Technoqueer: Re/Con/Figuring Posthuman Narratives
Edmond Y. Chang | Dissertation Abstract | 2012
My dissertation project extends recent technocultural and queer theory discourses by addressing the convergences and divergences between the two fields, particularly addressing the current theoretical tensions and silences in technoculture’s appropriation of queerness and queer theory’s near disavowal of technology. On the one hand, I argue that technocultural theories must be augmented by the intersectional approaches of queer and queer of color theory to account for gender, sexuality, and race in ways that do not simply amplify liberal (trans)humanist ideals of choice, individuality, and disembodiment or that do not end in technologically-induced colorblind, genderblind, or queerblind ideologies. On the other hand, current queer theory has stressed intersectionality, as seen in recent Social Text special issues Queer Transexions and What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?, embracing other terms like class, nationality, religion, war, citizenship, marriage, globalization, and time. Curiously missing, assumed, ignored, or disappeared, I argue, is a satisfying account of queer and technology or queer(ed) technologies since technology is often read as neutral or instrumental. Therefore, through an analysis of cyberspace and body modification technologies and through the discourses and literatures that take these real or imagined technologies as world-defining, my project theorizes technologically-mediated and -constituted race, gender, and sexuality, paying particular attention to the promises and consequences, both positive and negative, of posthuman instabilities in the boundaries of embodiment and identity categories. Here intersections and formations of technology, sexuality, gender, and race serve as the pantheon of what I call the “technoqueer.”
I argue that the technoqueer works to reconfigure the posthuman to demonstrate ways that technology can both produce domination and resistance. According to Cary Wolfe (2010), posthumanism “names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.” Therefore, the animating questions that frame my dissertation include: How are subjectivity and embodiment (the “human”) mediated and reconfigured by technology? How might these posthuman subjects and bodies account for how race, gender, and sexuality are concomitantly mediated and produced by and through technology? One of the popular promises and mythologies of technoculture and posthumanism is that of liberation, whether it is liberation from human frailty, singular identities, oppression, even mortality—the “meat” itself. However, as writers like N. Katherine Hayles or Lisa Nakamura or Thomas Foster caution, these narratives reveal that “only too often does one person’s ‘liberation’ constitute another’s recontainment” (Nakamura 2002). The technoqueer then is mindful that technology is co-constitutive of and with race, gender, and sexuality and that freedom from one set of embodiments or identities often means the stabilization or policing of others. I demonstrate this argument through alternative readings of figures like the cyborg, which has been previously read as privileging gender over sexuality and race, or contemporary cyberpunk narratives, which imagine technologically-manipulable bodies of many colors and configuration yet continue to perpetuate sexist, racist, and homophobic stereotypes, or cyberspace technologies like online video games, which promise players freedom, choice, power, and self-fashioning while they simultaneously restrict and control them via the game’s informatics and protocols.
My first chapter, “The Technoqueer Manifesto,” is an extended genealogy and definition of the “technoqueer,” a term that foregrounds the normative and potentially radical ways that technology itself co-constitutes our understandings and formations of race as more than a single color line, gender as both performative and embodied, and sexuality as less orientation and more circuits of desire. The technoqueer, I argue, reveals and challenges the structures of the near ubiquity of technological mediation and penetration into twenty-first century life—what I call the technonormative matrix—a technologically enhanced and informatically infected version of Judith Butler’s heteronormative matrix. My first chapter tracks technologically mediated queerness and queered technologies of late modernity, beginning with Alan Turing’s “imitation game” through Donna Haraway’s cyborg and Nina Wakeford’s “Cyberqueer” to present day posthuman(ist) and transhuman(ist) anxieties and utopias. Currently, most interventions into technologized subjectivity and embodiment argue for either posthuman liberation and transcendence or the loss or domination of humanity. Therefore, I present a close reading of Turing, Haraway, and Wakeford to articulate how technoculture studies attempts to provide an account of technologically-mediated race, gender, and sexuality, but more importantly, where each can be extended and reconfigured to be mindful of intersectional approaches. I argue that the technoqueer recovers and recalculates the alternative narratives, interventions, and imaginings lost or forgotten in the above examples.
