Critical Annotated Webliography (Question 2)

2. 'When the body is fractured into organs, fluids, and genetic codes, what happens to gender identity?' (Balsamo). Discuss some of the issues raised by the Visible Human Project about the embodiment gender, race and class.

The Visible Human Project Overview gives an overview of the Visible Human Project, which is one of the important terms that should be defined from the question. The official U.S. National Library of Medicine website describes the background and the methodology of the project thoroughly.

The project was established in 1989 in order to display the male and female anatomy visually. From this website, the details (i.e. data) of the project can be examined. It would be easier to see how it is related to the embodiment gender, race and class and how it challenges the notion of gender identity. There are problems with the Visual Human Project, however, such as the female corpse being from a woman who did not have reproductive organs that accurately represented one from a normal young woman. Additionally, the male was an executed man whose consent may have not been obtained willingly. Still, the Visual Human Project does fulfill its original purpose and has been a basis for many arguments and realizations in the scientific and general world.

In the article Both/And: Science Fiction and the Question of Changing Gender, Vint compared the different point of views by various authors regarding the issues of gender identity. The arguments of the authors can serve as evidence or counter-arguments for Balsamo's statement. It is essential to avoid bias when answering the stated question. Vint emphasizes the transsexual issue as it is controversial. Apart from this, Vint quotes Balsamo's line to support her ideas of speculative fiction.

It is also brought up that fictional bodies on the Internet have no definitive material form; they have no organs, no fluids. The online body can be any gender or no gender and can change between those forms at will. It will never be restricted by a form because such a construction cannot be created. The purpose of male and female is entirely temporal; there is no need for gender in a world that does not support reproduction. And so this point is particularly interesting because it raises the point of culture shaping gender, be it real culture or online culture.

Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women gives summaries of what Balsamo mentioned in her book. There is an introduction and six chapters that emphasize different gender issues. Although not all chapters are completely relevant to the stated question, it is still important to note what Balsamo believes. She suggests that women are reduced to "organs without bodies" and their surveillance is bred into society. People learn to treat women differently.

However, women have no organs online and thus their reproductive purpose is nullified. There is no meaning to gender on the Internet aside from ones our real life culture already created. However, the technology will bring women back eventually. The future will see that humanity and technology are inseparable and, though women have little place in modern technological history, technology is ultimately genderless and a rise for women will occur due to this.

Tara and Jui suggests in Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women that gender has been forced upon technology because it is a part of culture and society. Humanity decided that the minds must be different and then, when that could not be proven, decided that women must be inferior due to their menstruation, child-bearing, and breasts. The old identities are easily recognized and we are trained to notice the differences from early ages. Society has no need for new definitions of body, new definitions of gender. People also cannot deny their real life experience and existence. There is no way to step away from the corporeal form and take an entirely virtual form. Therefore, even in cyberspace, gender remains to be constructed according to preformed ideas.

King discusses the problems revolving around current gender identities in Gender Identity Disorder: Analysis of a Cyberspace Support Group. There are potentially several genders aside from just male and female due to sexual preference and current biology. As well, such people that do not conform to the normal idea of gender are victimized in society and their abnormal gender endangers their mental health and living style. Even as the body has been torn apart, their will does not conform to their organs, the purpose that society decided they were to fulfill.

The cyberspace support group breaks down all the genders and creates a help group that is not concerned with sex or preference but with the support of each other. Breaking apart this boundary is essential to help because people are still too concerned with race, gender, and class. Even if the group will accept everyone, the person joining may feel insecure and may not receive the help that they need. People need cyberspace because it normalizes them into a state where they can be comfortable. They need not think about race, class, or gender because, for those moments, it does not exist.

Spittle suggests that social change and progression is inhibited by the rigid definitions of race, gender, and class from his article Gender, Subjectivity and Identity in Cyberspace. Humans have changed greatly as noted, we have become cyborgs in the sense that we are one with our machines to a point that we are inseparable from them. Yet we still focus on what we see in order to classify each other. Cyberspace takes away the visual; people can no longer see inside our bodies to see the reproductive organs as they can in the Visual Human Project. There is no identity but that created online, the avatar.

Some feminists have gone against this progression, however. They wish to create a united action of women that identifies them as equal to men instead of the erasure of all identities. If gender identities are destroyed, if the organs are no longer visible, then women here have become useless a second time. A patriarchal society should not be able to decide that gender is unnecessary just when women were beginning to make advances in society. Thus, progression is further hindered by conventional beliefs as well as specialist movements which seek to keep the status quo or promote their own agendas instead of embracing the future.

These six articles discuss the Visual Human Project and impose their findings, subjective or otherwise, in a format that clearly defines the past, present, and future of humanity. They explain in detail the evolution of humanity and the recognition that we are both our material bodies and we are not. At this time, we cannot separate from our reproductive organs and yet, what is a sterile man or a sterile woman? They may have the organs but they serve no reproductive purpose in society. Still, we subject them to the same identities because we have grown accustomed to them. Yet one day, our future cyborg selves may determine that such a definition has outlived its usefulness.

References

Balsamo, Anne,"Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women", Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. http://www.stumptuous.com/comps/balsamo.html (accessed 2 Mar 2009)

King, Storm A., "Gender Identity Disorder: Analysis of a Cyberspace Support Group", 1995, http://webpages.charter.net/stormking/gender.html (accessed 1 Mar 2009)

Spittle, Steve, "Gender, Subjectivity and Identity in Cyberspace", 1995, http://www.ucm.es/info/rqtr/biblioteca/ciberespacio%20gltb/Is%20Any%20Body%20Out%20There.pdf (accessed 1 Mar 2009)

Tara and Jui, "Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women",
http://cndls.georgetown.edu/applications/posterTool/index.cfm?fuseaction=poster.display&posterID=3851 (accessed 2 Mar 2009)

U.S. National Library of Medicine, "The Visible Human Project Overview", 2003,
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html (accessed 27 Feb 2009)

Vint, Sherryl, "Both/And: Science Fiction and the Question of Changing Gender",2002, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020218/both_and.shtml (accessed 1 Mar 2009)