Page 204 - Cyberculture and New Media

Maria Bäcke 195
______________________________________________________________
the client. As Haraway puts it: “the boundary between science fiction and
30
social reality is an optical illusion.” Winterson thus knits Cyberspace
closely to the real world, and once again emotions are used to destabilize and
decolonize the idea of Cyberspace as an unreal, antiseptic, and purely
technical world.
Above all the novels question the view of women as hopelessly
incompetent users of technology, since the female characters interact on an
equal level with male characters. Sometimes they even challenge the validity
of the male norm. At other times the women actually take over and re-define
the technology and its uses. Cadigan and Winterson focus on the individual,
the human being that happens to communicate with other human beings via a
new medium. All four authors decolonize the image of the male Cyberspace
by stressing that emotions, values and ethics are just as important in
Cyberspace as they are in the real world. By showing Cyberspace from a
female point of view, the authors attempt to reverse othering and question the
single root of a Cyberspace colonized by men. While breaking the
Cyberspace Cowboy traditions, these authors thus present ICT as a neutral
tool that gives women opportunities to mould and decolonize Cyberspace.

Notes

1
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor, 1997, p. 11, 14.
2
Édouard. Glissant, p. 17.
3
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine. Transl.
B Massumi. Semiotext(e), New York, 1986, p. 34-36.
4
Donna J Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 176.
5
Donna Haraway, p. 175.
6
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business,
and Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 37.
7
Ibid., p. 39.
8
Ibid., p. 39.
9
Ibid., p. 41.
10
Ibid., p. 51.
11
Ibid., p. 89.
12
Ibid., p. 89.
13
Ibid., p. 59.
14
Ibid., p. 20.
15
Ibid., p. 20.