Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

 

"Introduction"

Balsamo begins from the premise that "the body", in its "production", is both a product and a process. "As a product, it is the material embodiment of ethnic, racial, and gender identities, as well as a staged performance, of beauty, of health…As a process, it is a way of knowing and marking the world, as well as a way of knowing and marking a 'self'."(p.3) She examines representations and practices of the gendered body from the last twenty years, focusing on "a continuum of discourses" to explore the "ideological tug of war between competing systems of meaning, which include and in part define the material struggles of physical bodies."(p.5)

Technology is the context of this contradictory pool of discourses; technology both enhances and increases surveillance of the material body; opens up possibilities for life and expands the horror of death. "Although", writes Balsamo, "the popularization of body technologies disseminates new hopes and dreams of corporal reconstruction and physical immortality, it also represses and obfuscates our awareness of new strains on and threats to the material body."(p.2)

When the body is fractured and reconstructed, asks Balsamo, where then is gender? Within the context of technology, the female body is relegated to the reproductive body (see Hynes and Raymond in Berner and Hynes anthology). She suggests that when seemingly stable boundaries are disrupted by technological innovation, other boundaries are more rigidly enforced. Thus although new possibilities for reshaping the human body have emerged, gender remains a naturalized and unchallenged categorization, which is both a "determining cultural condition and a social consequence of technological deployment."(p.9) Gender is an organizational framework which intersects with a hierarchy of culture and nature. However, these gender categories need not be static, since new technologies are coming into being, and consistently challenge naturalized boundaries.

Balsamo's main purpose here, then, is to "describe how certain technologies are, to borrow Wajcman's phrase, ideologically shaped by the operation of gender interests and, consequently, how they serve to reinforce traditional gendered patterns of power and authority."(p.10)

 

Chapter One, "Reading Cyborgs, Writing Feminism"

In this chapter, Balsamo examines how the cyborg has come to be inscribed by traditional anxieties about human difference, and how in "reading the body" culturally, one can see how the female body "historically was constructed as a hybrid case, thus making it compatible with notions of cyborg identity promulgated by more recent cultural theorists."(p.19)

Balsamo outlines the theory of Michel Foucault, and argues that "an apparatus or 'technology' articulates power relations, systems of communication, and productive activities or practices… both in the sense of 'expressing' that which is already given or operative, and in the sense of conjoining or connecting."(p.21) However, Foucault gives little attention to gender. Many models which utilize gender as part of this framework fall into an either-or logic of representing the body as either material flesh or discursive construct. In contrast, Balsamo argues that nature and culture are mutually constitutive, and offers the work of Mary Douglas as a useful point of entry into understanding this relation; the physical body is "at the heart of her account of the cultural construction of the symbolic body."(p.24) In traditional accounts of the body, particularly medical discourse, the female body is simultaneously knowable through scientific intervention and in danger of exceeding those limits; it is a border case which is both under and potentially transgressing control.

This contradictory model of the female body has persisted despite technological advances, and it is cast in opposition to a normative "unmarked" body. Furthermore, within postmodernism the body is held to disappear, and Balsamo notes the historical congruity of this notion with the emergence of feminist theorizing around the body. One postmodern alternative which holds promise, according to Balsamo, is Haraway's model of the cyborg. The cyborg, as Balsamo reads it, "connects a discursive body with a historically material body by taking account of the ways in which the body is constructed within different social and cultural formations."(p.33) Recent feminist scholarship has also taken up the notion of the female body as "1) a conceptual placeholder, 2) discursively constructed, 3) threatening to male systems of knowledge; but also attendant to the way the female body's constructedness organizes the perception of its materiality and the effects of this in women's lives."(p.35)

Thus the body is never an ontologically neutral entity over which cultural and social dramas are overlaid, but mutually constituted on both the material and discursive plane. Moreover, the facticity of the material body continually thwarts efforts to theorize its absence; feminists must remain attentive to the manifestations and processes of real bodies even as they observe their cultural inscriptions.

