MLA Convention 2020: Documenting a Graduate Course in Electronic Literature with Scalar

Section V: "Feminism, Print, Machines"

In this chapter, Spinosa does some kind of review of early experimentations around the notion of male authorship in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980, especially male authors. She holds that the power exerted on the reader by these experiments made many people in the field feel uneasy. Feminist poets, however, took advantage of this opportunity though they didn't feel less uncomfortable; they would still be fully aware of the "poet's interpretive and linguistic power over the reader." (51). These feminist writers were primarily interested in observing how readers interacted with machine-generated text but noticed that this way of working, however innovative, was not really helpful to making visible minority voices. 

Machine-written texts did represent a way of queering up the writing spectrum. Authors like Cage and Duncan found valuable potential in experimenting with technological ways of queering meaning. In this chapter, however, Espinosa is far more interested in bringing attention to the way feminist writers re-imagined the role of machine-mediated texts in the following years. She maintains that one central task for feminist writers has been that of breaking down male subjectivity in writing, especially because "white, heterosexual, and cis-gendered male poets have sometimes assumed that because majoritarian subjectivities like their own have significant precedent for being presented and represented in literature..." (51) For the feminist writers referred to in this chapter stepping aside this exclusive continuum does not necessarily imply complete withdrawal of male subjectivity. These writers use four ways of incorporating machine-generated into feminist texts. First, they purposefully limit the incidence of the author over the reader's interpretative role. Second, they embrace the personal emotions and engagements of the literal poet-person. Third, they insert these intimacies of the personal into the impersonal structures of the machine-writing to empower the reader's perceptions. Finally, they maintain that "this process is an attack on the larger organizational structures of the language, typically made manifest in their poetry in the figure of the archive." (53)

It is clear that the ulterior motive of their writing is that of bringing to the table the ambivalent subjectivity of the writer into the archive. By doing this they seek to deep-dive into unveiling repressions and fissures as spaces that allow for creative intervention. It becomes clear thus, that their very intent is that of analyzing how "post-anarchist literary theory" offers a useful approach to analyzing this process. 
 

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