in which a third human gender/post-gender, the blands, is created as a slave
caste; and James. Alan Gardner's Commitment Hour, in which genetic ...
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Elizabeth Shipley Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe Bismarckstr. 10 D-76133 Karlsruhe
[email protected]
Post-Gender Realities and the Virtual Classroom One of the best examples of what Donna Haraway calls ”the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender”(Haraway 1991:150) is provided by Ursula Le Guin. In an essay about her groundbreaking experiment in speculative gender, The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes: ”I eliminated gender, to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human” (Le Guin 1989:10). Taking Le Guin’s narrative gender experiments as its literary base, three classroom teachers in Germany, England and the US decided to try a collaborative narrative experiment to explore the question of whether radical experiments of speculative fiction could translate into reality using cyberspace as its medium. Although at first glance it would seem that the anonymity provided by cyberspace lends itself to experiencing greater gender freedom in the virtual world, many writers such as Anne Balsamo, in Technologies of the Gendered Body, have questioned this assumption.1 Instead of greater freedom, stereotypes and traditional binary conventions of gender seem to be dominant, as exemplified in the cyberpunk creations of William Gibson.2 Even when characters are posthuman, disembodied AIs, they (dis)embody conventional genders and their hierarchical markings. In idoru, for example, the marriage of a physical male human being to a Japanese virtual being, marked as female, illustrates the heterosexual hegemony that permeates the arcane experimentation in the realm of body.3
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See Balsamo 1996:147. For a discussion of this aspect of Gibson’s Neuromancer see Balsamo 1996:128-9, Nixon 1992, Punday 2000, Stone 1991. 3 As Zona says, “’Clearly, this dickless whore, the disembodied, has contrived to ensnare his soul.’”(Gibson 1996:11.) 2
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It is rather in science/speculative fiction, not cyberpunk, that the most radical gender experiments have been made. Postulating new kinds of humans or posthumans who are the result of biological or cybernetic engineering and separating gender from the conventional concepts of body is the stuff of a canon of science/speculative fiction. This canon includes most recently Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, in which a third gender of an alien species, the Ooloi, create new human/alien genders; Carolyn Ives Gilman's Halfway Human, in which a third human gender/post-gender, the blands, is created as a slave caste; and James Alan Gardner's Commitment Hour, in which genetic manipulation has developed a new gender composed of physical androgyny, ironically enough called the neuts. However, Gardner’s figures, as well as Theodore Sturgeon’s somewhat similar androgynes in Venus Plus X (1960), seem if anything too weighted down by their heterosexually symmetrical double genitals, an example perhaps of what Joanna Russ in To Write Like a Woman calls “tinkering with genitalia when the social structure is the problem” (Russ 1995: 38).4 These worlds may often mirror the same hierarchical and binary gender-marked mind-set with alternative or absent genital equipment, but even the failed attempt to transgress conventional boundaries can contribute provocative insights into the limits of the gendered imagination. Although the connection between cultural and gender alterity does play a role in these more recent texts, it is Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness in which this theme is extensively treated and thus it seemed a particularly appropriate literary text to accompany classroom explorations. The virtual classroom narrative experiments were anchored in an English cultural-studies pedagogy project at the University of Kiel concerned with the interrelationship between gender perception and intercultural communication. As project director and feminist critic Renate Haas has pointed out in numerous articles, the essential connection between these factors has often been neglected, to the clear disadvantage of one
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Russ elaborates: “It is certainly clear to me (and any other feminist) that men’s and women’s misunderstandings of one another, far from being due to the differences in their sexual organs or their experiences in sexual intercourse per se, are carefully cultivated in the service of sex-caste positions in a very nasty hierarchy, and that one cannot dissolve the hierarchy by giving people double or triple sexual equipment, even if we could get over the anatomical problem of where to place the extra goodies” (Russ 1995:38).
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gender.5 Thus, the aim of the narrative experiments was to create a context that would help foster an awareness among students of the importance of gender as an aspect of how culture is performed in the mirror of intercultural interaction. In Le Guin’s treatment of this theme in Left Hand of Darkness, the biological differences between Terrans (i.e., inhabitants of the planet Terra) and human beings of the planet Gethen are not so obvious on the surface. In fact, the Terran male narrator Genly Ai, who comes to the planet Gethen (which is also called Winter) as an envoy tends to see them as similarly gendered and uses the male generic pronoun in referring to them. The differences, however, are "profound," as the Gethenian Estraven notes (Le Guin 1969:5). The Gethenians have no sexuality or disparate gender identity except during specific periods, comparable to a menstrual cycle, when they are in kemmer and can become either male or female. Thus over time Gethenians may become both mothers and fathers, with children they sire, and children they give birth to. As a direct result of other-genderedness, their social structures are gendered very differently, as we are told. Everyone is liable to be ”tied down to childbearing.” In addition there is no "psycho-sexual relationship" to parents, no rape, no war, no "socio-sexual interaction" with gender roles of any sort (Le Guin 1969:94). Genly is unreliable in giving us an objective perception throughout most of the book because of his problems with Gethenian other-genderedness. As he himself tells us: Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own (Le Guin 1969:12).
