Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. The Impossible Feast of the Uncanny Technowoman: A Plural Feminist Cyborg Writes of the Possibilities for Science Fiction and Potent Body Politics A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology Massey University, Manawatū Campus New Zealand Geneva Connor 2019 i Abstract This research embodies Donna Haraway’s (1991) feminist cyborg as a potent political figure for women and their bodies in the 21st century West. The violences done to women all too often define them (Malabou, 2011), confining them to the heterosexual matrix characterised by their objectification and ‘excesses.’ The multiplicities and pluralities of ‘woman’ disrupt traditional psychological science that counts and categorises. Re-routing psychology through the hybridity and non-fixity of the science fiction genre, new possibilities for psychological knowledge production emerge, including figures (such as cyborgs), art installations and hyperdimensional arachnids through which to think new thoughts (Haraway, 2016). Through the figure of a feminist cyborg, ‘woman’ can be understood as politically potent through her multiplicities, partialities, simultaneities and contradictions. After rendering Haraway’s feminist cyborg through the science fiction genre, the thesis takes on a creative form to re-think the notion of apocalypse, re-theorise the uncanny, then explore a potently networked series of figures, internet users and movements (such as Human Barbies, internet folklore, pro-rape forums) that structure women’s bodies in ways that re-assert the heterosexual matrix, as well as in ways that re- build women outside of the heterosexual matrix. Re-figuring ‘woman’ outside of the heterosexual matrix could perhaps open new spaces in which to think women’s body politics differently in perpetually networked, ever-expanding technoworlds. ii iii Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr Leigh Coombes and Professor Mandy Morgan for all of their guidance and encouragement for many years now. Thanks for helping me become a better thinker and writer. Thank you both for the opportunities to learn. And thank you for laughing at my jokes. I have done so much I never thought I would do because of your support. Thank you also to my mother, my father and my brother for their continued support through my perpetual studenthood. Thanks for the distractions, the laughs, and the food! Thanks also to Ann and Mel for both their professional and personal support. I have learnt a lot from you both. iv v Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements iii Contents v Chapter One: User Guide, Terms and Conditions 1 *Pokes ‘Woman’* 3 Body Reboot 7 Ceci N'est Pas Une Figure 9 Impossible Kin 12 Technometaphors 101 20 Impossible Linearity 22 Chapter One Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 26 Chapter Two: Genre 29 Matrix Mothers 29 A Cyborg’s Embrace 35 “Then at a deadly pace It Came From Outer Space and this is how the message ran...” 37 “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end.” – Neo 40 Detectives and Science Fiction 43 Making Strange 50 Morality/Ethics 54 Transgressions/Multiplicities 56 Chapter Two Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 64 Chapter Three: The Cyborg 65 Swapping Binaries for Binary Code 65 Hello, Cyborg 68 Story Time in the Matrix 75 Metaphors 81 Ontology – Verb 84 eXXcess 86 vi Utopia, Interrupted 88 Individualism 89 Who is a Cyborg? 92 Chapter Three Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 96 A Weaver’s Interjection: “Time is a flat circle…” 97 Interruption: Linear Links Laughing Loudly 99 Chapter Four: Ethics in Wonderland 101 Staying with the Trouble 101 Response-Ability 105 ‘Data’ Birthed Prematurely 107 Reddit – Expansive 107 4chan – Cultural Text 113 Anon-IB – Decisions 116 SexyAbortions and Vote Brigading – When I Was Not Safe 118 To Encounter 120 Chapter Four Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 125 Soliloquy: A Melodramatic Deviation 127 Stuck in the Same Old 127 Chapter Five: Apocalypse 131 A Lovely Day for an Apocalypse 133 Massive 139 Cover Story 141 Educating Women 147 More Free Speech but at What Cost? 150 Campus Concerns 153 Panic Architecture 154 Bored 161 Apocalypse Now 165 Chapter Five Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 168 Chapter Six: Uncanny 169 vii The Uncanny as an Analytic Reading Practice – (In)Different (Un)Home for a Cyborg 169 A Clockwork Olympia 173 According to Freud (1919) 176 Olympias Gone Wild 196 Chapter Six Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 200 Chapter Seven: Slender Man 201 Freud: The Original Slender Man 201 Beware the Slender Man 202 Shift 209 Real Life 211 Slender Man Dismembered: A Body in the Woods 214 Faceless Suit 215 Tendril Limbs 218 Lurking 219 Mind-Body Uncertainty 220 Stealing or Returning 222 Anxiety 227 Chapter Seven Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 231 Interruption: Vision 233 Chapter Eight: (Female figure) 235 Reintroduction (LOOP) 235 Back to the Future 236 Cool Apocalypse 238 An Indestructible Body 242 (Female figure) as Technometaphor 244 Uncanny TechnoSpirituality 249 Chapter Eight Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts #1 254 California Annotated (2nd) Viewing 254 Chapter Eight Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts #2 258 viii Chapter Nine: Elliot Rodger 259 Colored Sculpture 260 The Curious Case of Elliot Rodger 263 Elliot Rodger is a Colored Sculpture 274 A Word on a Word: Desire 279 Chapter Ten: Human Barbie 283 People as Barcodes 286 Barcoding Human Barbie 290 “Imagine That You Are Mourning” 298 Chapter Ten Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 308 Interruption: Encountering Bodies 309 Chapter Eleven: Interlude 311 Data Lust 312 “… deathly oneness…” 313 Data Trauma 314 Data Reboot 314 Too Full Again 315 The Weaver as a Metaphor’d Practice for Decisions of Writing and Thinking 317 Chapter Eleven Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 319 Chapter Twelve: Violations 321 The Horrifying Adventures of the Roast Busters 321 Return to the PhilosophyOfRape 324 An Odd-ish Development 334 Nom Nom 337 #Jadapose: A Memetic Rape 341 Panic! at the Dinner Table 345 Chapter Twelve Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 347 Chapter Thirteen: Zero Days Left (Time’s Up) 349 Locked in a Deadly Embrace 352 ix Caught in Our Stuxnet 357 Chapter Thirteen Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts 361 Chapter Thirteen Appendix: Wholly Thoughts Enforced by Agent Smith 363 Theory: Feminist Poststructuralism 363 Cyborg 367 Cyborg as a Doing Figure 368 A Cyborg Methodology 370 Analytic Strategies and Yet More Figures 376 Jacking Into Possible Futures 378 References 383 Appendix: Now Streaming Consciousness: Psychology, Technology and Memes 445 1 Chapter One: User Guide, Terms and Conditions My family was somewhat late to computers and later still to the internet. My first experiences with computers through the 1990s were games played at friends’ houses, and in the children’s section of Auckland Museum, ‘Weird & Wonderful,’ that had a section full of computers with ‘educational’ games. I was notoriously difficult to pry away from those clunky white-grey computers, whether with my family or on school trips. ‘Weird & Wonderful’ looks different now, with those white-grey computing dinosaurs replaced with sleek, thin black screens infinitely more capable and connected. When I was last at Auckland Museum, children flittered back and forth between the screens and the other things to look at in the discovery centre. They tapped the devices with mundane ease, got what they needed (or got bored) and moved on. These ever-moving children looked very different from me and my child-peers, buddying up two to a computer and jittering in our seats as we waited an eternity for the white-grey machine to boot up and load new worlds for us to explore. One of the first full computer games I ever played was ‘Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?’ – an ‘educational’ game in which I helped track down notorious criminal mastermind Carmen Sandiego. Carmen would leave clues as to which country she was hiding in, I would follow them and eventually catch up to her as she gathered significant world artefacts, hoarding Treasures of Knowledge for herself. Carmen, digital as she was/is, was a prolific user of technology to aid in her escapes from justice, but more importantly, technology enabled her to taunt me, her would-be captor. Through videos and satellite phones and other fancy spy devices, Carmen would deploy 2 obnoxious and abusive barbs about how bad I was at catching her like when she interrupted electronic communications (easily, she adds) to say that she was “…a little disappointed: This hasn’t been half the challenge I thought it would be” (The Learning Company, 2001). Carmen was a bad girl and she used every available technology to not only be bad-er, but to ensure we could all see how bad she was. At some point, I do not know when, I wondered why we were chasing Carmen all over the world, and not any one of the other boy criminals who were doing even worse things than Carmen ever did, just with less flair. What was so particularly deviant about Carmen Sandiego that required this global (wo)man hunt? From my days jittering in computer chairs and being abused by a digital one- woman crime wave, emerged curiosity about the embodied experiences of technology and how these experiences have so rapidly changed and shifted over such a short space of time, even for the singular, individual me. I used to jitter for so long, willing a computer to respond to me and boot up quickly, but now a minute seems a lifetime, I have things to do, HURRY UP! And while Carmen’s obnoxious interrupting abuse still delights me, the chase is too slow and I cannot beat her with an unconventional object once I catch her like I can in other games (not that I would want to beat her, but the simplicity of her game style compared to modern video games renders her a tad… cheap and easy…). While the embodied waiting for technology to whir into life (either through the booting of a machine, or the stunted step-by-step game-play of early video games) was glacial compared to modern advances in personal computing (and access to personal computing), the embodied immediacy and simultaneity of technological connectivity in the West is a key rapid movement of the 21st century that entangles bodies and technologies. Today, a man can casually, yet dramatically, connect millions of abusers to a singular young woman (see Landsbaum, 2016). A woman can casually, 3 yet dramatically, become a meme through her sexually assaulted body (see Bates, 2014). Suddenly, my jittering body at a computer moved beyond that of anticipatory excitement at what awaited inside that slow machine, to an urgent anxiety about how bodies and technologies are becoming potently connected faster and more expansively than ever before. My jittering research then explores the urgency of the technopositionings that produce ‘women’ and their bodies, sometimes exploiting technological vulnerabilities much as Carmen Sandiego obnoxiously interrupted communications to obnoxiously taunt her pursuers (including me) again and again. My positioning as a poststructural(ish) feminist technowoman in the 21st century West produces a fraught connectivity with our social embeddedness in ultra-enmeshed patriarchal technologies that are now so mundane, so taken-for-granted. I must use a computer to write up this research. I must write this research. The ubiquity of technology to connect to, and the uncritical ease with which we connect troubles me, not in the sense that I want to shut it all down, but in the sense that we are, at best, unsure of what is being built, destroyed or mutated as we connect. And ‘woman’s’ position as highly constructed, destructed and monstrous suggests her positioning in the technoworld is dangerous and full of possibility. *Pokes ‘Woman’* An argument that focuses on ‘women’ seemingly either assumes ‘women’ as a unified category or disintegrates ‘women’ to the point of ‘nothing-worth-politicising.’ Through those two investigative options ‘women’ are rendered subjugated: either unified and dominated in their categorical opposition to ‘men,’ or dissolved into incoherent bits and pieces that can never quite become anybody. Debating what a ‘woman’ may or may not be is not a luxury we can enjoy in the 21st century (or in any century, in hindsight). Indeed, debates about what constitutes ‘woman’ seem to end as 4 they begin: violently.1 Descriptions of ‘women’ fast become problematic, as ways for articulating ‘woman’ have been produced through the binaries that define ‘man’ and justify his position as first in the man/woman binary (Braidotti, 1989; Grosz, 1989; Morgan, 1998; Potts, 2002). Woman, then, as an ‘other’ to man, has become multiple, partial and fragmented, and as Malabou (2011) suggests, denied an essence. The question perhaps shifts then from what woman is, to how women can be. For Malabou (2011) “… “woman” has never been able to define herself other than through the violence done to her” (p. vi).2 One of the things we best know about whatever a ‘woman’ might be, is that she is perpetually moving through violence. Globally, ‘women’ are beaten, raped and killed at astronomical rates (García-Moreno et al., 2013); they die while giving birth (Alkema et al., 2016) or aborting (Grimes et al., 2006) and before or shortly after they are born (Bongaarts & Guilmoto, 2015); they are poor and underemployed (Bullock, 2013); and they are desperately sick (Carr, Green & Ponce, 2015). What somewhat unifies these ‘women’s issues’ (if we must unify them) is the body: abused, sick, dead, under-utilised, under-nourished, contained and controlled. What we understand as ‘woman’ can be described as “objectified and alienated as social subjects partly through the denigration and containment of the female body” (Grosz, 1994, p. xiv). So when a ‘postfeminist’ “theoretical violence that refuses to give women 1 The figure of Haraway’s (1991) cyborg is inherently intersectional; however, she shifts the metaphor from the ‘intersection’ towards networking, multiplicity and simultaneity. Such a shift becomes problematic through the dominant Western imagery of a cyborg: thin and white. ‘Others’ may have an understandably tough time seeing themselves in dominant images of the cyborg precisely because those images are dominant. Through this thesis, I draw attention to and problematise such images through the rendering of figures, rather than images, to bring the multiplicities, simultaneities and contradictions of the category ‘woman’ through so that ‘others’ may see themselves (even if just partially), beyond their neoliberal categories, in the figure of the cyborg as she moves potently and politically through cyberspace. 2 The idea of woman being defined by the violences done to her will recur through my research. While the conventions of APA referencing demand I cite the source in full each time I utilise the idea, I am going to break some rules by considering Malabou’s words gifts to continue referencing without referencing, connecting text with text. 5 an essence” (Malabou, 2011, p. 96) emerges, understanding what constitutes ‘woman’ as through the “violence done to her” begrudgingly opens space for new ways to understand women’s embodied experiences. Opening up new spaces suggests an interrogation of the old spaces. Binary thinking privileges the (masculine, productive) mind over the (feminised, passive) body (Grosz, 1994), and produces women as “somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (p. 14). The production of women and their bodies through gendered binaries (masculine/feminine, active/passive, mind/body) makes for restrictive ways to inhabit a woman’s body, characterised by, as Malabou (2011) suggests, the violence done to it. Does ‘woman’ being characterised by violence mean she is apocalyptically doomed? Women became so quickly, so dramatically and so violently a focal point of the internet (mainly through pornography (Heider & Harp, 2002)) and technology in general (for example, those old ads for kitchen technology targeted toward wives (Holdsworth, 1988)). Technological advancements, whether through warfare, sex or the kitchen, have always been gendered amplifications of the violence against women, or at the very least, the binaries that produce violence against women. The 20th and 21st centuries have been characterised by rapid technological advancement, and the 21st century in particular has seen that rapid technological advancement enter into people’s homes and personal lives with proliferating access to increasingly sophisticated technologies. It is not simply the ubiquity of mobile phones, for example, that needs troubling, but the increasing ease of access to and use of technology within mobile phones that can enable violence against women (Harris, 2004). When mobile phone technology was limited to texting and calling, abusing women you knew became a little easier, as a technotool could be easily accessed in the palm of your hand, but such 6 potentials for abuse were still largely restricted to geographic clusters of people who knew each other or could share phone numbers. A woman and her abuser(s) carried the tool with them wherever they went, but the phone number still acted as a buffer for threats from unknown sources. Through the early part of the 21st century, the capabilities of the humble mobile phone have proliferated, with the introduction of internet access that enables instantaneous connection to websites, forums, social media and applications where the pool of women to abuse expands from those women you know, to any online woman, at any time, from anywhere. The rapid, expansive shifts from abusers having to physically locate a woman to abuse, to writing abusive letters, to abusive phone calls and texts, to ubiquitous instantaneous timeless access to the internet has (almost) necessitated the amplification of gender and gender-based violence. Such shifts have occurred so rapidly and so uncritically there has been no time to re-do gender even in small ways that might mitigate the potential new violence against women that ubiquitous internet connectivity can facilitate. If women were historically more beaten, raped and killed in larger numbers than men when access to women’s bodies was somewhat restricted by low technological connectivity, how do women and their bodies survive in a 21st century characterised by intensive technological connectivity? As the 21st century marches on, technologies like virtual reality, remote surgeries and self-driving cars are immanent, on the verge of emerging as the next phases of ubiquitous, mundane technology. The internet and its now mundane ubiquitous connectivity has already granted excessive access to women’s bodies (bodies that have already been excessively accessed); how will virtual reality exploit this access further? And how can women survive it? What happens when women unplug the binaries that constrain them and re-wire them? How do women’s bodies function when 7 disconnected from the masculinist mainframe? What would happen if women used alternative power sources, perhaps sources they built themselves? Jitter, jitter… Body Reboot Haraway draws our attention to the construction and manipulation of docile, knowable bodies in our present social system. She invites us to think of what new kinds of bodies are being constructed right now; that is, what kind of gender-system is being constructed under our very noses. (Braidotti, 2006, p. 198) The main questions of my research are concerned, deeply, with the excesses to the binaries that have produced ‘woman’ through ‘the violence done to her’ in the imaginative political hope of “a new kind of politics based on temporary and mobile coalitions and therefore on affinity” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 211) where ‘woman’ is not a definite or defined being, but an expansive series of partial points of hyperconnectivity.3 As such, this research is performed in the feminist tradition of “opening up of thought to what is new, different, and hitherto unthought” (Grosz, 1994, p. xiv), privileging the third options incorporated into or rejected by binary thought and gleefully horrified by how women’s embodiment may become terrifyingly new if they take up their excesses: “Still, I believe that the word “woman” has a meaning outside the heterosexual matrix. It is tedious to keep bringing it back there, making it the site of a constant parody…” (Malabou, 2011, pp. 135-136). For Grosz (1994) there is political potency in re-writing women’s bodies as positive rather than through their traditional binaried ‘lack’: to “be 3 A reminder here about the shift in metaphor away from the ‘intersection’ and towards the networked cyborg: I will not always be explicitly naming categories of neoliberal identity. Instead, I engage with social power relations through the formation and movement of figures. Categories, like race, may appear explicitly where connections become particularly dense in the network, but figures are drawn through social power relations, not neoliberal identities. 