the human
Despite the realities of computer use, the cultural imaginary positions the normative computer user as a man, typically white, nerdy, able-bodied, yet weak.1 Imagine popular (stereo)“types” of computer users: computer geek, gamer, hacker, software designer, animator, etc. While women of every type certainly exist, men are imagined as the main computer types. Further, gender hegemony positions “male” as the universal before we even arrive at the computer user.2 I decided to make the human based off a “woman” template in Fuse (what is a woman anyway?) to offset the androcentrism of computing, and of the unmarked, hegemonic human.
Despite my counterhegemonic intentions for representation and the imagined user, what happens when the used human is imagined as a woman? The human then carries with her the fraught positionality of women in a patriarchal world. Does the “to be used” female body evoke other spaces in which women’s bodies are used? In what ways are women’s bodies used (and exploited)? By whom? For what purposes? How are women's bodies shaped by patriarchal ideologies and affordance? How are these logics formulated by race, sexual identity, class, age, ability, location, religion, etc.? What are the sociopolitical implications of flesh, touch, availability, sexuality, and reproduction?
Much of feminist scholarship often critiques and attempts to subvert women’s positionality as “physical” and men’s as “cerebral.”3 Through Cartesian logic, the woman is the body and the man is the brain. The woman both has a physical body and is hostage to it. The man controls his materiality through mental superiority. The woman is then more closely connected to her own embodied materiality, something that affords touch. How do touch and physicality inform power? Have I constructed a space in which women’s bodies are used and consumed at will? What is subversive about women’s bodies rendered passive and available for use?4 Is agency a zero-sum game?
Further, what about the flesh of fleshLAB? Despite this work’s title, the humans are far from fleshy; they’re plastic, after all (the material, along with metal, that is often used to signal non-humanness). With flesh comes the discussion of skin color and with that, the social, somatic construction of race. Just as gender is used to objectify and sexualize women, racial categorization structures human ontologies, agency, and affordance.
I chose white plastic not to imply racial whiteness (although whiteness is often associated with the computer user and the hegemonic human), but rather, to imply a lack of vibrancy.5 It is an attempt to link the lack of color with lack of life, agency, etc.6 I want the human to recede from view, even as it is the central figure of the model, and become part of the environment—to become part of the landscape, not the dynamic subject, just as computers have.
Additionally, many computers and mobile devices are white plastic. What does this signal? Purity? The untouched nature of the device that implies newness or mine-ness? White wedding dress, like a virgin, touched for the very first time?
Further Questions:
►How do computers discipline the human body? How does this embodied experience structure and limit uses of the computer? Why has this posture remained relatively consistent, despite the ample proof that it is detrimental to the body?
►How does the “human” operate in terms of object-oriented7 and flat ontologies?8 How can we place the non-homogenous human, the non-human human,9 the non-human thing, and various subjectivities in conversation to understand embodiments, assemblages, and relationships of power?
►How do the objectification and stripping of agency of non-human entities project onto human-human encounters of objectification and subjugation?
►How does spatial and object design reflect the intended user and the positionality of that user?
<-back to fleshLAB
Footnotes:
- See, for instance: Deborah Lupton, “The Embodied Computer/User,” Body & Society 1:3-4 (1995): 97-112.
- While I could cite several academic sources discussing androcentrism, I would rather provide two everyday encounters that illustrate my point: 1) you’re at a zoo and every animal is suddenly “him.” 2) “Unisex” clothes are just men’s clothes (ever seen a “unisex” label on a t-shirt with cap sleeves?).
- For some of this discussion, see: Abigail Brooks and Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, “An Invitation to Feminist Research: The Feminist Critique of Positivism,” in Feminist Research Practice: A Primer, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Lina Leavy (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007), 6–24.; and Patricia Lina Leavy, “Feminist Postmodernism and Postructuralism,” in Feminist Research Practice: A Primer, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Lina Leavy (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007), 83–107.
- This image is also informed by the “colonial encounter.” Encounters signal ontological “otherness,” as well as the power systems that undergird those relationships. See: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
- For discussions about the agency and affective resonances of non-human objects or things, see: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22, doi:10.1086/449030.
- While I’m emphasizing a rather simple binary of object/subject in the relation between computer and human here, it is important to approach that relationship in terms of actor-network theory, in which all entities have agency, and power is not a zero-sum distribution, but rather an assemblage. See: Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications Plus More than a Few Complications,” Soziale Welt 47 (1996): 369–81.
- For a framework of object-oriented ontology, see: Ian Bogost, "What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?" 2009, http://bogost.com/writing/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog/.
- For more on flat ontology, see: Manuel Delanda, cited in Markus Gabriel, “How Flat Can Ontology Be?,” in Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 252.
- My framework for the non-human human is largely drawn from feminist and critical race scholars who question human ontology as a function of the assemblages of “identity,” including race, gender, class, etc., and specifically Sylvia Wynter’s body of scholarship. See: Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337, doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
