Seductions to Organic Wholeness

It's no secret that one of the things that perplexes me in the field is the canonization of Donna Haraway. Every paper I have seen in the last five years, if they intend to talk about robots or the cyborg at all, in any sense, has the obligatory quote from Haraway, no matter how shoehorned it is. 

Can I just say, I think we can talk about robots, especially fictional robots, without invoking St Haraway?  Can we realize that the majority of Simians, Cyborgs and Women, which is, after all, over 20 years old, is aspirational only?  And while I have no problems with aspiration and imagining new possibilities on a threshold of a new vector, it seems to be used instead in lieu of reality, rather than a measure of possibility against which to regularize or evaluate reality.

Let's face it, most of the promises and hopes of SCW have not come to pass.  I am thinking, especially and at first, about social presence online. Haraway promises transgression, that, say, an internet allows one to shed or transgress gender and race and age, to leave aside or behind the human, in lieu of an ultimate postmodern existence: fractured, playful, ironic, mercurial, and by essence undefinable.  At one point, she says, "The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust." (151).

However, we, the cyborg's organic root, we are made of mud.  And it seems we bring that 'mud' with us wherever we go.

We claim that the internet can free us from, say, gender, but I see, when I throw aside my Haraway-colored glasses, a ruthless inscription of gender, the exact opposite of transgression and playful freedom and irony, in fan communities.

In the Transformers fandom, there is a clear gender divide simply in internet presence. The males gather in the forums, doing their best to make it unwelcoming to 'female' things (not females but things they regard as female), and the women live in other fan communities, on tumblr, livejournal, dreamwidth, tumblr.  There was once a conversation on a major forum about, basically. 'why slashfic' and that turned with stunning speed into a hate fest and speedily deleted by the moderators as unacceptable. Not the violent homophobia spewed by the commenters, but the topic itself. Because, of course, relationships between genderless fictional beings is not acceptable for children, but the violent torture they regularly feature in IDW comics...is.    Seibertron.com has a 'ladies thread', which very name indicates that that is, in a sense, a corral where the women should be--the rest of the site is, then, not 'ladies' territory, not woman space.

Now, of course, that's not entirely true, women are allowed throughout the site and I've had a number of good conversations about comics and toys and other aspects of canon on that site.  But once again, the idea of having to dedicate a space for females speaks for itself--there are certain topics/things they think of as female that are not safe anywhere else.

So what, you say. I can shed my 'mud' and become genderless on those sites and it's all good and Haraway wins!

Well, no. It's not that simple. Because of course 'genderless' as it has been for most of Western culture, means 'male'.  I grew up still using the 'universal he' (each student will hand in his paper), simply a vestigial tail of gender non-neutrality.  We politically correct this to the agrammatical 'their', but that doesn't do much to break down the insidious part of the gender binary, where everything is a deviation off of the 'gold standard' of educated, heterosexual, white male. To 'pass' for male on a fansite means that I cannot talk about certain topics, like cosplay (though posting pictures of myself in sexually revealing cosplay is an exception, because, of course, I am then offering myself as a sexualized visual pleasure), or slash fiction, regardless of rating.  Kitbashing is okay: plushiemaking, NOT okay.

'Passing' on the internet means being dishonest about the totality of my fannish interests.  This is fragmentizing, yes, but I don't think it's what Haraway promised, because this sort of fracturing of self requires hiding to pass, requires splitting myself in order to belong, hiding other shards for fear of not-belonging.  That's not freedom, that's not transgression.  That's the exact opposite.

One other quick hit, because this isn't a rarrrr men and the phallocracy.  Women, females, are just as implicated in this sort of gender policing of the other (another post I will tackle self-gender-policing).  For example, many online roleplayers in Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, Tumblr, and Livejournal are female. A large number of them want to RP relationships and sex between their characters. In other words, they want to roleplay sexual relationships with a fantasy projection of themselves with someone else they find sexually attractive. I will go so far as to suggest that many female RPers who fit into this category are less attractive than the characters they play, and many of them express their own infatuation with how hot or attractive their own character is to them. This is seen as normal and healthy and liberating. 

Yet.

Yet.  When someone is discovered to be male (I am going by secrets on Fandom!Secrets and the defunct RoleplaySecrets blogs on Livejournal), who also wants to roleplay sex with their fantasy attractive character, they are 'basement dwelling neckbeards' who are intruding in what is, apparently, female space.  A player who plays an attractive female character is suddenly 'squicked' to discover that the person she has been writing porn with is biologically male.

Now, this scenario is complex and worth unpacking further, because it is a nexus of 'safe' space, sexuality, policing, and identity, but I bring it here this time, only in the context of proof that this sort of gender policing is not simply Oppressive Patriarchy--females do this same behavior as well, discriminating by the gender of what cyberpunk labeled 'the meat'. In other words, the very people Haraway was addressing, the very people whom one would think are the most interested in breaking down gender and identity, who claim to want to destroy boundaries, to express a sexuality that women have often been told to hide or deny, are twisting their sexual liberation to make it an unsafe space for those with penises.

Isn't that...missing the point of Haraway? That 'male', that penis-owning person on the other keyboard, may be a 'cyborg' too, longing for freedom, wanting to escape the biological and cultural determinism of his body, may be trying to explore different identities, explore sexuality free of the pressure of Western gender obsessions.

If the point of the cyborg is freedom, it should mean freedom for EVERYONE, don't you think?