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glossary

(Our) definitions of important keywords and of our favorite terms stand by no means for a general "truth". They are being reshaped in a constant process and are changing within the course of our work. We always appreciate and are glad about your critisism, as well as hints to other words, which could be important in this context.
Since we can't keep up with our work as fast as we would wish to, we also recommend the glossary of the OMO-Homepage which is a product of a seminar about "Transformation. Postmodernity. The East.".

contingent
incidental, but not arbitrary: always undergoing a historical-political process of construction
Donna Haraway is stressing the difference between arbitrarity - which she rejects - and contingency: "To say things could have been different is not the same as to say they are arbitrary." (Haraway 1995a:109)
Judith Butler introduces this term to the discussion about feminism and postmodernity - and sets a foundation for the possibility of feminist agency, in spite of the discoursive construction of gender. She argues against those many (misunderstandings...) like: "If everything is discourse, do bodies lack reality? And how can we grasp material ..., which women have to suffer?"
Feminist politics is based on contingent bases - and is not arbitrary... (Butler 1993:31ff) (.)(.)back to list

culture of dominance
"To live in a culture of dominance means being permanently encouraged to expansively take hold of power. Hereby the Christian tradition, an expansive economical system, and the power conditions between men and women are relying upon each other. They have in common to overcome tensions (made by differences) by producing hierarchies." (Birgit Rommelspacher: "Frauen in der Dominanzkultur")(.)(.)back to list

cyberspace
is a fiercely contested social space, a discursive, linguistically and materially structured space, which is intervowen with power conditions. It not only contains the virtual space in the sense of software surfaces, but also refers to its designing and programming, the production of hardware and knowledge, etc..
"Cyberspace is a set of social relations mediated by technological flows of information." (Rosi Braidotti "Difference, Diversity and Nomadic Subjectivity")
(.)(.)back to list

Cyborg
cybernetic organism; a hybrid of machine and organism;
Donna Haraway took this term from the science of space research, where it first signified the idea to (genetically) adapt the bodies of cosmonauts to the conditions of outer space.
She chooses the Cyborg and makes her a socialist-feminist agent in the late capitalist era of technoscience. Cyborgs are creatures of social reality and fiction, an imaginary resource, a condensed image of both imagination and material reality(s). They are creatures in a post-gender world and resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. They are oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.
Therefore the Cyborg is particularly apt for a politics of affinity and desire - without the need to have a bad conscience, being the illegitimate daughter of military industry.
(Donna Haraway "A Manifesto for Cyborg", 1995) (.)(.)back to list

feminism
(There are many feminisms. Therefore this is merely our working definition:)
Feminism is a strategic body politic focussing on the predominant conditions of power, attacking and undermining them. This mainly is concerned with gender (sexism, heterosexism, ...), and also with race, class and other minority positions. (.)(.)back to list

gender
According to Judith Butler we understand gender as a symbolic social construction, in which power and dominance are constituted and materialized in bodies.
Gender as well as sex are being produced by discursive and performative practices, which produce subjects in connection with a normative two-gender-system and enforced heterosexuality. Sex as well as gender are part of a regulative practice that is producing bodies and dominating them. Therefore sex is an ideal construct being in the process of a normative materialization.
Gender is not a cultural construction being inscribed into the surface of the material (body, sex), but the materiality of the body cannot be understood without this materializing normativity. (.)(.)back to list

hybridity
is an unclear, impure mixture. (.)(.)back to list

labour
Here we refer to the very different positions of Hannah Arendt, Donna Haraway, Antonio Negri, Christa Wichterich, and Brigitte Young.
Labour is human activity concerned with production and reproduction - hereby drawing a line to political action. We don't make a difference between reproductive labour (homework, sexwork, working on relationships, ...), productive labour (in factories, for wages, ...) and immaterial labour (affective labour, information work, communication work, the making of knowledge, ...).
Labour has its roots in the protestant tradition because of producing the subject and setting the norms for action and inaction reglementing individuals by these norms. For "men" labour traditionally signifies power, self-realization and identity, for "women" dependence, exploitation and low esteem.
Presently there seems to be a shift in the assessment of "female" and "male" work. The categorization and building of hierarchies takes place along new borderlines.
The present tendencies of a feminization of labour - universally taking place in globalized capitalism - mean the realization of early capitalist mechanisms of exploitation and precarized labour conditions. The term feminization (.)(.)back to list