8 able to talk of the body outside or in excess of binary pairs” (p. 24) opens formidable possibilities for women’s embodiment. Questions about ‘woman’ and the violence done to her, remind us that “thinking about the subject amounts to rethinking her bodily roots” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 207). A woman’s bodily ‘roots’ are typically constructed as natural, as the metaphor suggests, positioning woman alongside, or within, nature (as opposed, in the binary, to masculine culture) (Haraway, 1991), and therefore to be dominated (Griffin, 1997). Woman’s ‘naturalness’ focuses talk of her and her body towards so-called ‘natural’ topics, like fertility and health; how the woman’s body functions and can be controlled. Re-thinking these ‘natural’ bodily ‘roots’ not only challenges what these ‘roots’ enable and constrain for women and their bodies, but also opens space for new forms of embodiment that might not ‘root’ women to the ground. To ask more questions about the body and women’s embodied experiences, my research brings with it the idea that the body is the “political, social, and cultural object par excellence” (Grosz, 1994, p. 18), uprooted from the fixity of individualism and the mind/body split. Since before I was jittering in anxious connection to computers, feminist poststructuralists have been engaged in the problematising of binary thinking and the categorising individualism such thinking privileges, and enables and constrains for women’s bodies. Opening up the body (so to speak) to social and political production works to, at the very least, disrupt the dominant ideas about certain fixed or ‘given’ categories that the body belongs to, like ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ For Grosz (1994), bodies “function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable” (p. xi). That is, bodies are not stable, closed vessels for minds, but rather densely produced and shaped socio-political partialities and contradictions. Bodies have the potential for a great many political 9 variations. The body as produced through social, political, cultural and historical pushing and pulling, rather than conceptualising it as a fixed vessel for the mind, enables the re-thinking and re-working of the Western body in ways that can indeed challenge dominant phallocentrism and the categories through which such phallocentrism is predicated. Such challenges open space for new and different understandings about the body, and perhaps even new and different bodies. My jittering 21st century concern connects me to Donna Haraway and her extensive talk about 21st century bodies and the ways in which 21st century feminists can account for such bodies. For Braidotti (2011), Haraway updates and re-routes Foucault’s biopower through the technologies of now, privileging the hyperconnectivity of contemporary times to re-wire women and feminism through the ever-in-flux, ever- moving 21st century technologies of power that shape bodies. Why this matters for my research project is the technologically critical moments that manifest in the 21st century have violent impacts on ‘women’ and their bodies. If the violence done to women has defined them, then what happens to women4 when so much more violence can be done to her so much more easily, so much faster and so much more expansively? Ceci N'est Pas Une Figure To help explore these questions extensively and expansively, I will need the help of some potent figures. Figures are “materialistic mappings of situated, i.e., embedded and embodied, social positions” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 4); complex and resistant to boundaries that reduce or confine them. While Braidotti (2011) constructs figuration as 4 Throughout my research, ‘woman’ is a plural term, evocative of women’s multiplicities. Breaking down ‘woman’ as defined by, but not exclusive from, the taken-for-granted heterosexual matrix and re-routing her through the violences done to her (the plural and multiple her) produces ‘woman’ as always plural in multiple ways. My research evokes multiplicity so as to be response-able (Haraway, 2016) to the multiplicities of woman and women, and the multiple ways violence can be done to the multiple her. 10 a “politically informed map” (p. 5), it is a metaphor that perhaps falls a little flat (pun intended). Haraway (2008) constructs figures not as maps, but as “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another” (p. 4). Figuring enables more intricate and immersive understandings of the potential functioning of the metaphors through which we can more efficiently understand the complexity, partiality and contradiction of certain subject positions. Figures are the expansive bastard kin of metaphor; productions of complex constraints and excesses, producing bodies through text and transforming beyond a metaphoric representation to moving functional manifestations of contested and alternative subject positions. Figures differ from metaphors in “political density” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 61) in that they have a “commitment to account for the material conditions that sustain these different subject positions” (p. 11). Figures can perhaps help describe, and even embody, dense politics more actively and more potently than their metaphoric friends. Figuring is an “interactive collective process that relies upon interrelations and social networks of exchanges” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 11). Working with the production of ‘figures’ to help make sense, or un-make sense in some cases, allows for moving and complex understandings. Metaphors, while helpful and important, can remain somewhat static, sometimes requiring a mixing of metaphors to help the embodied experience form. Figures are more dynamic in more surprising ways. Simultaneously, there is something familiar about figures: “… figures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality; the dimensions tangle and require response” (Haraway, 2008, p. 4). Figures can perhaps embody a new or emerging iteration of something we have already encountered, something we have a sense of, but might have only experienced partially. 11 For example, in Janet Frame’s ‘Snap-dragons,’5 the triangular metaphor of her heroine’s mother’s house, institutional cell and a snap-dragon produce an understanding of the embodied feeling of being trapped, like a bee in a snap-dragon (see Frame, 2004). The metaphor enables an understanding of the young woman’s madness through the tightness of a small flower slammed shut and the frantic beating of bee wings. The story has a circular closed-ness (Parey, 2013), as it begins and ends with same embodied image of a bee trapped (woman) in a snap-dragon (that which keeps her confined), a natural metaphor for the closedness and recurrence of women’s restriction (of ‘excesses,’ like ‘madness’), even as they beat against it. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ the heroine of the story becomes a figure of madness within wallpaper: not a distinct metaphoric representation of madness, but a dynamic blurred entity pervasively inhabiting and influencing psychological space she has explicitly been forbidden (see Perkins Gilman, 1973). Perkins Gilman’s woman is confined too, and again to a room that is supposed to help her heal (like Ruth in ‘Snap-Dragons’ inhabits a hospital snap-dragon and a home snap- dragon). Rather than beating the walls of her home-prison, Perkins Gilman’s woman joins the walls and tears at their paper, blurring with the boundaries that confine her so as to disintegrate them. As such, she becomes somewhat un-locatable in her everywhere-ness of the wallpaper, every now and then congealing into a recognisable form, only to slip away again to bulge or decay or tear some other surface. Janet Frame’s positioning of Ruth as a bee in a flower is metaphoric (and important), but Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s creeping wallpaper woman is a figure who does transformative blurring, enabling something else to happen beyond the metaphoric 5 Literary and cultural narratives take on theoretical and analytic significance throughout my research. Feminist literature has long imagined new possibilities for women and their bodies, as well as playing in the transformative potential of shifting and blurring genres. 12 description of an embodied experience: the figure inhabits the experience, gives it movement and offers possibilities for new movements, inhabiting density that perhaps offers more potential for transformative connection. So to help explore questions about embodiment and boundaries and transformative possibilities, multiple figures are shaped through my research; some only partially, but partialities can often be more than sufficient. The key figure of the cyborg works/plays most consistently and most multiply through my research. She is figured extensively in chapter three (of course, she is a third thing), as I attempt to untangle some of her most tangled knots, and then re-tangle them. The cyborg “renews the language of political struggle, moving away from the tactic of head-on confrontations, in favour of a more specific and diffuse strategy based on irony6, diagonal attacks, and coalitions on the basis of affinity” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 209), offering the potential for transforming power relations. That is, the cyborg is a figure of networking and connection, untied from the binaried assumptions about whether she is friend or foe, good or bad. Breaking down such binaried assumptions means that the coalitions she forms can be alarming. As such, the cyborg has an impossibly strange extended family… Impossible Kin One of the (im)possibilities I wish to play with is the Human Barbie. As with Barbie™ the iconic doll, there are many variants of Human Barbie, as well, of course, as a few Human Kens. Human Barbies, as an eclectic group, model themselves, at the very least physically, on Barbie™ imagery (Attwood, 2015; Augustynowicz, 2017). 6 Strategies based on irony can be dangerous, as irony is “not a very kind rhetoric, because it does things to your audience that are not fair. When you use irony, you assume that your audience is reading out of much the same sort of experiences as you yourself, and they are not. You assume reading practices that you have to finally admit are highly privileged and often private” (Haraway, 2004, p. 325). 