Women Writing/Speaking Cyberfeminism Women's Words June 4-7, 2001 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. University of Alberta
Despite popular conceptions of computers as boy toys, a flourishing feminist avant-garde has long staked a claim in electronic spaces for artistic and political ends. This course will be an introduction to the world of the New Media Arts and to cyberfeminist texts. Ranging from hacktivists to hypertextualists to grrl game designers, we will read key feminist writers to see how women's issues have been creatively explored in fiction and discuss the implications of women speaking in and against the technological realm. Each class we will also spend an hour engaged in a MOO-based conversation with one of these major practitioners of the New Media Arts. The guest roster of leading writers will include M.D. Coverley (USA), dollyoko (Francesca da Rimini; Australia), Mary Flanagan (Canada), Kathy Rae Huffman (UK), Shelley Jackson (USA), Diane Ludin (USA), Judy Malloy (USA) and theorist N. Katherine Hayles (USA). To enroll in the course you need no previous experience writing web-based works, but you should be familiar with using a computer, navigating with a mouse and surfing the World Wide Web. Each student will create a small album of written 'snapshots' or 'postcards' as a personal response to each writer's work and to class discussions. These writings will be interwoven to create an online class anthology by the end of the course. Since re-reading is integral to this nonlinear art form, students are strongly advised to read as much of the course material as possible in advance to make space for reading them anew when we get to the texts.	Course Schedule: Day One: Introduction to cyberfeminism and the orality of electronic literature Guest speaker: · Judy Malloy, the mother of hypertext fiction Malloy's Texts: "Dorothy Abrona McCrae" Its Name Was Penelope, Eastgate Systems, 1993 Day Two: Women's Ways of Speaking: History, Genealogy and Oral Forms of Telling Guest speaker: · M.D. Coverley, the author of the first full-length hypermedia novel Coverley's Texts: "Life in the Chocolate Mountains" Califia or "Universal Resource Locator" Colette Gaiter, "The Natural Order of Things: South Africa" Day Three: Speaking the Textual Body Guest Speaker: · Shelley Jackson Jackson's Texts: "'my body': a wunderkammer" Patchwork Girl, Or A Modern Monster, Eastgate Systems, 1995. Liz Miller, "Moles: A Web Narrative" Day Four: Grrling Game Spaces Guest Speaker: · Mary Flanagan, game designer, and co-editor of Reload: Redefining Women and Cyberculture Flanagan's Text: "The Adventures of Josie True: A Girl Game" Website Other games: Natalie Bookchin, "The Intruder" Diana Reed Slattery, "Glide: The Maze Game" Day Five: Speaking Theoretically: Cyberfeminism and Art Guest Speakers: · dollyoko (Francesca da Rimini), member of VNS Matrix · Diane Ludin, feminist crusader, web and installation artist · Kathy Rae Huffman, moderator of Faces · N. Katherine Hayles, literary theorist dollyoko: "dollspace...hauntologies" Diane Ludin: "Identity Runners: re sembling the body called flesh"(and select 'Projects') Kathy Rae Huffman: "Faces, the Website" N. Katherine Hayles "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" (photocopy) from How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics A literary advisor to the Electronic Literature Organization, Carolyn Guertin is a scholar of the new media arts and the feminist avant-garde at the University of Alberta. Curator of Assemblage: The Women's New Media Gallery and poet in virtual residence at the trAce Online Writing Community in the U.K., her own creative and critical works have been published internationally in print and online.
Required Texts: Coverley, M.D. Calfia.Eastgate Systems, 2000. CD-ROM for Windows. Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, Or A Modern Monster, Eastgate Systems, 1995. Software. Malloy, Judy. Its Name Was Penelope, Eastgate Systems, 1993. Software. Optional Background Text: Flanagan, Mary and Austin Booth. Reload: Redefining Women + Cyberculture. Boston: MIT, 2001 (forthcoming: due before the course begins).