Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Nevertheless cyborg theory has presented a powerful set of tools for
women, and others, to engage positively with new technology with-
out abandoning the radical promise of Feminism. The Manifesto's
publication as part of Haraway's collection of essays
Simians, Cyborgs
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
in the early
s coincided
with the emergence of a new wave of feminist thought and action,
which, after a moribund period in the '
1990
s, sought to reinvigorate the
gender struggle. A catalytic series of events made clear the necessity
of such reinvigoration, including the Kennedy Smith and Tyson rape
trials and the congressional hearings for the accusations brought
against Supreme-Court nominee Clarence Thomas by his former
colleague Anita Hill. One result of the anger these events generated
was the Women's Action Coalition or WAC, which developed
sophisticated means for using communications technology, includ-
ing telephone trees, fax machines, e-mail and exploitation of media
contacts. Aside from these examples of practical use, third-wave
feminism did not, at first, actively engage with new technologies.
But elements of the third wave did take up questions of community
and identity in ways that resonated with the cyborg ideas of Haraway,
and the emerging possibilities of electronic networked communica-
tion. The idea of identity and gender as constructs was an important
to poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, as well to Queer
Theory and the liberal strain within Feminism.
80
punk and deconstruction
The developments in theory and philosophy described above echoed
developments in areas such as music, design and literature. In the
mid-
s Derrida's
De la grammatologie
was published in English
in the landmark translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Its
philosophical denseness and complexity made it inaccessible to all
but a few. Nevertheless its questioning of the totalizing nature of
dominant forms of knowledge, and its assertion of the material
1970
