abstracts+biobibs  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Andrea Sick

abstract:

click me -
on gender technologies

If the medium is the message, each new interface imprints the non plus ultra of the zeitgeist on the user's unconscious.(Friedrich A. Kittler) Would this relationship work beyond the question of gender? Hard to believe, taking into consideration the obsessive eroticisation of the latest styles in hard- and software called media art. Let's suppose the machine is meant to play the role of the girl in this game, for it is the image of the girl that attaches itelf endlessly to the machine by an unconscious coded by and coding patriarchy.

'Girls': Pathetic? Helpless? Smart? Do they hate concurrence and like ceramic hair straightener? Are they honest about being dishonest? Merciless, intuitive and disarmingly impossible?
„The new girly" (Cathy Lomax, Alex Michon), „playful and downright girly" (Mark Sladen): that' s how western curators and artists celebrate new tendencies in art, still practicing liberation from the 1970s liberating feminism. Their saying goes that today's 'girls' do not have to worry any more about being female (Sarah Doyle), "has nothing to do with gender and gender politics" (Hans Scheirl). Bio men "doing girly" fit the agenda. These "girls" even do not have to be gender or age specific any more, they just "use a whole gamut of once unworthy influence from pornography to romantic fiction".
Some tendencies in Eastern Europe's feminism after the fall of the 'iron curtain' are sometimes described in a similar way: coinciding with a fall for soap operas, ‚female' TV magazines as a criticsm of government or even politics. „It is difficult to understand that this sleazy world of cheap sentimentality and pseudo-problems for many highly educated women presents the choice they were forbidden to take." (Petra Hanáková) Does this attitude in East and West to celebrate once "unworthy influences", i.e. unworthy as capitalist, bourgeois, heterosexual, female stereotypes allow for some reading as feminist? Is the contradictory, possibly ironic ‚girly' attitude a strange way of reinventing feminism by negating it? Is it a twist of old school feminism that wants to escape from stereotyped feminist subjects, working out feminsim's paradoxes of representative, nearly normative "otherness"?

In contrast to this elaborated and strict playfulness in the cultural the dominant western meaning of "girls", especially Eastern European ones is derived from the ongoing supply of female sex workers to predominantly Western men. "Eastern european great chicks, high quality xxx site" will be the typical occasion that an Internet user will be reminded of „Eastern European girls" - as available as the open Eastern market for the global entrepreneur. In spite of reports on „Women and Girls Trafficked for Forced Prostitution in Kosovo" (amnesty international) that document clearly that „international presence generates sex trade" the official self-image of the West is to „protect and to promote human rights." One has to conclude: these "girls" seem to form an unmentioned exception of this rule or simply are not considered "human". At least one can say, they drop out in one sense: Their cases of modern slavery under KFOR's and UN's presence are denied by official politics and are unrecognized in mainstream consciousness.
How do these „Eastern girls", "not-humans" in the above sense, but without any playfulness, figure in the "new girly's " theoretical anti- (or post)humanism or within appetites for once forbidden romantic fiction and pornography? As possible identification figures within a wish for liberation from reality? For sure this would present a memorable symptom for a general negation of women being in the position of victims, be it structurally or through extreme violations of human rights..
Anyhow: how could a difference between girl and representation of a "girl" be made? Any "girl" concept would have difficulties to prove not to be made of "romantic fiction" and "pornography" itself, wouldn't it? What remains? A difference? A medium?

We put up a starting point for a debate: The dominant worldwide imagery of 'girls' in the TV and WWW esthetics is dominated formally and visually by increasing quantities of pornographic elements and runs parallel to today's various antifeminist tendencies and structural positioning of girls and women as non-subjects in art, theory, jurisdiction, every day life. How is this relation to be analyzed and described?

The project "click me - on gender technologies" encourages every cultural project that takes on to (re-)articulate, criticize or celebrate concepts of "girls" in the framework of media machines and (feminist or antifeminist) political theory.
We call for contributions especially in the media art, art, theory of culture and media, feminism from all disciplines, art-history, history, psychoanalysis, film, activism, social work…
A conference, workshops, a film program, an exhibition and art events, an online forum and a printed publication are planned.

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