13 Such modelling most typically manifests in plastic hyper-feminine bodies, surgerised with factory production-like repetition to produce a Barbie™ body through human flesh (and surgical materials like silicone and who knows what else). The aim is to carve the human body into the standard Barbie™ shape: a large head with big eyes, big lips and a small nose; large breasts; tiny waist; wide hips; and long, thin legs. The assumed impossibility of the Barbie™ body – as researched by Norton, Olds, Olive and Dank (1996) and infograph-ised by Rehabs.com (2012) and art-ified by Jason Freeny (2016) – makes for some fraught realisations of Barbie™ flesh, as well as some remarkable transformations of the human (woman’s) body that would not be possible without the wonders of modern technology. The principle variant of Human Barbie through my research is Valeria Lukyanova, a Ukrainian spiritual alien who hates children and believes the genetic mixing of races is making people ugly (see Idov, 2017). Lukyanova’s body, perhaps more so than any other Human Barbie, achieves the Barbie™ impossibilities. Through a mix of make-up, digital touch ups, surgery and imagination, Lukyanova’s body appears as plastic as Barbie™’s and is located within fleshed human agency. Coupled with her bewildering commentary on the world around her, her presentation of her body is a point of impossibility that demands attention. Another figure of women’s impossibility who you will meet through this research is (Female figure), an American art installation. She is an animatronic woman, skewered to a mirror. She dances to popular music and locks eyes with her viewers through facial recognition technology. In 2014, she went viral through global shares of videos and images of her mechanical moves and her uncanny stare at her viewers. (Female figure) is blond, with a witch-y green eye mask and shark-like teeth. She wears a white leotard and thigh-high white boots; she is covered in dirt and grime. 14 She has a lot to say, in her creator’s (male) voice, like “I would like to be a poet” and “this is my house” (Birkett, 2014, p. 47), as she twists, gesticulates and stares. While her body is (almost) obviously mechanical (her shoulder joints in particular expose nuts, bolts and wires), the fluidity of her movements and her seeming autonomy in her choice of who to lock eyes with produces an experience of viewing a technowoman’s body that becomes difficult to account for. (Female figure)’s creator, Jordan Wolfson, is an American artist who seems to specialise in political ambivalence (see Charnley, 2017; Da, 2017; Kurian, 2016). Prior to the technobirth of (Female figure), Wolfson’s most prominent works included a computer generated video of a “grotesque, animated caricature of a middle-aged orthodox Jew” (We Find Wildness, 2013, para. 2) and ‘Raspberry Poser,’ another digital video that mashes up cartoons, condoms and blood cells (E-flux, 2012). His prominent works since (Female figure)’s appearance include a thrashing freckled mechanical boy (‘Colored Sculpture’) and a virtual reality video that forces the viewer to watch as Wolfson brutally beats a man in the street with a baseball bat (‘Real Violence’) (Schwartz, 2017). Speaking of ‘real violence,’ an internet user through this research who exemplifies gendered violence is Elliot Rodger, a young American man who murdered six people and injured 13 others before killing himself in a massacre prompted by his perceived perpetual sexual rejection by women. His manifesto, written in his final weeks as he prepared for his ‘Day of Retribution,’ details a life characterised by an obsession with achieving the admiration of his family and peers, and especially young, ‘hot,’ blonde, white women. In particular, he sought sex. He became focused on possessing women, and wrote of acquiring their “love and sex” (Rodger, 2014, p. 109) just as he wrote of acquiring high-end commodities like Gucci sunglasses and expensive 15 cars. When he perceived that women were actively denying him the commodity of sex (it seems he rarely spoke to women, and when he did it was to threaten them), he began to develop ideas about the slaughter of young couples, and adopted a new world order in which women would be obliterated and love and sex abolished. While a sheriff’s report apparently documents Rodger’s history with mental illness (see Brugger, 2015), the form his beliefs took was shaped by Western patriarchal ideals of masculinity and heteronormativity, and his manifesto aligns with and informs the ideologies of the masculinist incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) and co-alpha (those who view themselves not as ‘beta males’ but as ‘co-alpha males’ who work with ‘alpha males’ to dominate women) movements online. As well as desiring to acquire the Western idealised female form (a Barbie™?) for his own use, Rodger tried desperately to increase his height and build muscle. He despised his mixed race heritage, clinging on to his white heritage to justify his superiority over Asian, African-American and Latino men he encountered who he deemed “ugly” (Rodger, 2014, p. 84, for example). He also became obsessed with becoming incredibly wealthy at a young age, so that women would have sex with him. He wore designer clothes and drove expensive cars, reproducing the appearance of extreme wealth with the aim of attracting a “hot blonde” (p. 87) to have sex with him. He was bewildered when his efforts did not work and “slobs” (p. 121) continued to have sex with women, while he remained “sex-starved” (p. 118). The narrative through which Rodger structured his beliefs – the thoughts he thought through – formed a normalised narrative of gendered relations: boy gets girl. His attempts to reproduce this narrative for himself were not dissimilar from normalised attempts to perform masculinity, but the efforts to produce the narrative became untenable for Rodger, and those who follow his ideology. While Rodger may be 16 accounted for as a singular individual man thinking particular violent thoughts, he was (and still is, despite his death) connected into a heteronormative network that is hyper- real and very powerful in its effects. These effects of heteronormativity can also be experienced through the tale of Gable Tostee and Warriena Wright. Gable Tostee is an Australian man who was charged with the murder of New Zealand woman Warriena Wright (see Fyfe, 2017). After meeting via Tinder, the preeminent Western world dating app, Tostee and Wright spent a fraught night together in Tostee’s apartment, where he audio recorded their sexual encounter, their fight and his quest for pizza. At the peak of their fight, Tostee locked Wright on his balcony, where she quickly fell to death. Tostee was found not guilty of culpability for Wright’s death, which was explained as her own drunken mistake while trying to escape the balcony she was trapped on. Tostee had an audio recording of his night with Wright in his apartment because, he explained, women had stolen from him in the past, and video and audio recording his encounters with women became insurance against possible thefts as well as records of his nights in case he could not remember his drunken activities (see Fyfe, 2017). In the case of Wright’s death, it became a humiliating recording of her last few hours, played in court (and some parts played through the media and in full online via YouTube) for her family and friends to hear. The recording also became Tostee’s strongest evidence that he did not push her off the balcony, which was a key legal matter. In the audio, we hear Wright’s muffled scream as she falls to her death, and Tostee’s heavy breathing and swearing as he tries to call his lawyer. We then hear his mundane journey to get some pizza. After his acquittal, Tostee returned to social media (including Tinder) under different names, most notably ‘Eric Thomas’ (a distinctly indistinct name!) (see Stolz, 2015). He used social media to speak about Wright and her family and the trial, 17 straddling the line between reproducing his versions of events and slandering Wright and her family. Warriena Wright’s death, and the looming figure of Gable Tostee, is an example of not only the technological ease with which Tinder provides predators with prey, but the ease with which it greases the wheels of gender-based violence. In the audio recording of the evening, Tostee is heard asking, “Why does this shit always happen to me. I didn’t ask for this. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I just invited the girl over” (Noble, 2016, para. 127), suggesting that his encounters with women in the past have run similar courses and require evidence of women’s complicity and/or deviance, like rejecting Tostee’s advances or fighting with him. Warriena Wright’s death enables understandings of the amplification of violence against women through technologised encounters. An interloper into my research is the figure of the Neoliberal Individual. He often appears to reject the structural production of violence against women, demanding attention be drawn to personal responsibility for violence. The Neoliberal Individual is characterised by individualist politics, people as numbers and commodities, masculinist processes, personal responsibility and freedoms (like freedom of speech and action). As such, despite the so-called privileging of ‘freedoms,’ the body of the Neoliberal Individual is tightly bound, jammed into categories that define him, quantify him and segregate him from ‘others.’ He is quantified and re-quantified and re-quantified again to ensure his boundaries are solid and stable. It is his responsibility to embody a ‘good’ commodity. Through this research, the Neoliberal Individual will appear with jerky movements, his self-pulling strings7 yanked, sharply pointing to individual, unified and 7 I once saw a dog that had been trained to walk itself. It held its own leash in its mouth. 18 distinct selves as the source of and solution to humanity’s most pressing issues, like poverty and employment, multiculturalism, obesity and ‘political correctness gone mad.’ The Neoliberal Individual asserts boundaries, and those boundaries assert hierarchies, and those hierarchies assert power. So through this research, which works to blur the ‘individual’ profoundly and unapologetically, the Neoliberal Individual sometimes appears to assert something (a boundary, a hierarchy, a ‘freedom’) in demand of his own survival in the chaos of a feminist poststructuralist sci-fi worlding (see Haraway, 2013) – by which I mean my research. The key figure for organisation and decision-making through chaos is The Weaver from China Miéville’s (2000) science fiction novel ‘Perdido Street Station.’ The Weaver is described as a massive interdimensional arachnid who mind-speaks in a poetic dream-like stream of consciousness, blurring the boundaries between The Weaver’s thoughts and the thoughts of those who encounter him (yes, Miéville, bizarrely, genders The Weaver as a ‘him’). The Weaver’s consciousness boarders the unintelligible, with the characters of ‘Perdido Street Station’ left to infer The Weaver’s meanings from the snippets (literally – you will get this ‘snip’ joke later) of fuzzy clarity in the dream-poetics coupled with the well-timed appearances and actions of the creature. The protagonists of ‘Perdido Street Station’ ask The Weaver to help them defeat the Slake Moths, a small group of powerful psychedelic mega-moths who are feeding off the consciousness of the inhabitants of Bas-Lag, littering the streets with comatose civilians. Along the way, The Weaver experiences some highs (snipping off ears) and lows (not winning a battle), and by the conclusion of the story, The Weaver has helped vanquish the Slake Moths he comes to see as kin. The Weaver’s (one of many Weavers, by the way. We are never quite sure if it is the same one each time he appears to help the story’s protagonists) most salient task is 19 creating and maintaining the worldweave, a spider-web-y representation of the universe across space and time. Like earth spiders care for their webs, The Weaver is concerned with the form and function of the worldweave, prioritising its aesthetics above all else, which produces some bizarre behaviours, as well as some hesitancy to influence events that may be creating particularly aesthetically pleasing worldweaves, even if those events are devastating and destructive to someone else’s world. The Weaver perhaps seems an unlikely figure for guiding research. However, The Weaver enables a way to articulate how hyperdimensional connections, however bizarre or hesitant, can be made in a chaotic technosocial world. In my favourite part of ‘Perdido Street Station,’ The Weaver experiences profound doubt about the violence he has enabled: … I TIRE AND GROW OLD AND COLD GRIMY LITTLING… the Weaver said quietly… YOU WORK WITH FINESSE I GRANT AND GIVE YOU BUT THIS SIPHONING OF PHANTASMS FROM MY SOLE SOUL LEAVES ME MELANCHOLIC SEE PATTERNS INHERE EVEN IN THESE VORACIOUS ONES PERHAPS I JUDGE QUICK AND SLICK TASTES I FALTER AND ALTER AND I AM UNSURE… It raised a handful of glistening guts to Isaac’s eyes and began to pull them gently apart. (Miéville, 2000, p. 799) In the moment of supposed victory, with Bas-Lag inhabitants rejoicing around him, The Weaver experiences kinship with the dead moths, albeit through their guts, and becomes “UNSURE”8 of how he came to be tiredly and sadly playing in the bowels of an ‘other’ 8 As with Malabou’s word-gifts, I will also accept Miéville’s Weaver’s gift of being “UNSURE,” to be referenced without the conventions of referencing throughout my research worldweave. 20 just like him, a position I have found myself in on a number of occasions through this research process. The hyperdimensionality of ideas coupled with the imposition of linear academic writing produces moments through my research of sudden disconnection and reconnection, sharp re-routings through alternative wiring and the trauma of severing some connections in the research worldweave network. The cuts, actions and inactions of this research project are productive of a worldweave that privileges the aesthetics of connections, the arbitrariness of exemplars and the politics of being ‘UNSURE.’ Technometaphors 101 The collection of characters that I have partially introduced so far, from Human Barbie to Elliot Rodger to The Weaver, will appear in multiple and partial ways throughout my research, alongside a cacophony of others who help (sometimes unwillingly) to tell stories about what is at stake for women’s embodiment in the technophilic 21st century West. The re-imagining of how women and their bodies can be understood through psychology in technologically-dominated times enables new possibilities for embodying the excesses of femininity that are still so tightly contained through dominant binaries and are implicated in the violences that women experience because they are women, and increasingly because they are technowomen. Re- imagining women and their bodies in technotimes also calls for a re-imagining of how psychology can, indeed, imagine. Shifting genres towards science fiction as a way to think and do psychology offers new potential spaces for new potential bodies. Enabling these potential new spaces throughout my research will be some technometaphors through which to think. I opened my research with my childhood ‘jittering’ at computers, and the transformation of that jittering to the urgencies of women’s technobodies. The conceptualisation of this embodied 21 anxiety/excitement/urgency as ‘jittering’ connects to the idea of the ‘phase jitter’: an “unwanted random signal distortion” (Chandor, 1981, p. 140) occurring in a microprocessor, the central electronic processing unit of a microchip. The ‘jitter’ is described as a measurement of signal distortion: it tells a computer technician “how far the signal period has wandered from its ideal value” (Roberts, 2003, para. 5). While I do not pretend to know what such electronic speak means to computer electricians, I have my own embodied understanding of a ‘phase jitter.’ The embodied excited signals connecting me to the computer as a child keen on the worlds built through computers became distorted, shifting the encounter from jittering potential to phase jitters: urgent signals distorting and hyperconnecting women and their bodies in troublesome ways. The ‘phase jitter’ serves as a gateway technometaphor: I will not use it again explicitly, even if I hope it is non-explicitly evoked throughout this textual network. Through my research project there are technometaphors of a structural kind. Panic Architecture and Architecture Fiction are cyborg terms for particular ways to build, but I will not pre-empt them here. However, a large and looming technometaphor extensively networked in the text is the ‘impossible feast.’ The ‘impossible feast’ is a cyborg term for the exponentially created and consumed information and connections produced online (CyborgAnthropology.com, 2012). Opening the internet presents internet users with a never-ending, constantly reproducing selection of data to consume. Meal after connected meal, feast after networked feast, the internet is an ever-expanding banquet of links, text and images that can be consumed rapidly, without much chewing, perhaps rarely reaching satiation and never running out of ‘food’ to consume. Data for my research project can be considered morsels, perhaps even crumbs, of this impossible feast. Chew as I may, feasting on technodata becomes impossible: comments amass, links proliferate, new information emerges. The impossibility of the feast is a critical 22 node in this research network. Feasting and consumption are very possible embodied experiences; what might happen when such possibilities are rendered impossible? Impossible Linearity Knowledge™ is not defined, manufactured and commodified through my research. Rather I build a network that is critically and potently open for connection and re-configuration. The structure of my research project is that of a hyperdimensional network, necessarily tamed into chapters, but always exceeding them. Chapter one, as you now know, introduces components of this expansive network and the figures who ping around it, including ‘woman,’ a neoliberal individual and a giant arachnid. These introductions serve to jack the reader in to the problem of violence against women through technology, and familiarise us with the figures who will help and hinder the telling of technostories. To be linear for a moment, chapter two asks questions about psychology’s genre, the mode and style that informs how we do psychology and produce psychological knowledge. These questions challenge psychology’s detective genre as a site of production for injustices and the chapter opens space for the mobilising of psychology through science fiction (see Squire, 1990), an alternative genre characterised by disrupted binaries and the blurred boundaries between hard science and imagination. Through science fiction, traditional understandings of text, power and troubled embodied lives are made strange and new understandings emerge. The kinship between science fiction materials like ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Another Earth’ and Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg disrupt and dissolve taken-for-granted notions of binary distinctness and bounded, individualised bodies. Disruption and dissolution of key 23 binaries (like dominance/subjugation) can open some space for some potent political figures and how “it matters what thoughts think thoughts” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12).9 Chapter three explicates Haraway’s cyborg, orientating the reader to the emergence of the cyborg as a feminist figure for Western women’s politicised embodiment in the 21st century and beyond, and constructs how this science fiction figure transforms research practices in psychology, including the ways we tell stories and engage with text. While characterised by hybridity, the cyborg is not just animal and machine. She is a multiple, partial, simultaneous and contradictory doing figure; a metaphor and an ontological position disrupting and reconfiguring the binaries that shape troubled lives and troubled bodies. Haraway’s cyborg, dismantled and reassembled, is a figure who networks together nodes of ontology, methodology, ethics and analysis. She has already materialised through this introductory chapter and works/plays through my project as we build, unbuild and rebuild. Chapter four details the journeys of an ethical Alice through a violent Wonderland. With shifts in genre come emergent engagements with psychology, with methodology, with data. Understandings of what counts as ‘ethical’ can be challenged and politicised. Re-routing ethics through the cyborg troubles the safe/not safe binary, and instead enables questions about embodied encounters, ethical engagement with data and text as cultural resource rather than expressions of individualism. Through chapter four, I stay with the trouble, as Haraway (2016) suggests. I move us back through my early explorations of ‘unsafe’ places, amassing connections and encounters through chaotic and catastrophic online spaces and bodies. 