Work Diary: Theatrical Machines Main Menu Contents

Human-Machine Creations

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What?

This essay explored what a cyborg is, digging into Jack Halberstam's "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine" and Kelly B. Wagman and Lisa Parks' "Beyond the Command: Feminist STS Research and Critical Issues for the Design of Social Machines." For this paper, I also leaned on the work of Donna Haraway (much like Jack Halberstam), Rachel Grossman, Ruha Benjamin, Alice A. Jardine, Lisa Nakamura, and Chela Sandoval; many of these writers are cited within the works of Halberstam, Wagman, and Parks, so I dug a touch deeper into them for the sake of exploring cyborgs. Halberstam's cyborg is female and intelligent, and Wagman and Parks' cyborg is implicitly female but outwardly chimeric. The works connect femininity and machinery together in a discussion of gender roles and feminism, though Halberstam's work in particular fails to explore the intersections of race with feminism.

Inspiration

The inspiration I drew from the works discussed was based on the combination of natural and unnatural as well as the combination of science and art; I love playing with music, but making music these days can be done entirely online, leaning on the technology to do most of the work for us. A particular line in Wagman and Parks' work stood out to me: they declared that each modern human is a cyborg from the “everyday use of the phone to offload memories, communicate with others, and navigate through the physical world” (Wagman and Parks 101:6). This line was the starting line for me in creating my final project idea, as I knew I wanted to explore how humans work with the technology now at our fingertips to redefine our existence and experiences. I was excited to explore how humans and machines rely on each other for creative enrichment, and how I myself am a cyborg; I use my phone and my computer often without even thinking about it, and all of the music I create now is done on Garageband and other online systems. I am cyborg in the sense that technology is necessary for me to create what plays in my head. I need technology in order to express myself.

References

Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.

Grossman, Rachel. Women’s Place in the Integrated Circuit. New England Free Press, 1980.

Halberstam, Jack. “On Pronouns.” The Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20230328000340/www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024. 
Halberstam, Judith. “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine.” Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991, pp. 439–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178281. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” in Sandra Kemp, and Judith Squires (eds), Feminisms (New York, NY, 1998; online edn, Oxford Academic, 31 Oct. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192892706.003.0083. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990.

Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Cornell University Press, 1985. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org stable/10.7591/j.ctvv416qm. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge, 2002.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 

Nakamura, Lisa. Race After the Internet, edited by Peter Chow-White. Routledge, 2012.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 

Wagman, Kelly B., and Lisa Parks. “Beyond the Command: Feminist STS Research and Critical Issues for the Design of Social Machines.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 5, no. CSCW1, 2021, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1145/3449175. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.

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