(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.".
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