MESH
Would you make love to a stick figure?

American author, academic and performance artist Dr A.R. Stone talks to Julie Clarke about gender in cyberspace, queer theory and surgery as art.

Yes. I think we are all multiple personae anyway, and that VR is a potentiating environment that enables us to express those more readily than we could otherwise.

We all do it. Virtual Reality does give a kind of a licence because I think that most people do it more consciously in Virtual well, in cyberspace, which is all human communication through electronic means. VR is part of cyberspace. But VR communication doesn't exist yet - only in theory.
Well, the transgendered body is the natural body in cyberspace, because anyone can possess any body they claim to possess.
Because that's the ground of being in cyberspace, and by our customary definitions, nature is the ground of being. We could also use the definition of ordinary, if you want to say "natural" means "ordinary". It's also ordinary in cyberspace, therefore it still counts as natural.
Virtual Reality doesn't exist! Virtual Reality is total hype. Nobody has ever met anybody in VR, except in experiments, and nobody is likely to for a considerable period - except for very rare experiments in which you meet another person as a stick figure.
One could learn to make love to a stick figure, but as far as confusing cyberspace with Virtual Reality, please don't, because VR is a crock right now. It's all hype, nobody is doing it.
I don't think he's talking about a VR scenario at all, I think he's talking about a cyberspace scenario. He may be talking about a future imaginary Virtual Reality scenario - the equipment necessary will not be practical to build during our lifetimes. It requires far too much bandwidth, far too much processor speed, far too much RAM - we simply do not have that hardware now. You can do it with a bunch of Onyx reality machines at $US300,000, and for around a million and a half dollars you can put together a system the way a practitioner in the U.S. did. It used fifteen computers, two of which were Onxy reality machines; they required a full-time staff to keep the thing running, the software was incredibly fragile - it's the closest anyone has come to date to building a real Virtual Reality environment, and it wasn't very good. It's not because they don't have the smarts, they do; but our actual ability to do that kind of thing is so far in the future. Anything is possible, but that doesn't make for very interesting discussion, which is why I restrict myself to cyberspace. .
Bill Gibson never mentions the words Virtual Reality.
Well, he did propose a number of interesting devices, one of which was cyberspace - that exists. Another was cyberspace decks, which don't exist; and the 'trodes, the electrodes that allow you to visualise cyberspace inside your brain. He was talking about something that happens in your mind, in which you recreate or create three-dimensional images with full sound and smell and everything else, that are completely realistic. But you do it in your mind, which has the processor power to do that kind of thing.
Yes, but he never mentioned goggles and gloves. Goggles and gloves are in Johnnie Mnemonic because we think of VR in terms of goggles and gloves, but he never thought of G and G. He knew about Jarron Lanier, he knew about VR and all that stuff, but he never talked about it because he knew damn well it wasn't possible. People use VR now for medical and architectural things, but high-resolution images of people meeting people in full surround, with full details, sound and touch - not in our lifetime, sorry!
To the extent that I still have women as objects of my sexuality and I am an object of women's sexuality. Those aren't the correct terms; I am trying to think how to describe it. I still have women lovers and women still choose me as a lover. I have a male lover currently and that makes me bisexual; and because I have had and will continue to have transsexual lovers, that makes me polysexual. Believe me, there is nothing more interesting than being in bed with another transy because of the way identity continually moves and changes between you.
I was not rejecting queer labelling, I was rejecting the appropriation of queer theory or what I interpreted as the appropriation of queer theory by Teresa de Laurentus,to mean gays and lesbians. I was in touch with Differences to ask if they would be willing to do a queer theory 2 issue, in which they opened up the field of queer theory to someone other than gays and lesbians, and they were totally uninterested. At the moment I reject queer theory by that definition. I reject queer theory of all sexualities except heterosexual - they are not generally included in queer theory. No, absolutely not, because a third sex is just a way of reifying the other two. No, transgender theory is about class, not sex - about a class of people that includes pre-operative, post-operative, cross dressers, transvestites and people of ambiguous genitals. These are the people most often excluded from traditional gay and lesbian discourses.
No, it's because gays and lesbians stake out their own territory, and possibly because they don't understand. I went to a meeting recently at my university's Gay and Lesbian faculty association, which was recently renamed the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual faculty organisation, and I said "what about transgenders?" and spelt out the definition, and they said "what?" Some of their eyes turned to little saucers, some of them dinner plates. They said "we never thought of that before", and they were perfectly open to it - it was just a case of making them aware that there was something else. I'm talking about an event six months ago at a major university, so this is a case of little by little, of education, of we're not gay, we're not lesbian, we're not strictly speaking bisexual. We are more than that and less, and we need room too, and intend to have room.
