Virtual Representations: A Somatechnical Politics of Sexual Difference (2014)

Virtual Representations:A Somatechnical Politics

of Sexual Difference

Peta Hinton

Somatechnical Genealogies

There is much in the history of feminist engagement with technologiesthat presents as a somatechnical enterprise (Dahl and Sunden 2013227). Somatechnics, as Nikki Sullivan explains, highlights ‘theinextricability of soma and techne, of bodily-being-in-the-world, andthe dispositifs in and through which corporealities, identities, anddifference(s) are formed and transformed’ (2012: 302). For Sullivan,somatechnics ‘supplants the logic of the “and”’, revising theinstrumentalism that would ordinarily attend our relationship totechnologies as separate from the bodies that would manipulate them,with the implication that somatechnics designate processual, context-specific ‘ways of seeing, knowing, feeling, moving, being, acting, andso on’ (2012: 302). Drawing on Sullivan and her colleague SamanthaMurray’s definition, Ulrika Dahl and Jenny Sunden highlightthe political significance of somatechnical figurations. With the‘intimate entanglement of soma (the body) and techne (techniques ortechnologies)’, they argue, somatechnics presents as a ‘means bywhich bodies and their politics are transformed’ (Dahl and Sunden2013: 227).

As such, Dahl and Sunden point out, somatechnics continues‘a longer discussion’ in feminist figurings of technologies as spacesfor political intervention (2013: 227). Summarising the aims ofthis somatechnical heritage, they are clear that the political

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recommendations of this inquiry do not immediately translate into adivisive sexual politics:

To acknowledge the inseparability of bodies (human, nonhuman andotherwise) and technologies is not to give up, or give in to a certainmasculine script of technological development and progress, but ratherto envision the only site possible for feminist intervention andinfiltration. (2013: 227)

As forms of early exploration into the political possibilities madeavailable through the complication of human and machine,cyberfeminism marks one such moment in a somatechnicalgenealogy of feminist engagement with technological systems.Emerging at a time when the question of sexual difference wasgaining prominence as a way of reworking feminist political agendas,cyberfeminism marks an historical moment within a feminist politicsof difference in which the conceptual commitments of this body ofwork started to meet with new and seemingly alien technologies.Through figures like the posthuman subject and the cyborg,cyberfeminism provided critical commentary on the politicalpossibilities of more nuanced and complicated forms of embodimentthat the new digital technologies were thought to offer and, for themost part, this response to cyberspace and its associated technologiesviewed them as politically hopeful. Cyberspace presented as a space inwhich traditional readings of identity could be subverted throughdenaturalising assumptions regarding physicality and embodiment(Hayles 1993: 174–5); a space where matter mediated by computertechnology could provide a seductive example of how the split betweenthe body and its others cannot be sustained. With the complexoperations of sexual difference brought to bear upon virtualtechnologies, materiality was seen to be implicated in its digitalrepresentations, with the potential to subvert traditional readings offemininity and ‘woman’.

Without doubt many cyberfeminists remained alert to thecomplexities of the relationship between matter and virtuality; thereis rarely a wholesale rejection of cyberspace as a completely abstractedand therefore inherently masculine space. As Dahl and Sunden suggestabove, the political momentum of somatechnics for feminist purposesdoes not culminate in a diagnosis and dismissal of technologicaldevelopments (solely) as a form of masculinist progressivism. Forcyberfeminists specifically, such a move would be considered politicallyand theoretically naıve in an arena which, although consideredby some as potentially masculine by virtue of the distance it might

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take from embodiment, is, in fact, thought to muddy the distinctionbetween bodies and machines, and to offer new opportunities forfeminine subjectivities. There is an acknowledgement that even in itsintangibility, cyberspace is seen to contain a political cogency, albeita confused one, that enables it to open sexed and human identity tocontestation. As such, a cyberfeminist exploration of the relationbetween bodies, machines, and representations presented animportant and critical interrogation of these categories.

Given the vigorous and fruitful contributions to debates aroundsexual difference that cyberfeminism has offered, it is relevant toquestion why it is that the output of this field of feminist engagementhas lessened and dissipated. As Sarah Kember notes, the ‘rather quietpassing’ of cyberfeminism ‘may be said to have signalled the failureand obsolescence of the cyberfeminist project’ (2002: 627). Accordingto Kember (2002: 627), this ‘failure’ of cyberfeminism appears to becontingent on the ‘rhetoric of resistance’ it adopted as a generalapproach – an approach based on an anarchic or liberatory politicsand recuperated essentialism which were largely products of thefeminist theoretical milieu from which this writing emerged.

While the terrain of cyberfeminism is diverse, marked at its polarends by both celebratory and castigatory appraisals of embodiedtechnicity, a close reading of some of its key contributions indicatesthat the way cyberfeminism has taken up with the nature of theincorporeal, underscored by a particular reading of sexual difference,compromises the full impact of what its reconfiguring of virtualtechnologies, representations and the human might achieve. In theaim to rethink materiality and the feminine, to rework a logic thatauthorises at the same time that it elides masculinist or phallocentricrepresentations of femininity and technicity, it appears that arevaluation of the feminine in cyberfeminist terms has been unableto problematise the masculine and virtual in robust ways. Its importantlegacy for Internet Studies notwithstanding, it could be argued thatcyberfeminism has lost its momentum because its political aims,formulated in these terms, cannot be sustained. While the variedcontributions of cyberfeminist discourse have metamorphosed intonewer forms of engagement with the posthuman, or have indeedsuffered the quiet passing that Kember suggests, a critical reflection onthis field of feminist scholarship provides an instructive promissory tofeminism’s ongoing discussion with the possible political movementscontained in its somatechnical figurations.