9 Like Malabou gifted her idea about violence classifying ‘woman,’ Haraway gifts me the idea of it mattering “what thoughts think thoughts.” The idea will recur, referenced without referencing, throughout my research project. 24 Chapter five re-imagines apocalypse, a point of rupture for theorising ‘the end of the world’ as a metaphor for the daily and mundane disintegrations of women and their bodies, as well as a politically potent narrative for giving language to impossible and fraught technobodies. The chapter is an experience of an apocalyptic crisis. Critical obliterations are ever-immanent, and through crises emerge unsettling critical responses and potential positionings for inhabiting catastrophes. After an apocalypse has materialised, I go salvaging. In the chapters that emerge I re-theorises the uncanny, reconnecting it to its technological home. Re-routing the uncanny through the figure of the automaton Olympia in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ reboots the uncanny for the 21st century, privileging the terrifying possibilities of the convergence of women’s bodies, technology and uncertainty. After deteriorating into the uncanny, the chapters that follow recover parts, positions and possibilities for new technobodies. I produce a Slender Man and pull apart a (Female figure). I thrash around a ‘Colored Sculpture’ and play with a Human Barbie. I interrupt with an assessment of the network, re-wiring through a Weaver. I occupy a series of violations then work my way out of a deadly embrace. Finally, in possibly no sense of the term, I set up a meeting place for possible others. While the above conforms to a linear description of the contents of this research, the chapters are extensively networked, begrudgingly cordoned off but connecting expansively through metaphors, figures and running jokes. Some metaphors, figures and running jokes will appear before they are explained, a delightful problem of time as flat and circular.10 Other times, in the expanse of the technoworld the cyborg inhabits and builds, ideas re-route abruptly. Throughout my research there are also sporadic memes, produced through the simulated consciousness (see appendix) of my embeddedness in 10 A joke explained on page 97 of this research project. 25 the technophilic West and in technoresearch. As with internet memes, the sense that these memes make may not be apparent at first encounter. They are serious play with deadliness, deterioration and delight. Simultaneously, many chapters will end with a sub-section of “un-wholly thoughts”; a series of nuts and bolts that did not quite find a moment or were just left behind or helped to build something else somewhere else. These sub-sections are made up of quotes, half-ideas, unfollowed connections, images, partialities, random ideas and other bits and pieces that might be found in and around a cyborg. 26 Chapter One Appendage: Un-Wholly Thoughts The un-wholly thoughts of this introductory chapter are the bones of a draft introduction I wrote that did not make the cut, for obvious obnoxious reasons… This is a disclaimer, perhaps a warning, about the writing that follows. It is cyborg writing. In order to complete the PhD task, it is (so I am told) necessary to adhere to at least some of the strict Western, patriarchal writing conventions that dictate linear, ordered writing just as it dictates linear, ordered women. It is perhaps the most challenging task for a cyborg to write a vast, networked, embodied world into a linear page that moves from the top to the bottom, from the left to right, in two dimensions. Writing must be in chapters, following a logical order that a good Western citizen (although, if you find yourself here, you may not be one) can follow closely, progressing through ideas that develop and reach a climatic pinnacle: The Idea™! Cyborgs, however, would prefer, I think, if they had to write/right in thesis form (and a cyborg never has to do anything), to write in that obnoxious WordArt with 3D effects, and gifs, and galaxies, and middle fingers, and serrated edges, and anything else a cyborg can find. But alas, here we are, in two dimensions, top-bottom, left-right, lather- rinse-repeat. While what follows is conventional in the sense that it is words-on-a-page, it cites sources in APA format (but not always) and, in a way (albeit a different way), it analyses data to produce Research, it does so simultaneously wholeheartedly and begrudgingly; an encounter with simultaneity, playing seriously with the conventions of academia and of writing. What manifests, I hope, is the desperate necessity for embodying the simultaneous, partial contradictions of Western femininity for survival. There are moments, perhaps long ones, of obnoxiousness that will be unpleasant. But 27 the how of the unpleasantness is important, a reading practice soaked in the, in Haraway-ian terms, response-able (Haraway, 2016). That is, the embodied responses enabled by and enabling of ethical connection. Ethics is about being able to respond, about critical interconnection. As such, my research shifts through simultaneous responses to genre, to ethics, to data, and how new responses enable new possibilities. It does so from the margins, where all ethical responses typically congeal (see?! Obnoxious!). There is a current trend (through the 2010s) towards positive psychology: think happy, be happy; mindfulness; smile more; go for a jog. What better way for psychology to absolve itself of its sins and of its response-abilities than to locate the cause and the cure of disorder with the self-contained neoliberal individual, all while marketing positive psychology as a commodity. At the same time women are told to jog for their mental health, they are also being told to do so in groups and in broad daylight and covered up and with a mobile phone so they can avoid the murderous and/or sexually violent intent of the men who prowl in the darkness of daytime sunshine. Women’s entry into public spaces continues to be contested as a privilege (from jogging to women-only ‘Wonder Woman’ screenings causing uproars to selfie culture to lady presidential candidates to Twitter to Women’s Marches), as does their occupancy of private spaces (from physical abuse to online abuse to stalking to heteronormative domesticity). Smiling more seems an unethical suggestion from psychologists to those who may need some help. Women have been told to ‘smile more’ for centuries, and yet we still find ourselves bloodied depressed stressed anorexic insomniac delusional catatonic 28 panicked angry suicidal paranoid dissociated anxious broken addicted compulsive. If smiling were the cure, women’s mental and physical health would be immaculate. So psychology strikes again! The current trend towards mindfulness and colouring books for stressed adults seems little removed from the bedrest cures of yesteryear where ‘hysterical’ women were locked in rooms by themselves to ‘rest’ and become ‘not hysterical anymore.’ In 2018, women colour within the lines of their colouring books, immersed in hysteria-preventing patterns just as Charlotte Perkins Gilman immersed her hysterical heroine in yellow wallpaper. Indeed, social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are surfaces in which we also become immersed like hysterics to wallpaper. 29 Chapter Two: Genre Matrix Mothers Working with modern possibilities for new bodies has historically been an important feminist exercise, from the transformative potential of education (Wollstonecraft, 1792/1975) and the re-working of economics (Perkins Gilman, 1898/201211), to the cultural (Bordo, 2004) and the docile body (Bartky, 1998), to the horrors of the reproductive body (Ussher, 2006). As a general and easily broken rule, work on the body and embodiment has peaked in times of rapid social change, and stalled in times of social (masculinist) fixity, like world wars (for examples see Gordon, 2000; Schwartz, 1986). The 21st century, alarmingly, seems characterised by both rapid social shifts and intense global warfare enabled by sudden and pervasive technological advancements (from Twitter to drones). So situating the body in the early 21st century still requires educational, economic, cultural and reproductive work, but within the context of rapid social and technological upheavals that contribute to our daily lives as they do to warzones.12 The work of feminist theorists (psychological and otherwise) on the idea of the technologically-mediated gendered body has been unsurprisingly multiple. Perhaps the focus has been on problematic reproductive technologies and technological interventions into women’s pregnant bodies (for example, Gimenez, 1991; Lie, 2002; Nordqvist, 2008; O’Riordan & Haran, 2009; Palmer, 2009; Sætnan, 1996; Shildrick, 1997); but others have problematised the technological mediation of cosmetic 11 The significance of the 90s of whatever century is already emerging. 12 And of course, many people’s daily lives are warzones. 30 interventions (for example, Balsamo, 1992; Braun, 2005; Davis, 1995, 1997; Gimlin, 2010; Tiefer, 2008); disabled bodies (for example, De Preester, 2011); ‘deviant’ and/or ‘deficient’ bodies (for example, Bordo, 2004; Burke, 2009; Hogle, 2005); and deviant femininity (for example, Fournier, 2002). Other pivotal foci concern the gendering of technology use/access, and the technology industry (for example, Henwood, 2000; Kennedy, 2005; Spender, 1995; Stoate, 2012; van Doorn, van Zoonen & Wyatt, 2007); and increasingly, gendering performed through social media use (for example, Dobson, 2015; Manago, 2013; Rice & Watson, 2016; Ringrose, Harvey, Gill & Livingstone, 2013). While women researchers have theorised women’s connections with technology in multiple ways, much of this work has somewhat reproduced the body/mind binary (how technology influences or intervenes on bodies or minds, for example), rather than radically challenging, or indeed, blurring the boundaries between taken-for-granted binaries, such as human/machine, in the pursuit of transformative, political embodiment. Theoretically, some feminists have been interested in how the gendered body is produced in and through technology (for example, Barnard, 2000; Bayer & Malone, 1996; Daniels, 2009; Masters, 2005; Melzer, 2010; Pitts, 2005; Thomas, 2004; Van Der Ploeg, 2004), interrogating the boundaries between women and technologies and asking questions about these boundaries as sites for new forms of women’s agency. Technological embodiment, for feminist researchers then, might also be concerned with possibilities for transformative power relations and how technology might enable politicised embodiment for women in the 21st century as a consanguineous union with machines that blurs the boundaries of the binaries that violently shape women’s lived experience in order to simultaneously resist them and live them (for example, Balsamo, 1995; Bayer, 1999; Braidotti, 2003, 2006; De Preester, 2011; Haraway, 1991; Mitchell, 2006; Morgan, 2004; Potts, 2002; Sawicki, 1991; Squires, 2000; Wajcman, 2004). 