The Femi-Borg and the Masculine Project

Contemporary feminist discourse has been wrought with contradictions that aren’t solely self-inflicted, but also those that are resultant of associations with a variety of other pertinent issues such as gender, sexuality, race and class. By contemporary I am implying the schools of feminist thought that are post-mannish lesbian, as well as the cross-gender ideas with which most cultures have pinned upon women, while notwithstanding arguments of a feminism that is based on reverse-chauvinism. I am attempting at outlining a feminism that is free of muscilinist intervention and validation, a feminism for the “New Woman”, who might seem self-deifying, but still remaining man’s perfect antonym within the equilibrium of social evolution. This “New Woman” is the subject, though fictional, of an inquisitive mind – which doesn’t claim authority on issues of philosophical discourse. The Othering of the female form since the 1920’s through the technology and medium of cinema meant a great deal of essentialization permeated a plethora of social discourses, be they around race ,gender and sexuality as constructs that vary from culture to culture. Ideas of race were constructed and destructed through cinema/media, sexual identity assembled and disassembled just the same. But in this case, I will utilise Cinema (specifically science and technology oriented films) as a tool of analysis which would substantiate my taxonomy of an issue that is more burning than the question of “Real Masculinity” among men. So, my conviction is that the creation of the female automaton is a masculine project, and from this stand point I will argue why the reinvention of the female form into an embodiment of masculine fantasy has produced an assimilated femaleness or woman-ness which I have chosen to dub ‘The Cyborg Woman’. Therefore any reclamations of the female identity will thus depend to a great extend on understanding masculine discourse in terms of social castration, which most men attribute to the emancipation of women in present day economies. Women became a politically recognised class only after the second world war many scholars argue, when statutes were put into place that would allow for women to obtain a certain degree of education. But often that never, the education systems allocated women was designed by a patriarchal system of power that wished to further keep women within the subservient sphere of domesticity. Women were taught mainly household friendly courses such as home economics, nursing, teaching and if they were to access post industrial capitalists structures, qualifications in secretarial work was an advantage. The desktop or kitchen table top workforce was thus established, and such female jobs were misconstrued as symptoms of progress in societies that actually dishonoured womanhood. In The History of Sexuality Foucault claims, "Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere". Linking this premise to a historical framework of desire, Foucault revisions the political economy of the power-pleasure structure. He explains, "Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations". Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume One. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. The Male Gaze The objectification of the female body has long been there in history, (Most fine arts bear proof of this) long before cinematic interpretations such as The Femme Fatale of noir cinema (images) or domesticated damsel of 1950’s soapies stepped into the scene. That era of ‘The Sex Revolution” incidentally coincided with a technological revolution ushered by wars that produced some utilitarian technologies such as the washing machine, the microwave oven and other electrical and electronic devices (tools for female domestication), and the vibrator, the blow up doll, both of which are products of masculine imaginings of what woman-ness constitutes. It might be presumptive of me to claim that an internalised urge for emancipation from cultural roles which kept women in subservience prior to WW2, eventually introduced a reinvention of the captured body which characterised the birth of Sex-Act Cinema, and antonymously the revolutionary woman who engendered discourses around issues of sexuality and gender - The Sex Revolution, so to speak. The sexual identity crises that characterised the 1950’s and its “Homosexual Scare” was due to these newly reformed notion of woman-ness primarily represented by the liberated female, and therefore the liberal masculine mindset of the patriarchy confronted with a changing sexual landscape. Ideological concepts of gender and sexuality arising from cultural constructions still proved to vary from culture to culture. To backtrack a bit, take for instance the cross-gender roles in certain Native American tribes, which constituted an opportunity for women to assume male roles permanently and to marry women (and vice versa) – according to Western assumption about gender roles this would have been deemed unethical. Quite unlike those antique times, as ethnographical and anthropological literature would have it, when these Native American tribes (the Kaska of Yukon, the Mohave, the Klamath of Oregon just to name a few) had a progressive understanding of sexuality and gender – today’s perspectives are moulded by gender systems that create asymmetry in the form of male dominance and female subservience and enforce corresponding forms of sexual behaviour. Although most anthropological works on cross-gender roles focused mainly on the male ‘berdache’ and less on female cross-gender roles, it would be undeniable that women ‘berdache’ was also a viable institution among these ancient tribes. But by the late nineteenth century the female cross-gender system had all but vanished among Native Americans. Its final demise was related to a change in the construction of sexuality and gender in these tribes compounded by western ideological pressures that encouraged the native people to reject the validity of cross-gender roles. The dominant ideology of western culture, with its belief in the inferior nature of the female role and its insistence on heterosexualilty, invoked notions of “proper” sexuality that supported masculine possession of female sexual rights began to replace indigenous gender systems. The Mirror Gaze I have in the past weeks been watching a lot of classic science fiction films such as Metropolis, Alphaville, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, just to name a few; and I was amazed by the amount of characterisations of females as automatons (in the forms of Cyborgs) so prevalent in these films. Through these films, it was simple to realise how technology as a compliant to values of society at all levels, it can be an autonomous force that restructures these values and social structures themselves – social subjects as well. If humanity is to progress, it does so at the expense of the environmental and moral ideals. And through technology this has been radically achieved while it has changed the way we understand ourselves. On how women saw themselves through these tools of progress is something entirely. Because if we are to appropriate technology because of our desires for power or self-emancipation, this has to be done through technological domination of the body. And this statement is reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s postulate as to why humankind will never