With this in mind, my task here is not to effect any closureon cyberfeminism’s achievements, diagnosed in terms of its

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‘political errors’ (Ahmed et al. 2000: 6). Instead, a retrospective reviewof this field and its responses discovers in these contributions somesurprising suggestions for a feminist politics of sexual difference thatI wish to explore. The somatechnical inquiry that I undertake hereis twofold in its approach. In the texts with which I engage, one findsa somatechnical reading of difference that critiques the foreclosureof categories of human-sexed identity and technologies, as well as asomatechnical figuration of difference that disturbs and makespossible a reconfigured politics of sexual difference that avoids fixityor closure of its critical and ontological terms. In this vein, the works ofSadie Plant and Kim Toffoletti provide an insightful counterpoint toZoe Sophia’s evaluation of virtual technologies. In their separatearguments, Plant and Toffoletti reconsider the interface between maleand female, female and machine, and human and machine, in orderto rework sexual difference in terms that rethink the coherence ofmale and female or a strictly human subjectivity (and its separationfrom technological systems) upon which these identities have so farrelied. To this end, I wish to continue a line of inquiry that KristinSampson has proposed in a recent issue of the Somatechnics journal, toinvestigate ‘the possibilities’ that a ‘somatechnical understanding’ ofcorporeality and techne ‘opens up in relation to sexual difference’(2013: 234).

Masculine Virtuality/Displaced Femininity

Considered to be pioneers of a distinctive reading of sexual differencefor cyberspace, Sophia and Plant have both, in their varied ways,explored the potential for virtuality to address or further feministpolitical futures through a reconfiguration of femininity and femininesubjectivity. Sophia, for example, contests any straightforward appealto the idea that the body disappears, or is rendered absent, in virtualculture. Her take on virtuality is a quietly pessimistic appraisal of howwomen or the feminine are accommodated within arguments forvirtual embodiment. Initially uncomfortable with the notion of virtualcorporeality, Sophia accedes to its ability to disturb the separation ofself and other that she regards as an ancillary characteristic of thebody’s implication with computer technologies, but quickly discountsthe ambiguity around sexual difference that this disassembling ofboundaries might also engineer.

Reviewing early representations of cyberspace, Sophia (1992: 15)perceives a masculine identification with maternal fertility thattransposes onto representations of the ‘masculinist/rational brain’.

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In a sort of colonising of the female body, ‘the (masculine) brain isequated with the (maternal) womb’ and ‘upwardly displaced intointellectual production’ to form a new body from ‘the cannibalisedmother’ (1992: 14). Thus, to the question of what place the female bodymight have in cyberspace, Sophia responds ‘almost none’, arguing that‘femininity and maternity are present’ in cyberspace and its discourses,‘but displaced onto masculine and corporate technological fertility’(1992: 15). The feminine is subsumed by masculine rationality andthe masculine qualities of ‘mastery and control’ that attend anunderstanding of computer use as instrumentation.

Sophia’s argument indicates that virtual technologies would findit difficult to acknowledge the feminine, except as a ground that hasbeen superseded by masculine appropriation and control. She draws astructural equivalence between women and computers as ‘the signs orobjects but not usually the possessors or subjects of knowledges’ (1992:16). The masculine penetration of the feminine body/cyberspacematrix has created, in Sophia’s view, ‘unconscious barriers to womenusers of computers’ (1992: 16), and on this basis Sophia clears the wayfor women to be cast as victims and subjects of masculine instrumentalcontrol, while the (feminine) body is a disenfranchised casualtyof masculine self-affection transferred onto the computer.1 It appearsthat she wants to critique this outcome by suggesting that womenneed to ‘negotiate and explore rather than suppress or ignore thecontradictory experiences of seduction by and rejection of virtualbodies and worlds’ (Sophia 1992: 21). However, she concludesher argument by advocating technologies that make ‘real ratherthan virtual reparations’, emphasising the insistent reality, the‘maternal/planetary axis’, that underlies the ‘ultimately misogynisticfantasy of escape from Earth, gravity, and maternal/material origins’offered by virtual technologies (Sophia 1992: 21).

In raising the specific question of sexual difference forcyberspace, Sophia overlooks a crucial disjunction in her argument:that her understanding of the feminine as penetrated andappropriated by the masculine is already contingent upon anunspoken affirmation of the implicit masculinism of abstraction andtechnology. In other words, any suggestion for the complex andgenerative nature of the masculine is denied by correctives aboutits restricted and dangerous economy. Ironically, the assumedmasculinism of cyberspace animates Sophia’s argument, even as shefinds this symbolic order contentious and circumscribed. She must,paradoxically, act as guarantor to the essential masculinity ofdisembodied representation in order to critique it.


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It is not surprising, then, that Sophia remains sceptical of thepolitical efficacy of cyberspace, given that her argument is establishedon an understanding of sexual difference as the difference between themasculine virtual and its appropriation of the feminine matrix/womb/ground. As such, a binary is introduced here: there cannot be anyambiguity in the differences which mark off the feminine from themasculine in an argument which relies on the firm demarcation ofthese identities in order to derive its understanding of politics.Cyberspace is politicised by virtue of its masculine appropriation of thefeminine matrix/womb. Any ambiguity in sexual identity wouldcomplicate the nature of sexual difference, as Sophia understands it,as well as the political strategies meant to accurately acknowledge it.

Thus we could say that Sophia’s scepticism around cyberspace’spolitical prospects is motivated by her quiet commitment to apre-existing distinction between masculine virtuality and a feminineground. This issue of virtuality’s essential masculinity is not opened toquestion in Sophia’s argument. Women are structurally excluded fromcyberspace. Defined in their difference from men, they are left in aposition outside the virtual system from where they can negotiate, orstrategise and rally against, the dominant representations orcontainment of the feminine within virtual culture. Consequently,the political nature of this medium is assumed rather than fullyexplored by Sophia. She raises the question of technology’sinstrumentality or utility, but quickly forecloses it in her criticism ofthe masculine mastery of the computer/woman, because thisunderstanding of technology itself becomes instrumental to anargument that must, of necessity, rely on the closure of its termsto extrapolate its politics. In short, from a somatechnical perspectivethe logic of Sophia’s approach relies on a Cartesian distinctionbetween representation and real – the virtual system and its materialeffects – that the novel ontology which is said to characterisecyberspace strives to put into question.

