Text
Various writing and poetry from the past five or so years.
spiderwork
i think the time is nothing
if not nigh
to let the truth out
coolest f-word ever deserves a fucking shout!
i mean
why can’t all decent men and women
call themselves feminists?
out of respect
for those who fought for thisani difranco, “Grand Canyon”
I call myself a feminist. The thing is, though, I often put cyber in front of the F word we love. Funny how the prefix changes the feminism to which it is attached. In the lyrics above, the Righteous Babe spouts righteous rage that “decent men and women” would not identify themselves as feminists. This nostalgic rally cry routes the listener through the woman-identified-woman wave to propel her forward into twenty-first century feminism and cyberfeminism.
When I call myself a cyberfeminist, the person I’m with often tries to confirm this label by checking to see if my internet-enabled cell phone is in my hand or if my laptop’s wireless signal is steady. And when asked what cyberfeminism is, I usually respond with the etymological history of the word, first used in the early 1990s by independent scholar Sadie Plant and the Australian artist collective VNS Matrix. Cornelia Sollfrank (one of the founders of the cyberfeminist portal Old Boys Network ), examining the two early usages, chastises Plant for an overly clean representation of women + technology = good and applauds VNS Matrix’s ironic assertions of digital femininity and inclusion of bodily fluids, exemplified by their phrase “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.” Reversed, it still works: the matrix is a direct line that links stimulated women together. Technophobia has plagued feminism for years, but it’s time to let the truth out—cyberfeminism, too, deserves a fucking shout.
Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” struck fear in some 1970s feminists, who seemingly accepted the premise that the feminist message would be obscured by medium—and this technophobia endures in the academy, where much of the later feminist catspaws occurred; many feminist theory classes include a single class meeting that lumps cyborg, cyberfeminist, and posthumanist theory with Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a dated standard from 1985, inappropriate as anything but a harbinger of the term cyberfeminism.
In the late 1980s, cyber, while attached to other words, was still associated with cyberspace, novelist William Gibson’s 1982 coinage of the space in computer networks. While Wikipedia, the online jointly-edited encyclopedia, defines cyberspace, cybernetics (”a theory of communication and control of regulatory feedback”), and cyberpunk, no entry only a stub for cyberfeminism exists as of this writing. Are cyberfeminists simply too busy creating art and publishing to post these definitions? Perhaps. Or, as Yvonne Volkart suggests, there are only cyberfeminisms. The 1997 First Cyberfeminist International drafted the 100 anti-theses for cyberfeminism, including “18. cyberfeminism is not an ism,” and this smazy stance precludes definition attempts and separates cyberfeminists from cyberpunks. The groups overlap as hackers, but cyberfeminists recoil from the cyberpunk MO of conflicts and “jacking” in and out of dystopias; they refuse to align themselves with Trinity’s vacillations in The Matrix, instead shaping their relationship with cyberspace as an analogous, symbiotic one.
Not defining cyberfeminism increases the entry barrier of information for potential cyberfeminists and depletes the stickiness of the term cyberfeminism itself. It is significant that the chosen terminology is not neofeminism, virtual feminism, or digital feminism, which might connote a new feminist wave pulsing through cables, a vraisemblance of feminism, or a direct application of traditional feminist best practices, respectively. Cyberfeminism, as a term, intimates art, life, personal, political, criticism, praise, practice, performance, and play, but if larger cyberfeminist sites like the Old Boys Network do not use the term and therefore appear further down the Google list (subRosa, www.cyberfeminism.net, appears first), cyberfeminists will find ourselves cyberpunk’d out of the medium.
I did not discover cyberfeminism until a few years ago when I took a digital art class and created a Flash animation of a feminist landscape titled “a l o n e s o m e h i g h w a y.” The piece contrasts iconic women from the Madonna to Madonna and I realize now I was searching for other feminists riotously crawling the web, making art, acting out, connecting with their machines. Like water for chocolate, the animation ends with a square nougat floating over an oblivious Forrest Gump and browning out the user’s screen—my visual representation of the heady perfume of Spider-work, the term originally given to textiles woven on the first piece of automated machinery, the Jacquard loom, in the early eighteenth century that I associate with my cyberfeminist activities. In her influential book Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant uses the Jacquard loom’s bundling of threads into groups that could then be placed in similar positions at the same time to describe how the machine presets empower women as designers; as a web designer, I use cascading style sheets to make global changes in a given site design, to rewrite one line of code to update the color of all visited links on a site. This allows me to expend creative energies on site metaphors and checking to see that the site is valid, which means that the site retains its integrity by looking the same on all browsers, so more users can experience the site.
In deference to our cybermothers and cyberfathers, and as part of the ongoing weaving of the second generation of cyberfeminists, my online identity is kthread. In the murkiness of the machine, where I now spend most of my waking life, I squint slightly, peer beyond the ancestral artifacts of dead sites and dirty code, and see new life in all directions. Swathed in curiosity, I feel the firm pressure of the broad bands connecting me to cyberfeminist networks where we sing, we name, we SHOUT; I flick my wrists, pull the computer closer into my lap, and begin to type…
…………………………..
Kristen Taylor is a freelance web designer and digital artist exploring strange new terrains in cyberspace– seeking out new life, boldly going where women, men, and posthumans have been before…and learning from them.
…………………………..
This piece originally appeared in iris magazine’s Fall 2005 Pop! issue.
