Introduction



Amanda DeVincentis
devincea@gusun.georgetown.edu

After a semester of investigating the consequences of technology and the computer age on literary theory, the text, and pedagogy, I became interested in the physical manifestations of technology. What does it mean to inhabit a body in this age? As I questioned before, where does the body end? Feminist theory has complicated this question especially in theorizing different forms and effects of representation. Representation informs the experience of living in a gendered body. In other words, through representation and our, as spectators, negotiation with representations, we come to associate the categories of masculine and feminine with the physical sexes of male and female. This is old news: gender does not mimetically relate to physical sex. And herein lies the body. I believe that computer technology reveals that just as gender is not a strict, easily definable category, neither is the body.



In this project, I wanted to show how traditional forms of representation, i.e, popular mainstream film, are complicated by representations and my use of technology. In other words, I analyzed several recent popular movies, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Strange Days, The Net, and Copycat, for their treatment of computers and bodies. Often, bodies becomes "Woman," particularly in these films. The cinema features and centralizes the physical appearance of women, highlighting one body to represent women as a whole. Whereas traditional film tends to objectify women, the use and of new technology, for example, virtual space and computer mediated forms of communication, reveal that the category "Woman" is not so easily definable. The movies in this report compare by foregrounding bodies, identities and the complications that result from new forms of technology. However, each film, individually, introduces critical issues and intertextualizes this traditional form of representation through the suggestion of another representation: the computer. Whereas as spectators, we sit and watch a movie on a television or movie screen, in the movie, the characters interact, kill, love, live and survive through their computer screens.



Feminists have postulated forms of radical spectatorship in which a spectator or a community of spectators can recuperate a film for its empowering moments or find gaps in the seams of its narrative. The representation of computer interaction complicates our role as spectators.



In an interview for Wired, Sandy Stone discusses how virtual space complicates our defintions of our bodies and our identities. Susan Stryker poses,



I know a woman with several distinct personalities, some of which manifest only online. Where do those personalities go when this person's body isn't touching a keyboard that's plugged into the Net?


Stone responds:

This is one of those Where does the candle flame go when it goes out? Questions. The best analogy would be quantum theory. Identities appear and they disappear. They go from virtual to real, from real to virtual, crossing back and forth over those boundaries, sometimes predictably and sometimes not. So an easily intelligible answer to the question Where is that identity when it is off the Net? Is to say it becomes virtual, or potential, during that time. The presence of the prosthesis in the communication network is what makes the virtual persona become real...Virtual environments allow the terms self and body to mean differently. (Stryker 136)


Often bodies are used to define "who we really are." Because bodies are physical they seem to transcend the fluidiy of language and are often ascribed to the realm of the "natural," the "a-historical," and the "transcendent." These movies reveal that bodies are not as static as they seem. Furthermore, representations of bodies are not wholly monolithic. The suggestion of virtual space or alternate realities and differing definitions of identity manifest and destablizes a traditional genre, the cinema, a genre that tends to naturalize the categories of "Woman" and "Man" and tries to isolate the body.



In the various pages I have constructed to discuss these films, I use repeated images of the starring female actor as a backgorund. I hope to call attention to the presence of female bodies in all of these films through this gesture. The text is always complicated by the body. Futhermore, when I examine the films, I use the names of the actors rather than the characters. Once again this is a self conscious genture. I hope to contextualize the previous (or lack there of) work of the actors. We, as spectators, bring our own knowledge and opinions of these actors as well as our own personal histories and investments to these movies and I want to call attention to the importance of the cultural reader. Several themes permeate the films, especially conspiracy and surveillance, which connect to definitions of or threats to personhood and identity. After all, where does the image end and my body begin? Where does virtual space stop and "reality" take over?
Johnny Mnemonic
Strange Days
Virtusoity
The Net
Copycat
Bibliogrphy

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This page was made for Randy Bass' graduate seminar:
The Electronic Kool-Aid Acid Text, or, Text, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Electronic Age,
Spring 1996.