In the following article, Jim Dwight seeks to deconstruct gendered representations with respect to technologies in educational settings. This analysis relies on poststructuralist semiotic and feminist perspectives to critically examine the frontier narrative that serves as a regulating discourse. Beginning with depictions of women in technologically enhanced classrooms as needing guidance, as being dangerous, and serving as morally protective schoolmarms, "Reconstructing the Fables" searches for an alternative cyborg frontier fable as means of oppression and resistance.

Reconstructing the Fables: Women on the Educational Cyberfrontier

Jim Dwight

<1> Computer technology and the Internet inspire narratives based upon modernist tropes. The frontier narrative stands out as one of the most intriguing tropes. Often the language for the Internet regulation and administration of computers, particularly in education, plays on tropes of the "Wild, Wild West." Sojourners brave the untamed expanses of cyberspace laying claim to virgin territories. Often, writers represent the frontier as a pure form of woman, the object of masculine desires for conquest such as Natty Bumppo's symbolic marriage to the disappearing frontier in James Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1981 [1826]), Odysseus' conquest of the frontier witch Circe (Homer, 1963), and Joseph Conrad's marriage of Kurtz and the jungle princess in Heart of Darkness (1988 [1899]) [1]. This first wave of frontiersmen is a ragged bunch of men converting a pristine, virginal paradise into a rowdy, uncontrolled spaces fit only for the most courageous. Next come women and children who need to be protected from the wantonness of frontier life fraught with debauchery and miscreants. As Gwen Stefani of No Doubt sarcastically laments, girls need to be looked after for their own good. Therefore, virtual men in white hats come to rid the digital frontier of bandits, perverts, and mountebanks. Gone is the saloon and gunfighters (pornographic cyberspaces and hackers, respectively), replaced by virtual marshals, cyber-churches, and on-line schools that will mold the souls and minds of those too weak to fend for themselves. Laura Miller (1998) reflecting on the Net as a man's frontier remarks that "the idea that women merit special protection in an environment as incorporeal as the Net is intimately bound up with the idea that women's minds are weak, fragile, and unsuited to the rough and tumble of public discourse" (105). Armed with codes instead of colts and riding an etherwave not a pinto, these do-gooders are cleaning up the net and preparing America for its next grand undertaking. Or, so the story goes.

<2> The frontier narrative that women will civilize the frontier informs technology in education advertising tropes. Such advertisements feature females are schoolmarms bringing to the digital frontier the needed moralizing influence while being protected by virtual sheriffs. Part of this construct posits that women are moral agents, yet not intellectually trustworthy. Marketers target school administrators and school board members, who are predominantly male and pro-business, and in doing so marginalize teachers, who are predominantly female (Spring 2002). The marginalized teacher, moreover, is typically portrayed as a nurturing body, not an agent with rational intellect. As such, a computer -- filled with masculine authority as episteme (Plant 2000 [1996]) -- serves as her intellect. The administrator has direct access to the students via the computer's mind—a replica of masculine rationality incorporated within the networked curriculum (Pinar 1994 [1981]) —- and the female's body.

<3> As important as elucidating this feminine marginalizing trend is, this alone will not suffice. After identifying and deconstructing these misogynistic frontier tropes inculcated in e-learning narratives, I will suggest what a feminized cyberfrontier may incorporate and explain how an alternative mythos can affect educational philosophies. Hence, I have a two-fold purpose. The first is to illustrate how the traditional frontier mythos acts as a master narrative in educational technology advertising. To do this, I will deconstruct some typical educational technology advertisements relying on such poststructuralist theorists as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and feminist scholars such as Nina Baym, Megan Boler, Mary Bryson & Suzanne de Castell, Donna Haraway, Laurie Miller, Jodie O'Brien, and Zoe Sophia. In the second half of this paper, I make a leap of faith to premise a new feminized frontier narrative, one offering opportunities for female teachers and learners. As the American Association of University Women (AAUW 2000) states to successfully integrate girls and women into cyberculture, females need to be encouraged to "get into the pipeline" (p. ?) and a paradigm shift needs to take place so that the very social structures informing cyberculture become more girl friendly. The genre of cyberpunk, a subset of science fiction, offers some revolutionary ideas regarding the frontier narrative. A trope that I examine, in particular, with respect to cyberpunk narratives is the cyborg. The cyborg leitmotif serves both to inscribe masculinity in some cases and in others to blur traditional boundaries between human and machine, man and woman, and intellect and body (Haraway, 1991/2000), both requiring examination.

