I think the order in which I read these articles definitely had an effect on how I read them. Starting with Harraway made sense, particularly as all of the other readings, save for the MOO transcript, explicitly referenced her. Ending with the MOO transcript, however, prejudiced my reading of it because I kept looking for a manifestation of some of the claims in the theoretical works in the conversation captured by the MOO, and I found them.
For instance, the Harraway piece works hard to promote the notion of affinity. She challenges us to think beyond dichotomies, because the notion and reality of cyborgian life demands it. Harraway does more than view cyborgianism through a feminist lens; she makes an argument that cyborgianism is the embodiment of “truer”? feminist principles, challenging the “Taxonomies of feminism [that] produce espistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience,” and establishing a reasonable way around “the theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation,” and other limited and destructive dichotomous views (7). The way Harraway’s thinking troubles the notions of “subject” and “agency” is particularly interesting to my thinking about Montessorian philosophies as applied to the teaching of writing. (More on that later.)
But the MOO transcript, which seems more of a casual conversation among self-identifying queer scholars in rhetoric and composition around the topic of the role of online “gay” sites and chat rooms, indicates nothing in the realm of affinities that attempt to move beyond issues of identity via differentiation. In fact, this conversation seemed to affirm that even among “techies”–these scholars identify as “technocomp”-ers, to use a phrase from Alexander and Rhodes’ On Multimodality (2015)–and techies who embrace and promote a cultural “queering”–embracing the “nature” of life as existing in messy, ill-define-able, anti-dichotic, middle grounds of gender, sexuality, and everything–there persists a fierce resistance to affinity in the service of identity.
The Moo transcript seems merely to confirm Nakamura’s “cybertypes,” too, particularly in her charge that utopian hopefulness for the potential anonymousness the internet confers is illusive and potentially damaging . Essentially the stereotyping present in the embodied world is manifesting in the virtual one. Nakamura’s focus is on racial stereotypes, but it’s a short walk to considering her insights as applied to any type of stereotyping of oppressed groups, like those of the LBGT community. The author argues that “Supposedly ‘flued’ selves are no less subject to cultural hegemonies, rules of conduct and regulating cultural nors than are ‘solid’ ones.” It may be that the MOO participants perceive their participation in online gay communities as freer from pressures present in RL settings, such as bars; it’s easier, perhaps, to forget about larger social contexts.
But this speaks to Feenburg’s reference to Heidegger’s “de-worlding power” (59), seems to me. It’s interesting to think about the implication of Feenburg “instrumentalization theory” and the “de-worlding” that so clearly seems to happen in the MOO transcript.
[Instrumentalization theory] involves a process of de-worlding in which objects are torn out of their original contexts and exposed to analysis and manipulation while subjects are positioned for distanced control. Modern societies are unique in de-worlding human beings in order to subject them to technical action–we call it management–and in pro- longing the basic gesture of de-worlding theoretically in technical disciplines which become the basis for complex technical networks.
There were two instances in the MOO transcript that felt very de-worlded to me. The first was in the discussion of men who are married in real life but lead alternative “virtual” lives online in gay chatrooms and on gay websites. This was mentioned in a totally decontextualized way; no mention of the suffering indicated by or surrounding such a situation. In fact there was virtually no discussion of RL social contextualization OR online “social” contextualization. Once someone mentioned a site that had a substantial commercial presence, but that was about it in terms of mentioning the groups “writing themselves” online.
It’s like the real estate of “online”-dom is neutral. I believe Nakamura claims this isn’t the case.
The other instance of decontextualization surfaces in the mention of HIV- men trying out identities of HIV+ men before they try IRL to become HIV+. There’s a word for that. There are words for all sorts of “types” of folks who identify LBGT. Seems like the RL identities become “options” for folks creating identities online. I’m not sure what’s changed by the “freedoms” of online communities dedicated to any particular group. Perhaps a lesser sense of anxiety IRL for members? But how is that “real”?
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