 

Chapter Two, "Feminist Bodybuilding"

In this essay, Balsamo uses three streams of feminist scholarship on the body: on the ideological construction of the body, semiotic analyses of media discourse, and a cultural interpretation of filmic narrative. She begins by reviewing the history of women and sport to show how the female body is continually culturally reconfigured in the context of their reproductive role. She moves on to examine media representations of female athletes to show shifts in ideals of feminine beauty, so that women's physical power is appropriated back into the logic of a capitalist beauty economy. Finally, she concludes by doing an indepth reading of the filme Pumping Iron II: The Women. All sections are concerned with the play between material bodies and cultural redefinitions in various historical and social contexts.

Ideologically, female athletes are seen as transgressive on a variety of fronts. They are both naturalized as reproducers, which precludes physical activity, as well as pathologized as inherently diseased, again which makes physical activity dangerous. Female bodybuilders intrude on male terrain by actively constructing their body, and threatening discrete gender boundaries. The athletic female body is inscribed within a number of ideological systems: race, ethnicity, sexuality, physical ability. Balsamo cites, for example, bell hooks on the subject of the so-called black superwoman who is seen as less transgressive than her ambiguously gendered peers in the film, noting that the ideological anxiety over the "black superwoman" conceals very real relations of inequality.

Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, these forms of technological body transgression do not really threaten, and moreover recapitulate, the power structures and systems of a hegemonic social order. Structures of dominance are easily able to appropriate and incorporate subversions, and responds to challenges of gender artificiality by re-inscribing relations of "naturalness".

 

Chapter Three, "On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and New Imaging Technologies"

In this chapter, Balsamo takes up the notion of the body as visual text which is able to be fragmented and placed under surveillance. In the context of cosmetic surgery, she argues (following Carole Spitzack) that it uses three interlocking mechanisms of cultural control: "inscription, surveillance, and confession."(p.56) The gaze of the surgeon translates the body into visual text, and then re-encodes it, re-defining it as an object which can then be surgically manipulated. These mechanisms intersect with structures and systems of gender which both medicalize and pathologize the female body, and which subsumes diversity and difference under sameness.

Cosmetic surgery is a particularly interesting site of examination, because although its discourse is revealing, it also literally transforms the (usually female) body. Relations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class intersect to shape normative ideals of a "standard human" in diagrams of the "aesthetic face", as well as to designate deviance and abnormality. In a society where capitalist exchange is the dominant system, the body and its parts become commodities to be desired and acquired. Using techniques of visual imaging and surveillance, a mode of looking is constructed which is composed of the omnipotent gaze of the surgeon, visually inspecting an object/text for signs of deviance, and anticipating methods of regulation and discipline.

 

Chapter Four, "Public Pregnancies and Cultural Narratives of Surveillance"

In this chapter, Balsamo outlines three key features of culturally determined ideologies around reproduction. First, a pregnant woman is stripped of bodily sovereignty, and becomes an icon or spectacle. Second, her identity is subsumed into that of the fetus/embryo, which is consituted as an active subject in its own right. Third, the role of reproduction is so wondrous and necessary that women should be willing to undergo any hardship for the sake of it. Women here become reduced to what Braidotti terms "organs without bodies"; ambulatory containers for potential persons, whose status is a matter of public concern. This has both the effect of erasing women's subjectivity as well as providing sites for medical control and intervention. The pregnant woman is simultaneously disempowered and held responsible.

Reproductive technologies, argues Balsamo, "provide the means for exercising power relations on the flesh of the female body."(p.82) These power relations are deployed as part of cultural narratives about women, disciplining female bodies as if "they were all potential maternal bodies, and maternal bodies as if they were all potentially criminal."(p.83) Increased monitoring of reproduction as part of institutionalized medical practice "not only has brought the maternal body and fetus into a broader system of surveillance, but it also functions to control and monitor the obstetricians themselves."(p.89) Thus both the medical personnel and pregnant women are incorporated into systems of normative surveillance (with, of course, differing effects and manifestations). Another consequence of medical surveillance is the according of personhood to the fetus (see Stabile on this subject).

