From shulea@waag.org Wed Aug 26 08:46:32 1998 Received: from imo21.mx.aol.com (imo21.mx.aol.com [198.81.17.65]) by A01.waag.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id IAA31949 for ; Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:46:32 +0200 From: KmSaRee@aol.com Received: from KmSaRee@aol.com by imo21.mx.aol.com (IMOv14_b1.1) id 8LISa03888 for ; Wed, 26 Aug 1998 02:45:22 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <7c489a8d.35e3af03@aol.com> Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 02:45:22 EDT To: tabody@waag.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Subject: re:subscribe Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 for Mac sub 84 auth 0549a058 subscribe tabody KmSaRee@aol.com From shulea@waag.org Wed Aug 26 16:58:30 1998 Received: from [194.134.18.57] (A47.waag.org [194.134.18.57]) by A01.waag.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA02587; Wed, 26 Aug 1998 16:58:26 +0200 Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 16:58:26 +0200 Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: tabody@waag.org From: shu lea cheang Subject: September forum, tabody listserve Cc: Mylene van Noort , philippe hi, everyone- I think so far we only have Shu lea, Jennifer Terry, Sandy Stone and Kimberly Tomes sign on the tabody listserve.... I would advise you all follow the procedure and sign on.. meanwhile I am bcc this e-mail to all listed. (so, sorry that Sandy, jenny and kimberly if you do receive this e-mail 2x) The forum on digi gender social body has been in planning...and I am sending you this focus statement written by Lisa Cartwright to start our focus discussion for the forum. I am now based in DeWaag, Amsterdam to finishing the programming and audio stream end for the forum. The forum conduction will also involve data base input through our e-mail listserve discussion and organized subject by subject with Lisa moderating. please check on- http://brandon.guggenheim.org/credits/interface/TA go to 1st installment link to find the forum statement also check the installation pix for Theatrum Anatomicum by clicking Theatrum installation and to http://www.intra.waag.org/brandon/TAbody to find sketch of our visual and texts interface/intervention development. I'll be off line for the next 4 days and will pick up the discussion on monday- enclosed- Forum for Digi Gender Social Body September 20, 1998 netlink forum- http://brandon.guggenheim.org The Guggenheim Museum, 2-4pm Theatrum Anatomicum, DeWaag, 8-10pm in conjunction with World Wide Video Festival, Stedelijk Museum Forum moderator: Lisa Cartwright New York participants: Lisa Cartwright Jennifer Terry,, Allucquere Rosanne Stone , Jennifer Gonzalez , Vernon Rosario , Curator: New York/Guggenheim Museum Matthew Drutt Assistant curator: New York John Ippolito Online moderation: New York Kimberly Saree Tomes , Amsterdam participants: Jose Van Dijck Susan Stryker , <<<3rd panelist yet to be determined>>>> on line moderation: Shu Lea Cheang Curator: Amsterdam Suzanne Oxenaar production manager: Amsterdam philippe press agent: Amsterdam Mylene van Noort Focus statement for forum written by Lisa Cartwright some keywords for subject-data textual violence avatar attack technosocial body cross-section slice artifact the real body genitalia dissect viscera knife glove tissue Intersex organs ________________________________ Digi Gender Social Body Under the Knife, Under the Spell of Anesthesia 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. =+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+=+-+= Lisa Cartwright, Associate Professor English/Visual and Cultural Studies Department of English Morey Hall University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 Phone:716-464-9318 Fax: 716-442-5769 Email: lcartwright@earthlink.net =+/-+=\+-+=+-+=/+-+=+-+\=+-+=+/-+=+-+\=+-+=/+-+=+-\+=