UCLA Center for the Study of Women

As the title of this panel suggests, these papers largely dealt with the strong and often playful effect of cybernetics and cyberspace on the ways we conceive of gendered and queer bodies. It is also fitting that the title uses the slightly dated term “cyber” instead of “new media” or “digital,” as James Hixon started the panel with a paper on the genealogy of information studies and its continual focus on its relationship to the body. Titled “Bodies Into Bits: A Reparative Approach to Informationalizing the Body,” Hixon’s paper discussed such luminaries as Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Katherine Hayles, with the main thrust of his argument addressing the works of Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, as Hixon eloquently described, Deleuze and Guattari break down some of the central issues of digital culture and embodiment through an exploration of the similarities between the natural body and information. Hixon’s discussion focused on the “body without organs,” a phrase used to describe the virtual dimensions of the body. Deleuze and Guattari point out that people are made up of an endless number of virtual personae and possibilities, and by performing these different personae, we are actively experimenting with different ways of representing ourselves. This pre-digital idea is particularly resonant with both the age of the avatar, and the queer body—a body that actively investigates its own potentialities—a body without organs. As such, Hixon helpfully pointed out that digital media often encourages people to rethink and reform their bodies and subjectivities as bodies without organs.