Feminism and Writing Technologies: Teaching Queerish Travels through Maps, Territories, and Pattern

The strange thing about Americans, Katie, is that they think you have to be either serious or funny.

—Gregory Bateson, sometime around 1974

Introduction: “Avoid All Typographical Ornamentation”—Translation Piled upon Translation

This essay was originally produced on a MacPlus and laser-printed using one font called “Lambda” for the title pages and another called “Los Angeles” for the body of the text. Thus the title pages were intended to be humorously overornamented, and the body of the essay to appear handprinted in an obviously artificial yet jaunty, informal style. The Greek letter lambda has been used by gay people for a couple of decades as an increasingly public code of identification. Greek letters have also encoded that Western writing technology par excellence, the alphabet—the sign of the politicized distinction between the oral and the written. Los Angeles was the site of the conference for which this essay was written, and this typeface was personally appropriate since I have an injury of the hand that makes handwriting painful and and the results illegible; I can only “handwrite” using the computer. Each section of the essay was headed by a postcard from a painting by a contemporary woman artist, chosen as a serious “joke” about the material in that section. Here I will mention only the title-page painting, A Moment of Levity by Irene Belknap (1989), which shows a woman floating above a set of historically heterogeneous scientific apparatus, layered and disorganized by multiple points of perspective. The notion of “layers” of abstraction is a principal point in my argument concerning the technique of literalization. All of these visualized elements of the essay were examples of such “literalization,” intended to be playful and serious at the same time.

The essay was intended for circulation at a small workshop-style conference. It was not to be read aloud there (it is in fact not an oral piece, but instead very visual); rather, along with other previously circulated papers it was to be used as a point of departure for conversations on the subject of “Techniques of Imaging and Representation”—indeed, exploiting the possibilities of variant meanings of “techniques,” “imaging,” and “representation.” As such it introduced a “technique” or tool—that is, the idea of “literalization”—and depended upon a shared polemic against the notion of “representation.” The essay describes and depends upon my ongoing research in what I call “Feminism and Writing Technologies,” research that depends upon and contributes to resources in women’s and queer studies, social studies of science and technology, and transnational cultural studies. It was because of my work in these areas that I was invited to the conference.

Feminism and writing technologies investigates specific technologies (for example, alphabet, moveable type, book, index, pencil, typewriter, xerox machine, computer) enmeshed in historical and current multinational divisions of labor encoded by sex, race, class, region; the neocolonialisms embedded in descriptions of oral and written consciousness; the investments of feminism in specific ethnic, racial, sexual, national literacies; and the international systems of publication and copyright constructing academic and market values. How are the United States and other Eurocenters, overvalued parts of a world economy, delineating particular literacies, including nonwritten ones? Deliberately, “writing” in the phrase “writing technologies” is extended in meaning beyond inked words on paper, borrowing from the critical practices of deconstruction the added and complicated investments in understanding those ideologies under which writing has been divided (and also cannot be divided) from other generations of cultural meaning. My intention is both to call writing’s history into political relief in the movements of power—stories in which feminism has great investments—and to do so without simultaneously romanticizing “orality.” Rather, oral and alternate “writing technologies” (cultural technologies for producing meaning in a very broad sense) also have political histories and chart material movements of power, and at the same time are complexly commingled with written “writing technologies.” The “oral” and the “written” are not conceived of here as mutually exclusive terrains, each with distinct epistemologies and ideologies, for “writing technologies” are historically variant, commingling in material...