Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture / Edition 1

by Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth

Overview

An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture.

Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction—fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies—and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262561501
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/03/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	596
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Director of the Tiltfactor game research laboratory, and Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press).

Austin Booth is Director of Collections and Research Services at State University of New York at Buffalo.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Reload is an indispensable guide to a body of literature that has not received the attention it deserves. The collection makes us aware of a significant gap in our understanding of cyberpunk fiction, while at the same time filling that gap admirably. Although we have long understood the importance of cyberpunk fiction for postmodern theory and contemporary culture, many of us have made the mistake of thinking of cyberpunk as a masculinist genre. Reload shows us how women writers have been contributing to, expanding, and reimagining the genre."The collection is encyclopedic in scope with more than two dozen important essays and fiction pieces as well as a lucid introduction by the two editors. Reload is unusual in the way that it combines theory and practice. Examples from feminist cyberfiction are placed beside critical essays. The genres of fiction and critique are usually kept rigidly separate, but Reload, like feminist theory itself, blurs such traditional boundaries. The result is an exciting volume in which feminist theory helps to explain the practice of women science fiction writers, and feminist cyberfiction gives us new insights into feminist theory."—Jay David Bolter, Wesley Professor of New Media, Georgia Institute of TechnologyPlease note: Endorser gives permission to excerpt from quote.

Editorial Reviews

"The focus in this book on research and creative work by women is desperately needed in the largely male-dominated world of science fiction and cyberpunk. Reload provides resources not easily accessible elsewhere."--N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English, and Design and New Media, University of California, Los Angeles

& quot; The focus in this book on research and creative work by women is desperately needed in the largely male-dominated world of science fiction and cyberpunk. Reload provides resources not easily accessible elsewhere.& quot; --N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English, and Design and New Media, University of California, Los Angeles

" The focus in this book on research and creative work by women is desperately needed in the largely male-dominated world of science fiction and cyberpunk. Reload provides resources not easily accessible elsewhere." --N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English, and Design and New Media, University of California, Los Angeles

--N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English, and Design and New Media, University of California, Los Angeles

From the Publisher

Women writers, many of them lesbian feminists, have begun to explore the relationships between humans and machines. Along the way, they are rethinking how race, class, and gender affect technological change, especially given the growing gap between those with access to equipment and those without it. The entries in Reload 11 pieces of fiction and 17 critical essays assess the ways technology has, or will, affect female life. Take, for example, the notion that cyberspace levels the playing field by allowing users to don whatever identity they choose. According to contributor Lisa Nakamura, "when users are free to choose their own race, all were presumed to be white. And many of those who adopted nonwhite personae turned out to be white male users masquerading as exotic samurai and horny geishas." Chilling as this is, cyberspace remains a positive "place" for many users; writer Sharon Cumberland reminds us that women's chat rooms are often valued precisely because of the anonymity offered. Reload is filled with provocative and often contradictory glimpses into cyberculture. Unfortunately, too much of the collection is steeped in technobabble, rendering it of limited use to a general audience. Recommended for academic libraries and specialized collections only. Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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