Switch V4N1, Electronic Gender: Art at the Interstice
http://switch.sjsu.edu
Editorial Notes by Christine Laffer

This issue developed out of the Chik Tek '97 conference and exhibition
held here in San Jose, California, last November. In that forum,
participants discussed various aspects of women artists working in/with
technology, including whether women needed to have a gender-specific
forum at all. These questions triggered a debate that could have
continued and which Helen Wood took up in her series of post-conference
interviews (see "Chik Tek Symposium Revisited").

For the forum of Switch, however, the conference as a beginning point
offered only a narrow range of possibilities, particularly for those of
us in graduate programs who wished to take up questions in theoretical
discourse. Thus the question of constructing oneself as a female,
whether through role-playing or in a game patch as Anne-Marie Schleiner
does (see "Does Lara Croft Ware Fake Polygons: Gender Analysis of the
'1st Person shooter/adventure game with female heroine' and Gender Role
Subversion and Production in the Game Patch"), expands into conceptual
structures beyond "women in technology."

The shift to "gender" allows play, beyond feminism or post-modernism, in
the disruptive field of queer theory. "Gender" is most problematic when
it acts as an umbrella or cover term for women's studies, rarely
including references to constructions of maleness by men. Evidence of
recent publications begins to allow that this all-inclusive term
actually can apply to men (an example might be Male Trouble: A Crisis in
Representation, by Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1997), although by a female
author). Yet the strength of "gender" shows most clearly when Joan
Schuman, in her paper "Either/Or...Both/And: Field Notes on Gender
Ambiguity & Medical Technologies," excavates a middle space–an
interstice between the female and male topographies–which challenges
both sides of dominant sexual binarism.

The revolt against socially accepted norms spawns the development of new
cultural identities, and in this expanding gap where "gender" cuts
across "electronic media" cyberfeminists have also appeared. New to the
feminist pantheon, cyberfems evolve idiosyncratically, totally without a
need to be consistent with each other or any other authority. Sadie
Plant, who coined the word, has her own fascination with the complex,
and largely ignored, relationship between woman and machine. In
reviewing her recent book, Zeros and Ones, Alex Galloway, in his "Report
on Cyberfeminism," goes further and makes an attempt to describe
cyberfem's history and clarify its theoretical forms.

For another glimpse into the difficulty of of pinning this identity down
in any definitive way, Mary-Anne Breeze interviews Francesca da Rimini
(see "Attack of the Cyberfeminists"), one of the members of the VNS
Matrix collective which published the "VNS Matrix Manifesto" (1991) that
declared themselves cyberfeminists. As artists/writers/ gamers they feel
free to shift from essentialist woman-womb image/word combinations to
technoist lingo aimed to infect technology from within.

Monica Vasilescu's "Cyberfeminist Resources" and my own "Charred Edges:
Grrrl Power and the Structures of Feminism" flesh out the web-based map
of cultural activity going on at the female/machine interstice. Not all
of this activity shows up as art, nor does it always exhibit a radical
or subversive political stance. Access, however, equals power, and
electronic media–even as it loses ground to commercialization and
censorship–have now been accessed and occupied by more than one gender,
with enough energy to cause arcs at the gaps.