Text page
Plant - IT Girl for the 21st Century (Interview with Ann Treneman 1997)
"Plant - IT Girl for the 21st Century (Interview with Ann Treneman 1997)" makes cyberfeminist and posthuman arguments legible through interview form, where scene position, public voice, and technical theory have to meet.
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 4
Sadie Plant is a puzzle. She says the most outrageous things about women and computers and then acts as if she has said nothing unusual at all. She says women have been liberated by technology and foresees a future when "hysterical" thinking will be all the rage. Male dominance in all things, be it authoritarian ways of thinking or the missionary position, is on its way out. The future is female - or at least, not male. All of this is theoretical, mind, but that is also where Plant does her best thinking.
Definition · paragraph 4
Sadie Plant is a puzzle. She says the most outrageous things about women and computers and then acts as if she has said nothing unusual at all. She says women have been liberated by technology and foresees a future when "hysterical" thinking will be all the rage.
Definition · paragraph 6
I like her immediately because she seems so down to earth despite her CV. After all she is actually Dr Sadie Plant with a doctorate in philosophy who taught Cultural Studies for five years before helping to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University.
Definition · paragraph 6
I like her immediately because she seems so down to earth despite her CV. After all she is actually Dr Sadie Plant with a doctorate in philosophy who taught Cultural Studies for five years before helping to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University. She doesn't flaunt her Foucault, though, and has a habit of zooming off on extraordinary tangents only to suddenly switch to something quite ordinary.
Definition · paragraph 5
After all, she has been in academia for most of her rather short life (she is 33) and her new book Zeros and Ones: digital women + the new technoculture reflects that. It has flashes of brilliance but parts of it are also baffling. I tell her that I had some trouble with the bit about Freud, hysteria and sex and she says that I am the first interviewer who has even asked about that part of the book.
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.