Genly's concept of gender reveals his binary bias, his belief in men as the universal gender and women as a category of Otherness, for it is what he perceives as their femininity that he distrusts most about the Gethenians. At first his gender prejudices, both homophobic and misogynist in nature, prevent him from understanding essential information about the culture, crucial to the political success of his mission. The book traces his slow and difficult learning experience with the Other through the figure of Estraven, who rescues him from the 5
See Haas 1992, 1994, 2000, 2001.
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prison farm where his cultural misunderstandings have landed him. During their journey in the dead of winter across a glacier together, Genly learns to truly see Estraven as his friend really is, a process that involves a recognition of the connection between sexuality, gender performance and cultural identity.6 As Genly Ai learned to move beyond the projections of his own gendered cultural identity, could a post-gender confrontation with Otherness among readers and writers be created using the anonymity of the web? Or would the opposite prove true? To explore these questions, a virtual classroom was created in the time period from October 2000 to March 2001, connecting English literature and EFL pedagogy courses at Kiel University; imaginative writing and programming courses at Fort Worth Country Day School, a private school with a state-of-the-art technology program; and German conversation classes at the Royal High School Bath. The asynchronous classroom was a shared webpage on which students were asked to post a series of anonymous cross-gender narratives, one from a female and one from a male point of view, while their virtual co-student readers abroad tried to guess the gender of the authors of those texts, looking for the clues that seemed revelatory. Afterwards they looked at how their expectations were met or overturned, what concepts of gender were implicit in those expectations, and if learning the gender of the author changed their perception of the narrative. Thus, it was an exercise in creative reading as well as creative writing, as not only the genders of the writers, but also of the readers influenced results. The gender distribution of the participants was quite polarized, as the following table shows:
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This supports Judith Butler‘s statement in Gender Trouble that “gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (Butler 1990:3).
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Gender Distribution of Students
SCHOOL
FEMALE
MALE
ALL PARTICIPANTS
Erziehungswissenschaftliche 13 Fakultät der Universität Kiel
5
18
13
21
34
Fort Worth Country Day School, Fort Worth (K-12 private co-ed school)
10
The Royal High School Bath 10 (K-13 private girls school) TOTAL
36
26
62
Whereas in Fort Worth, there was a decided majority of boys taking part in the writing courses and, stereotypically, exclusively boys in the programming classes, in Kiel there were primarily female students, and in Bath there were only girls. The oddly polarized gender distribution of the participants played a role in the communications and was partly responsible for friction that developed in an early email exchange that preceded the actual narrative project. For the young writers in Fort Worth, the concept of writing from a gendered narrative perspective different than their own was a new one and they had some initial difficulties divorcing their created narrators from themselves. However, they, as well as the Kiel writers, soon began to concentrate on using the network-based medium to write gender as a deliberate deception and to outguess the gender deceptions of their anonymous virtual co-creators. This addressed the current discussion about how easily this is really possible in cyberspace. Denise Murray, for example, cites research demonstrating that it is more difficult to mask gender on the web than has been often asserted:
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Thus, the research so far contradicts the predictions of many commentators that CMC would create a equal site for communication. The assumption was that CMC would allow for anonymous interaction in which gender was masked. However, the research shows that users of asynchronous CMC mostly retain their real-life identities, and even when they try to mask their gender, gender-specific clues are visible through discourse style. (Murray 2000: 413)
Thus, German students puzzled whether a 17- or 18-year-old U.S. high school female senior could really write that convincingly about a rape or a brutal murder from a male perspective. They puzzled whether a boy of that same age could write that convincingly about the complex feelings of a girl for an ex-boyfriend. Deception proved astonishingly easy, in the time-honored tradition of deliberate deceptions of narrative gender, such as those of Alice Raccoona Sheldon, who for many years wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of James Tiptree, Jr.7 Her use of male sexist narrators led critics like Robert Silverberg to believe that the author must be a man, and who, to his later great embarrassment published a statement to that effect: It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing…. His obviously first-hand acquaintance with the world of airports and bureaucrats, as demonstrated in stories as “The Women Men Don’t See,” gives some support to this notion, just as his equally keen knowledge of the world of hunters and fishermen, in the same story, would appear to prove him male….So, then, James Tiptree—a man of 50 or 55, I guess, possibly unmarried, fond of outdoor life, restless in his everyday existence, a man who has seen much of the world and understands it well (Silverberg 1975: xii-xiv).
