictum: ‘The personal is political.’ It is now necessary to become aware of how we deal with differences in our most intimate spheres. At the same time we need to strengthen our presence in the greatly contested digital domain as technology has been an integral part of the construction and positioning of identities. In the current state of technologically facilitated global capitalism it becomes imperative to find new ways of interacting in and out of cyberspace.” (See Introduction, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices. A subRosa anthology, Autonomedia, 2003)
It would be interesting to learn how feminist activists and artists have made use of ICT. Worldwide, women’s and people’s movements practicing self-organized and grass-roots (feminist) activism use the expanded territory of cyberspace. Examples include RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan); Cindy Sheehan organizing US military mothers to bring their children home; and Pink Bloc, Women on Waves, Women in Black, Soldier’s Mothers, the Zapatista Women’s brigades, the Mothers of Juarez, the Atalantis Project, to name but a few. The Zapatistas and many of the landless people’s movements rely on their Web presence as an organizing base, to give them visibility and credibility and to communicate with similar movements worldwide. They are spreading many hands-on technologies via the internet, and building coalitions with many different constituencies.
Dear Irina: I found your thoughts and questions to be of great interest to me at this moment—especially since I’ve been thinking so much about the two big Feminist Art exhibitions in the US this year: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MOCA, LA) and Global Feminisms (The Brooklyn Museum). Many people have remarked that both shows are “body” shows. The cover for the WACK! catalog—a 1970’s Martha Rosler collage made of cutouts of naked women from Playboy magazine--is extremely explicit in its reference to the representations of women’s bodies (in the 70s) that were found to be offensive to the then blossoming women’s liberation movement and concurrent Feminist Art movement. The 2nd wave women’s liberation and feminist art movements in the US were fueled by themes of female sexual and reproductive liberation: the Pill, “free love”, female orgasm, sexual and reproductive choice, feminist health movement and right to abortion and contraception, rape counseling centers, domestic violence, racist sexual violence, activism against representations of violence against women in pop culture, and the like. Many of these themes became the content of the performances, environments, videos, photoworks, collages, paintings, writings, and actions by feminist artists in the US, in Eastern and Western Europe, and in a few other countries like Japan, Australia, Canada. While many of these works were fueled by rage and were strongly critical of the cultural, religious, and political representations of sexualized and victimized women’s bodies, they often depicted young, beautiful, white, naked females (usually the artists themselves) thus raising the questions asked by some of the Marxist British feminists like Mary Kelly and Griselda Pollock et al: whether the explicit representation of nude female bodies wasn’t directly contradicting the “message” and criticality of the works. After all, we’ve been culturally trained to regard nude, white, young female bodies as sexually desirable and titillating—and combining nudity with violence is often even more exciting. Such works need a strong critical/historical contextualization though this still may not prevent many people from getting secret kicks from the work. This contextualization is not provided in the WACK! show, and though I have not seen it yet, is not present in the Global Feminisms show either. Both WACK! and Global Feminisms have quite a few European (both east and west) artists in them. So this is just as a sort of little historical note to your panel discussion.
1. In performance art the showing of the naked “body” is over valued and over validated, no question about it. And often the notion of “body” is concomitant with “naked” and even with “naked woman.” My performance students invariably wrestle with this taken-for-granted trope that performance artists have to take their clothes off because this shows the “real” body, and makes a “risky” statement. When confronted with a live naked body in a room full of clothed ones almost everyone cringes and that body becomes something else too—it becomes one’s own greatest fear perhaps, the fear of exposure and vulnerability. But one also begins to critique that body, to regard its aesthetics since this is what is offered as the “art work.” When Marina Abramovic and Ulay made people squeeze between a narrow passage created by their naked bodies they forced a “touch” on viewers rather than a “gaze.” Such direct confrontational work where the viewer becomes a body-with-bodies seems much more productive than gazing at someone (Marina again) hurting herself deliberately. It is interesting to contemplate Stelarc’s work in terms of his nakedness in the work. Stelarc does not, and has never had (sorry Stelarc) a heroic or classically molded male body. He is short, hairy, stocky. He speaks of his body as “the body”, as the obsolete body—yet he always shows it to us as fully as possible only wearing perhaps a tiny jockstrap (which I myself find very distracting, he should let it all hang out already). His body does become heroic when connected to the various machines and robotic extensions that he’s invented. This connection is sexy in certain ways, provocative in its monstrous graftings (as Donna Haraway might describe it). Stelarc’s body is always a body in action though, even in the suspension performances he has to act in order to keep a balance and a tension going so his skin doesn’t tear. He is a little like I imagine the naked athletes (both male and female) of Sparta were, completely attentive and imbued with their actions so the body really does become a tool. Some dancers use the naked body this way also (how can we tell the dancer from the dance?), and that works for me in a different way than most naked female body performances. Seems like quite a bit of the new biotech art also uses various prosthetics along with the body. The machine body is also beloved of cyberfeminists who are trying out Haraway’s notion that they’d rather be cyborgs than goddesses. Orlan is of course another example of using her actual body in embodied real performance where the audience has to watch an operation going on. Much of the cyborgian media art made by cyberfeminists now is seen only as video and not as “live art.” This makes a big difference I think in that it removes the “real” body and distances us from it. I did see a performance by Annemarie Schleiner at the Cyberfem show in Castellon, Spain, last year, in which she and another woman wore VR headgear and rollerskated through the city (in very tiny black shorts and tops) photographing and projecting the spaces they moved through with their headgear. It was fun to watch and certainly did provide this image of the female body with sexy machinic extensions. Not sure though whether it was in any way an extension of ways of thinking about the female body.
