**Cyberfeminist Theories and the Benefits of Teaching Cyberfeminist Literature**

Maya Zalbidea Paniagua *Camilo José Cela University of Madrid Spain* 

#### **1. Introduction**

242 Social Sciences and Cultural Studies – Issues of Language, Public Opinion, Education and Welfare

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Sotelo, Xiana. (2009). "Intersectionality and Gender Perspective in the Virtual Communities

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Wollstoncraft, Mary.(1981). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London, Walter Scott;

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Yuval-Davis, Nora and Floya Anthias. (1992). Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and Anti-Racist Struggle. London, New York, Routledge.

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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3

In 2010 I had the opportunity to interview Julianne Pierce, writer and artist who took part of the first cyberfeminist group called VNS Matrix, at the conference "Riot Girls Techno Queen: the Rise of Laptop Generation Women" at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. When I asked her what she thought about present day cyberfeminism she answered melancholically: "Cyberfeminist movements are not as visible as they used to be during the 90s" ("Personal Interview with Julianne Pierce by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua" n/p) It is certainly true that the 80s and 90s supposed the golden age of cybercultures. Cybernetics arrived in the 1960s (Wiener 1968) but the glorious age of the Internet started in the 80s. In 1984 William Gibson coined the term cyberspace and anticipated the Internet revolution in his novel *Neuromancer* (1984). Other cyberpunk novels also illustrated a post-apocalyptic future such as: *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* (1968) by Philip K. Dick. Cyberpunk films such as *Blade Runner* (1982) and *The Terminator* (1984) received enormous impact. And some years later the Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, CERN publicized the new World Wide Web project in 1991, and during the 90s cyberfeminist theories and movements spread internationally. Unfortunately a climax of disillusion and a crisis of moral values has influenced negatively cyberfeminist thought, promoted by the idea that women in the third world cannot have access to the Internet, the battle between ecofeminists and cyberfeminists, and the ecological awareness of the difficulty to eliminate electronic garbage.

In the same conference I also had the opportunity to have a conversation with Professor Remedios Zafra, who investigates on cyberfeminism and the body in cyberspace. She has translated into Spanish language the most famous cyberfeminist media artworks and writings in her project "Violencia sin cuerpos", as well as introducing cyberfeminist and body theories in cyberspace in the Spanish academia publishing: *Netianas N(h)acer mujer en Internet* (2005) and has recently published *Un cuarto propio conectado. (Ciber)espacio y (auto)gestión del yo* (Fórcola, Madrid, 2010) as well as coordinated "X0y1 #ensayos sobre género y ciberespacio" (2010). When I commented that I was doing my research on topics related to hers, she coincided with Julianne Pierce's view that most of the research on cyberfeminism corresponds to the 90s period. Notwithstanding this fact, due to the increase of electronic media for reading, a renewed interest on feminist networks emerged. Nowadays the use of the new technologies is becoming more responsible and professional

Cyberfeminist Theories and the Benefits of Teaching Cyberfeminist Literature 245

very imprecise for us" (Haraway, *Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature* 153). Humans have always used tools to satisfy their needs and desires, primitive men and women worked with sticks, stones, spires, used make up and wore piercings. Present day humans use cars, computers, cellphones and other technological body extensions such as prosthesis. Haraway affirms how even if we are not aware of it we are connecting the technology to our bodies: "We are all cyborgs, hybrids of machine and organism" (p.150). Haraway makes reference to the tools of early primate females, the baby-sling and the containers for carrying things that these female primates invented to make their lives easier. These inventions were right alongside male-created weaponry tools. Those baby-slings combined with modern cosmetic surgery and other technology adaptations for women were a revelation (Haraway, *Primate Visions* 196, 334). Furthermore, according to Katherine Hayles, we have always been posthuman (Hayles 279). In sciences we find constant prosthetic applications: the C-Leg system by Otto Bock HealthCare to replace a human leg that has been amputated because of injury or illness, cochlear and magnetic implants and even the possibility to link the nervous system into the Internet as Kevin Warwick showed

