Focus statement for the forum
written by Lisa Cartwright

some topics: 

textual violence
avatar attack
technosocial body
cross-section
slice
artifact
the real body
genitalia
dissect
viscera
knife
glove
tissue
Intersex
organs
________________________________

On Techno-Social Bodies

Gender is not a property of bodies...it is the product and process of various 
social technologies, institutional discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices.
                                                               --Teresa de Lauretis

The transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted 
through textual violence.                 --Sandy Stone

Gender may not, as de Lauretis suggests, be a natural property of bodies;
 it is constructed through one's engagement within institutional discourses--
through performance, in writing, or in acts of private and public display.
But gender, like race and the idea of (dis)ability, is nonetheless made materially 
to inhere in bodies through social practices that  range from the textual and the 
discursive (writing about the body, performance, fashion) to the plastic and the 
chemical (cosmetic surgeries, genital conversion surgeries, hormone therapies). 
As we approach the end of the century, digital technologies and biomedicine have 
been strategically deployed together not only to better conform the body to these 
normative categories of difference, but to allow us to redefine and move beyond 
these norms--to imagine and construct bodies that play with or alter the meanings
 made to inhere in our anatomies. Plastic surgery can be a means of making our 
bodies better conform to cultural norms. But we can also use it to push the limits of 
meaning by reconfiguring anatomical form to challenge these norms. Whereas 
digital technologies expand our abilities to manipulate representations of the body 
with a degree of precision and detail previously unimagined, biomedical advances 
in surgery and anesthesiology make it possible to move from the realm of the purely 
representational to flesh as a textual medium. The virtual body crafted on the screen
 in images, words, and symbols merges with the body crafted on the operating table
 in procedures in which the digital display is as vital as the surgical knife, and the 
screen image is as real as the fleshly body. 

Cultural identity may not inhere in bodies, but with surgical technologies added to 
the repertoire of inscriptive and performative techniques, the creative articulation 
of identity can take place at a different register of physical and psychical force:
 The textual violence that inscribes social bodies, alluded to by Stone in the quote above,
 finds an extreme  and dramatic articulation in the surgical transformation of bodies. 
It is one thing to articulate one's identity through speech acts, writing, and performance, 
another to express it through the cutting and reconfiguring of one's flesh. The digital
 enactment of surgery by cultural critics and other *lay* doctors that takes place in 
this installment of the Brandon project allows us to consider the interface between 
text-image and body-flesh, and between the different issues and effects at stake in 
working with the virtual-textual body, on the one hand, and the physical-fleshly 
body, on the other.

What is the relationship between the textual acts that inscribe the body within identity
 groups and the physical acts of surgery that alter the material signifiers of identity? 
Elizabeth Grosz has stated that *there is the "'real,' material body on the one hand and 
its various historical and cultural inscriptions on the other.... These representations and 
cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies and help to produce them as such."
Although I have never been certain about this binary construction, it has helped me to 
think what the technosocial body can be beyond the two-handed real/representation divide. 
Can we imagine a multihanded technosocial body, one that juggles the technological as 
something that is necessarily both real and culturally inscribed, material and imagined? 
This body of knowledge refuses to hold separate the real from the messy work of its 
representation and technological-textual  reconstruction. Grosz goes on to say that part of 
the nature of human bodies is their "ontological or organic incompleteness  or lack of 
finality, an amenability to social completion, social ordering, and organization." In theory,
the technosocial body is only ambivalently open to the ideal of social completion, because it 
recognizes this process as both inevitable and unattainable within its own terms. But can
the technosocial subject takes pleasure in the status of incompleteness and the possibility 
of something else--something that breaks the categories of race, or the binaries of hands,
sexes, coupling, ability-disability, or subject-object relations? 

The *surgery* we perform through the Brandon project allows us to collectively construct 
a social body of theory, to imaginatively reconstruct a body on-line somewhere ambiguously 
and promisingly between image and text. The textual violence we perform with our virtual 
*knives* is directed against the public prohibition against the right of subjects to exist in 
bodies that do not conform to social norms. The tools of surgery, digital fabrication, and mass 
reproduction figuratively appropriated in this act become a means of giving new public lives 
and meanings to the deviant bodies we create out of the raw material of fantasy, media, and text.


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 Lisa Cartwright, Associate Professor
English/Visual and Cultural Studies

Department of English
Morey Hall
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627