Jenny Sundén

What Happened to Difference in Cyberspace? The (Re)turn of the She-Cyborg

One of the most recent trends in feminist theory and practice has grown out of an emergent use of new communication technologies. It has to an increasing extent by several theorists and practitioners been labeled a cyberfeminismo . The term itself has been cruising the Net in different forms for several years, avoiding any ® nal de® nition of its inner content and purpose. Despite this ̄ uidity it is possible to ® nd at least two, partly contradictory tendencies. One of these operates on a sophisticated theoretical level of feminism and technoscience, where Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a central character. The other formation is more openly connected to a political movement, searching to integrate different women’s everyday lives and their actual use of communication technology. The tension between the two is very much a high-tech version of the classical feminist divide between the striving for a breakdown of a womano as a category to minimize the meaning of sex difference, and the need to keep the category as a foundation for identity and political action. In contrast to the use of cyborgs in mainstream science ® ction as an illustration of a hardened masculinity through the fusion of the (hu)man and technology, the ® rst cyberfeminism mentioned above reads the cyborg as transcendence of the dichotomous categorization male/female towards a genderless utopia. In the Internet among disembodied subjectivities, this feminist utopia could be realized. The absence of the physical body in this world opens up for the possibility of a life beyond the dichotomous categorizations of Enlightenment epistemology. On the other side of the cyberfeminist divide, women worldwide seek through networking and through their different experiences with technology to create special women’s spaces of resistance in between the patriarchal structures of the Net. These streams of feminist thought and action are not clearly separable and intermingle in the Web, rather (hyper)linked in a myriad of ways. For analytical purposes it would be useful though to keep them at least partly separated. The purpose of this article is to capture some distinctive features in the feminism(s) slowly taking shape on the Net, its theoretical and political implications. What constitutes the grounding, the foundation of cyberfeminism? How do cyberfeminists conceptualize gender and female identity? Secondly, it is an attempt to introduce an alternative cyberfeminism through the conceptualization of a feminist cyborg in terms of a sexual differenceo . The text departs from three

Desires at Play On Closeness and Epistemological Uncertainty

This article discusses knowledge production in game studies by exploring notions of emotion, closeness and (queer) desire in new media ethnography. It uses field notes and experiences from an ethnographic study of the online game World of Warcraft. As opposed to the kind of fieldwork where being, living, and staying in the field is the only option, new media ethnography brings with it the possibility of moving through different locations and bodies to the point where the borders between them may start to blur. The text positions itself within this very uncertainty to investigate its consequences for ways of knowing online game cultures. Drawing on autoethnography, as well as the body of ethnographic work interrogating erotic subjectivity and desire in the field, the discussion makes use of personal experiences - in particular an in-game as well as out-of-the game love affair - as potentially important sources of knowledge. Was it her, regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Or was it the game “itself ”? The article provides the story of a particular way of being introduced to and of falling for a game, a woman, and the ways in which these two were intensely connected. Set against the backdrop of “the affective turn” in cultural and feminist theory, and in making visible how desire may circulate through game spaces, the article argues for an articulation of desire as intimately related to technology; of desiring technology and of technological, or perhaps technologized desires.

Steampunk Practices: Time, Tactility, and a Racial Politics of Touch

Sara met me at the train station. Dressed in black, well-tailored clothing inspired by the turn of the last century. At the house in the Swedish countryside, I got a quick tour. Upstairs a sewing room with mannequins and big closets, a four-poster bed with parts of the latest LARP (live action role-playing) project all spread out. Downstairs the living room with all kinds of flea market finds, among them an old gramophone. The conversation circled around the allure of steampunk. For Sara, it has to do with a passion for alternate history and do-it-yourself practices. “Steampunk is very forgiving”, she said, “there’s not just one way of doing it. You can bend it, make things up, fantasize.” For her husband Pierre, steampunk is a relatively abstract attribute that can be added to other things, but the specific combinations are important, so that “it feels and tastes steampunk.” Steampunk needs to be in touch with the era of steam-powered technologies, they argued, and the materials and fabrics need to have the right “feel”. It is difficult to put brass, cogs and cogwheels next to plastic and rubber and still call it steampunk. This is something I’ve heard repeatedly since; “it needs to have the right feel.”

Shameless hags and tolerance whores: feminist resistance and the affective circuits of online hate

Abstract This article explores shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resistance to online misogyny, hate and shaming within a Nordic context. In our Swedish examples, this involves affective reclaiming of the term “hagga” (hag), which has come to embody shameless femininity and feminist solidarity, as well as the Facebook event “Skamlös utsläckning” (shameless extinction), which extends the solidarity or the hag to a collective of non-men. Our Finnish examples revolve around appropriating derisive terms used of women defending multiculturalism and countering the current rise of nationalist anti-immigration policy and activism across Web platforms, such as “kukkahattutäti” (aunt with a flower hat) and “suvakkihuora” (“overtly tolerant whore”). Drawing on Facebook posts, blogs and discussion forums, the article conceptualizes the affective dynamics and intersectional nature of online hate against women and other others. More specifically, we examine the dynamics of shaming and the possibilities of shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resistance. Since online humor often targets women, racial others and queers, the models of resistance that this article uncovers add a new stitch to its memetic logics. We propose that a networked politics of reclaiming is taking shape, one using collective imagination and wit to refuel feminist communities.

Femininity revisited – A round table

One of our motivations for this special issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies has been the paradox that femininity has posed for feminist theory. As we wrote in the introduction, it remains relatively under-scrutinised in the journal as well as, to some extent, more broadly in women’s/gender studies: on the one hand, a central problem especially for (white) women, on the other, a seemingly undertheorised concept. Curiously, while we have deconstructed ‘woman’ as a unified subject and object of feminism, femininity itself seems to still need further reconfiguration. As an afterword to this issue, special issue editors Ulrika Dahl and Jenny Sundén have worked with Open Forum editor madeleine kennedy-macfoy on inviting a few scholars who have influenced our own work and whose work in turn has developed theoretical discussions around femininity to a virtual round table discussion. We thank Professor Lina Gálvez-Muñoz and PhD researcher Laura Martínez-Jiménez, both scholars at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville) and members of GEP&DO Observatory; Gayatri Gopinath, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University; Clare Hemmings, Professor of Gender Theory, London School of Economics; and Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Race and Education at Leeds Beckett University for agreeing to share their thoughts here. First of all and by way of opening this discussion, we’d like to ask each of you what comes to mind when you think of the concept of femininity and how it works in your own research?

Clockwork corsets: Pressed against the past

For a feminist scholar of technology, contemporary steampunk cultures incorporate several interesting elements. They embrace playful ways of relating to technology. They contain thrifty Do-It-Yourself strategies and ethics of recycling, linking the crafting of sexually specific bodies to imaginative time-play. They involve an intermingling of technological extensions with modes of embodiment and costuming. The corset is an emblematic Victorian, industrial technology in steampunk costuming, altering bodies and affects as well as aesthetics and politics. But how far can white, Victorian, middle-class, imperialist, corseted femininity be ‘punked’, twisted, modified or transformed? And how much do these transpositions in and through time get caught up in a machinery of repetition rather than revision? Or are there ways of thinking the old and the new differently altogether?