The term "cyborg" was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to refer to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in space, in extraterrestrial environments. Clynes melded "cybernetics" and "organism" into "cyborg". Both, Clynes and Kline suggested that humans could be modified with implants and drugs so that they could exist in space without space suits (Gray 18): "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him in space" (Clynes and Kline 26). Recently, NASA and General Motors revealed "Robonaut 2", a very advanced humanoid robot. It was part of the payload of Shuttle Discovery on the successful launch February 24, 2010. This robot is intended to do

All these experiments with cyborgs and humanoid robots provide the possibilities of humans living in other planets. This question creates controversy for the hypothetical inmorality of altering the nature of humans to develop cyborg astronauts. Grant Gillett, a professor of medical ethics at the Bioethics Center of the University of Otago Medical School in New Zealand expressed the ethical concern of the alteration of humans which can be so significantly that they could end up being not entirely human (Herath "Cyborg Astronauts needed to colonize space" n/p). Medical and military interventions to inject implants in human beings for getting information causes controversy too, for the loss of private life and

Cyborgs have been in the imaginary long time ago before technological advances. Centuries before, in 1843, Edgar Allan Poe described a man with extensive prostheses in the short story "The Man That Was Used Up". In 1908, Jean de la Hire introduced "Nyctalope" -the first cyborg superhero- in the novel *L'Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L'eau* (*The Man Who Can Live in the Water*). Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his novel *The Comet Doom* in 1928. He later featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating around in a transparent case, in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future. In the short story "No Woman Born" in 1944, C. L. Moore imagined a dancer whose body was burned completely and whose brain was

spacewalks for NASA ("Robonaut 2 wakes up in space" Nasa Homepage).

the nightmarish possibility of being mentally controlled via satellite.

placed in a faceless but beautiful and supple mechanical body.

in his 2002 Project Cyborg.

in communication, research and education, and curiosity for the effects of this Information Society revolution is increasing. In cyberspace private becomes public and thus, it is beneficial to cyberfeminists to accomplish the common objectives of feminists: take part in public life and empowering themselves creating communities of politically and socially active women.

### **2. Bodies and gender in cyberspace**

In cyberspace and electronic literature the reader and writer become posthuman. Machines become writers and writers become machines. The term posthuman is regarded positively by Katherine Hayles in *How We Became Posthuman*, from her view human can be a distributed cognitive system, where part of the intelligence lies in the human brain, part in intelligent machines and part in the interface between them (Wiman "N. Katherine Hayles: *How We Became Posthuman* n/p).

Katherine Hayles explains in *How We Became Posthuman* that it seems to be difficult to try to guess when we are talking to a person or a machine in the famous Turing test. Every time an individual uses a computer and cannot see the recipient the task consists of posing questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. When one cannot distinguish the intelligent machine from the intelligent human there is some evidence that, to some extent, machines can think.

*The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman (Hayles xiv)* 

Electronic literature is the one that can only be read on a computer while cyberliterature is generated by computers. Cyberliterature is a literary proposal where the machine can be considered co-author of the text (Borrás 42). In generative writing the human writer disappears. It is the machine which creates writing without human intervention. The traditional printed text is static while the digital is dynamic. The distinction of woman, man, human and machine is blurred in the use of the new technologies. As Donna Haraway affirms, the cyborg suggests the possibility of moving beyond the old limits of male and female into a new world of human, machine and animals (Haraway 173). Haraway used the metaphor of the cyborg as a means of understanding and navigating one's place in a rapidly ever-changing techno-scientific world as well as challenging what it means to be human.