Deconstructing Frontier Tropes

<4> To understand this frontier narrative and associated tropes, I will examine educational technology journal advertisements aided by Roland Barthes' semiotic perspective on the rhetoric of figures and Michel Foucault's ideas regarding heterogeneous discourses. Barthes (1977 [1961]) writes that most people often contrive that photographs are objective facts (simple denotation) not socially coded and decoded texts (connotation):

the special credibility of the photograph -- this, as was seen, being simply its exceptional power of denotation -- in order to pass off as merely denoted a message which is in reality heavily connoted; in no other treatment does connotation assume so completely the "objective" mask of denotation. (p. 21)

In this objective masking of denotation, typically oppressive masculinities can be portrayed as natural, biologically determined. So it seems only natural that men are technology producers and active users whereas women and children are technology consumers and objects of technological development. Advertisements, using such commonsense connotations, exhibit feminine teachers as cyborgs of embodied feminine nurturing and computer intellect. The perfect teacher can be boiled down to a nurturing breast and thinking silicon chip. Advertisers picture men's intellect being aided by technology thereby increasing their social prestige and power to manipulate objects; advertisers picture women's intellect being supplanted by computer technology, thereby emphasizing their powerlessness and social role as objects. These advertisements reinforce the supposed natural gender dichotomies of Western analytical logic and the power differences dichotomies reinforce.

Figure 1: "You've come a long way, baby," Virginia Slims

<5> Representations of power can be subtle, seemingly subversive images can actually be reasserting traditional power structures. Figure 1 seems to profess a form of feminine agency, yet the overarching power is capitalist ideology. While this woman has the power to choose, this choice must occur within the confines of the dominant market ideology. Foucault (1980) claims with respect to discourse theory that heterogeneous discourses inform one another. For example, dominant discourses determine that computers offer opportunities for equal education by means of a transcendent subjectivity, and yet normalizing practices tend to make social assumptions of gender biases less fluid, thereby undermining the prior discourse. For obedience to occur, the former discourse must inform the latter. For the discourse to exist and function, most people need to believe that the ideals for equality should work, but that incompetent practitioners fail to meet the intended goals. To keep feminized bodies docile, such a coercive discourse needs to dictate commonsense thinking. This issue of free-will sovereignty (cf. Virginia Slims ad campaign "you've come a long way, baby") disguises the function of domination so that such coercive technologies do not appear, in fact, coercive and oppressive. In Figure 1, we see how in the Old West, women who smoked were excluded from society, here shunted to a separate, open car, but now women are free to choose to smoke and not be shunned. This trope places the frontier as limiting to women and the modern age (signified by the boot wearing woman below the historical recreation) and invokes the trope of autonomous chooser (Marshall, 1998). This highly stylized woman has choices within consumer culture, as long as she chooses to act normally within the consumer discourse. One can hardly imagine an anarchist female advocating a ban on smoking (consuming Virginia Slims) being given such credence in popular magazines.

<6> The means for coercion are subtle and exist at the subconscious, inconspicuous level, as do most norms. The supervisory role is necessarily a masculine, constant, consistent, and powerful gaze -- the Panopticon (Foucault, 1977). This reflexivity promotes hegemonic tropes of feminine such as helplessness, dangerous, or protectors of the moral order (Baym, 1998). The helpless trope is signified by computer technology as an aid to the hapless teacher; the dangerous trope paints feminine, typically student, as a virus that needs to be controlled; and, the protector of children, the nanny or schoolmarm, as the shield protecting children from the pariahs of the net. Moreover, the construct of cyberspace as virgin territory that needs to be tamed and claimed by rugged men borders on troubling rape motif -- one that the alternative cyberpunk frontier narrative will invoke and subvert. Is this turn back to tired tropes of rampantly virility really necessary or even inevitable?

