Technologies of Wonder by Susan Delagrange

The Female Wunderkammern Continued...

But the underlying feminism argument continues to crop up. Going deeper into her feminism argument in chapter three, she puts aside the argument of modern media and takes us back to the time of male-dominated anatomy books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as an example of literary spaces being dominated by men. She then attempts to link this back to her argument that the body of knowledge that is dominantly male dabbles into pedagogy and the images being used to teach.

In order to illustrate her point, she includes old anatomy books in her argument. She says that “historical discourse of immateriality, and the scholarly pedagogical performances that articulate them, still permeate the theory and practice of teaching multimediated writing and rhetoric”. This means that how multimedia is being taught is still predominantly male and isn’t the free system it could be. Like in the ancient times, all you see in books on the human body are males as female bodies cannot be viewed in public. Hence, media (the female body) is not allowed in academia.

Her analogy seems to be one that shows visuals amongst the body of knowledge as women amongst men. She juxtaposes this to race to ensure the solidity of her argument and not create any false binaries. If we can obscure the attributes that denote race, gender, and ethnicity then we can eliminate the problems that minorities face (opening up digital pedagogy to all ideas). In this case, the minorities are academic multimedia works that need to be embodied in their own space. Not only that, but she insists that these minorities will be able to speak out more in this medium, creating a free system.

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