Balsamo notes that often feminist responses to reproductive technology are complex. Using Wajcman, she states that "although technologies and scientific knowledge are shaped by and indeed embody political and ultimately patriarchal interests, they are not monolithic structures that impose a singular reality or set of consequences on all women equally."(p.96) Balsamo adds that it is important to think of technologies as "formations" rather than static things. Thus "a more critical concern for feminist scholars is how to gain access to the relevant information about technological use and development of reproductive technologies, how to disseminate such information to the women who are most likely to be the subjects of such expert knowledge, and how to enable people to make informed decisions about their own use of such technologies."(p.97)

 

Chapter Five, "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace"

In this chapter, Balsamo explores issues around the body in cyberspace (she begins by describing the "frontier" metaphor, but not as critically as Miller). To do so, she examines the (sub)cultural aspects of the VR industry (with all the community and commodity production that this entails), with an eye to critically observing the repression/disappearance of the body and what consequences result.

The significant features of the VR subculture include "popular cultural artifacts… a mythic set of founding fathers [see Millar here]… a specialized language that draws on the science of computer technology and computer programming, and the promise of new high-tech commodities. Oddly, at the same time that it promotes the sexiness of new technology and is unabashedly elitist, it also evokes a countercultural belief in the possibility of resistance within a corporate culture."(p.122) Despite its protestations of providing alternatives, Balsamo argues that the VR subculture merely reproduces the status quo of commodity fetishism (and, Millar would argue, male dominance).

One of the most recurrent claims of VR is that it allows transcendence of the "meat" or material body. Balsamo notes critically: "[u]pon analyzing the 'lived' experience of virtual reality, I discovered that this conceptual denial of the body is accomplished through the material repression of the physical body."(p.123) Given women's culturally invested and loaded relationship to both the ideological female and lived material body, this repression is important. Ostensible transcendence is, given our Cartesian history, really repression of the female-as-body, and moreover does not challenge real, lived bodily experiences in bodies which are always marked by gender, race, and other variables and situated within relations of power.

 

Chapter Six, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed"

In this chapter, Balsamo examines cyberpunk narratives and culture to argue that cyberpunk offers "a vision of posthuman existence where 'technology' and the 'human' are understood in contiguous rather than oppositional terms."(p.136) In this model, humans and machines are not static, dichotomous categories, but rather points of a continuum along which human subjectivity situates itself.

Balsamo uses Carolyn Marvin to illustrate a paradigm of information not as a commodity but as a knowledge process which requires knowing bodies as "its necessary materialist foundation."(p.139) Reading Pat Cadigan's Synners, Balsamo finds a variety of models for "the different embodied relations one can have, in theory and in fiction, to a nonmaterial space of information access and exchange."(p.140) In this imagining, bodies are not transcended or gender (or race-) neutral but are always marked within a nexus of intersecting variables, with the female bodies being conceptualized as "bodies-in-connection" (a material body that labours) and the males as "bodies-in-isolation" (repressed or disappearing). Herring would likely agree that "[c]yberspace is a place where bodies aren't supposed to matter, but many women discover that they do matter. The false denial of the body (mainly by male users) requires the defensive denial of the body (mainly by female users) so that communication can occur."(p.150)

Balsamo refers to the historical erasure and celebration of the perpetual present as "radical presentism". This approach "augments two ideological projects of the information age: the construction of social theories narrated by disembodied virtual minds, and the construction of technological histories written without women, without workers, and without politics."(p.151) The traditional ideological identification of (certain kinds of) technology as male has led to the belief that women are always constituted in a deficient relationship to it; moreover, a focus only on particular technological practices (such as information technology) elides the work of low-status technological workers such as female chip manufacturers. A crucial question for feminists, then, is "who counts?" Strategies for future feminist intervention can range from policy work to the creation of "countermythologies" that write women back into technological history.