politics
According to Hannah Arendt politics emerge from the in-between-humans. This means that political identities are no natural ones but negotiated. But this notion of politics takes for granted a sovereign, self-confident subject.
Political identity is the product of performative acts. Politics is the struggle for the power of definition, the struggle for the process of construction and materialization of identity.
The constitution of political communities on the ground of totalizing identities (race, class, gender,...) means a destruction of political space.
A positive (in our opinion) notion of politics (according to Butler, Hark and Foucault) refers to the possibility of minority (anti-totalitarian) politics, taking the chance of subversion within the reiterable performativity of discourse. Therefore for us politics means the striving to change the principles of perception by which we construct and give meaning to our social order. It is the questioning and transformation of naturalized social realities.
In e.g. queer and feminist politics the struggle for the power of definition is de-identification with the norms which produce and materialize sexual difference.
Politics i.e. political agency can be anti-essentialistic, minoritary, parodistic, temporary, noisy, ... (.)(.)back to list

postmodernism and postmodernity
Judith Butler tries to avoid a definition of the term, since she says that the categorizing of postmodernism would be modernistic and therefore is not possible with this term. Nevertheless she is playing her usual game with questions also about postmodernity - and touches some relevant aspects:
(sorry, i had to translate back into english, since i only have the german version,...)
"Without doubt the question of postmodernism really is a question: does anything you name postmodernism exist at all? And is it all about a historical determination or a theoretical position? What does it mean when a term, which originally described a certain aesthetic practice, is now refering to social theory, and especially to feminist social and political theory? Who are those postmodernists? Is "postmodern" a name you claim for yourself or is this a title being ascribed to someone who critizises the subject, analyses discourses, or questions the integrity and coherence of totalizing social descriptions?
(Judith Butler "Kontingente Grundlagen: Der Feminismus und die Frage der "Postmoderne"")
Rosi Braidotti tries to give a positivistic definition of the term:
"I take postmodernity to signify the specific historical situation of post-industrial societies after the decline of modernist hopes and tropes.(...) This is primarily but not exclusively a Western world problem. The distinct feature of postmodernity is in fact the trans-national nature of its economy in the age of the decline of the nation state. It is about ethnic mixity through the flow of world migration: an infinite process of hybridization at a time of increasing racism and xenophobia in the West. Postmodernity is also about an enormous push towards the "third-worldification" of the "first" world, with continuing exploitation of the "third" world. It is about the decline of what was known as "the second world", the communist block, and the recurrence of a process of 'balkanization' of the whole Eastern European block."
(Rosi Braidotti "Cyberfeminism with a difference")
Looking at these distinct definitions by Braidotti and Butler it seems to be important to differentiate between "postmodernism" and "postmodernity" - this difference doesn't exist in German and Russian. Postmodernity refers rather to the era or epoch, while postmodernism stands for postmodern style, method or thinking. (.)(.)back to list

science and social fiction, feminist
According to Haraway it is writing along the borderline between social reality and fiction, whereby social reality becomes evident as fiction. Such a writing plays with identities, borderlines and links, and refuses the wish of innocent totality.
"The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual identity, or body. (...) Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman." (Donna Haraway "A Manifesto for Cyborg" 1985) (.)(.)back to list

space
Space is always gendered - understood as a sphere of public, privacy or bodies.
Space is always political - and politics take place in spaces (between people/bodies). Political space is based on plurality, i.e. individual diversity, the presence of countless different aspects and perspectives.
Space - which often is understood as material and anti-speculative - is constructed and intervowen by power. This is becoming obvious by the "emerging" of cyberspace: with it the question of distinction of material and virtual, of real and imaginative spaces has to be asked anew.
Bourdieu distinguishes between physical space and social appropriated space. Social space is a structure of parallel social positions, whose reality is being inscribed into the physical space. For us this means that physical space - as well as sex - is being materialized by social appropriation. Therefore no space exists which is not hierarchic resp. being gendered. These hierarchies are being disguised by the process of naturalization, which the process of reiterated inscription causes.
The ability to dominate the appropriated space depends on capital (economic, cultural, social; according to Bourdieu). (.)(.)back to list