Comments on: Future female: fetish or force?

By: tracy

tracy — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:10:11 +0000

Hi Lesley, thank you for the comments. Yes I thought that too, the whole of My Fair Lady is a lesson on how painful it can be for a woman to attempt to conform to a man’s idealised image of how they should be.

And I also chose the bionic woman doll to try and show that dislocation – her face was removable (for those of us born in the 70’s perhaps our first exposure to a cyberwoman).

By: lesleyf

lesleyf — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:13:20 +0000

Hi Nicola, one of the things that strikes me about your video is the sad expression on Audrey Hepburn’s face. I think this speaks volumes about the pressures on woman to be everything to all people…..really powerful stuff and cyberwomen seem to be no different.

Moving on to the other characters – most, if not all, have sad or expressionless looks on their faces. the detached smile is significant for me also. is the smile real – No….really powerful and interesting stuff – I loved it.

down with cybersuperwoman!

By: Nicola Osborne

Nicola Osborne — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:45:26 +0000

Tracy, very glad to hear I get a gold star for comment there – maybe we should sketch out a whole new archetype for future female as a side project. See if we can ever make her as culturally alluring as the rubber clad sexbot types

By: tracy

tracy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:31:44 +0000

Oo lots of lovely comments!!

Nicola, my favourite comment so far “I want cuddly, geeky, a bit kick ass and, yeah, a bit intimidating, a bit sexy to be more my archetype. Something of Willow from Buffy crossed with Angelina Jolie in Hackers plus an awful lot of cake”. Thank you!!

Bill, hehe these girls? http://www.ffshrine.org/ffx2/wallpapers/01.jpg Oh ok, you can count them if you want but I don’t think they have really been trying with the cake, have they?

Jen, yes… and no, well maybe. Gah this needs a whole post to itself I will read the article before posting though.

By: Nicola's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog » Weekly Digest for October 16th

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:34:30 +0000

[...] Posted Comments on: Future female: fetish or force?. [...]

By: Nicola Osborne

Nicola Osborne — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:24:30 +0000

I really enjoyed the video too Tracey (although I’m a bit jealous I didn’t think of it first!). Gender and embodiment of gender in digital spaces is fascinating. A lot of the comments above have noted the consistency of form of the women in the video – slim, attractive, busty – and what I think is interesting is that future male exemplars are more varied from the skinny and pale to the enormously pumped and most everything (especially ordinary looking middle aged men when you get to the 50s/60s future males) in between. That the fetishist imagery hasn’t desisted (and has perhaps increased) over the last 40 years says some interesting things about how mediated images effect expectations and sense of self.

If the options are vulnerable and glamorous or masculine, gun toting and glamorous I am not sure that there is a future female embodiment out there that represents me. I want cuddly, geeky, a bit kick ass and, yeah, a bit intimidating, a bit sexy to be more my archetype. Something of Willow from Buffy crossed with Angelina Jolie in Hackers plus an awful lot of cake sort of gets near the image I’d like to see offered as a future female. Judzia Dax on DS9 isn’t a bad non-stereotypical portrayal but she is leggy, attractive, and, rather crucially (darn it), her intelligence is portrayed as largely directly inherited from a male soul/memory which is about as compromising as you can get. I actually think the, usually comic, popularity of male to female sex change characters in film and television is related to the quite specific fantasy of male power, aggression and ambition in an (invariably) improbable female form.

Anyway I digress… A rocking video!

By: jen

jen — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:35:34 +0000

Truly brilliant use of music and image, Tracy – this is a really compelling piece of work!

I think the main point I took from the film is that there is little in the way of difference between the fetish and the force in these representations – I often couldn’t tell which was which. Both rely on extreme gender parodies and are highly fetishised. So I interpret the call to ‘make your choice’ as a call for alternative representations, not a call to choose between what is currently on offer. However, I wonder if that overly simplifies what is possible in virtual (or physical for that matter – a la Judith Butler) worlds. Some of you might remember TL Taylor’s work from IDEL. She wrote an article in 2003 called “Intentional Bodies: Virtual environments and the designers who shape them” (http://tltaylor.com/2009/07/intentional-bodies-virtual-environments-and-the-designers-who-shape-them/) which discusses the social context of software design. Ie: you can customise your avatar in Second Life or WoW a lot, but you don’t have a choice about choosing a gender. Mediated environments are never neutral, and *someone’s* assumptions are always going to be coded in.

But perhaps it doesn’t overly simplify it, just raises it as a possibility for us to discuss. In which case – success!

By: billb

billb — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:01:02 +0000

@tracy
What about the girl heroes from Final Fantasy X2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_X-2)? Do they qualify as a combination of “moderately but not overtly sexy slightly kick-ass but also kinda girl next door cyberpunk/sci-fi female heroes”, Tracy?

Enjoyed the vid, by the way, and I think that both you and Tony are right: yes, there seems to be such a distinction in popular (cyber)culture and yes, it was presented in a polarised manner.

By: tracy

tracy — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:40:04 +0000

Thanks Henry. The RW? I think it is an indication that women have better things to do with their time. If you google ‘aiko fembot’ there are tons of interesting (in a sad way) articles about her and her creator. Apparently she can clean his ears and her software could be tweaked to “simulate her having an orgasm.” Why? There is a lot of great work on robotics going on but the robots that look like women are just gloified ‘real dolls’ (another thing to google if you don’t know what they are ). Women are happy with a toy they can hold in their hand if you get my drift, we don’t need it to have a hairy chest and a six-pack.

IMO, if we ever create a masbot it will be for the military, and it will make war, not the other thing.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:00:01 +0000

Strong message there Tracy with imagery intimitating to most men apart from perhaps the battle-heartened alpha-4 males.

It is interesting to note that there are ample of examples of fembots out there but (to my knowledge) there is no ‘mascbot’-equivalent or the like around.
Is this not an indicaiton that the RW has a strong influence on the shape of the emerging cyber society.