The Machine and the Identity of Woman

Although not without its problems, the interface of body/technologyelicits a more nuanced reading in the work of Sadie Plant. Her essay,‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics’ (1995),provides a particular example of how difference and its politicalattentions might be understood in a more generous framework. Therelationship of woman and computer is given a different spin by Plantwhen she inverts the familiar association of masculinity with both the

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machine and the incorporeal. This allows her to elaborate theintegration of woman and machine in a way that casts cyberspace asa feminised space. To this end, Plant adapts Luce Irigaray’s reading ofwoman as ‘mimesis’ to her understanding of Internet technology. Likethe feminine, the machine is mimetic, grounding and reflecting, ormirroring, masculine desires rather than being subsumed by them. Ina more optimistic exploration of virtuality, Plant allows for therethinking of the feminine through a technology that she regards ascontinuous with the complex nature of identity.

In a reading of the interface that attempts to think through thedynamic relationality of its terms, Plant emphasises the historical andpolitical contingencies it has generated between the masculine, thefeminine and the machine. Organising her claims through Irigaray’sargument, Plant notes that woman has played a significant role in themasculine drive for dominance and transcendence. At all times she hashelped to create the history of man’s subjective self-authoring,providing ‘a mirror for man, his servant and accommodation, histools and means of communication . . . man’s natural resource for hisown cultural development’ (1995: 58). This instrumentality of womanis quickly equated with the computer in a rethinking of utility asnot simply extraneous to the (masculine) user, but as generatinghis identity (as an autonomous subject). As Plant notes, ‘man’sdomination cannot be allowed to become the annihilation of thematerials he needs’ (1995: 58); instead, man is inherently dependenton woman and the machine as they comprise the tools for constructinghis own identity and his culture. This produces an interesting powerrelationship between man and woman, or man and machine. ‘Likewoman’, Plant argues, ‘software systems are used as man’s tools, hismedia and his weapons; all are developed in the interests of men, butall are poised to betray him’ (1995: 58).

As the general ground to man’s desires, woman’s inability to‘be anything’, to have an identity in her own right, means that her verymode of being depends on her ability to ‘imitate anything valued byman’ (Plant 1995: 58). Woman is thus ‘the very possibility of mimesis’,a simulation of masculine desire which emphasises the complex powerrelationship she shares with man. As a simulation or mirror to man’sdesires, both technology and woman cannot be limited to man’s masteryof them, but rather they exceed their own instrumentality. Importantlyfor Plant, this notion of excess does not proceed by reference to ageneral ground or an excessive materiality that is situated prior to, orunderlying, mimesis. The mirror suggests that the specular economywhich usually privileges the masculine gaze also exceeds or subverts it,


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reversing it so that man is himself subject to a gaze of sorts, reinterpretedin his own projection of his desires. Thus, these mimetic abilities‘throw woman into a universality unknown and unknowable to the onewho knows who she is: she fits any bill, but in so doing, she is alreadymore than that which she imitates’ (Plant 1995: 59).

The computer interface, also part of the machinery of mimesis, issimilarly excessive. Rather than simply representing an oblique cutbetween situated self and virtuality, matter and representation, Plant’sargument suggests that the masculine subject’s relationship with theinterface is implicated in his very constitution as a subject, and inmaking this suggestion Plant is not forced to locate or properly assignsubjectivity, because it already incorporates its own excess. In its lack ofcontainment, the identity of woman or the machine is unknowable andsimulated, and yet it is also ‘the living foundation for the whole stagingof the world’ (Irigaray, cited in Plant 1995: 59). With Irigaray, Plantmakes the exciting suggestion that while subjectivity as essentiallymasculine is in the process of being reinterpreted through woman’s(or the computer’s) mimetic ability, at the same time the lack ofcontainment which characterises mimesis means that woman herself(or the computer itself) is both dispersed and universal.

In this configuration the nature of the feminine or technologyis not subsumed by the masculine; rather, it is unidentifiable evento the masculine gaze that presumes to know what woman or themachine is. And, more importantly, it is integral to the very identity ofthe masculine subject: it is the ground which contaminates andreinterprets masculine authorisations of the world and self. In thisway, Plant suggests that the identity of the masculine is alreadycompromised by the feminine in its excessiveness, and also intimatesthe obverse. In effect, Plant advocates a view of identity thatunderstands masculinity, femininity, and virtuality to be implicated.Crucially, the very system that is thought to contain woman, themasculine gaze that interprets and represents women’s difference,actually enables her excess of any phallocentric system ofrepresentation, and the excessive identity of the feminine alreadyincorporates man and machine.

In this reading of identity, cyberspace cannot simply representa masculine ‘cerebral flight from the mysteries of matter’ (Plant1995: 60). As Plant sees it, there is no escape from the flesh incyberspace, it is ‘nothing transcendent’:

These are simply the guises which pander to man’s projections of his ownrear-view illusions; reproduction of desires which have guided his dream

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of technological authority and now become the collective nightmareof a soulless integration. Entering the matrix is not an assertion ofmasculinity, but a loss of humanity; to jack into cyberspace is not topenetrate, but to be invaded. (1995: 60)

Plant makes the important observation here that in the interfacingbetween matter and machine the fraught nature of identity is extendedto an evaluation of the human. Sexual difference and the divisions itassumes or confuses become part of an enlarged system of identity.In this system, the idea of human identity and its boundaries arealready permeated by the machine, so that the very ‘humanness’ of thehuman becomes ambiguous.

With identity confused in such a way, the implication of feminineand masculine identities with the computer takes on an enlargedpolitical quality. Contrary to Sophia’s approach, which represents thematrix as feminine and penetrable, open to masculine inscription andlacking any political capacity of its own, Plant (1995: 60) conceives ofthe cyberspace matrix as a womb that is not characterised by anyabsence or lack, but which marks a space for women’s affirmation, itsidentity already penetrating the world. In this rethinking of sexualpolitics, virtuality and femininity are ‘home to no-one and no-thing’,both dispersed and yet, paradoxically, providing a location for theaffirmation of (the impossibility of) the feminine, an identity which isnot truly knowable or available. Woman is herself virtual, the simulationand instrumentation of men’s desires that exceeds this logic ofdomination from within the parameters of the interface. In other words,to this point Plant has theorised sexual difference as given by, and yetexcessive to, the interfacing that lends masculine and feminine, as wellas masculine and machine, their identities. The politics of thisinterface as Plant understands it presents some troubling and yetnecessary questions about the nature of difference and the politicalmore generally.

