Text page
Plant - Escape Attempts (Review) (Canadian Journal of Sociology 1995)
"Plant - Escape Attempts (Review) (Canadian Journal of Sociology 1995)" uses review form to turn cultural criticism into a compact diagnosis of cyberfeminist modernity, media systems, and gendered abstraction.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 8
Nevertheless, it is easy to forget how imaginative and innovative this book was at the time of its initial publication, when it served as a significant antidote to the drier reaches of sociological thought. And, read in conjunction with other critiques of the everyday, Escape Attempts remains an insightful and instructive text for all students of this area, even if those really looking for escape would do better to take some more recent advice. University of Birmingham Sadie Plant Nicholas J.
Definition · paragraph 1
Canadian Journal of Sociology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie. http://www.jstor.org Review Author(s): Sadie Plant Review by: Sadie Plant Source:
Definition · paragraph 2
The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 20, No. 3 (
Definition · paragraph 7
But this is also the great weakness of this text. For if everyday life is itself a prison, going up and "over the wall," to quote one of the book's chapter titles, is precisely what the imprisoned want: escape, and not just survival inside. Escape Attempts is full of wonderful examples of people's resilience to mundanity, but it offers little in the way of strategies for destroying this mundanity in the first place.
Method · paragraph 8
And, read in conjunction with other critiques of the everyday, Escape Attempts remains an insightful and instructive text for all students of this area, even if those really looking for escape would do better to take some more recent advice. University of Birmingham Sadie Plant Nicholas J. Fox, Postmodernism, Sociology and Health.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.