Appeared in Rogue, an AOL magazine, February 1996
Anne Balsamo begins Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women by listing some parts of, or rather, parts for the human body. Citing a 1989 Life piece, titled "Visions of Tomorrow," she recounts the replacement parts currently on the medical market: pacemakers, artificial tendons, joints, and ligaments, eyes, and the Jarvik 7 artificial heart, to name a few. The result of such new biotechnologies, she argues, is a merger of the biological with the technological, the "reconceptualization of the human body as a new 'techno-body'" (5). In the 70s, The Six Million Dollar Man fictionally joined flesh to electro-fibers, but this conjuncture is no longer fantastic, Balsamo reminds us. Instead, the former astronaut's super-enhanced eye, arm, and legs illustrate the unbounded potential of techno-bodies, a potential permitted by their essential mutability, their amenability to strap-ons and plug-ins. Predicated on such mutability, techno-bodies seemingly offer the ability to reconstruct even putatively essential categories like sex and gender. Instead, Balsamo's collection of essays argues that traditional ideas of gender remain uncontested: "the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body of the flesh" (9).
Balsamo's first chapter, "Reading Cyborgs, Writing Feminism," presents a theoretical framework for her subsequent close readings of texts and events. She uses the idea of a cyborg body--a hybrid of human and machine seen in Metropolis' Maria as well as in Transformer action figures--to signal the effects of technologies on both the fictional and the material female body. One of the strengths of Balsamo's work is her commitment to examining both discursive formulations of gender and the ways these formulations actually affect women. The relationship is circular and never ending: our cultural constructions of the female body influence how particular technologies are deployed onto women, and these same constructions in turn encourage certain directions of technological development.
To illustrate her claims, Balsamo considers efforts to technologically alter the female body in her second and third chapters on female body building and cosmetic surgery. She proposes that while new technologies proffer novel possibilities for redefining the female body, dominant cultural narratives frequently subvert any radical revisioning of gender. For example, the muscularity of the sporting female body, a potentially empowering attribute, is eroticized by media representations in a way that promotes sexual desirability over athletic prowess. In terms of cosmetic surgery, also, female bodies are sites of inscription, this time of Western ideals of beauty. Still, while cosmetic surgery has been used to idealize "natural" (and yet "fixable") female beauty, Balsamo concludes this discussion by suggesting that physical alteration could prove a point of strength for women, allowing for a bodily performance of gender identity not rooted in wistful evocations of a natural, unmarked body.
In Balsamo's strongest chapter, "Public Pregnancies," she confidently relates how new medical technologies of surveillance--laparoscopy, ultrasounds, and advanced drug testing--permit and even demand novel invasions of the female body. Using an example much in the news recently--criminal penalties against pregnant women on crack--Balsamo argues that such technologies assist the development of a cultural logic of surveillance, where the relationship of women's pregnant bodies to overall public health comes under new scrutiny. Such heightened examination turns pregnancy from an individual to a public experience, allowing doctors and even strangers on the street into the reproductive process. Using Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid'sTale, Balsamo reveals how this logic of surveillance could easily expand beyond society's have-nots, who represent an ideological testing ground of sorts, to general prescriptions defining all female bodies as "potentially maternal bodies and all pregnant bodies as inherently duplicitous and possible threatening to public health" (14).
Balsamo also considers what happens to bodies when technology makes them disappear, as they ostensibly do in virtual reality (VR) simulations and in computer-mediated communication. Whereas enthusiasts celebrate the freedom of VR, Balsamo argues that "VR encounters really provide an...illusion of control over reality, nature, and especially over the unruly, gender- and race-marked, essentially mortal body" (127). And if virtual realities offer us the new possibility of interaction in real time over great distances, then, Balsamo reminds us, we are just as likely to use these new technologies to tell old stories as to create different ones.
In her final chapter, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," Balsamo explores the nonmaterial space of computer-mediated information exchange: the space constructed in chat rooms, IRCs, MUDs and MOOs. Because participants know each other only through textual representations, these spaces seem to escape the constraints of bodies and genders. Through a reading of Pat Cadigan's cyberpunk novel Synners, however, Balsamo proposes that men and women establish different relationships to cyberspace. Whereas Sam and Gina, the novel's female characters, use cybernetic space to communicate with others, the male characters, Mark and Gabe, crave cyberspace for the release it offers them from their material bodies (144). In Gina's and Sam's potent combination of technical expertise and synthesizing warmth, Balsamo sees a model for feminist educators. If feminists can harness the power of technological developments without being trapped in old stories of bodies and genders, she concludes, technologies can effect beneficial social change.
Technologies of the Gendered Body addresses important topics, Balsamo's range of evidence is wide, and she provides helpful insight into how feminists can intervene in cultural narratives that perpetuate notions of the technological body's gendered identity. While her overarching conclusion--that new technologies of the body have not altered our perceptions of gender--is sound, her research is dated (a perpetual problem when studying either popular culture or the Internet) and her discussions of virtual reality and cyberspace do not do justice to the diverse users of these realms. I am more hopeful than Balsamo that our new technologies will offer productive ways of exploring and changing our ideas about gender. In text-based virtual realities like MUDs, for example, participants can present as either male or female OR choose a neutral or plural character (e.g., Laurel&Hardy). The research of MIT's Amy Bruckman suggests that this flexibility permits individuals to view life on the other side: for example, after playing female characters, one Andrew said he realized why "Men suck" (Bruckman). ;-) In addition, Bruckman proposes, the restrictions of text-based virtual interaction--that you must communicate textually--makes sexist behavior more blatant, a development that has encouraged the open discussion of the impact of gender on human relations in Usenet newsgroups and listservs related to MUDs and MOOs. So, while we are unlikely to discard gender any time soon as a primary reference for making sense of others around us, perhaps virtual communities can help us to understand the ways that we learn about and use gender and so alter the ways gender can be employed to restrict both male and female expression and identities.
Amy Bruckman, "Gender Swapping on the Internet," presented at The Internet Society, San Francisco, CA, August 1993. Available via anonymous ftp at ftp.media.mit.edu/pub/asb/pape rs/