Our daily use of computers is influencing us to become cyborgs, we depend on the Internet to manage practically all our social and commercial transactions: e-mails, booking on-line, searching for information, using GPS with our mobile phones, learning on-line, interacting in social networks (*facebook, twitter, myspace*), etc. When technology is added to human body in a real physical extension to repair a deficiency (in the use of contact lenses, glasses, false teeth) or to change the physical appearance (highlights on the hair, wearing heels or beauty surgery) it is not easy to identify the limits between nature and technology. As Haraway affirmed in her "Cyborg Manifesto" : "the boundary between physical and non-physical is

in communication, research and education, and curiosity for the effects of this Information Society revolution is increasing. In cyberspace private becomes public and thus, it is beneficial to cyberfeminists to accomplish the common objectives of feminists: take part in public life and empowering themselves creating communities of politically and socially

In cyberspace and electronic literature the reader and writer become posthuman. Machines become writers and writers become machines. The term posthuman is regarded positively by Katherine Hayles in *How We Became Posthuman*, from her view human can be a distributed cognitive system, where part of the intelligence lies in the human brain, part in intelligent machines and part in the interface between them (Wiman "N. Katherine Hayles:

Katherine Hayles explains in *How We Became Posthuman* that it seems to be difficult to try to guess when we are talking to a person or a machine in the famous Turing test. Every time an individual uses a computer and cannot see the recipient the task consists of posing questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. When one cannot distinguish the intelligent machine from the intelligent human there is some evidence that,

*The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have* 

Electronic literature is the one that can only be read on a computer while cyberliterature is generated by computers. Cyberliterature is a literary proposal where the machine can be considered co-author of the text (Borrás 42). In generative writing the human writer disappears. It is the machine which creates writing without human intervention. The traditional printed text is static while the digital is dynamic. The distinction of woman, man, human and machine is blurred in the use of the new technologies. As Donna Haraway affirms, the cyborg suggests the possibility of moving beyond the old limits of male and female into a new world of human, machine and animals (Haraway 173). Haraway used the metaphor of the cyborg as a means of understanding and navigating one's place in a rapidly ever-changing techno-scientific world as well as challenging what it means to be human.

Our daily use of computers is influencing us to become cyborgs, we depend on the Internet to manage practically all our social and commercial transactions: e-mails, booking on-line, searching for information, using GPS with our mobile phones, learning on-line, interacting in social networks (*facebook, twitter, myspace*), etc. When technology is added to human body in a real physical extension to repair a deficiency (in the use of contact lenses, glasses, false teeth) or to change the physical appearance (highlights on the hair, wearing heels or beauty surgery) it is not easy to identify the limits between nature and technology. As Haraway affirmed in her "Cyborg Manifesto" : "the boundary between physical and non-physical is

active women.

**2. Bodies and gender in cyberspace** 

*How We Became Posthuman* n/p).

to some extent, machines can think.

*already become posthuman (Hayles xiv)* 

very imprecise for us" (Haraway, *Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature* 153). Humans have always used tools to satisfy their needs and desires, primitive men and women worked with sticks, stones, spires, used make up and wore piercings. Present day humans use cars, computers, cellphones and other technological body extensions such as prosthesis. Haraway affirms how even if we are not aware of it we are connecting the technology to our bodies: "We are all cyborgs, hybrids of machine and organism" (p.150). Haraway makes reference to the tools of early primate females, the baby-sling and the containers for carrying things that these female primates invented to make their lives easier. These inventions were right alongside male-created weaponry tools. Those baby-slings combined with modern cosmetic surgery and other technology adaptations for women were a revelation (Haraway, *Primate Visions* 196, 334). Furthermore, according to Katherine Hayles, we have always been posthuman (Hayles 279). In sciences we find constant prosthetic applications: the C-Leg system by Otto Bock HealthCare to replace a human leg that has been amputated because of injury or illness, cochlear and magnetic implants and even the possibility to link the nervous system into the Internet as Kevin Warwick showed in his 2002 Project Cyborg.

