Gibson-Graham asks:
“Why is ‘the economy’ at once the scene of abject submission, the social site that constrains activities at all other sites, the supreme being whose dictates must unquestioningly be obeyed and, at the same time, an entity that is subject to our full understanding and consequent manipulation? And how is it, furthermore, that something we can fully understand and thus by implication fully control is susceptible only to the most minimal adjustments, interventions of the most prosaic and subservient sort? What accounts for the twin dispositions of utter submission and confident mastery, and for boldness and arrogance devolving to lackluster economic interventions?” (94)
While I have some difficulty with the equation of understanding and control — Gibson-Graham here conveniently ignores any considerations of power — the question is both provocative and intelligently posed, and seems as if it might produce considerations that could help me to answer some of my questions about class, technology, and agency in the context of the economies of the wired writing classroom.
To begin to anwer their question, Gibson-Graham queries poststructuralist imaginings of “space” through a close examination of the spatial metaphors associated with what Sharon Marcus theorizes as “rape scripts” and then draws correlations to societal narratives of capitalistic domination and penetration. It sounds a little confusing, and it is, and I’m not willing to explain further because, frankly, I’m not convinced. I have a hard time accepting wholesale Gibson-Graham’s metaphorical “connection between the language of rape and the language of capitalist globalization” (124) because it seems to me a metaphor with points of coincidence, and little more. On the other hand, their quoting “Marcus paraphrasing Brownmiller: ‘The instrumental theory of rape . . . argues that men rape because their penises possess the objective capacity to be weapons, tools, and instruments of torture’ (1992: 395)” (124) seemed to me to be a striking potential connection to computers and the economy and that same “objective capacity” and something that might even play out in the way educational engagement with computers tends to be gendered. But when Gibson-Graham asks questions like, “how might we get globalization to lose its erection — its ability to instill fear and thereby garner cooperation?”, I begin to lose something of my own: my patience. This sort of ludic feminist analysis seems to me a discredit to the much sharper and more rigorous Marxist feminist critique I’ve encountered in reading some of Toril Moi’s work.
Gibson-Graham’s theoretical play with rape takes rape out of the realm of the physical and the material, out of the realm of broken teeth, black eyes, and split lips, and into the realm of theoretical instrumentality where everything is always good for something, where everything always has a purpose. It turns rape into the smooth surface of representation and nothing more, and then seeks economic analogies, which — when serving as analogies — can only possess that same smooth surface, and none of the material realities associated with what “the economy” can do: hunger, cold, the violence of deprivation.
At the same time, I’m doing my best to understand and identify with their mission, which, as they state it one way, does strike me as startlingly insightful and useful: “it is necessary to defamiliarize the economy as feminists have defamiliarized the body” (97).
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