Page 199 - Cyberculture and New Media

190 De-Colonizing Cyberspace
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“Cyberspace Cowboy”. Space generated by ICT equals male space, a space
colonized by men. Happily, this is of course not always the case. In the
following I will be discussing the gender boundaries in Cyberspace, and how
female cyberfiction authors claim their own space, choose their own issues
and ways of writing. Simply by choosing to write cyberfiction they attempt to
decolonize a genre already colonized by male authors.
I have examined five contemporary books written by female
authors: Close to the Machine by computer programmer Ellen Ullman, The
Jazz by sci-fi author Melissa Scott, The PowerBook by fiction author Jeanette
Winterson, and the novels Avatar and Dervish is Digital by “the queen of
Cyberpunk,” Pat Cadigan. By using ICT, sometimes as an image, sometimes
as a tool, these authors explore patterns of power, hierarchy and colonization
in Cyberspace. I will, by linking post-colonial/post-structural/post-modern
theory and technology, explore the way they transgress boundaries in the
space they create.
Although I will use Manuel Castells’ four-layered theory on Internet
cultures as a structure, the underlying theory of this paper has its origin in
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ideas. The rhizome – a fluctuating “web”
or a “root-and-branch-system” without centre or definition, always on the
verge of becoming something else – is linked to postcolonial theory by
Édouard Glissant who highlights the benefits of its multiplicity: “Rhisomatic
thought is ... extended through a relationship with the Other” which
challenges the intolerance of the single root of the colonizer, the norm against
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which the colonized struggle. Glissant stresses the limitation of the
dichotomy between self and other, since this means that the colonized is
always-and only-defined and measured against the colonizer. Decolonization,
however, has the possibility to destabilize this dichotomy and create a space –
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a rhizome – that takes a multitude of viewpoints into account.
What Glissant labels decolonization can be related to Deleuze and
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Guattari’s idea of smooth and striated space. Smooth space is open,
nomadic, flowing and flexible, whereas the striated spaces are described as
grid-like in structure, relying on clear definitions, and always trying to bring
the smooth spaces under their control. The creation of smooth space –
ultimately an act of decolonization – is addressed by the cyberfeminist Donna
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J. Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The “post-gender” cyborg , an
ambiguous hybrid of machine and organism, has the power to effectively
destabilize all boundaries, and cyborg writing, “the technology of cyborgs”,
creates something that comes close to smooth space:

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive ... seizing the
tools to mark the world that marked them as other. The
tools are often stories.... In retelling origin stories, cyborg
authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western