Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture

Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, editors. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: MIT Press, 2002.

Anthology of significant short stories, some excerpts from fictional works, and critical essays, with the brief description by MIT Press: "An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture" (link below, after longer excerpt from MIT P).

As of July 2023, the full table of contents on line at the Villanova U Falvey Library page here.[1]

DIRECTLY RELEVANT FICTION:

Candas Jane Dorsey, "(Learning About) Machine Sex"
Anne McCaffrey, "The Ship Who Sang"
Mary Rosenblum, "Entrada"
Melissa Scott, Trouble and Her Friends excerpt
Sue Thomas, Correspondence excerpt
C. L. Moore, "No Woman Born"
Amy Thompson, Virtual Girl excerpt
Laura J. Mixon, Proxies excerpt (#2 in Avatar's Dance series)
Shariann Lewitt, "A Real Girl"
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon), "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"

DIRECTLY RELEVANT CRITICISM:

"Introduction" by the Editors

Austin Booth, "Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction"

Heather Hicks, "Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the "Human" in Marge Piercy's He, She and It"

Alison Adam, "The Ethical Dimension of Cyberfeminism"

Jyanni Steffensen, "Doing It Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity"

Thomas Foster, "'The Postproduction of the Human Heart': Desire, Identification, and Virtual Embodiment in Feminist Narratives of Cyberspace"

Dianne Currier, "Assembling Bodies in Cyberspace: Technologies, Bodies, and Sexual Difference"

"Description" (shortened and lightly edited) from MIT Press, as of July 2023, on line here.[2]

Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction — fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies — and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. [...]

In their own words, the editors begin their "Introduction" thus:

In 1998 the editors [...] wanted to find an anthology of women's cyberpunk fiction for use in a cybertheory course and could not find one, despite the increasing number of women writing what can loosely be called cyberfiction — writing that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies. We wished to show students that our technoculteure, imagined so creatively by writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson (and reimagined by popular Hollywood cinema), is actively being reshaped by women's voices. As teachers, we wanted to make available to students the feminist voices challenging the two existing visions of cyberspace: that of the almost exclusively male cyberpunk writers and technological aficianados (the Wired/Mondo generation) and that of cyberfeminist theorists.

This book fills two problematic gaps — the absence of a volume that introduces women's cyberfiction and the absence of a volume that considers gender and technology issues from fictional and theoretical viewpoints with and against each other. This collection brings together women's fictional representations of cyberculture with feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. (p. 1)

Thom Dunn, RDE, finishing, 21May23 f., 12Aug23