At a certain point in her argument, however, Plant begins tocircumscribe the reach of this politics of difference. Responding to theconventional logic that man’s denial of matter ‘has made his culture –and his technologies – possible’, she tries to demonstrate Irigaray’ssuggestion that ‘the matter denied by human culture is a virtual system’(1995: 61). According to Plant, the nature man thought he had denied is,in fact, still available, still cultural and yet subtending ‘its extension inthe form of nature’ (1995: 61). In another reversal of terms, Plantargues that ‘the virtual is the abstract machine from which the actualemerges; nature is already the camouflage of matter’ (1995: 61).


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Confusing established origin stories which position matter as theoriginal basis from which masculine subjectivity is extrapolated, Plantmakes some analytically insightful and politically significantstatements here. The feminine cannot be considered a priorground to masculine self-authorship. Virtuality, the simulation ormirroring of nature that is woman’s excessive identity, already existsas the origin and its re-interpretation. In other words, if any referenceto matter is always a reference to its excessive identity as alreadyvirtual, then a more restricted understanding of matter or virtuality,masculine or feminine, is disrupted.

However, in arguing that nature is already virtual, the force ofPlant’s argument is tempered by her challenge that underneath thecamouflage of ‘nature’, ‘[t]here is indeed nothing there’ (1995: 61).What man conceives of nature ‘is simply the camouflage, the veil again,which conceals its virtuality’ (Plant, 1995: 61). Unfortunately, withthis bold claim Plant’s argument is thrown into disarray because itbecomes unclear whether she is actually suggesting that ‘there is nooutside of virtuality’. And, if this is the case, it is unclear whether thevirtual retains an uncanny ability to be materially constituted/ive (ina different configuration of both virtual (technicity) and material),or whether, at some stage, this virtuality retains a purity of existencewhich is separable from matter/nature, or whether matter as suchsimply cannot exist (if indeed this could be the case). To rephrase:is Plant suggesting that nature, the maternal, the feminine arereducible to virtual simulations in the absence of materiality? Thatthere is no matter? Or, is she claiming that any argument for thevirtual already complicates biology, and implicates it in its enlargedidentity, in a completely refigured understanding of how biology isconstituted?2

The enduring simulation of nature and the feminine is apparentin Plant’s understanding of the virtual womb/matrix; she explores thevery logic that can acknowledge the excessiveness of a system thatproduces its own ‘other’. The simulation or virtuality of woman andmachine as mimesis is not an afterthought to an originary maternalground. Plant makes it clear that woman’s ontology as a naturalresource for man’s cultural development does not derive from ‘beingleft behind, always at the beginning’ (1995: 58). Rather, woman as themirror is already situated at ‘the beginning’ in a very interestinginterpretation of the origin as somehow already containing both theidentity of the masculine and its feminine reflection. In other words,through Irigaray, Plant suggests that the simulational immediacy ofthe feminine mirror cohabits with the masculine at the origin

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of any identity, so that the identity of masculine or feminine is alwayscontaminated by its other. This cohabitation within the origin is mademore complicated by the double-edged nature of mimesis. The originincorporates all of the following: the masculine, the feminine, thereflection of masculine desires, and the effective absence of thefeminine in her mimicry and translation of both masculine desires andidentity.

What seems to be happening here is that the excessive nature ofthe masculine is acknowledged as inhabiting the origin and beyond.The masculine swells beyond its boundaries; it is present, its desires re-presented and potentially reinscribed, at the same time that it attemptsto supplement the identity of the feminine. The feminine is equallyexpansive, its excessive identity also given by its receptibility, the‘nothingness’ that is the plenitude of the feminine, as well as its abilityto mirror masculine desires. If Plant is suggesting that virtuality can beunderstood in the same way, then the claim that everything is virtualremains provocative and politically enabling.

However, we see a more conservative note enter her argumentwhen she makes a break from what she ultimately perceives as thelimitations of the masculine. Machines and women, Plant argues,‘mimic their humanity, but they never simply become it’ (1995: 63).Instead, the feminine appears to depart from the masculine in itscomplex virtuality in much the same way that Plant proposes her ownargument departs from earlier feminist readings of difference:

They may aspire to be the same as man, but in every effort they becomemore complex than he has ever been. Cybernetic feminism does not, likemany of its predecessors. . . seek out for woman a subjectivity, an identityor even a sexuality of her own: there is no subject position and noidentity on the other side of the screens. And female sexuality is always inexcess of anything that could be called ‘her own’. Woman cannot existlike man; neither can the machine. As soon as her mimicry earns herequality, she is already something, and somewhere, other than him.(1995:63)

If we pause to consider what becomes of the masculine in thisconfiguring of the feminine, this is where some of the trouble canbe seen to lie. Compared to the amorphous complexity of thefeminine/virtuality, it appears that, for Plant, masculinity continues tobe coterminous with ‘the human’, a fixed position that does little toshift the dominant constructions of the human subject. The differencehere is that rather than being inscribed by overtly masculinerepresentations of woman, the feminine is itself reflecting and


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representing the masculine in an expansive ontology that unhingessubjectivity and humanness itself.

The question to be posed, then, is why the masculine does notshare in this expansive ontology. This curtailing of masculine identityhappens again in Plant’s appeal to the temporality of women’sinvolvement in the history of technicity, into which ‘women andcomputers have flooded’ (1995: 63). But on this basis we should alsoask: why were they not already inside, and creating, the historicity ofthe machine? The temporal break Plant establishes here marks adefinitive distinction between the masculine and the feminine, and itallows the problematic assumptions of a masculine domination oftechnology and its history to remain in place. Although the actualdistinction between matter and representation is not suspect here, thequestion of whether Plant understands the ‘nothing there’ of nature tomean its irreducible virtuality in a restricted sense is not resolved,because the problem in her argument shifts to the distinction shedraws between feminine and masculine. Moreover, this distinctioncannot do justice to the very interesting interpretation of identity at theorigin that Plant has potentially offered. If virtuality is the field ofdifference itself, the dynamic process of identity coming into being,then how does it exclude or circumscribe the masculine?