The term "cyborg" was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to refer to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in space, in extraterrestrial environments. Clynes melded "cybernetics" and "organism" into "cyborg". Both, Clynes and Kline suggested that humans could be modified with implants and drugs so that they could exist in space without space suits (Gray 18): "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him in space" (Clynes and Kline 26). Recently, NASA and General Motors revealed "Robonaut 2", a very advanced humanoid robot. It was part of the payload of Shuttle Discovery on the successful launch February 24, 2010. This robot is intended to do spacewalks for NASA ("Robonaut 2 wakes up in space" Nasa Homepage).

All these experiments with cyborgs and humanoid robots provide the possibilities of humans living in other planets. This question creates controversy for the hypothetical inmorality of altering the nature of humans to develop cyborg astronauts. Grant Gillett, a professor of medical ethics at the Bioethics Center of the University of Otago Medical School in New Zealand expressed the ethical concern of the alteration of humans which can be so significantly that they could end up being not entirely human (Herath "Cyborg Astronauts needed to colonize space" n/p). Medical and military interventions to inject implants in human beings for getting information causes controversy too, for the loss of private life and the nightmarish possibility of being mentally controlled via satellite.

Cyborgs have been in the imaginary long time ago before technological advances. Centuries before, in 1843, Edgar Allan Poe described a man with extensive prostheses in the short story "The Man That Was Used Up". In 1908, Jean de la Hire introduced "Nyctalope" -the first cyborg superhero- in the novel *L'Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L'eau* (*The Man Who Can Live in the Water*). Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his novel *The Comet Doom* in 1928. He later featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating around in a transparent case, in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future. In the short story "No Woman Born" in 1944, C. L. Moore imagined a dancer whose body was burned completely and whose brain was placed in a faceless but beautiful and supple mechanical body.

Cyberfeminist Theories and the Benefits of Teaching Cyberfeminist Literature 247

Another artist who experiments with his own body following a posthuman philosophy is Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. Most of his works are centered on his idea that the human body is obsolete. Orlan based one of her operations on a text by Antonin Artaud who dreamed of a body without organs. Transhumanist artists and scientists are obsessed with the dream of the disappearance of the body, an old idea which Plato had already discussed, considering the body as a prison of the soul. Stelarc uses medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has made three films of the inside of his body and has performed with a third hand and a virtual arm. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. For 'Third Ear' he surgically constructed an extra ear within his arm that was Internet enabled, making it an publicly accessible acoustical organ for people in other places. Another more recent artist, French artist Émilie Simon is one of the latest cyborg musicians, she uses a prosthetic arm to control music effects and distort her own voice when performing her songs in which she mixes organic sounds, like her own voice or the sound of water, with electronic music. Her voice

Orlan, Stelarc and Simon's work questions if our natural or artificial body represents our identity or not and how artificial materials added to the body can make the individual feel that he or she can be transformed physically to look like the self he/she feels inside. The notion we have of ourselves does not necessarily correspond to our physical bodies. An old person does not recognize himself/herself in the mirror, and some old people use a picture of themselves when they were young on their social networks profiles because this is how they may feel inside or would like to look: young and beautiful. Transgendered people think that their sex does not correspond to their gender, and in order to get rid of this ambiguity some have sex change operations. Some intersexuals also have sex change surgery, however, recent researches on intersexuals problematics reject the idea of surgical interventions on babies because they consider that the idea comes from some doctors who assume that intersexuals cannot have a real identity. Parent's choice of the baby's genitalia can create a gender identity problem on the individual in case that he/she does not feel identified with the imposed gender. Furthermore, 20-50% of surgical cases result in a loss of sexual sensation ("The Surgical Management of Infants and Children With Ambiguous

The perception of our own body has changed through decades. Merci Torras explains that before the creation of mirrors, men and women were born, lived and died without having seen their whole bodies, and on the contrary nowadays we can not imagine ourselves without looking at a mirror (Trans. from Spanish by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, *Textualidades Electrónicas* Borrás 147). Cyberspace allows the individual to lose gender or to acquire different identities at the same time. When the Internet user adopts different roles, bodies or gender, he/she may acquire unconsciously transgressive identities. Cyberspace has been seen as a place where nobody is judged in no respect by one's body, but perhaps by an imagined body. Gender, race and class can disappear in the non-physical relationships online. In online games, social networks and chats, people change their genders and play the role of a different gender from the one they own. However, we wonder: Are these gender performances subversive? In the MUDs, Lori Kendall observed, this was not necessarily true. The performance was not always acknowledged, and imitations were not always subversive (Kendall quoted in Raymond "Performativity on the Net" n/p). Judith Butler

becomes robotic in her album *The Big Machine* (2009).