31 New technologies, and increasing access to them, enables the production of new differences and new ways to legitimise the hierarchical order of old differences, inscribing the same old meanings onto women’s bodies, as well as adding some that are new. In the context of Western technological advancement, it is almost always “at times of great technological advance that Western culture reiterates some of its most persistent habits, notably the tendency to create differences and organize them hierarchically” (Braidotti, 2003, p. 252).13 Feminist explorations of the construction of the gendered body, technologised representations of women’s bodies and technological interventions for the disruption of taken-for-granted boundaries, explicitly for women’s politicised embodiment, have enabled access points for dismantling these old (and new) hierarchies. A hierarchy is formed through the separation of people, places and things into ordered, prioritised, distinct and static categories. The maintenance of these distinct categories (like ‘men’ and ‘women’) produces and reproduces the hierarchal power structures that produce the categories: an endless closed loop.14 The loop, however, is not unhackable. For Braidotti (2003), the “hierarchal organization of differences is key to phallologocentrism” (p. 255), so disrupting the hierarchy to enable new political embodiments is a key feminist textual strategy. Problematising taken-for-granted categories (or at the very least the distinctions between them) has the potential to disrupt and dismantle such categories and their boundaries. For example, Davis (1997) explored the technology of cosmetic surgery as 13 Braidotti (2003) uses sexism in video games and pornography as examples of the reproduction of old (and normalised) representations of women through new technologies. Many years later, Braidotti’s arguments about sexism in video games and porn remain critically relevant, and need to shift only in the sense that there are now more games and more porn that are much more violent, much more accessible and much, much more immersive. 14 Chandor, Graham and Williamson (1970) define a ‘closed loop’ as a “continuous loop in a program from which there is no exit except by operator intervention or by action on the part of some executive program monitoring the operation of the program concerned” (p. 78). Violence against women indeed feels cyclical, a continuous loop executed through dominant patriarchal operators who do not have any interest in intervening in the functioning of the program. 32 potential space for feminist utopia, not unproblematically – “It is difficult to imagine that cosmetic surgery might entail both compliance and resistance” (p. 179) – but emphasising the contradictory and complex technopotential for new embodiments and new (political) performances of beauty through technology, rather than dismissing cosmetic surgery as simply another patriarchal tool to oppress women. Davis (1997) disrupts the dominance/subjugation of the binary and privileges the notion of a third position that exceeds the assumed and closed options. The feminist theorists who have engaged with technology as a tool (important work, but not my work) and as a socio-political cultural system open to exploitation and reconfiguration through feminist work/play have enabled dangerous and exciting opportunities for hacking the system, maximising disruption, upending so-called ‘realities’ and creating the potential for recalibrating women’s embodied lives as livably multiple. Potts (2002) breaks down and opens up (if you will excuse the double entendre15) women’s embodiment through sex, focusing on the binaried assumptions of phallocentric heterosex at particular sites of great violence, as well as the great opportunities for re-figuring and resistance. Challenging what counts as ‘normal,’ ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ enables understandings of women’s embodied lives that exceed the taken-for-granted binaries explicitly produced through heterosex,16 and 15 Throughout this thesis, I draw on typical internet tropes, such as drawing attention to puns, double entendres and other textual jokes, like simulating ‘clickbait’ and using memes to illustrate arguments. 16 For example, Potts (2002) discusses the control of women’s multiple orgasms: “Women’s orgasmic ability, depicted as an insatiable ‘hunger’, a frighteningly multiplying desire for ‘more’, an endless deferral of satisfaction, requires restriction and unification” (p. 66), whereby, “she is prescribed an orgasmic diet, consisting of one big ‘ultimate’ orgasm rather than countless smaller or non-final ones” (p. 67). The male-dominated construction of heterosex privileges the finalising of sexual encounters with the male orgasm and the potential multiplicity of women’s sexuality is “in excess of the male’s” (p. 67) and as such is in need of control. While such an example is simple and explicit, it highlights the control of women’s bodies through heterosex in ways that specifically target women’s excesses as compared to men and their bodies. The construction of women’s sexuality/sexual pleasure/orgasm and their bodies in general as passive, ‘inner’ and implicit exceeds the outward decisive finality and boundedness of the male orgasm and the male body. 33 argues for the re-figuring of women’s embodiment through these excesses. Reconfiguring ‘excess’ beyond a good/bad binary enables control of women’s bodies to be challenged, possibility offering women something new to play with other than being singularly ‘good’ or unified as ‘bad.’ Disrupting binaries and the assumed unification of identity that such binaries produce can enable new politically potent performances of ‘woman.’ Like for the category ‘woman,’ keeping “the category “human” fixed excludes an entire range of possibilities in advance and freezes out important dimensions of the analysis of the workings of power” (Barad, 2001, p. 93), producing and reproducing bounded individuals who produce and reproduce the same old binaries through the same old hierarchies for the same old performances of gender. The masculinist privilege of fixity and distinction of categories closes off opportunities for new ways to do gender, unless the fixity itself is challenged. Barad (2003) suggests that the human as ‘phenomena’ rather than a singular being means that “the notion of discursivity cannot be founded on an inherent distinction between humans and nonhumans” (p. 818), and as such, boundaries assumed wholly stable can disintegrate into partialities, multiplicities and contradictions, opening spaces for new figurations of ‘woman,’ science and bodies. As a form of thinking in and through binaries where masculinism is privileged (see for example, Grosz, 1989), phallocentrism draws attention to the ways in which psychologists, and adjacent others, produce and interpret phenomena to reproduce pathologisation and binaries that are embedded in textuality. Locating mainstream, masculinist psychological quests for fixed ‘facts’ and categories within a specific genre brings phallocentric thought and textuality into play together, since genres “provide frameworks with which texts are produced and interpreted” (Chandler, 1997, p. 5). 34 As well as being considered frameworks for production/interpretation, genres “can be defined as UTTERANCES/TEXTS in relation to other utterances/texts” (Wales, 2001, p. 259). That is, all text is in dialogue with other text: “… no text is ‘free’ of other text” (p. 259). Text here is reproductive and networked: even through those texts that follow a genre trajectory strictly – for example a detective genre – text itself proliferates and opens possibilities. As much as a narrative may close an ending and assert the order of events, reading still opens possibilities and proliferates connections. Genre is about culture, where the relationship between text and its audience is privileged, shifting “attention away from the ‘inherent’ properties of text, and towards the relationship between text and audiences…” (Buckingham, 1993, p. 136). In academic text production, the relationship between text and audience is prioritised at the publication phase, with psychologists, for example, placing importance on the communication of the research with other psychologists: “For psychology as a scientific knowledge, narratives produce speaking subjects who know the facts of the lives and experiences of other subjects, and hold these facts as commonly intelligible among themselves” (Coombes & Morgan, 2004, p. 304). The incestuous approach of writing psychological text for an audience of other psychologists (and the psychologist-esque) produces text that ensures ‘cohesion’ of psychology ‘facts’ in order to produce a clean, clear, ‘factual’ account of the events that fits the cultural goals of Western psychology – the knowledge authority on Western neoliberal individuals. Why not embrace ambiguous, simultaneous, contradictory writing in order to reflect the ambiguous, simultaneous and contradictory experience of writing, researching and embodiment in the 21st century? 