Throughout her argument, the question of sexual difference isdisplaced for Plant, just as the agency of the human subject isdispersed. She moves the focus of enquiry from the human subject tothe computer and its cybernetic systems, now theorised as an extendedsystem of difference ‘of which nature and culture are the subprograms’(1995: 63). Indeed, Plant would consider the discourse of humanismitself under threat because the masculine universal human subject,his mastery over ‘his tools’, and his desire for transcendence, arepresumably rendered invalid by the excessive virtuality of the feminine.However, in tracing these very powerful reconfigurations of the natureof sexual difference, Plant returns a humanist logic to her assessmentof the identity of the masculine. It now appears that the subject andthe human still exist, they retain their integrity, and they are stillclearly masculine. The known parameters of sexual difference havenot been disrupted so much as the feminine has been dislocatedirrevocably from the maternal ground, a ground which never reallyexisted in the sense that it has been traditionally understood, while themasculine remains tied to his conceptual conventions. Real politicalwork thus takes place with the feminine/virtual reconfigurations oftechnology, identity, representation and its questionably materialfoundation.

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The power differential in the technology/materiality ormasculine/feminine binary has been inverted and then expanded, sothat Plant acknowledges and explores the complex generativity andimplication of identity. However, the interfacing of sexual difference asa division is quietly reinstalled, and it works within Plant’s approach toactively delimit or circumscribe the more implicated understandingof identity that her argument offers. The difference animatingnature and culture is found inside the web of virtuality, which, stilltheorised as an interface, can continue to acknowledge its convolutedconstitution. But, with her diagnosis of the masculine as theretrogressive outside to the coupling of machine and woman, thetemporal and spatial coordinates of dualism are reintroduced in thisargument to shut down some of its most provocative suggestionsabout the identity of the masculine. In effect, Plant has to agree tomasculinity’s necessary separation from a system of difference that, byvirtue of its very excessiveness, wants to incorporate it in its generativeschema. Ironically, if she were to concede to masculinity’s excess, totheorise the masculine as (part of) the same system of virtuality thatgives the feminine its strongest political charge, then her argumentwould have very different implications for feminism. Plant leavesroom for the masculine to be universalised, but only in a restricted,oppositional sense. Unhinged from its own foundations, the masculineis given free reign to continue to construct the same myths oftranscendence that she would trouble otherwise.

The Difference with the Posthuman

Almost a decade later, Kim Toffoletti continues Plant’s suggestion thatquestions around sexual difference and virtual technologies extendinto the field of difference and the status of the human itself.3 Herargument traces the limitations of the figures of the cyborg and themonster as tropes for understanding difference because they havefocused on the subversive possibilities for the feminine, rather thanidentity generally. For Toffoletti, the posthuman can open the way forfeminist figurations of subjectivity that do not have to maintain theintegrity of identity categories that these other figures suggest.4

In what she perceives to be a development upon earliercontributions to the cyberfeminist project, Toffoletti draws on theposthuman figure to show that the political reach of the body’simbrication with technology cannot be confined to the delimiting logicof cyborg and monster politics because these require the sexualisationof virtuality as feminine in order to reconsider the masculine affinity


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with technology or representation. Toffoletti champions a posthumanidentity because its constitution is not restricted to a ‘feministmetaphor for difference’ which ‘threatens to disrupt phallogocentricmodels of self-hood’ in order to ‘reclaim Otherness as a site of femalesubject identification’ (2004: para. 5). Evolving from figures of cyborgand monster, the posthuman challenges systems of meaning aboutthe human itself, into which the integrity of masculine and feminineare tied.5

The axis for this rethinking of difference through the posthumanfigure hinges on its ‘disavowal of difference’ (2004: para. 2) and, onthis basis, Toffoletti considers the posthuman to disturb feministreadings of self and Other relationships which are necessary to afeminist identity politic. According to Toffoletti, the forms ofdifference that would usually characterise such relationships aresubsumed by the posthuman: it contests ‘the separation of theorganic and machinic, the human and the non-human in favour ofa symbiotic and contaminated interaction whereby interiorities andexteriorities, self and Other, no longer exist’ (2004: para. 14). Byeliding the type of difference that is characterised as the differencebetween masculine and feminine, machine and human, the posthumansubject disallows the integrity of identity. It ‘destablizes a coherentidentity that is structured in a binaristic system of meaningdetermining gender and race and the natural, originary, and thehuman’ (Toffoletti, 2004: para. 16).

From this, it would appear that, for Toffoletti, the posthumansubject incorporates binary differences into its excessive identity, to thepoint where these differences no longer hold any significance; theyare insubstantial within the political economy that the posthumanadvances. But this is not to suggest that differences no longer exist.As Toffoletti argues, the posthuman subject does not simply negatedifference, but rather opens it up beyond binary distinctions. Sexualdifference is therefore not denied, ‘but becomes a proliferation ofpossibilities generated by the posthuman condition’ (Toffoletti 2004:para. 19). ‘Anatomical being is thus no longer a stable referent’, so it is‘difference, as a marker of sexual, racial, and ethnic identity’ that is‘under attack’ (2004: para. 19).

In many ways, Toffoletti’s understanding of the posthumanresponds to Plant’s quandary of having to position the masculineand the feminine at the origin of identity, without knowing how todisassemble the integrity of the masculine and human whenexpounding the nature of the feminine/virtual. Where for Plant thefeminine is considered mimetic, that which simulates masculine desire,

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for Toffoletti the posthuman removes references to specifically sexualidentities so as to be, in itself, a simulation of itself. In other words,where Plant has been forced to separate the masculine from thevirtuality of the feminine in order to explore a specifically femininedeviant technology, Toffoletti understands all forms of identity –including masculine, feminine, and human, to be bound up in theirown simulation.6 In this way there can be no claim to a ‘proper’ origin,and, more importantly, this origin cannot be sexualised. In a verycritical way, the incorporation of the binary structure into the figure ofthe posthuman also involves a reconfigured temporality. QuotingJudith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, editors of the seminalcompendium of its field, Posthuman Bodies, Toffoletti comments that‘the posthuman monstrosity and its bodily forms are recognizablebecause they occupy the overlap between the now and then, the hereand the always: the annunciation of posthumanity is always bothpremature and old news’ (2004: para. 6, emphasis added).

