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Sexualities, technologies, and literacies: Metonymy and material
online
by Jacqueline
Rhodes
California State University, San Bernardino
The erotic is a
measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our
strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which,
once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having
experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power,
in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
-- Audre Lorde
BIO NOTES
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This
special issue presents a delightfully queer challenge to editors and writers,
since a multitude of ambiguous meaning sloshes about in terms like
"literacy," "technology," "writing," and of course "sexuality." While many of
us tend to agree that textuality and identity intersect rather intimately, we
still differ--quite strenuously at times--over this intersection, the effects
of it, and the feared/desired consequences of it. Given what we think we know
about identity construction through text, we have questioned in particular
the different textual/identity possibilities of cyberspace. In cyberspace,
does anyone know you're a dog? Can you be a dog, a man, a woman, a bot,
a borg, or something of all of these multiplicitous textual identities at
once? Well, of course. We might even agree that such shaping is usually only problematic if
what we seek is a unified, coherent self, an "I am" there, even in
cyberspace. And yet É many times, we push the writing body to the side of the
stage, perhaps even into the orchestra pit to sit and applaud our brain's
star turn.
It
is in this performance, at the juncture of pedagogy and erotics, that queer
theory offers a more fully embodied way to look at these disunities, these
slippages. Desire and technology overlap pedagogically, as
discourse--especially techno-discourse--inflames a passion for an unknowable
Truth, making us simultaneously crave the surety of physical reality and love
the disjointed play of text. And as Barreca and Morse note:
Whether it is
perceived as an instrument of dominance or a mode of revelation, the
educational process involves an emotionally suffused link between human
beings. Its intimacies form a tangled web of intellectual aspiration
and erotic desire. In our culture, the idea of education is
inextricably bound up with constructions of power, governance, and an
erotically charged allegiance or submission to the father- (or, with
increasing frequency, mother-) teacher. (vii)
In
the world of computer-enhanced or computer-mediated (or network-mediated)
pedagogy, what becomes of this "emotionally suffused link" when it no longer
exists between human beings, but somehow in and through them? The
"tangled web" of the internet might itself be a signifier of "intellectual aspiration
and erotic desire" as students and teacher move to fill up the space between people. Perhaps.
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