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secretion
she slouches toward bethlehem
to be the muse or the savior
she can never remember which
hair mussed, idle, wild, strung out
from the battle with her sisters
for the eyeball, those bitches,
this time, the thread is hers to string
and she will mete out Grace
who sits quietly, elegantly
shapeshifting as she watches
her fertility discharge beneath her
swaddled body heaving
she passes out coffee spoons
for the host
she has remembered: she is eve
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dehiscence
It should have been awkward
you, eating emptiness
me, watching Resistance
writhe through the carpet
(You) demur
weigh the allowance
consider anti-static dryer sheets
Eclipsed, kairos clings to truth
undulating like recycled air
conditioning our exchange
Did we bargain well-
your past for my dehiscence?
________________________________________
blushing pilgrims
we click with the rain - a sonata
couched, we tangle words, I offer
backhanded compliments,
you knit black and blue together
nicely, not snarling and skipping stiches as I do,
producing holes large enough for you
and sandwiched goddesses to
bump and grind in looping karmic grooves
sampled and resampled and unsampled
___________________________________________
the liar
she calls her a coal miner’s daughter
only now she is mining for data
collecting, collating, and sorting
hard dark pieces, a premodern world
she wonders why she receives hazard pay
when danger is hers for the taking
reflecting, no one has asked her
or cares if those pieces begin
to add up to a whole life’s resistance
carved out of existence before when
she lived in a cave of her making
with the man that she thought she loved
so much that it made up the difference
that the dark couldn’t crush her within it
she was wrong and he’s gone and it’s bright now
if she squints she sees specks in the air
……………………………………………..
softly, softly tiptoeing onward
the new he won’t realize he needs her
that their crazy confection of meaning
depends on his smile, on somethings
they could probably work through together
if he wasn’t the king, she the savior
and the dog at his feet that he loved so
didn’t jump up each time she walked by
as if her gait, her slight instep,
was more than this wannabe hero
deserved — she still came when he called, though
and counseled as if she could stay
…………………………………….
she was born of the air and she was
like lady lazarus, eating
the men of her choosing, she spared him
as he made her feel half-alive
then he ducked as her spells almost bound him
almost opened him up to the colors
that might flow at his dispersal–
instead he filled up his court
with yesmen and lesbians, thinking
that their threats were lesser and this way
the numbness that he loved inside him
could continue to keep him apart
as if his distinction was borne on
the sadness he succored to help him
decide whether to be or not be
the man that his father would reach
with his message: it ran in his bloodlines
to commit the offense that would sweetly
remove him from all further acts
and this ghost, a device of the play
silly word games, distractions,
he beats them, a phalanx with phalanges
victory does not become him or his
thwarted ambition: tragic or damned
……………………………………..
his intended kept where he can’t reach her
or damp down her fire, her orange
she waits on her balcony watching
time fuel his terrible doubt
…………………………………….
and she’s banished (the muse)
he won’t have her
close to him, close to truth
beauty
she might give him just what he’s seeking
if he asked, but he’s proud and she’s gone—
_______________________________________________________________________
displaced_out
M.A. Thesis in American Studies in English, University of Virginia, Defended July, 2004
Thesis (right-click and “save as” to download, 1414KB Flash file)
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a pretty hewn town
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made
we knew the chef and so we stayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and someone struck, and someone played
and someone slept and someone strayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made
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steganography
newly filtered,
modalities
martyr animated
distance
tween hidden and open
it’s me Kip
the public, packeted self
separate yourself from other men
flame out
completely accredited
unbidden, unknown
she will love you more than any other guy
bearers heartless, a lovely
impressive logo for your company
sallying forth
get double effect and save your money
terribly beautiful truth
serum
Re:
signals, noise
politeness improper
transmanumission
thump modern burial
trump postmodern farce
stump transhuman savvy
contaminate cartography
network knight-errant
neutrality
discover the feeling of being young
again
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deconstructed
he never said it
out loud
in some political way
or as anything
other than
a statement of fact
that pants
he wore
were made for
women
and he was
into that
and me
for a while
when we slipped
clothes off and
on as if
cloth could hold
us upright till
he ripped my favorite
sweater round the neck
and didn’t tell me
till i noticed
and decided
that i liked it better
this way
more room to breathe
________________________________________
baked alaska
a classic, torched ending
protected by
insubstantial whites
bound by an agent
a sweet, aching softness
suspended by
crummy supporters
lying prone riddled
a tested amalgam
safehoused until
elegance implodes
the lady is a tramp
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fissiparous
through me like wildfire
burns all the way down
running through dead brush
the poison just found
the droning of voices
the murmur behind
shaving off seconds
time seldom so kind
stroking that one place
past bleeding now
cast slow the
abject
vow
__________________________________________
refrain
Troubled, warm, I take them from the machine
the bar smell gone, yours too, too bad, for me
who has forgotten how to kiss or clean
This shirt that clings to my arms, string bean
arms that have seen better days and I see
through the sleeves and your intentions, I lean
Into the thought of us sparring—you mean
to metrically split my infinitive, free
from matching the rest of my outfit, keen
To tumble, warm, like those from the machine
that smoothed rocks into pebbles by degree
lending weight to my pocket; shape the scene
Now, as I walk to the water between
rough edges, the con, current plea
from waking voices bedeviling green
Colorless ideas sleeping, pristine
memory laundered, fashioned tragedy:
a false dry yield—furious to wean
the indigo cotton, the arc of Jeanne
_______________________________________
reel
i’m not sure we ever change
you wrote
the work of a moment
spitting out lines hard
to tack on to my conception
of who we were and
you spun me around the kitchen
the way you always do
but it wasn’t ’til you left
i was dizzy
________________________________
pecas
I want him to trace the path
connect freckles on my back
create constellations, ask
why this one and when was that
I want him to hear the tales
see the shapes behind the dots
lift oral tradition veils:
who came before, what they wrought
I want him to touch each point
pierce the mute skin of the sky
fingers spanning story joints
he braces me, we sigh—