The irony in calling the posthuman ‘post’ is that according to thisvery curious take on temporality, it has always existed, and yet is still tocome into being. Taking Halberstam and Livingston’s suggestion that‘the annunciation of the posthuman is always both premature and oldnews’, Toffoletti understands the posthuman as a subject whoseconstitution excludes nothing. Rather, the identity of anything isalready found to be implicated in this dispersed system of subjectivity.The masculine cannot stand outside of the feminine because it hasalways been implicated in the feminine, so much so that, for Toffoletti,sexual differences are not relevant to the posthuman.

Halberstam and Livingston’s reference to the annunciation of theposthuman, the announcement of its being, is made more curiouswhen one considers how it is that this creature can be called into beingif it already appears to implicate all being and non-being. Put anotherway, where the focus of feminist politics of difference has been tocreate a space for enunciation, an opportunity for the feminine subjectto speak and represent herself, the reference to annunciation hereexpands the parameters of agency from the speaking subject to asystem which appears to challenge and converse with itself.Annunciation suggests that the existence of something is announcedto an Other, but in excluding nothing, this Other to the posthumansubject is also itself.

This idea is repeated in Toffoletti’s appraisal of the posthuman asa simulation. As a product of simulation, ‘the posthuman figurationhas no Other, no referent from which to constitute the self’ (2004:para. 8). Thus, if the posthuman is not Other, if it does not have


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an Other, its announcement is internal, it represents a dynamic systemof becoming (difference). In this understanding, all difference mustbe implicated within a subjectivity that has already existed and yet isstill to arrive. This difference exists now, and yet is also deferred fromitself, deferring the opportunity for identity to be fixed to an originaryground. As a simulation, Toffoletti’s reading of the posthumanrequires that it is also disallowed any myth of its own origin becauseit has no beginning and no end. There is no maternal or materialground from which it has emerged, nor is it simply a replication orrepresentation of anything that might have pre-existed it. In a veryinteresting move, it appears that the posthuman subject becomescreation as we know it.

With the crucial and provocative rethinking of difference thatthis account of the posthuman offers, Toffoletti’s suggestion thatdifference itself is erased in the schema of the posthuman now becomesa little confusing. Because difference ‘exceeds binary dualisms,threatening how we know the world and make meaning’, it resides‘beyond signification or systems of value’ according to Toffoletti (2004:para. 27). In this way, ‘difference is annihilated so that it cannot beunderstood as different to something. It is same’ (2004: para. 27,emphasis added). However, this annihilation of difference doesnot reduce all identities to a logic of the same in Toffoletti’s view,as we are reminded that ‘difference escapes containment andhomogenisation by exceeding signification’ (2004: para. 28). Inother words, homogenisation, the process of rendering all identitiessame, is not even possible because it is a process understood asoppositional to containment, it presumes something of identity andthe binary of same/difference that has already been exceededby/within the posthuman.

It is, therefore, understandable that Toffoletti would suggestthat difference as we know it in its binary articulations does not existas such. However, its erasure represents a potentially problematicaspect of her argument because it appears to be at odds with thegenerosity of difference she advances. In her understanding of theposthuman, Toffoletti concedes that difference has to be displacedfrom itself, and if this process is internal to the posthuman subject,then it draws forward, calls out or announces these differences as partof its own systemic working. In which case, how can difference beerased?

Toffoletti describes the posthuman subject as ‘a fatal site, a placeof unstable signification that cannot be contained within an economyof exchange that relies upon the dualistic nature of difference’

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(2004: para. 20). The posthuman exceeds existing notions of identityand subjectivity, and this is still well within the machinery of itsinclusivity. But it remains unclear how these differences might disappearin this posthuman figuration. Because of her own assertions, Toffolettiis pushed to ask how ‘the question of difference’ might ‘be negotiatedin an order of simulation where difference is erased’ (2004: para. 22).But her claim that the posthuman erases binary difference isdiscontinuous with an argument that suggests that the posthuman isthe field of difference itself. It may be, then, that Toffoletti is workingwith an understanding of the interface in the restricted sense of itsbinary pairing, the self/Other relationship within which she believesdifference to be (problematically) produced. Circumscribed in thisway, difference constituted by the logic of dualism must be erased bythe more generous schema of the posthuman.

An alternative suggestion might be that Toffoletti circumscribesdifference in another way; as that which attaches to bodies, seeing thatit is ‘[d]ifference, as a marker of sexual, racial, and ethnic identity’which she regards as ‘under attack’. Perhaps her suggestion thatdifference is erased refers specifically to her position that forms ofbody-based difference are annihilated because their integrity is alwayscontaminated. This, however, would suggest that we have just thoughtdifference the wrong way. It does not account for the way difference asdynamic or ‘transformative’ (Toffoletti 2004: para. 22) might evenproduce its own tensions, its own oppositional logic, internally.Drawing on Vivian Sobchack’s work on morphology, Toffoletti (2004:para. 23) offers Sobchack’s comment that the posthuman denies thepower relations that accompany the binary structure. But from her ownreading of difference one is pressed to ask how this might be possiblegiven that the interfacing of male and female, thought and matter,have had productive and useful political effects. And how is thedifference of this ‘error’ (of dualism), and its constitutive qualities,denied in a system that must incorporate it?

What appears to be happening in Toffoletti’s argument is that atsome stage difference has been equated more easily with systems ofsignification, so that where the posthuman is thought to move ‘beyondsignification’ (2004: para. 25), ‘to circulate beyond the fixity ofsignifying codes’ (2004: para. 29), it does, in fact, exceed existingnotions of representation and simulation as that which maps the real.In Toffoletti’s words, the posthuman is a ‘point of slippage thatcorrupts an understanding of representation as a mirror of reality’because there is no ‘real’ in existence (2004: para. 32). The posthumanis excessive in its simulation because, in having no point of reference


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and in erasing binary difference, it exceeds any sense of autonomy orreferral in order to open meaning to a multiplicity which pushesbeyond the fixity of signifying practice. Toffoletti, similar to Plant,finds the best expression for difference in the ‘excess of the simulacra’(2004: para. 32) which, despite its need to exceed even the boundariesof signification, to incorporate the material, the virtual and so on,appears, upon closer analysis, to remain covertly tied to anunderstanding of representation that might end up replacing bodilymarkers of difference.

