Webliography

WOMN2205 WEBLIOGRAPHY- Anna Hartley

'The figure of the cyborg is deeply implicated in western culture's fear of the monstrous other, which itself is a deeply gendered anxiety. Discuss'

Fear of the ‘other’ is an age old one, with new forms of the ‘other’ being constructed throughout history. This fear of other is also a deeply gendered issue, tied up with fear of the feminine. My webliography, which concerns itself primarily with the cyborg body, spans from discussions about the feminist theory of the monster Frankenstein, written decades ago, through to a modern websites devoted to a symbiotic study of art and critical theory, in medienkunstnetz.

1. Donna Haraway- “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”

I have included this source because it would be a large oversight to exclude this seminal text from any discussion about cyborgs.

2. Leslie Swartz and Brian Watermeyer -“Cyborg anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and the boundaries of what it means to be human”

This article discusses the notion of the disabled in society as being viewed as somehow other than human. Oscar Pistorius is a disabled athlete who was prevented from competing alongside able-bodied athletes, because of fear that he would have an super-human, unfair advantage in the competition.

3. Yvonne Volkart- “Monstrous Bodies: The Disarranged Gender Body as an Arena for Monstrous Subject Relations”

A very comprehensive and intersting online resource, with articles on various topics concerned with the body. This article is based on the premise that the cyborg is so monstrous because it reflects the monstrosoty of the society which created it. “The cyborg body is always an effect and symptom body of the neoliberal information society. It is its product and its symbol, its sabotaging traversal and alternative conception of the subject“.
This article contains chapter links, the most useful to this topic in my opinion being ‘The Monstrosity of the Endlessly Interfaceable, Digital Body’.

4. Katherine Swan- “Feminism and Education in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”

This is a very interesting article which deals with the notion of the Frankenstein novel being a deeply gendered text. Swan posits that like Frankenstein must self-educate, women in the time of Mary Shelley had to do the same. Also that the “monster destroys on weak women, representing education’s destruction of female inferiority”.It basically links the age-old theme of fear of ‘other’ which Frankenstein epitomises, with feminist theory.
However, while the article reads well, the webpage it is hosted by is not a professional journal, but a user-contributed site. Thus, any articles referenced from the site must be carefully read to asses their academic value.

5. Judith Halberstam- “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine”

In this article, Halberstam argues that cyborgs have provided a new platform upon which to argue that “gender and its representations are technological products. In a sense, cybernetics simultaneously maps out the terrain for both postmodern discussions of the subject in late capitalism and feminist debates about technology, postmodernism and gender”.


In conclusion, I have found the above online resources very interesting and certainly useful in facilitating a good essay about the topic. I did find it difficult to sort through all the flotsam that is on the internet to come to suitable resources, but once I was on the right track I was pleasantly surprised at how much critical theory there is on this topic. This was an interesting assignment and I enjoyed researching it.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, The European Graduate School, 1991,
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway/haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.html (accessed 03/09/08)

Leslie Swartz and Brian Watermeyer , ‘Cyborg anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and the boundaries of what it means to be human’, informaworld.com, March 2008, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a791124509&fulltext=713240928, (accessed 03/09/08)

Yvonne Volkart, ‘Monstrous Bodies: The Disarranged Gender Body as an Arena for Monstrous Subject Relations’, medienkunstnetz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/cyborg_bodies/monstrous_bodies/, (accessed 03/09/08)

Katherine Swan, ‘Feminism and Education in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Associated Content, Feb 2005, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/13718/feminism_and_education_in_mary_shelleys.html?cat=38 (accessed 03/09/08)

Judith Halberstam, ‘Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine, JStor, 1991,http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0046-3663(199123)17%3A3%3C439%3AAGPFIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M, (accessed 03/09/08)