Genitalia" Newman, Randolph and Anderson 644).

Some artists have used cybernetic mechanisms to improve their bodies, to express monstruosity, or for artistic experimentation. This is the case of Orlan, the first artist to use surgery as an artistic medium, what she called: "Carnal Art" which consisted of modifying her body through constant surgical interventions. This French artist recorded her operations and used the videos as a performance. "Carnal Art" opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art:

*Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between desfiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a "modified ready-made", no longer seen as the ideal it once represented; the body is not anymore this ideal ready-made it was satisfying to sign ("Manifesto of Carnal Art", Orlan n/p)* 

In May 1990 Orlan started a project called: "The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan". She underwent nine plastic surgical operations to transform herself into a new woman. With these operations her aim was to deconstruct mythological images of women: have the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Orlan stated: "my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!" (Orlan, Official Website n/p)

Many feminists consider Orlan an anti-feminist because she embraces plastic surgery, which is painful and dangerous for health. Orlan states that she is trying to reveal against beauty canons that men have invented. As a response, we may wonder: Would not be more appropriate to admit that instead of liberating herself from those beauty canons suggested by male artists she is using her own body as an object of circus spectacles, suffering painful plastic surgeries? Orlan has answered to feminist reproaches in the following way:

*Feminists reproach me for promoting cosmetic surgery. In fact, although I am a feminist, I am not against cosmetic surgery. In the past we had a life expectancy of forty to fifty years. Today, it has risen to seventy or eighty (and is still rising). We all have a feeling of strangeness in front of a mirror; this often becomes more acute as we age. For some people this becomes unbearable and the use of cosmetic surgery could be very positive (Orlan, Official Website n/p)* 

The intervention of cybernetics in the human body is an idea that comes from science fiction narratives and it is present nowadays. Tattoos and piercings are signs of ancient tribes and metaphors of avant-garde and cyberculture at the same time. Most of celebrities in the media get plastic surgery. Michael Jackson's change of skin color is one of the most representative ones. The spectators have unavoidably fantasies of posthumanism "developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities" (Brostrom n/p). In the 21st century citizens dream of having a body in which all beautiful possibilities are exalted. According to María Goicoechea de Jorge Orlan's live plastic surgery and her slogan represents the spirit of the 90s in relation to body and its manipulation, the continuous insatisfaction, beauty as an ideal which is always beyond us, a feeling of disadjustment and lack of identification of our own body (Trans. from Spanish by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, Goicoechea 406).

Some artists have used cybernetic mechanisms to improve their bodies, to express monstruosity, or for artistic experimentation. This is the case of Orlan, the first artist to use surgery as an artistic medium, what she called: "Carnal Art" which consisted of modifying her body through constant surgical interventions. This French artist recorded her operations and used the videos as a performance. "Carnal Art" opposes the social pressures that are

*Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between desfiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a "modified ready-made", no longer seen as the ideal it once represented; the body is not anymore this ideal ready-made it was satisfying to sign* 

In May 1990 Orlan started a project called: "The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan". She underwent nine plastic surgical operations to transform herself into a new woman. With these operations her aim was to deconstruct mythological images of women: have the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Orlan stated: "my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!" (Orlan, Official

Many feminists consider Orlan an anti-feminist because she embraces plastic surgery, which is painful and dangerous for health. Orlan states that she is trying to reveal against beauty canons that men have invented. As a response, we may wonder: Would not be more appropriate to admit that instead of liberating herself from those beauty canons suggested by male artists she is using her own body as an object of circus spectacles, suffering painful