inhabit space in their present form. Towards the Femi Borg When investigating digital culture one realises how society and technology correlate, and that technology influences gender as much as it does other social matters. Undeniably, Woman-ness suffers when it is witnessed through mass mediated presentations, particularly commercial efforts, which offer up a regular diet of banal, stereotypical fare and as a result many may agree that sexuality matters, and lesbianism specifically, may not be seen as what matters most. In 21st-century gender discourses, uniquely falls to “race card” dismissals and moralist judgements which see not past ethical barriers created by social consensus on these matters. From a cinematic point of view I would like to make reference to a film I enjoyed which dealt with issues of gender and sexuality titled Shortbus. Shortbus is a 2006 comedy-drama written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. The plot revolves around a sexually diverse ensemble of emotionally challenged characters trying desperately to connect in New York City. Shortbus is a film noted for the explicitness of its sexual representations in order to suggest that the sex life of the digital age doesn’t exist but as an array of traumatised subjects and forms. The characters among whom are a Jewish and oriental couple, lesbian couple, a transvesdite salon queen, all have sex related issues, and converge daily at a sexual salon. Sofia is a sex therapist who herself is searching in vain for her orgasm, a dilemma which apparently stems from an uncomfortable experience with her voyeuristic father when she was young. Her, affable husband however, feels emasculated as he cannot give her an orgasm, a crisis which eventually leads the couple in divergent paths of self-discovery. The politics of identity associated with the two selected race groups also have their harbingers; Jews were not considered white until the late 1930 during the civil rights movement, and The orientals were indentured slaves. But the films has a motley cast of sexual subjects who go about their business of putting digital mediations to uses largely undisclosed to all but themselves. Three notable technological devices assist in their quest for sexual liberation: the digital camera, cellular smart phones and the internet for social networking (and later the Vibrating Egg which I will analyse as a symbol of masculine intervention into the feminine realm). These technologies feature as un-narratable characters in themselves which allow the film’s queer ensemble to exceed generic constraints of the film in its customary dimensions and to see where digital sexualities merge with real-life. Digital sexualities and the erotic affinities afforded by technological innovations – such as anonymity, self-invention and reinvention – come into play more so when the film seeks to account for these digital sexualities in non-pathologized ways. Therefore, the film uses technology as a mediating force that doesn’t only isolate individuals, butkeeping them separated from one another while exacerbating inter-personal distance. The Vibrating Egg Towards the film’s last sequences, Sofia and her husband Rob enter this sexually charged decor of Shortbus, and Sofia decides to give Rob a remote control to a “Vibrating Egg” device she has inserted into her vagina. The symbolism of the act of giving the masculine subject control over the feminine seems clearer here. We find ourselves marvelling at the ignorance that permeates the scene as Rob keep accidentally pressing the button, which in turn gives Sofia uncontrollable spasms which finally send her off the rails and, compounded with her own frustrations, a tantrum erupts. I am willing to argue that the technology utilised in this seminal scene, being under a man’s control seemed to symbolised a more convoluted truth about how men would like to be given unrestricted access to the female body. While the film attempts to produce the truth about sexuality through its staging of real sex in an effort to liberate us from inhibitions and restrictive categories, it also raises questions that relate to problematising sex - questions about sex being just sex, or an emotional extension of internal laws that govern individual aspiration. It is undeniably an optimistic film in an infectious free-to-be-you-and-me, erotically democratic zeal. The egg is trans-masculine by its nature, thus allowing for further symbolization of a feminine element the patriarchy would choose to control in the spectacle of subverting femininity. This way, a sort of robotisised woman-ness is revealed and the precept of a Cyborg woman takes precedence. Sexual surrogates such as blow up dolls become precursors of cybernetic sex-pets of the future, and the western heterosexual sexuality system would indeed have created its own women – an appropriated perfect subservient woman-ness. In the sci-fi films I mentioned earlier, the Cyborg characters seem to have unlimited potentiality to disrupt the pigeonholes of race and gender identity through their scientifically morphed and politically realigned multiplicities of affinity. With the ability that belie their apparent "cyborg" transcendence of racial identity there proves to be less successful at identity subversion the neo-masculine fervour to defame the “New Woman” as mere character reversal of chauvinism, because the morphed female identity has and is still proving a formidable advisory to patriarchy as a social construct. As Donna Haraway calls forth in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; she explains, "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction". Haraway envisions the future of identity revolution arising from these technical mergings and mechanic parodies, which seemingly would find fertile ground in science fictional arenas such as those of Blade Runner, Metropolis, Alphaville among other cinematic masterpieces (The Vibrating Egg in Shortbus being one). But as Foucault later describes in Discipline and Punish, the body (in this instance the Cyborg body) internalizes the external law (here, the law of essentialized genderised interpretations of the body) and manifests the law from within the tremendous potentiality of a "cyborg" reality. Conclusion Aldous Huxley was at some point scandalised for his portrayal of the “New Woman” in his book Brave New World. This was a woman who lived beyond the heterosexual confines of fidelity, and in other words, promiscuous. But this form of gender awareness is now becoming a norm, an acceptance accelerated by technology and its rapid innovations that ought to SERVE and not alienate humankind. As Dana Haraway so eloquently put it, “ the new industrial revolution is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. These developments are neither gender nor race-neutral. Men in advanced industrial societies have become increasingly vulnerable to permanent job loss and women are not disappearing from the job roll at the same rate as men. Many women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age.” I perceive this advent to be the birth of The Cyborg woman. And with all the prospects of ‘Virtual sex’ in the digital domain, new possibilities are heralded; “ the disappearance of human-machine interface and a merging which throws the one-time individual into a pulsing of switches which are neither climatic, clean, nor secure.” ( Adrian Gargett INTIMACY (VIRTUAL SEX) Written by: Paul Zisiwe