My second chapter, “Queering Cyberspace,” I suggest that current critiques of disembodiment, for example made by scholars like N. Katherine Hayles, oversimplify the “nightmare” of cybertechnologies and fail to explore the productive ambivalences that might offer non-normative subjects different modalities of agency and power. The chapter further refines my argument for attending to alternative theorizations of the posthuman, as particularly framed by the metaphor of cyberspace. Early cyberspace scholarship and cyberpunk fiction extolled the virtues of cyberspace as a “final frontier,” a space of liberation, individualism, and escape from what William Gibson called the “meat.” I consider the ways that cyberspace is always-already queer but constantly recuperated by technonormative protocol, what Alexander Galloway calls “a proscription for structure.” I offer a queer reading of Gibson’s Neuromancer, drawing on feminist and queer responses to cyberpunk, and even use Gibson’s earlier short stories to deconstruct the binarism of “mind” and “meat.” I then contrast the conservativism of Neuromancer with Jonathan Littell’s overlooked novel Bad Voltage (1989) and the critically-acclaimed video game Bioshock (Irrational Games, 2007) to technoqueer cyberspace, to show what identities and bodies are overprivileged or undertheorized, and to articulate alternative visions of a more intersectional and radically configured cyberspace.
Chapter Three, “Bodyhacking Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” extends my second chapter, moving from the virtual to the material, from the avatar body to the actual body. Again, in response to Hayles’s (1999) nightmare culture “inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories,” I unpack the dangers and possibilities of a fully transformable and revisable embodiment. For example, I begin with the manipulation of race and close read George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) alongside Paul Gilroy’s Against Race to reveal the radical politics and potentiality of technologized race and racism. Schuyler’s novel’s anxieties over a machine that can turn black bodies white reveal the ways technology’s attempt to fix race only further fixes panic over the loss of white privilege, which is ultimately routed through sexuality and the fear of miscegenation. The chapter then connects the problematics of technorace to technosexuality via recent cyberpunk narratives about same-sex relations by Cory Doctorow, Geoff Ryman, and David Gerrold to illustrate the limits of the technological fix and the need to queer transhumanist fantasies. This chapter takes up these narratives and practices of body modification to unpack the ways that transforming, augmenting, and hacking the body do not necessarily free it from technonormativity and the naturalized logics of biological determinism. The technoqueer here then negotiates the risks of a fully-manipulable self, uncovering alternative understandings of identity and embodiment and culminating in a critique of techno-possessive individualism.
The fourth chapter, “The Seductions of Gamification,” addresses the recent “gamification” movement in business, education, and digital media. Gamification put simply is the application of gamic elements—things that make games “fun” and “engaging”—to things that are not traditionally considered games such as achievement points for weight loss, frequent purchases, or grades. The fourth chapter challenges the techno-utopian desire to see gamification as the panacea to social, political, and cultural ills and argues for a more critical and nuanced approach to and analysis of digital games, in particular via a close reading of the social networking game Frontierville by Zynga and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft by Blizzard. This chapter critiques the resurgence of technolibertarian narratives, particularly in the medium of video games, and argues for the need to take games as important cultural productions and manifestations “cybertyped” (Nakamura 2002) race, gender, and sexuality. Given that gamification exploits and intensifies the technonormative, I argue for alternative modes of game play, design, and scholarship that articulate what Galloway calls “countergaming” or what Jane McGonigal calls “gamefulness.”
Finally, the coda, “Technoqueer Utopias,” takes up the threads begun in the preceding chapters and attempts to imagine the potentiality of the technoqueer, a “bridge” to the antimony of posthumanism and queer theory. The coda returns to Turing and his incomplete short story “Pryce’s Buoy” to propose queer worldmaking possibilities drawing on Berlant and Warner, Tom Moylan, and Jose Estaban Munoz. It is through these technoqueer utopias that both queer theory and technoculture theory can continue to revitalize the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and technology, and it is through this attention to queering technology and technologizing queerness that we can imagine and embolden challenges to the technonormative matrix.