35 A Cyborg’s Embrace Haraway’s (1991) figure of the cyborg explicitly offers politicised embodiment that acknowledges not only (Western) women’s multiplicities and partialities, but also their embeddedness in patriarchal technoculture that simultaneously produces and condemns women as deviants from the (masculine/masculinist) norm. Haraway (1991) works/plays with the ‘otherness’ of women as sites for technologised 21st century disruptions and the potential for embodying the contradictory simultaneity of Western femininity. Inevitably, in the process she works/plays with other ‘otherness’ as well and as her choice of figure might suggest, cyborg work/play is performed between and in excess of the genre boundaries that hold science and fiction apart. For Haraway, the ways of thinking that enabled the figure of the cyborg were the points of emergence of (feminist) politics. While her cyborg, for me, does a great many weird and wonderful things for political activism, the thoughts used to think her, and do her (if you will excuse the double entendre again), play a significant part for the transformative politics she offers. As an example, Haraway has turned to our old friend individualism to argue for science fiction as a genre through which to think: “Here, I expand on the argument that bounded individualism in its many flavors in science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or any other way” (Haraway, 2016, p. 5). The complexity and interconnectedness of our expanding technologised and globalised world renders individualism, technically, impossible. Doing individualism involves rejecting anything other than Me Me Me, even as all signs point to proliferating interconnectivity. The tension between Western neoliberal individualism and the present impossibility to think with it is amplifying a 36 great many problems at local levels (precarity, family violence, sexual violence, Trump) and global levels (precarity, family violence, sexual violence, Trump17). For Haraway (2016), it “matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (p. 101). As science and psychology are produced through ideologies of individualism, so we produce stories about individuals, and such individualised production has implications for how those stories end (like assuming they end, for example). Some individuals benefit; a great many do not. So the difficulties we have in combating individualised neoliberal thinking become clearer – impossible individuals thinking with impossibly individual thoughts. Science fiction, even at its most unimaginative, offers an alternative and promising way of thinking thoughts. Like Haraway, I think “… we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the connections open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (Haraway, 2016, p. 101). These open and greedy potential connections enable understandings and transformations that bounded (closed) individuals cannot engage with, which constrains their participation in ethical change for disenfranchised others. But maybe, for cyborgs, and other kin (or otherkin, as Haraway puts it), science fiction can disrupt, corrupt and interrupt power relations and infiltrate neoliberal politics in ways that, at the very least, irritate the hierarchy. Those who enjoy sci-fi “are accustomed to the lively and irreverent arts of fan fiction. Story arcs and worlds are fodder for mutant 17 As I am reading, researching and writing my project, we are living through weirdly co-mingled worlds of Hollywood and politics that sees reality TV business man Donald Trump elected president of the United States of America. Just as Donna Haraway was crafting her cyborg manifesto through the bizarre turmoil of the Ronald Reagan presidency (the first example of a Hollywood actor turned president) in the 1980s, I write and research through strange Trump times. 37 transformations or for loving but perverse extensions” (Haraway, 2016, p. 136). Neoliberal individualism may be insidious, but science fiction could be pervasive. “Then at a deadly pace It Came From Outer Space and this is how the message ran...”18 Connecting through the work of Braidotti, Haraway and Barad, Kember (2011) uses the science fiction of aliens (fiction?!) to explore the potent political non-human- ness of positions such as ‘feminist’ and other ‘others.’ She aims to “enable feminist theory itself to become alien again” (Kember, 2011, p. 184), calling for attention to relationality in response to/with neoliberalism. Locating ‘feminism’ as a science fiction enables the kinds of possibilities that Haraway (1991, 1992), Braidotti (2006) and Barad (2003) imagine through the ‘posthuman’19: ethical responsibilities to the construction and political potencies of ‘others.’ As demonstrated by Kember (2011), an explicit feminist connection to science fiction figures, tropes and media also opens new possibilities for politicised metaphors for women. Morgan (2004) questions the embodied experiences of human/machine boundary blurring through the film ‘Strange Days,’ and the ‘The Matrix’ trilogy has inspired the exploration of the blurred boundaries between male/female, masculine/feminine (see for example, Frentz & Rushing, 2002; Koller, 2005), staples of feminist theorising, technologised or otherwise. But ‘The Matrix’ trilogy, perhaps more significantly for sci-fi theorists, presents the intolerability of two worlds, the binary, the 18 (O’Brien, 1975). 19 As with the notion of ‘post-feminism,’ the ‘posthuman’ is a problematic concept. Seems to me that Haraway, Braidotti and Barad theorise the ‘posthuman’ as a troubling of embodiment in the 21st century, rather than the more popularised understandings that utilise the ‘human’ as a category that can have a post- quality when augmented. For Haraway (2016), the vast and proliferating interconnectivity between humans (and between non-humans) undoes posthumanism: “All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done under that sign” (p. 32). 38 either/or choice, mediated by technology, as simultaneously salvic (through protagonist Neo) and destructive. It employs computers and technologies as metaphors for human systems, and the potentialities of their connectivity and possibilities for information sharing and processing (Lee, 2005). Importantly it is Neo’s “capacity to operate outside the rules of given structures” (Bartlett & Byers, 2003, p. 37) that offers new possibilities and transformative politics (and saves the day!). For Neo, and perhaps also for feminist researchers, shifting beyond the limits of the technological, social, political and physical structures imposed through dominant systems enables new and powerful embodied politics. Neo was not always able to operate outside the dominant structures (nor was he ever allowed to…), but once he figured out how “… by ceasing to think the way he has been programmed to think in his false reality…” (Frentz & Rushing, 2002, p. 76), the task of dismantling the dominant, oppressive structures became achievable, “granting the techno-human a model of progressiveness, (pro)creativity and possibility” (Lee, 2005, p. 563). Through thinking through different thoughts, it is possible to reject the fixed singularity of so-called ‘reality’ and instead function in alternative ways, moving the body otherwise, through multiple, networked connections. It mattered what thoughts Neo thought with. Much as Neo transformed how he moved in his worlds, feminist (sci- fi) theorists seek to transform how we can move in ours. For example: Neo finally enters the role of The One, not as a form of transcendence, but as an indication that he has rejected the normative and regulatory fictions – of the real and of gender – that have been imposed by The Matrix. (Wolmark, 2002, p. 84) Through such a technological transformation, the taken-for-granted power structures that violently inscribe, restrict and control bodies are fictionalised and therefore opened to reconfiguration through cyborg politics. 39 In ‘The Matrix’ trilogy, Neo becomes the figure of resistance and transformative politics through his embodied connectivity with machines. The dissolution of his biological and technological boundaries enabled new ways of moving in and through the matrix, and thus the disruption of the matrix. For feminist theorists in psychology, the figure of the cyborg can offer similar disruptive positionings. The cyborg can embody multiple, partial, simultaneous contradictions and produce (and be produced by) noninnocent (not unified) politics. As a sci-fi figure, the cyborg is born from the blurred boundaries of technology and biology, pulled (and perhaps repelled) together by fantastical dreams (fiction) of potential realities (science). Through the hybridisation of science and fiction, Haraway (1991) suggests, “… a ‘cyborg’ feminism that is perhaps more able to remain attuned to specific historical and political positionings and permanent partialities without abandoning the search for potent connections” (p. 1). However, science fiction, as a genre for psychology, and feminist researchers, continues to be subordinated to the traditional, structure-maintaining (and therefore ‘legitimate’) genre that has been analysed as detective (Squire, 1990). A series of sci-fi feminist theorists, operating as tokens (as, for example, one of the token diversity papers or chapters), and fragmented by their tokenism, attempt to argue for transformative politics (for theory, for research, for practice) but are continually marginalised as those ‘other’ technophilic feminists who are merely producing patriarchal technologies as dominant, or are policed as academic deviants. As such there is a disconnect (something Haraway had been seeking to avoid) between the transformative potentialities offered through science fiction, theoretically, and the outcomes of research that deal with technological interventions on/in the (woman’s) body and feminist politics. 40 “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end.” – Neo20 In ‘The Matrix,’ Neo is asked to choose between the Red Pill and the Blue Pill. Taking the Red Pill means Neo will experience ‘reality,’ the world as it really is, the ‘truth’ in all its horror. Taking the Blue Pill means Neo will experience the world as constructed, detached from ‘reality’ and ‘truth,’ but a little easier to bear (see Silver, Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999). Online, Red Pill-ers are a men’s rights movement that is, unsurprisingly, anti-feminist and claims that feminists cannot see or accept the ‘reality’ that they are already equal to men, and always have been, or that they are just naturally inferior to men, and should accept this as ‘reality.’ The Blue Pill is an online feminist movement that satirises the Red Pill movement, set up to dismantle Red Pill arguments and engage in discussions about gender and sexism. The matrix, in the movie trilogy, refers to the Red Pill world: reality, an apocalyptic world destroyed by man’s wars against his own technologies. Such a representation could be viewed as an indictment of masculine ‘reality,’ even if it is celebrated by masculine voices as the only ‘legitimate’ experience. Neo, despite his decision to take the Red Pill, wants to enable a world “without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible” (Silver, Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999). He rejects ‘reality’ as experienced through the Red Pill, and desires the blurred boundaries between the constructed Blue Pill world and Red Pill ‘reality,’ disrupting that dominant/subjugated binary where ‘reality’ as singular and fixed is privileged. In the film explicitly, ‘Neo’ is an