Text page
Plant, Miller Ullman - Sexing the Machine (Salon)
"Plant, Miller Ullman - Sexing the Machine (Salon)" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
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 1
sexing the machine Three digital women debate gender, technology and the Net 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 BY LAURA MILLER | this three-way e-mail conversation about technology, the changes it's working on our lives and how those changes affect women in particular was held at the request of a national magazine.
Definition · paragraph 8
Laura Miller: We've taken a pretty wide detour from our initial topic. Is there something that really needs to be said about women and computers, something that doesn't apply equally to many men? Sadie Plant: Here are some points I'd really like to see raised: There's nothing peculiarly masculine about new technologies, which, if anything, offer a great deal to women and everyone for whom access to information and means of communication were severely restricted in the past.
Definition · paragraph 3
Doing many things at once 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Sadie Plant: We shouldn't assume, even now, that women turn their backs on high-tech careers because of the obstacles in their way, and we certainly shouldn't assume that programming a computer or even managing a corporation is the most desirable or socially significant thing to do.
Definition · paragraph 3
Given the prejudice about women's ability with math and machines, the number -- and certainly the quality -- of women working in both the creative and business sides of new technologies might be said to be pretty high. Ellen Ullman: Rather than asking why women are not more involved in computing, we might just as well ask why anybody enjoys watching a Net browser tell you how many bytes remain to be downloaded.
Definition · paragraph 6
[Women and technology, illustration by Bart Nagel] 3. The authoritarian net 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Ellen Ullman: Sadie, you say that computing does reproduce the old paradigms of work but also changes the way things are done.
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.