2. Another woman artist in that same show however made a very interesting work about other female bodies in the city—that is, of trafficked women from both Romania and Northern Africa, who ply their trade in the orange groves surrounding Castellon. Anna’s project did not show the women themselves, but rather mapped the routes of exchange and networks of capital and human flows that fuel this trade in bodies. One of the interesting things about these trafficked, illegal, migrant bodies is that they are usually unseen even though they move amongst us constantly. Often they do remain hidden literally imprisoned in various ways, but they are constantly moving and we are not seeing them (perhaps because they are not naked?). Yet they live in the titillated imaginary as “globalized women” as bodies of terror and hysteria. There’s a kind of unhealthy obsession here—many people want to “see” these women who are imagined as extremely sexual and victimized. In regard especially to the nude performance work of younger women from Eastern European countries I wonder if this can be understood in quite classic terms of the exchange of sex for power. Mira Schor has written about how students often offer their bodies and their sexualities to their powerful teachers because they have nothing else to give. (Sort of like Leda and the Swan—she exchanges her sexual body for his knowledge and power). Tanya Ostojevic’s work made that very literal when she offered her naked body on the internet in exchange for marriage with a Western male. (Andrea Fraser offered a night of sex with herself to any collector who would pay $10,000 and showed her toned, naked body to all viewers who came to her performance when she made the offer). Women’s bodies have always been a medium of exchange—just as cows have. Women are chattel (very similar to cattle). The value of the woman’s body is her sexuality and reproductive powers. Do women and women artists still feel that they have nothing else to exchange but their naked bodies (their sexuality)? Even if they are smart and accomplished they have to show cleavage and wear short skirts. One realizes this very quickly as one becomes older in the US. No longer can one trade on one’s looks and sexuality. And let’s consider also what bodies are usually shown—it is rarely that we see naked middle-aged, old, weak, sick, ordinary bodies. We see bodies of terror all the time which are also shown as almost a kind of pornography: starving bodies in the Sahel, exploded and dumped bodies in Iraq and Palestine, captured bodies from the borders of Mexico, martyred bodies from the inner city gang wars, etc.
3. I had some thoughts about the loss of the “natural” body and its connection to wanting to “see” naked bodies. As John Berger says, seeing the naked body of the beloved is reassuring, is the only thing that can actually measure up to our desire for the beloved. (I’m probably botching up what he says much more eloquently). But it strikes me that the naked body has often been used that way in performance and art and theatre—to reassure people, to bring them closer. I am thinking of some of the performances of the Living Theatre who got crowds everywhere to take off their clothes and mix and mingle joyfully. In the 60s nakedness was a political statement almost, a declaration of “freedom” and of a certain kind of resistance to religious and family values (these were mostly the sons and daughters of well-off or middle-class white folks). No wonder Blake with his advocacy of the human naked body divine was one of the most popular subjects for PhD dissertations in the late 60’s. The loss of the “natural” body is also perhaps partly at the root of current obsessions about eating organic and local foods, foods one has touched, foods from the real, grass-fed bodies of animals and chickens and plants. There is also the obsession with obesity, with fat as some kind of almost mystical substance. This is in contradiction to the Christian and religious right’s obsession with abstinence, fasting, homosexuality, childmolestation, etc.
4. I am curious to hear more about your thoughts on the body as medium AND message.
Panel Discussion: “Super-Embodiment of Woman-Artist in Media Art”
Question of Embodiment and in particular – Nudity and the Nude – have become key issues in contemporary art, theory and politics. Women artists face what Foucault called ‘hysteriarization of female body’, while men artists face an issue of ‘absent male body’ (Kelly Oliver) and respond to it with various strategies. One might argue that both Western and Eastern European women artists have exhibited ‘too much body’, and to a certain extent find it difficult to leave “body” behind. However, we rarely discuss what impact socialist gender policies and practices
have had on this process within aesthetics. If performance art leaves us with legacy of ‘too much body’ - ‘super-embodiment’, - one wonders of it morphs into (new) media art as question of ‘machine’ / ‘cyborg’ embodiment and its identity. Media art by Boryana Dragoeva Rossa
(Bulgaria), Erika Katalina Pasztor (Hungary), and Elena Kovylina (Germany / Russia) will serve as case studies, alternative to and through ‘super-embodiment’ in contemporary art.
Participants: Nina Czegledy, Anne Nigten, Angela Plohman, Irina Aristarkhova, Olga Shishko, and Elena Kovylina.
Some thoughts:
1. "Body" from performance art into media art (like video) and new media (like Stelarc or SubRosa). It does not seem accidental that some of the more successful new media artists and art groups (apart from net-art), come from performance art tradition.
2. Coupling with 20th century European conceptual obsession with the 'body', 'embodiment', etc., to deconstruct the subject, it leads us to 'cyborg body' or 'technological body' concerns, clearly present in bio-art.
3. Remebering that this is a specifically Western history: Christian + capitalist history, it would be interesting to explore what Ryklin called "bodies of terror" within Soviet past, and wheather gender, sexual difference and Soviet past contributed to our media art and new media art aesthetics.
Some problems:
1. A certain unexplored identification of 'nudity' with 'freedom'. Not so much as a problem of 'impossibility of freedom', but still as some kind of belief in 'representation' and its power.
2. Medium is the body, still, and not the message. We declare more than we can.
3. Interesting unpacking through this of Western aesthetics as romantic tradition of human form (in Kantian / Hegelian formulation) - and that which makes / frames it: post-human, animal, machine, monster, God, and so on.
4. Thus, 'too much body'...
]]>Thanks for helping to set it up. I'll be adding a few things in the next couple of days, so join in! I hope Faith will be able to participate too.
Irina
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