*Feminists reproach me for promoting cosmetic surgery. In fact, although I am a feminist, I am not against cosmetic surgery. In the past we had a life expectancy of forty to fifty years. Today, it has risen to seventy or eighty (and is still rising). We all have a feeling of strangeness in front of a mirror; this often becomes more acute as we age. For some people this becomes unbearable and* 

The intervention of cybernetics in the human body is an idea that comes from science fiction narratives and it is present nowadays. Tattoos and piercings are signs of ancient tribes and metaphors of avant-garde and cyberculture at the same time. Most of celebrities in the media get plastic surgery. Michael Jackson's change of skin color is one of the most representative ones. The spectators have unavoidably fantasies of posthumanism "developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities" (Brostrom n/p). In the 21st century citizens dream of having a body in which all beautiful possibilities are exalted. According to María Goicoechea de Jorge Orlan's live plastic surgery and her slogan represents the spirit of the 90s in relation to body and its manipulation, the continuous insatisfaction, beauty as an ideal which is always beyond us, a feeling of disadjustment and lack of identification of our own body (Trans. from Spanish by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua,

plastic surgeries? Orlan has answered to feminist reproaches in the following way:

*the use of cosmetic surgery could be very positive (Orlan, Official Website n/p)* 

exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art:

*("Manifesto of Carnal Art", Orlan n/p)* 

Website n/p)

Goicoechea 406).

Another artist who experiments with his own body following a posthuman philosophy is Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. Most of his works are centered on his idea that the human body is obsolete. Orlan based one of her operations on a text by Antonin Artaud who dreamed of a body without organs. Transhumanist artists and scientists are obsessed with the dream of the disappearance of the body, an old idea which Plato had already discussed, considering the body as a prison of the soul. Stelarc uses medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has made three films of the inside of his body and has performed with a third hand and a virtual arm. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. For 'Third Ear' he surgically constructed an extra ear within his arm that was Internet enabled, making it an publicly accessible acoustical organ for people in other places. Another more recent artist, French artist Émilie Simon is one of the latest cyborg musicians, she uses a prosthetic arm to control music effects and distort her own voice when performing her songs in which she mixes organic sounds, like her own voice or the sound of water, with electronic music. Her voice becomes robotic in her album *The Big Machine* (2009).

Orlan, Stelarc and Simon's work questions if our natural or artificial body represents our identity or not and how artificial materials added to the body can make the individual feel that he or she can be transformed physically to look like the self he/she feels inside. The notion we have of ourselves does not necessarily correspond to our physical bodies. An old person does not recognize himself/herself in the mirror, and some old people use a picture of themselves when they were young on their social networks profiles because this is how they may feel inside or would like to look: young and beautiful. Transgendered people think that their sex does not correspond to their gender, and in order to get rid of this ambiguity some have sex change operations. Some intersexuals also have sex change surgery, however, recent researches on intersexuals problematics reject the idea of surgical interventions on babies because they consider that the idea comes from some doctors who assume that intersexuals cannot have a real identity. Parent's choice of the baby's genitalia can create a gender identity problem on the individual in case that he/she does not feel identified with the imposed gender. Furthermore, 20-50% of surgical cases result in a loss of sexual sensation ("The Surgical Management of Infants and Children With Ambiguous Genitalia" Newman, Randolph and Anderson 644).