One of the most interesting virtual classroom experiments was done by one of the Texan students who had written pieces of carefully crafted and well-researched deception, with a sexist male narrator who was a pimp and as a female narrator, a girl experiencing her first menstruation at school with schoolmates making fun of her when they saw she was bleeding. German and British readers found these two pieces of gender narrative from the same high school author irreconcilable for either gender. The young man was delighted at the difficulties he had been able to cause his readers. In general it was the pleasure of successful narrative cross-dressing that proved one of the primary drawing points of the experiments to the writers and the aspect that provoked the most exciting discussions in the classroom.
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Cf. Donawerth 1997: 124-128.
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Narrators marked as female or male who seemed to differ from the most conventional of stereotypes were quickly suspected of varying from heteronormativity. For example, a male narrator who talked about wanting to go shopping for shoes was read by the Fort Worth students as gay, in spite of the fact that the narrator mentioned having a girlfriend. This may reflect the need for projecting exaggerated stereotypical binary markers within the anonymous environment of the web, much perhaps as the stereotypical markers Genly Ai at first projected on Gethenians in order to compensate for the absence of conventional gender protocols. Among students the final posting of these interactive narratives was in the form a web demo called “Whodunnit,” which is currently posted under www.fwcds.org/fiction and www.ph-karlsruhe.de/~shipley. The web demo provides a somewhat simplified image of the process as a guessing game, availing viewers of a choice of a cultural identities, as well as gender. Readers may ascertain for themselves the difficulties of second guessing the intentional exhibition of gender roles/stereotypes, by projecting their own strategies onto the imagined author. Though this virtual experiment could hardly lay claim to providing readers with an experience in post-gender reality, nevertheless the anonymity of the internet provided in this case an opportunity to explore the extrapolation of such ideas, a “thought-experiment,” practice in reading and writing oneself as a narrative gender mystery in the mirror of the Other.
References Balsamo, Anne (1996). Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. (1990): Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, Octavia E. (1989): Lilith's Brood. New York: Warner. Donawerth, Jane (1997): Cross-Dressing as a Male Narrator. In: Frankenstein’s Daughters. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press: pp. 109-176. Gardner, James Alan (1998): Commitment Hour. New York: Avon.
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Gibson, William (1984): Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Gibson, William (1996): idoru. New York: Penguin. Gilman, Carolyn Ives (1998): Halfway Human. New York: Avon. Haraway, Donna J. (1991): Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haas, Renate (1992): Zu den sexistischen Aspekten des neusprachlichen Reformstreits in Deutschland. In: Numéro Spécial du Bulletin CILA (=56). pp. 59-74. Haas, Renate (1994) : Women and the Development of English Studies in Germany. In: Anglistentag 1993 Eichstätt: Proceedings. Eds.Günther Blaicher/Brigitte Glaser. Tübingen: Niemeyer. pp. 528-540. Haas, Renate (2000): Eine vernachlässigte Grundfrage: Was bedeute(te)n Englischkenntnisse für deutsche Mädchen und Frauen? In: Anglistik—quo vadis? Ed. Helmut Schrey. Essen: Die Blaue Eule. pp. 71-89. Haas, Renate (2001): We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. Geschlechterforschung und Englischdidaktik. In: Geschlechterperspektiven in der Fachdidaktik. Eds. Heidrun Hoppe/Marita Kampshoff/Elke Nyssen. Weinheim: Beltz. pp. 101-121. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1969): The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1989): Is Gender Necessary? Redux. In: Dancing at the Edge of the World. London: Paladin, 1990. pp.7-16. Murray, Denise E. (2000). Protean Communication: The Language of Computer-Mediated Communication. TESOL Quarterly, 34/3. pp. 397-421. Nixon, Nicola (1992): Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?. In: Cybersexualities. Ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp. 191-207. Punday, Daniel (2000): The Narrative Construction of Cyberspace: Reading Neuromancer, Reading Cyberspace Debates. College English 63/2. pp. 194-213. Russ, Joanna (1995): SF and Technology as Mystification. In: To Write Like a Woman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 26-40. Silverberg, Robert (1975): Introduction. In: Warm Worlds and Otherwise. By James Tiptree, Jr. New York: Ballantine. pp. ix-xviii. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne (1991): Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures. In: Cybersexualities. Ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp. 69-98. Sturgeon, Theodore (1960): Venus Plus X. New York: Bluejay Books.