I think it has to do with the individual. When she says she can always pick a transgender on the Net, I don't think she can pick them all. It depends upon how the person came to be transgendered, how long they've been transgendered, their relationship to language. Some people understand language enough to be able to escape the very subtle trap of gendered language; I doubt that any trap over the net would trap an experienced person who didn't want to be trapped - whether they were a transy or not. Well, we communicate by face, and that's where the term comes from. The face is very important. We're having a problem with the term. 'Face' for me means interface. It's the area immediately around my nose and extends out to my ears and that's really a screen for projection of myself and that's immutable - some of it instantly, by means of my internal state, and therefore I'm projecting myself onto that screen. About fifty percent of that is my underlying skin. If you come and look at me when I'm unconscious you see one face, when I'm inhabiting the face you see something else - similarly with dead people.
Yes - if I had thought about surgery as an art work, which I couldn't at the time. My surgery had to be done secretly, this having to do with the lesbian separatist organisation I was working for at the time. I was not thinking in terms of art - more fear and hiding - but had I thought of it in terms of art I probably would have had it documented. Unfortunately I would have been unconscious at the time. I couldn't have commented on it while it was going on, nor would I have wanted to be awake, because I think the consequences of having surgery while essentially standing on one's head would be unpleasant. The surgery is done in what's called the hyper flexor lapitomy position - you're standing on your head on a tilting table. It is a very bloody operation, so anything that is likely to reduce bleeding is a good thing, and you're more accessible when standing on your head if the surgery is being conducted on your genital area. Otherwise I would have liked to document it; and if I do anything else I'll probably document it.
I certainly do!
From my ears? From my eyes? Do you mean, do I lubricate? Yes.
Some transsexuals lubricate, some don't. I naturally lubricate - sometimes I don't.
No, but I did have a phantom corona, I did have the sensation of the portion of my penis which was not present. Phantom erections - no!
Very little was actually cut off. In 1977 they removed the tip and a certain amount of the interior erectile tissue, and the rest they used as part of the reconstruction; so almost everything is still there, it's simply reconfigured.
It surrounds the vulva and the place where the clitoris is. I have a clitoris and I become engorged when I'm sexually excited.
No. I was a creature of my time; it was only possible to think about gender from one extreme to the other, particularly when dealing with the medical community. It never dawned on many of us to do anything else. If I had it to do all over again I might or might not have surgery, because I do identify very strongly as a woman most of the time, but sometimes I identity strongly as a male, and sometimes as other places in the spectrum. At the time the options were more limited. I didn't have the language to speak of that, I didn't develop the language until a few years later.
You mean in the sense of losing a penis? I could have had more fun if I'd kept a penis and a vagina, and to that extent I'm sorry.
I align myself with all of cyborg socialism. Lestat is a cyborg, I'm a cyborg - Lestat and I share something and to that extent I identify with him, yes.
From time to time he desires death, but the reason he looks at humans and envies them the ability to die - Lestat the vampire, not Lestat the cultural theorist - is because the sort of life enabled by realising one has only a limited period in which to live is a different kind of life. He is having a love affair with ephemerality. But that's not strange - all gods have occasional love affairs with ephemerality. Everybody's imperfect. That's an interesting question. Nearly everybody is looking back on something they have lost. We talk about the good old days of the 1950s in the United States and that's a crock, because those days are not as we remember them. And in twenty years from now, fifty years or a hundred years, people will look back on our time and romanticise it, the way people sometimes romanticise the Woodstock age. Having lived through the Woodstock age I can tell you that it was horrible - I don't want it back and I don't think anybody else willing to be honest with themselves wants it back either.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone is the author of The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the mechanical era (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1995.) She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory (ACTlab) at the University of Texas at Austin. An academic and performance artist, she was in Australia during July and August attending the RMIT Design School Winter Conference "Where worlds converge", the University of Melbourne's "Medicine and Sexuality" Conference, and the Biennale of Ideas in Sydney.

Julie Clarke is a digital artist/critic, currently a candidate for a Master of Arts (by Research) in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Melbourne. Her working thesis title is Post-Human Scenarios: Performance artists' interaction with recent technologies.

© Julie Clarke 1995. MESH#6 Winter, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts