Table Of Content
Processed Lives
We live in a world saturated by innovative technology. A world which has seen a dramatic proliferation of
new devices, methods of communication, biological and biomedical developments and creative domestic
machinery. But are these new technologies and machineries helpful for our understanding of gender? Are they
merely reflecting our concepts of masculinity and femininity, or can they transform these notions?
Processed Lives analyzes the interrelations of gender and technology. It considers how the terms of
gender are embodied in technologies and, conversely, how technologies shape our notions of gender. The
contributors explore the complex territory between the lust for technology and the fear of technology,
commenting particularly on the ambivalence women experience in relation to machines. Discussing topics
such as embryonic fertilization, the virtual female, networking women, the sexuality of computers, the
inexact science of gender, surveillance systems, UFOs, contraceptives and the emancipation of Barbie,
Processed Lives asks the question, who actually benefits from technology?
Combining text with over 70 images and illustrations, Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in
Everyday Life offers a broad, provocative, visually rich and playfully critical approach to the multifaceted
relationships between masculinity, femininity and machines, now and in the future.
Contributors: Barbie Liberation Organization, Ericka Beckman, Gregg Bordowitz, Lisa Cartwright,
Sara Diamond, Judith Halberstam, Evelynn M.Hammonds, Kathy High, David Horn, Ira Livingston, Bonita
Makuch, Margaret Morse, Soheir Morsy, Liss Platt, B.Ruby Rich, Connie Samaras, Joyan Saunders, Julia
Scher, Andrea Slane, Mary Ellen Strom, Christine Tamblyn, Nina Wakeford.
Editors: Jennifer Terry is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University. Melodie
Calvert is the Associate Curator of Media, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The preface is by
Bill Horrigan.
Processed Lives
Gender and Technology in Everyday Life
Edited by
Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 Editorial matter and selection Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert
© Additional chapters the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Processed lives: gender and technology in everyday life/[edited by] Jennifer Terry
and Melodie Calvert
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-14931-2(hardcover: alk. paper).—ISBN 0-415-14932-0
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Women—Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Technology—Social
aspects. 3. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 4. Sex role. 5.
Femininity (Psychology) 6. Masculinity (Psychology) I. Terry, Jennifer,
1958–. II. Calvert, Melodie, 1961–.
HQ1233.P76 1997
303.48′33–dc20 96–26628
CIP
ISBN 0-203-99098-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-14931-2 (hbk)
0-415-14932-0 (pbk)
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
About the Wexner Center vii
Introduction: Machine/Lives 1
Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert
part one: DIGITAL WORLDS
1 Virtually Female: Body and Code 15
Margaret Morse
2 Girl TV 24
Mary Ellen Strom
3 Remote Control: The Electronic Transference 27
Christine Tamblyn
4 She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology 31
Christine Tamblyn
5 Networking Women and Grrrls with Information/Communication Technology: 35
Surfing Tales of the World Wide Web
Nina Wakeford
6 Hiatus 47
Ericka Beckman
7 Romancing the System: Women, Narrative Film, and the Sexuality of Computers 50
Andrea Slane
8 Taylor’s Way: Women, Cultures and Technology 56
Sara Diamond
part two: BODIES
9 Indiscretions: Of Body, Gender, Technology 66
Ira Livingston
10 Present Tense 71
Gregg Bordowitz
v
11 New Technologies of Race 74
Evelynn M.Hammonds
12 The Visible Man: The Male Criminal Subject as Biomedical Norm 86
Lisa Cartwright
13 Inseminations 100
Bonita Makuch
14 Unnatural Acts: Procreation and the Genealogy of Artifice 105
David Horn
15 23 Questions 112
Kathy High
16 Biotechnology and the Taming of Women’s Bodies 118
Soheir Morsy
17 Brains on Toast: The Inexact Science of Gender 125
Joyan Saunders and Liss Platt
part three: HOME
18 Techno-Homo: On Bathrooms, Butches, and Sex with Furniture 130
Judith Halberstam
19 Home Surgery Instructions 138
Barbie Liberation Organization
20 Is It Tomorrow or Just the End of Time? 141
Connie Samaras
21 Vulnerabilities 151
Andrea Slane
22 The Party Line: Gender and Technology in the Home 156
B.Ruby Rich
23 Information America 163
Julia Scher
List of contributors 165
Index 169
acknowledgments
The idea for this volume grew out of a year-long series of events organized around the topic of gender and
technology held at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, during
the 1994–95 academic year. The programs consisted of a series of visiting artists’ presentations, film and
video screenings, and a two-day symposium involving fifteen panelists. In conjunction with the program, a
hands-on video workshop for teenage girls entitled Girl TV was conducted by Mary Ellen Strom, and an
interactive CD-ROM installation designed by Christine Tamblyn was exhibited, entitled She Loves It, She
Loves It Not about women’s ambivalent relationship to technology.
In addition to the contributors to this volume, we would like to thank the following institutions and
individuals for their contributions to making the program a success: the Wexner Center for the Arts and the
Division of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University, Sherri Geldin, Bill
Horrigan, Marla Krupman, Marit Legler, Patricia Trumps, Erin Pound, Roger Addleman, Dave Filipi, Zlata
Baum, Eva Heisler, Sarah Rogers, Chuck Helm, Chris Jones, Gary Sankey, Kathryn Morris, Dana Master,
Bonita Makuch, Wayne E.Carlson, Judith Mayne, E.Beth Sullivan, Jane M.Fraser, Suzanne K.Damarin,
Richard Roth, Susan King Roth, Leila Rupp, Xiaomei Chen, Linda A.Bernhard, Leslie S.Jones, Sally Kitch,
Mary Margaret Fonow, and Sabra Webber.
We would also like to thank our editor, Rebecca Barden, at Routledge for her support through the
publication of this volume.
Jennifer Terry
and
Melodie Calvert
about the wexner center
As a contemporary arts center based on the campus of the most populous university in the nation, the
Wexner Center for the Arts is bound by both desire and mandate to contribute to the intellectual and
cultural well-being of The Ohio State University.
When the Wexner Center opened its doors in November 1989, a remarkable amount of publicity and
commentary was generated, focusing principally on the character of the building’s architectural design by
Peter Eisenman (working with Richard Trott) whose first large-scale commission the Wexner represented.
Those of us who have worked within this remarkable building over the past seven years have become almost
blind to its spatial eccentricities, and it is only when a colleague arrives to make her first visit to the Center
and stands bewildered in the upper lobby that we are able to regain, if only in a flash of involuntary
memory, the destabilizing quality of what Mr Eisenman imagined and produced. Most of the time, the rest
of the time, we assume a blinkered or default mode and simply annex these spaces as sites to be filled by
people and ideas and objects; the spaces do defer, obligingly, to the extent that those people and ideas and
objects are armed with conviction and willfulness equal to Mr Eisenman’s audacities.
Having over the course of time labored toward becoming intuitively one (on the levels of physical
display, exhibition and performance) with the interrogatory nature of the Wexner’s built public spaces, it
has hence become second nature, when faced with those same demands to curate or to exhibit or to present,
to second-guess in like manner (i.e., pathetically and fallaciously) the very terms and conditions scheduled
to occur within those spaces—as though it would constitute a kind of dishonor to pretend we were all still
laboring within the vacuumed white cube of the modern museum. Foreseen or not, one effect produced by
the physical attributes of the Center’s building is to encourage those charged with plotting its content to
almost instinctively think against ourselves at all stages of the process.
It was thus over time that the gender and technology problematic emerged to command extended enquiry,
a problematic physically anchored on one side by the Center’s Art and Technology video production and post-
production facility, and anchored on the other by the Center’s ongoing commitment to the work of women
artists and producers. Indeed, the first artist to use Art and Technology, albeit in nascent form, was also the
first artist commissioned by the Wexner to produce a new installation—Julia Scher, whose facility-wide
surveillance project, Occupational Placement (Security by Julia) was on view the day the building opened in
1989, and whose contribution to the present volume appears on its concluding pages.
The Gender and Technology events that have made their way, transfigured, into Processed Lives: Gender
and Technology in Everyday Life, represented a natural coming together of the Wexner Center’s Media Arts
department’s programmatic interests, with the intellectual and research interests of our colleagues in the
university’s Division of Comparative Studies in the Humanities. Conceived jointly by Media Arts Associate
Curator, Melodie Calvert, and Comparative Studies Assistant Professor, Jennifer Terry, the Gender and
Technology project began in November 1994, with a three-month screening series presented by artists
viii
Kathy High, Judith Barry and Ericka Beckman. Overlapping these in-person presentations were curated
programs of shorter works, presented from January to March 1995, focusing on gender and technology as
articulated in the home, in the realm of information, and within the site of the body, with these three foci
then providing the conceptual and tactical framework for the symposium itself in April 1995, a free two-day
event attended by over 800 students, faculty, and community members.
Coming to the Wexner Center in September 1994, Director Sherri Geldin strongly supported the Gender
and Technology project; equal conviction was demonstrated by Director of Exhibitions, Sarah J.Rogers and
Director of Education, Patricia Trumps, whose Young Arts and Youth and Technology programs, funded by
the Leo Yassenoff Foundation, were welcome ancillary activities. Media Arts program assistant Dave Filipi
provided expert management assistance on all aspects of the event, as did the project’s administrative
assistant, Marit Legler. Additionally, the Ohio Arts Council, under Director Wayne Lawson, provided
valuable funding support, as did the National Endowment for the Arts’ Media Arts Division.
Finally, for this as for much else, our thanks to the Wexner Center Foundation, whose extraordinary
support drives and enables the Center’s commitment to the production of challenging new art across all
disciplines.
Bill Horrigan
Curator, Media Arts
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University
introduction
Machines/Lives
Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert
The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our
processes, an aspect of our embodiment.
Donna Haraway (1991:180)
Gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings,…it is the
product and process of various social technologies, institutional discourses, epistemologies, and
critical practices, as well as practices of daily life.
Teresa de Lauretis (1987:2)
Try getting through a day without machines. Or, for that matter, try getting through a day without gender.
The challenge in both of these propositions is not to do without technology or gender (since it is practically
impossible to do so), but to analyze, by imagining for a moment their absence, what bearing these privileged
systems have on all of us in terms of our hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations. We live in a world not only
structured but saturated by technology and gender, the characteristics and consequences of which are
explored in this anthology.
DISCERNING TECHNOLOGY
In a very basic sense, the term technology conjures up the objects we call tools or machines. In human
origin stories offered to us by archaeologists and physical anthropologists, tools signify culture and
civilization, distinguishing Man [sic] from other species of life and providing evidence of his superior
relation to the natural world. Tools are proof of Man’s innate faculty of rationality. In these origin tales,
tools are generally defined as the means to harness energy, to get the job of survival done, and eventually to
ensure health, security, and convenience; in short, tools and their descendants, machines, are civilized and
civilizing. They are signs of progress. They enhance life, and their designers and users are, by definition,
civilized, or so the story goes. Critics of this positivist and laudatory definition of technology begin by
asking whose lives are being enhanced through technological development. Problems of automation, de-
skilling, unemployment, and work speed-ups caused by machines are seldom addressed (Aronowitz 1994),
to say nothing of the worldwide ecological destruction and planned “uneven” development wrought by
modern Western technology when it is imposed upon Third World countries (Sachs 1992), or the
paradoxical effect of household appliances actually adding to women’s burdens of housekeeping (Cowan
1983; Strasser 1982). Nevertheless, archaeologists’ tales, World Bank development schemes, and General
Electric “We-Bring-Good-Things-To-Life” advertising campaigns often rhyme with one another.