Available via ProQuest: https://www.proquest.com/openview/f83f2705e099b4d0b221febede3feac7/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
The Birth of the Cyberqueer Manifesto
Edmond Y. Chang | MA Project Description | 2005
Written as the capstone of my Master’s program at the University of Maryland, this paper addresses the need for a queer reading and queer politicizing of cyberspace. Taking on the stylistic tropes of a manifesto, I argue that cyberspace is queer. It is a space of contention, differing definition, rich and revolving identities, fear and desire, loathing and luminescence. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Nina Wakeford, and Michael Warner, my project investigates the technological and experiential terrain of cyberspace where strangers, cyborgs, and cyberqueers provide a way to imagine a radical queer politics.
Excerpt
Fourth and finally, the end lesson is one of hope, inclusion, healing, and imagination. We must possess and pass on the willingness, the frankness, and the openness to imagine a utopia, a cybertopia. We must find and savor the strength and subversive instinct to pull away the mantle of oppressions, dissolve the grids of power, and recreate and reorganize in the manner of snowflakes, bee hives, fractals, and protests (maybe even riots). The dilemma and destiny of the cyberqueer is a tightrope walk, a careful but acrobatic traversing of the thin and thick edges of ideologies, the sharp and smooth and sometimes slippery boundaries of gender, race, class, cyborghood, and citizenship, and the hypertextual and electromagnetic lines of old media, new media, and cyberspace. We must walk, dance, run, wheel, roll, crawl, teleport through space, through life, through barriers with impunity, with pride, with promise.
Cyberqueer identity is elusive, effusive, erotic, ergodic; it is complexity rising out of simplicity. Cyberqueer is the symbiosis of cyborg bodies, the flattening of public and private spaces, the welcoming of strangers into our midst, and the realization that true community, true coalition rises out of emergence. Emergence theory has come out of economics, biology, sociology, philosophy, as well as cyberstudies. Emergence is all about self-organization, about bottom-up systems (rather than top-down), about local particulars becoming global patterns. Emergence tries to understand “how ant colonies learn to forage and build nests; why industrial neighborhoods form along class lines; how our minds learn to recognize faces” (Johnson 18). It is “movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication” (Johnson 18). It is how radical, disparate, disconnected individuals and groups can self-empower and self-organize to gather cultural power, to start progressive movement, and to sustain political momentum. Cyberqueer is emergence. Cyberactivism is emergence. Cyberspace is emergence. And cybercitizenship is achieved through self-organizing coalitions, emergent counterpublics, and flash mobility.
Cyberqueers must embrace, inculcate, and imagine their slipperiness, their difference, their strangeness, their cleavages, their multiplicity. But they must remember that play is not without responsibility, that resistance is not necessarily chaos, and that the many can be a whole and unity can must be made by many. Shane Phelan says, “Fully accepting plurality means living with structures that fail to capture all, or all of everyone’s, concerns…The goal of this multiplication is not a larger ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which the best will win, or simply a space for a thousand flowers to bloom, but rather the formation of new hegemonic blocs that can produce changes in the lives of people” (145).
Cyberqueers must add all of this to their minds, bodies, lexicons, routines, and programming. The usual channels to power and acknowledgement and diversity are well-worn and often passages equally fenced in by glass walls, glass ceilings, and glass gates. Old paths need ripping up, repaving, or rerouting, and new channels must be found, tried, reconnoitered, and well-lighted. Possibility comes from cyberqueer imagination. Resistance comes from a cyberqueer politics. Healing comes from a cyberqueer desire and need. Haraway agrees, “We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world with gender” (181). Ultimately, hope comes from a cyberqueer aesthetics and poetics.
One cyberqueer manifesto has been written, imagined, digitized.
Others are on the way. Let slip the digihounds.
We must rally. We must make noise. We must raise hell. We’re here, we’re queer, and cyberspace is ours. We are cybercitizens. We can be, will be, must be anything we want on- and offline. We have the advantage. We have the technology. We must build, invite, coalesce, and access. In short, we are cyberqueer. It gives us our ontology, our mythology. It gives us our politics, our tools, our data, our lives.
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