Cyborg Lives? is a groundbreaking collection of women’s autobiographical accounts of everyday relationships with technology. The ‘technobiographies’ presented here describe encounters with technology ranging from CDROMS and web pages to science laboratories, ante-natal screening, nuclear power and applicances in the home. These very personal stories offer insight into lived experience where gender intersects with class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, generation, and subcultural identity in shaping technological encounters.

Cyborg Lives? uses Donna Haraway's now well-known cyborg metaphor to examine the centrality of technology to daily life. The result is a series of fascinating life-stories that stimulate thinking about the ways that technology intersects with ordinary, everyday experieces. The volume asserts that, in the twenty-first century, technology is an intrinsic part of our subjectivity - whether we like it or not.

Cyborg Lives? is written in an accessible way, while at the same time reflecting a range of sophisticated theoretical perspectives. The book will be of interest both to new students and experienced researchers, and will become an invaluable resource in the fields of women's and gender studies, auto/biography, sociology, literature, and cultural, technology and communication studies.

review by Lisa-Jane McGerty (opens in new browser)

CONTENTS

Judy Wajcman

Foreword
read the Foreword online

Flis Henwood, Gwyneth Hughes, Helen Kennedy, Nod Miller, Sally Wyatt

Introduction: Cyborg Lives in context: writing women’s technobiographies

SECTION 1: Encountering technology: Consumption, identity, and everyday life

Flis Henwood

In/different screening: contesting medical knowledge in an antenatal setting

Linda Leung

From set menu to all-you-can-eat: comparing representations of my ethnicity in broadcast and new media technologies

Jules Cassidy, Sally Wyatt

Plugging into the mother country

Sally Wyatt

Growing up in the belly of the beast

SECTION 2: Becoming technologists: on taking up (and making up) technological identities

Helen Kennedy

HTMK meets HTML: from technofraud to cyberchick

Gwyneth Hughes

Technology and Romance in the laboratory: reflections on being a 'normal' woman scientist

Linda Leung

The past lives of a cyborg: encountering 'space invaders ' from the 1980s to the 1990s

Nanda Bandyopadhyay

Technology, tradition and transition: the journey of a middle-class Indian woman

SECTION 3:Resisting the cyborg life?

Nod Miller

I'd rather be a goddess than a cyborg: technobiographical tales, from drains to divas

We welcome enquries and comments; please contact Raw Nerve by letter post or at info@rawnervebooks.co.uk
 
top of page