The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age

by Allucquère Rosanne Stone

In this witty, far-reaching, and utterly original work, Allucquère Rosanne Stone examines the myriad ways modern technology is challenging traditional notions of gender identity. Face-to-face meetings, and even telephone conversations, involuntarily reveal crucial aspects of identity such as gender, age, and race. However, these bits of identity are completely masked by computer-mediated communications; all that is revealed is what we choose to reveal—and then only if we choose to tell the truth. The rise of computer-mediated communications is giving people the means to try on alternative personae—in a sense, to reinvent themselves—which, as Stone compellingly argues, has both positive and potentially destructive implications. Not a traditional text but rather a series of intellectual provocations, the book moves between fascinating accounts of the modern interface of technology and from busy cyberlabs to the electronic solitude of the Internet, from phone sex to "virtual cross-dressers," and from the trial of a man accused of having raped a woman by seducing one of her multiple personalities to the Vampire Lestat. Throughout, Stone wrestles with the question of how best to convey a complex description of a culture whose chief activity is complex description. Writing eloquently of creating a "text that breaks rules," serving as a "sampler of possible choices," she employs elements from a wide range of disciplines and genres, including cultural and critical theory, social sciences, pulp journalism, science fiction, and personal memoirs. Each chapter of the book can be read as a kind of performance piece, with its own individual voice and structure. In the final chapter, Stone threads the various narratives together, holding them in productive tension rather than attempting to collapse them into a single unifying a process that best reflects the confused, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory state of gender relations at the close of the mechanical age.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Research, Transgender

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone is an American academic theorist, media theorist, author, and performance artist. She is currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone has worked in and written about film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming. Stone is transgender and is considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies. She has been profiled in ArtForum, Wired, Mondo 2000, and other publications, and been interviewed for documentaries like Traceroute.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretentious drivel most assuredly promoted by the smelly grad student girl who taught English 101 at The University of Georgia Spring Quarter 1994 at 2:25PM Mon-Wed.

[Rachel Kamphaus]

Found this fascinating but also thought that it worked better in its theoretical mode. While this reads as more or less academic, there are also sections that are more journalistic, and according to the endnotes, fictional. I think that some of this felt like filler (did we need two “end of innocence” chapters?). That said; I think Stone has compelling thoughts about what happens to the body/self online, theorizing computers both as a prosthesis but also as gateways into the multiplicity of the self