{"id":411,"date":"2009-03-17T18:04:39","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T23:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=411"},"modified":"2009-03-24T07:12:23","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T12:12:23","slug":"assumptions-and-cyborgs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=411","title":{"rendered":"Assumptions and Cyborgs"},"content":{"rendered":"

What impressed me most about The Female Man<\/em> was the way Whileaway made me aware of my own habitual assumptions.\u00a0 Every time Janet would describe another aspect of life on Whileaway, describe another work category, I would have to stop short and reassess my automatic subconscious default provisional assignment of male gender.\u00a0 When Janet described riding on a train and mentioned the engineer, I assumed the engineer was male (80).\u00a0 I don’t know why it was so hard for me to remember that everyone was a woman – no really, everyone!\u00a0 But my brain kept trying to revert to the provisional assumption of masculinity for any person whose gender was not explicitly stated.\u00a0 Of course, one other solution to this assumption of maleness is to make the category of man available to women as well, as Russ asserts on page 140: “If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman.”\u00a0 This statement reminds me of the way that Susan B. Anthony by trying to vote herself challenged the implicit male assumptions in the categories of “person” and “citizen” in the Fourteenth Amendment’s granting of the right to vote.<\/p>\n

One thing that puzzled me about Jael’s world was how the women still gave male babies to the men.\u00a0 Assuming the women have some kind of semen stockpile and have not advanced to genetic engineering, why would they give their enemy the very means of continuing themselves?\u00a0 The only answer I could see was that the women had an essential view of men as enemies – even baby men were still men and therefore enemies.\u00a0 Therefore nurturing them and indoctrinating them would presumably serve no purpose.\u00a0 Except for Davy (and who knows how common he is) and perhaps commerce, the women are not portrayed as desiring or needing the opposite gender or perpetuating gender roles like the men are.\u00a0 In making the male society so crude and disagreeable, Russ is creating a parody of the normal state of gender roles.\u00a0 Taken to the extreme, it’s easy to see how gender roles are only perpetuated by the males who benefit by them.\u00a0 Yet the women are no saints either, and their hatred leads first to the creation and perpetuation of the awful male society and ultimately, as Jael implies, to genocide.<\/p>\n

Whileaway society definitely echoed aspects of Haraway’s cyborg utopia, and certainly the skill with induction helmets and other aspects of technology reflected the “intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceas[ing] to be a sin , but an aspect of embodiment” (180).\u00a0 Although Haraway’s vision of a cyborg worldview seems a utopia, she convinced me pretty well that cyborg imagery is a good place to start to escape the divisive use of dualisms and navigate our discourse more effectively and happily.\u00a0 Perhaps with a cyborg worldview, I wouldn’t make those assumptions of provisional male gender.\u00a0 Although cyborg theory itself is a totalizing theory (which Haraway condemns) in that she implies that everyone can be a cyborg, the extremely adaptive nature of cyborgs mean that cyborg theory in Haraway’s view will never be limiting or exclusionary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What impressed me most about The Female Man was the way Whileaway made me aware of my own habitual assumptions.\u00a0 Every time Janet would describe another aspect of life on Whileaway, describe another work category, I would have to stop short and reassess my automatic subconscious default provisional assignment of male gender.\u00a0 When Janet described … Continue reading Assumptions and Cyborgs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[13,51],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-9-female-man","tag-technology","tag-the-female-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}