The perception of our own body has changed through decades. Merci Torras explains that before the creation of mirrors, men and women were born, lived and died without having seen their whole bodies, and on the contrary nowadays we can not imagine ourselves without looking at a mirror (Trans. from Spanish by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, *Textualidades Electrónicas* Borrás 147). Cyberspace allows the individual to lose gender or to acquire different identities at the same time. When the Internet user adopts different roles, bodies or gender, he/she may acquire unconsciously transgressive identities. Cyberspace has been seen as a place where nobody is judged in no respect by one's body, but perhaps by an imagined body. Gender, race and class can disappear in the non-physical relationships online. In online games, social networks and chats, people change their genders and play the role of a different gender from the one they own. However, we wonder: Are these gender performances subversive? In the MUDs, Lori Kendall observed, this was not necessarily true. The performance was not always acknowledged, and imitations were not always subversive (Kendall quoted in Raymond "Performativity on the Net" n/p). Judith Butler

Cyberfeminist Theories and the Benefits of Teaching Cyberfeminist Literature 249

knowledge of the previous feminist theories she follows or objects. My research contributes to study of feminist and gender theory emphasizing the importance of reading and rereading

Haraway's theories were clearly influenced by one of the most important works of the third wave and present day feminisms: G*ender Trouble* (1990) by Judith Butler. In her first work Butler enacted a very logical reason about women and men condition affirming that both sex and gender are constructed. This idea is inspired from J. L. Austin *How to Do Things with Words* (1962) and Jacques Derrida's "Signature, Event, Context" (1971) as well as Paul de Man's notion of "matalepsis" in *Allegories of Reading* (1981). Butler revolutionized the concept

*In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of Identity, Butler denaturalizes gender categories by proposing that they are performative; That is, gender is part of an overall structure* 

*There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historic experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy,* 

For Haraway a cyborg has a changing identity and feminists should create coalitions based on affinity rather than on identity. Haraway supports Chela Sandoval's theory on "oppositional consciousness" (1984) arguing that feminists had suffered breakdowns because of insisting on the idea of unity rather than on multiplicity: "Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) has made the concept of woman elusive" (Haraway 155), and women of color contribution to feminism is essential to transform the old colonialist way of thinking. If we read the text Haraway's is refering to: Chela Sandoval's "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World" we will realise that what she is supporting is that it is essential to consider the distinction of some women to others as positive. "Oppositional consciousness"

*I propose that the hegemonic, feminist structure of oppositional consciousness be recognized for* 

*classes which have sought subjective forms of resistance other than those forms determined by* 

Admitting that there are many feminisms and women have different needs depending on their culture, religion, philosophies, history, profession, background, etc is one of the most appropriate positions that some third wave feminists like Donna Haraway defends. Haraway coincides with Katie King in the idea that taxonimizing -classifying into categories- the feminist movement into liberal, radical or socialist only creates a battle

*...*

 *Those subordinated* 

Like Judith Butler, who does not believe in purely feminine or masculine behaviors but "performative" acts which follow rituals imposed by culture and society, Haraway also rejects the idea of the situation of all women as a universal one. Haraway criticizes some of the second-wave determinations. Haraway responds to the essentialist feminism rejecting any theory which identifies the constitution of gender identity or patriarchy, universal,

previous and subsequent feminist theories before criticizing third wave feminist ideas.

of gender creating a fusion of feminist insights into linguistic theories.

historical and necessary. For Haraway:

*colonialism, and capitalism (Haraway 155)* 

consists of the opposition to the dominant social order:

*the social order itself (Sandoval 2-3, 10-11)* 

*what it is, reconceptualized, and replaced by the structure which follows.* 

*of power that can be disrupted by individual agency (Xiana Sotelo, 342)* 

points out that the ambivalence between the ideal and the norm makes compulsory heterosexuality forever unstable, forever needing to reinforce itself, to repeat imitations of its ideals. Compulsory heterosexuality is performative because it is an ideal which we fail to approximate, and because it is an identification which we exceed, and which we cannot define us completely. Ambivalence means that compulsory heterosexuality it is a performance requiring a reiteration of norms and the continued exclusion of that which exceeds certain definitions of sexuality, race, and gender. As Butler explains performativity is not a deliberate "act" but rather as the reiterative practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names (Butler, *Bodies that Matter* 2). In cyberspace performativity and gender differences remain, therefore, it is cyberfeminists objective to create non-phallocentric spaces where women can stand for their rights.
