User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/stone/

Abstract

Allucquere Rosanne Stone: Will the real Body please stand up? Boundary stories about virtual cultures. In: Barbara M. Kennedy and David Bell (Edit.): The Cybercultures Reader, Routledge, 2007.

1. The machines are restless tonight
   • boundaries between 'nature', 'society', and 'technology'
   • divide between nature and technology has become unrecognisable
   • interest about communities and how they work
   • technology and culture constitute each other
2. Schizophrenia as commodity fetish
   • case study Julie, computer conference NY 1985
   • disabled older woman, who could push keys of computer with head-stick
   • on the Net Julie's disability was invisible and irrelevant
   • female friends would share their intimate feelings and thoughts
   • turned out that 'Julie' was a middle-aged male psychiatrist
   • old assumptions about the nature of identity had quietly vanished
   • imaginary locus of interaction created by communal agreement
3. Computer cross-dressing
   • men routinely use female personae and vice versa
   • gendered modes relatively stable, but can be used by different people
   • separation from the person's embodied life in the 'real' world
   • consensual locus has its own 'reality', determined by local conditions
   • 3D representations of individuals in the cyberspace
4. A virtual systems origin myth
   • early cyberspaces have been virtual communities
   • collections of common beliefs and practices
   • united people who were physically separated
5. Epochs of Virtuality
   • Epoch One: Texts (from the mid–1600s)
   • Epoch Two: Electronic communication and entertainment media (1900+)
   • Epoch Three: Information technology (1960+)
   • Epoch Four: Virtual reality and cyberspace (1984+)
6. Decoupling the body and the subject
   • "The illusion will be so powerful you won't be able to tell what's real and what's not." (Steve Williams)
   • no matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached

Afterthoughts

• comes from a transgender studies background
• machinery and desire
• uses term of story telling
• users become agents

Sex Workers

• very little information on how to represent body > decompressed > re-expanded
• penetrating the cyberspace > wearing the female

3rd Space

• needs low-res, little information > space of projection
• example phone sex > go beyond representation
• space of possibility > being a women even though you are not

Literature

• Bruno Latour >moments of discovery not in isolation
• Sherry Turkle > computer as the 2nd self
• Judith Butler > each society writes / produces bodies
• McLuhan > writing of personality through society (public space)