For Toffoletti, concentrating on difference through theposthuman allows us to focus on ‘its function within a politicaleconomy of signification’ (2004: para. 33), an important step inunderstanding ‘what is at stake for women in a post-material,post-gender, and posthuman landscape’. However, if we allow in herargument for simulation to account for all things in a radicallyreconfigured ontology of difference, then Toffoletti’s reference to thepolitical economy of signification would have to be as expansive as theposthuman itself. Her understanding of difference seems to suggestthat simulation and signification always involve biology, so that neithersimulation nor biology is properly identifiable. But this troubling oftheir identity does not seem to extend to their ontology. In otherwords, while Toffoletti can argue that they are not identifiable on onelevel, she does not address how biology and signification are actuallyconstituted.

Differentiating at the level of signification seems to be the primaryprocess of difference. Gender becomes ‘a surface effect, rather thana marker of identity locatable in the body’ in this argument (2004:para. 19). Toffoletti wants to make clear that this surface effect is notsimply a writing on the surface of the body, that the function of theskin ‘as a boundary between biological interiorities and the externalinvasions of technology is . . . rendered obsolete’ (2004: para. 14).However, if gender, ‘like skin, is a surface effect’ then a boundary ofsorts has been introduced here. And although this argument is meantto indicate the already dynamic and transformative capacity ofcorporeality, it may not be able to achieve the full aim of its renderingof the posthuman. Instead, Toffoletti claims that the posthuman ‘makesus aware of race as culturally and historically constructed, rather thanbiologically given’ (2004: para. 15, emphasis added).

While it is clear that Toffoletti’s argument can properly allow forthe messy and contaminated quality of culture and nature, one is leftwith the sense that this contamination is more a signifying practice andless a broader material constitution. In an argument which seems

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to understand that nothing can stand outside of the system it choosesto explore, it is difficult to see how the posthuman is able to ‘gobeyond’ existing ways of understanding representation and materiality.Nor is there any easy way of understanding how we are able to inhabit apost-gender world, given that temporality as chronology has neverexisted ‘as such’, and that all possibilities for gender and any sexualidentity must already be available in/as posthuman. Similarly, it isunclear how the posthuman destabilises coherent identities, orpotential body politics, as though after the fact of these identities, ifthese have never existed as stable or fixed points of reference in thefirst place. What is most provocative for this analysis is that insuggesting that the posthuman incorporates all difference, this mustinclude that which it considers to be restricted or incorrect.

In many ways Toffoletti identifies and takes on the core problemof a feminist politics of difference – its potential mapping of differenceto the body as the correct location for political contestation and itsreliance on the integrity of the identity of woman, around whichits politics can be organised. She is also concerned to contestunderstandings of the body as (reductively) semiotically produced.The posthuman is presented by Toffoletti as a more sophisticatedreading of the political field of difference because it dismantlesidentity at a fundamental level, thereby dismantling its politics andinvalidating claims to feminine subjecthood which remain tied to anoppositional logic. As she understands it, ‘subjectivity forged uponidentification with the posthuman’ is itself made impossible (2004:para. 33), as subjectivity in any traditional or located sense cannot beconstituted through the posthuman. Following this, Toffoletti arguesthat the posthuman does not offer a ‘productive difference’ becausesubjectivity here ‘is understood as a series of displacements whereidentity cannot be secured in relation to popular images in terms ofidentification of resistance’ (2004: para. 33). What is left from thisis the concept of a productive field of difference that is tied to itsutility for a particular group, women in this case, to resist existingrepresentations, and these actions are only made available through abinary logic which the posthuman actually erases; clearly this is apolitics that Toffoletti’s posthuman figure contests.

Where Toffoletti questions the agency of the human subject, shesuggests, but does not fully consider, an expanded sense of agency –namely, the mechanics of difference itself. Within her argument, shedoes not explore the posthuman as already productive in the sense ofproducing its own torsions, tensions and displacements. Instead,Toffoletti argues that identity ‘is abolished by posthuman figurations in


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favour of a model of the subject that is unstable, transformative, andcatastrophic’ (2004: para. 33). Toffoletti considers the conventionalmarkers of identity, such as the skin, to be a point of posthumantransformation, and quotes Halberstam’s view that the skin as aboundary or signifier of difference ‘does not fit’ with this enlargedschema of the posthuman (2004: para. 13). However, even withthis boundary configured in such a way that it is unidentifiable,in a system of difference that denies the ‘true’ coherence of anyidentity, that which ‘does not fit’ must still reside, and have productiveeffects.

A Somatechnics of Sexual Difference

In these accounts it has become clear that the way virtuality getsfigured in a feminist politics of difference, where it has beenreconceived in terms of the feminine, or where its identity as otherto materiality is understood to be effaced, in most cases its naturecannot be elaborated. Both Plant and Toffoletti provide a readingof (sexual) difference which exceeds a more conventional framework,demonstrating that, if carefully analysed, difference’s incorporationand implication of identity extends to a larger terrain than argumentsabout sexual difference may have most often allowed. However, inseparate ways, both Plant and Toffoletti’s essays reproduce the verytensions that difference generates, exemplifying the way in which themechanism of difference also appears to produce and negate its ownframe of reference. In distinct ways, they suggest that the field ofvirtuality is already a dynamic field of difference incorporating andexceeding the interface of male and female or human and machine.Although there are limitations within both writers’ arguments thatserve to curtail some of their more promising suggestions, theirconsiderations of difference are significant in demonstrating howthe question of the (machine/body) interface might be symptomaticof the way sexual difference operates. The foreclosure of virtualityin the feminist accounts of difference discussed here indicates thatthe interface between male and female has, for the most part, beenassumed on one level, even as it is opened to question on others.

