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This week in my grad seminar, we discussed new materialism, technology, and embodiment via Elvia Wilk\u2019s Cluster Mag<\/a> article on \u201cHow the feminist internet utopia failed, and we ended up with speculative realism,\u201d and Julian Gill-Peterson\u2019s blog post<\/a> \u201cWe Are Not Cyborg Subjects, We Are Artisans.\u201d Wilk\u2019s article is about, in part, the way that posthumanism, as a concept and an area of academic study, shifted from 90s cyberfeminism to postmillennial new materialism\/speculative realism. It\u2019s also a feminist analysis of the expectation that our online selves accurately and truthfully represent our \u201creal\u201d fleshy bodies (as are manifest, for example, in the nymwars<\/a>). Peterson\u2019s post is about transgender embodiment; it uses a new materialist framework to argue that technology is not something mixed in with an already self-sufficient body (e.g., a cyborg), but a co-requisite of embodiment from the beginning. As Peterson argues, \u201call bodies are formed through technogenesis and the active participation of the body\u2019s materiality in its continual becoming, its continual modification.\u201d Things like games, toys, interaction with caregivers–all these things draw out and shape its bodies potentialities into a typically \u201chuman\u201d body, one that, for example, knows how to use its opposable thumb, and has hand-eye coordination. Peterson\u2019s point is that trans* embodiment isn\u2019t more or less technologically mediated\/assisted than regular embodiment–it\u2019s just different technologies with a vastly different politics. The world has been materially, technologically, socially, epistemically, and politically organized to make bodies cis-gendered, so trans* embodiment requires working against the grain or bending the circuits of normative technogenesis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One of these normative circuits is the demand for what Wilk calls the \u201c1:1 self-to-body ratio.\u201d [1] \u00a0As we discussed it in class, the \u201c1:1 self-to-body ratio\u201d is the idea that the identity you claim, your \u201cself,\u201d must legibly correspond to the identity others perceive on or attribute to your body. If I say I\u2019m a woman, then my body must be visible or legible to others as, if not fully cis-female, then feminine enough not to raise suspicion that I may be misrepresenting myself. This 1:1 self-to-body ratio is one of the norms that makes so-called \u201ccatfishing\u201d a problem. It is generally considered deceptive, if not fraudulent, to present your \u201cself\u201d (the person people interact with online) as having a different kind of body than you \u201creally\u201d do.<\/p>\n The 1:1 self-to-body ratio is where Wilk\u2019s discussion of internet norms overlaps with trans* theory. Hegemonic understandings of trans* identity and embodiment are grounded in a similar 1:1 self-to-body ratio, which is often referred to in trans* studies as the \u201cwrong body narrative<\/a>.\u201d As Janet Mock explains,<\/p>\n To me, \u201ctrapped in the wrong body\u201d is a blanket statement that makes trans* people\u2019s varying journeys and narratives palatable to the masses. It\u2019s helped cis masses understand our plight \u2013 to a certain extent. It\u2019s basically a soundbite of struggle, \u201cI was a girl (boy) trapped in a boy\u2019s (girl\u2019s) body,\u201d which aims to humanize trans* folks, who are often seen as alien, as freaks, as less-than-human and other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n You\u2019re in the \u201cwrong\u201d body if your body doesn\u2019t perceptibly match up to your felt sense of self. The wrong body narrative translates, via the 1:1 ratio, trans* identity and embodiment to normal\/normative understandings of human subjectivity and embodiment.<\/p>\n So there\u2019s this overlap between the 1:1 ratio in internet usage, and the 1:1 ratio in gender identity (cis\/trans). I need to think more about this, but it seems to me that it\u2019s not entirely the same 1:1 ratio in each case, but variations on the same theme. But maybe it is more homogeneous. I dunno. This overlap, though, might be a helpful way to situate work like Micha Cardenas\u2019s stuff on \u201ctransreal<\/a>\u201d aesthetics and politics…which I really need to go back and look at more carefully. And that\u2019s pretty much where I am on this\/where we left things in class. If anyone has any further thoughts, or recommended reading on this issue, I\u2019d love to hear them.<\/p>\n [1] The 1:1 ratio wasn\u2019t always an internet norm. As Wilk notes, a lot of 90s cyberfeminism theorized the internet as a place where one\u2019s \u201cself\u201d did not need to correspond to one\u2019s \u201cbody.\u201d But then, as Wilk implies, \u201cprotecting women\u201d from things like sexual abuse, exploitation, and bullying became an excuse to demand real-name technologies and impose the 1:1 ratio on online interactions. Sounds like another instance in which hegemony\/white supremacist patriarchal capitalism uses \u201cprotecting women\u201d as an excuse to actually further exploit white women and POC.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Robin is on twitter as @doctaj. Her avi pic may or may not perfectly correspond to her present physical appearance.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week in my grad seminar, we discussed new materialism, technology, and embodiment via Elvia Wilk\u2019s Cluster Mag article on \u201cHow the feminist internet utopia failed, and we ended up with speculative realism,\u201d and Julian Gill-Peterson\u2019s blog post \u201cWe Are Not Cyborg Subjects, We Are Artisans.\u201d Wilk\u2019s article is about, in part, the way that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[26586,26585,26584,306],"class_list":["post-18227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-cardenas","tag-new-materalism","tag-posthuman","tag-transgender"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18228,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18227\/revisions\/18228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n