However, in a qualified sense, Toffoletti’s reading of theposthuman makes some crucial suggestions for a somatechnicalpolitics of sexual difference: namely, that there cannot be anoriginary term or an identity that precedes its other, so that bodyand machine, feminine and masculine have always been entangled intheir coming into being as co-constitutive and productive. In this

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thinking, virtual representations have always been caught up within agenerous ontology. A feminist politics that might claim its politicalterritory against a masculinist technology has to also concede to itsalready implicated identity. But instead of then collapsing masculineand feminine into the belly of the virtual machine, a reduction ofdifference that we’ve seen enacted and yet made unattainable inToffoletti’s posthuman figuration, what this somatechnics of sexualdifference might offer us instead is ‘a proliferation of possibilitiesgenerated by the posthuman condition’ (2004: para. 19).

Albeit taking a different path through a ‘Homeric conception ofcorporeality’ (and, by implication, techne), Sampson finds the samepossibilities to think through ‘a conception of variety and difference –including sexual difference – without an underlying substance orbeing’ (2013: 241). For Sampson, this somatechnics of sexualdifference ‘would then be something that permeates the living manand woman’, confusing the distinctions between nature and cultureto make way for ‘a conception of living existence as differentiated, alsosexually’ (2013: 241). In a later essay, Plant offers a general suggestionof where this thinking of sexual difference might lead feminism.Although some of the comments she makes here do not quite meshwith her overall point, in particular the antagonism that she paintsfor virtual reality as the enemy of identity (an antagonism that sits inline with Toffoletti’s posthuman denial of difference), for the sakeof its provocations, her suggestion is worth quoting in close to itsentirety:

It takes an irresponsible feminism – which may not be feminism atall – to trace the inhuman paths on which woman begins to assembleherself as the cracks and crazes now emerging across the once smoothsurfaces of patriarchal order . . . There is no authentic or essential womanup ahead, no self to be reclaimed from some long lost past, nor even apotential subjectivity to be constructed in the present day. Nor is thereonly absence or lack. Instead there is virtual reality, an emergent processfor which identity is not the goal but the enemy, precisely what has keptat bay the matrix of potentialities from which women have alwaysdownloaded their roles. (1996: 182–3)

What Plant appears to propose here is that it is only in keeping theidentity of woman (and to this I would add man) open in an emergentprocess that she terms a virtual reality, that new and renewedconfigurations – the matrix of potentialities – of a feminist politics ofsexual difference can arrive. And in this thinking, as Sampson (2013:243) suggests, ‘who knows what could happen?’


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Notes1. A similar logic invigorates arguments that women need to clear a space for

their own (empowered) participation in cyberspace given the structuralexclusion of women from forms of technology. See, for example, Dale Spender’sNattering on the Net (1995) and Melanie Stewart Millar’s Cracking the Gender Code(2000).

2. Kember (2002: 627) points to a biological essentialism in Plant’s essay that givesmomentum to her cyberfeminist claims. However, I would argue that thecomplexity of difference that Plant alludes to serves to destabilise any clearcategorisation that would support a straightforward biological essentialism withinthe reading of sexual difference that she provides here.

3. Arriving at this point, Toffoletti’s argument, strictly speaking, cannot be said to fallwithin the scope of cyberfeminism as this body of feminist writing is ordinarilyunderstood. For the purposes of this paper, I have engaged with Toffoletti’sargument as a continuation of cyberfeminist engagements with the nature ofvirtual reality and virtual representations made available through digitaltechnologies.

4. Toffoletti’s analysis works with the image of Marilyn Manson on the cover of thealbum Mechanical Animals as exemplary of the posthuman figure; a boundarycreature whose morphogenesis into animal and strange plasticity challenges ‘theintegrity of the organic body’, signaling ‘a breakdown in the system of meaningthat programs the distinctions between animal and human, organism andmachine’ (2004: para. 3). In order to engage with her reading of the posthumanwithin the trajectory of feminist analysis, I have generalised this figure rather thanimporting the detail of Toffoletti’s focus on Manson as a posthuman figure morespecifically.

5. In some readings of the posthuman the cyborg is still taken to be an example of aposthuman figure. See for example Ann Weinstone’s Avatar Bodies (2004).

6. Although we have seen this same claim made available in Plant’s argument, itcannot be maintained because her understanding of sexual difference ultimatelyhinges on a humanist understanding of the masculine subject.

References

Ahmed, Sara, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs (2000),‘Introduction: Thinking through Feminism’, in S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury,M. McNeil and B. Skeggs (eds.), Transformations: Thinking through Feminism,London: Routledge, pp. 1–23.

Dahl, Ulrika and Jenny Sunden (2013), ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction: SomatechnicalFigurations’, Somatechnics, 3:2, pp. 225–32.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1993), ‘The Seductions of Cyberspace’, in V. Conley (ed.),Rethinking Technologies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 173–89.

Kember, Sarah (2002), ‘Reinventing Cyberfeminism: Cyberfeminism and theNew Biology’, Economy and Society, 31:4, pp. 626–41.

Millar, Stephanie Stewart (2000), Cracking the Gender Code: Who Rules the Wired World?,Sydney: Pluto Press.

Plant, Sadie (1995), ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics’, inM. Feathertone and R. Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures ofTechnological Embodiment, London: Sage Publications, pp. 45–64.

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Plant, Sadie (1996), ‘On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations’, in R. Shields (ed.),Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, London: SagePublications, pp. 170–183.

Sampson, Kristin (2013), ‘Soma, Techne and the Somatechnics of Sexual Difference’,Somatechnics, 3:2, pp. 233–249.

Sophia, Zoe (1992), ‘Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View’, Australian Feminist Studies,7:15, pp. 11–24.

Spender, Dale (1995), Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, Melbourne:Spinifex.

Sullivan, Nikki (2012), ‘The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of theNon/Human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism’, European Journal ofWomen’s Studies, 19:3, pp. 299–313.

Toffoletti, Kim (2004), ‘Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman, andDifference’, thirdspace, 3:2, available online: http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/view/toffoletti/175 (accessed 19 November 2013).

Weinstone, Ann (2003), Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism, Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.


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Virtual Representations: A Somatechnical Politics of Sexual Difference (2014)

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