<7> Cyberfrontier narratives are fraught with troubling misogynistic motifs and tropes carried over from former frontier myths. Various poststructuralists and feminist theorists have analyzed how these myths operate and what effects they have on culture. Matthew Weinstein (1998) examines how traditional constructs masculinity and femininity are reproduced in computer advertisements. This paper seeks to amplify his assertions and to posit alternative constructs of women on the digital frontier. Zia Sophia (1998) offers an alternative with permeable boundaries to the modernist gender duality of colonizer/colonized. She invokes a feminized troupe of discovery, not one of conquest but of cooperation. She bases her pluralistic and networked construction of cyberspace on cyberpunk myths. This alternative mythos constructs cyberspace as a shared place within which individualized, purely intellectual desires for control are exorcised by anti-militaristic cyborg tropes. Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell (1998) add that we need to deny the headlong rush to technorationality; we need to stop making sense. They recognize the power of romanticized narratives constructed about the potential of the Internet in which technophila is normal and technophobia is a psychological pathology (Sofia, 1998). It should come as little surprise that the former corresponds to the masculine and the latter to the feminine. Megan Boler (2002) warns that the promise of disembodied minds in digital discourse invokes gendered stereotypes that discriminate against the feminine. Jodi O'Brien (1999) posits that digital discourse maps the digital "frontier with the same social categories of distinction that we have used to chart modern reality—which we tend to code [gender] as based in a state of nature" (p. 88). Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star (1999) write that humans naturally classify the world to make sense of various stimuli and that we rely on social scripts (O'Brien, 1999) and dominant discourses to do so (Foucault, 1980). What is not natural is that most people take the arbitrary categories, such as gender, determined from biological difference, i.e. sex, as inherent and natural, and those assumptions act as discursive boundaries. Donna Haraway (2000 [1991]) however, argues that digital discourse and the use of computers can help make discursive boundaries more permeable, giving the feminine more subjectivity as cyborg.

<8> Like Haraway I perceive the feminine opportunities that the term cyborg encompasses. The normalizing mythos of a female cyborg as female body with computer mind often invokes simultaneously a desire for the perfected woman and a fear of the unnatural in such fictional accounts as Metropolis, Bladerunner, and The Stepford Wives (Doanne, 2000). Yet cyborgs can also male, a synthesis of man and machine, such as the terminator -- another locus of desire and fear. These gendered cyborgs take on characteristics of their human gender and the machine. In the case of the female cyborgs, they are too desirable for men and will disrupt society through men's desire to have such perfect women; in the case of the male cyborgs, the emphasis switches to power from sexuality as the desirable trait. Male dominated science fiction audiences' see female cyborgs as commodities to be owned and male cyborgs as a means to power, an ability to conquer.

Depicting Women on the Cyberfrontier

Figure 2: "Cybercowboy," AECT National Convention, 2002.

<9> In Figure 2, we see a cowboy on his trusty mount with a laptop alone on an empty western plain; this is the denotation. This is the figure that the Association for Educational Computing and Technology (AECT) has chosen for its annual meeting in Dallas (2002). The connotation can be read as the technology user being equated with the strong American symbol of the cowboy: a self-sufficient icon out of Western mythos. The myth underlying this figure presages the preeminence of rugged masculinity riding bravely on the technology frontier. The sin here is one of omission and irony: the absence is others, especially women, and the irony of this figure is its construing education as a masculine field, when women highly outnumber men in education. However, technology, the overriding myth, is most often represented as masculine and thereby valuable.
<10> The myths informing this cybercowboy require reconsideration. Barthes' critique of structuralist semiotics offers a means for deconstructing how the frontier narrative operates in Cybercultural. Specifically, he examines how unnatural meaning-making is, how it is rather a social function. Dominant narratives determine how most people code representations and this commonsense decoding leads to hegemonic coding of stimuli as a seemingly natural undertaking. In "The structuralist activity," Barthes (1964/2000) critiques traditional semiotics, specifically examining de Saussure's structuralism. Traditional, structuralist semiotics posited the goal of decoding stimuli is to mentally reproduce (the mimetic approach) an object in the mind; however, Barthes writes that this process is a directed, interested simulacrum -- intellect added to the object, not simply a mental mirror. We do not so much represent an object as much as we interpret it from past social experience. We choose what we see, and we attach further value in interpretation. The purpose is not to copy, but to render signs intelligible. Perception is an activity colored by social scripts, not a recreation of objective reality: "technique is the very being of all creation" (p. 490). Creating meaning is neither real nor rational, but a social function. The simulacrum takes place in two steps: dissection and articulation. The former is the figure/representation of the world; the latter is the analysis/meaning attached to it by intellect. These are not distinct activities, but subfunctions. Typically, the former is the entirety according to the metaphysics of presence -- the essence/reality. Codes/signs, contrary to the traditional means of ascribing reality, do not have meaning in of themselves, but are fabricated by humans transacting with the environment: "it [is] not so much stable, finite, ‘true' meanings as the shudder of an enormous machine which is humanity tirelessly undertaking to create meaning, without which it would no longer be human" (p. 492). Ideology, not reality, maintains the myth of essential, quantifiable meanings.

Figure 3: "Changing the world," NCS Learn, 2002.

<11> In Figure 3, we can see how the omission of the female teacher and the centering of the male student illustrates how social power colors the connotation (meaning making) of figures. In this figure, we see a boy raising his hand to answer a question posed by the teacher. One should note that this advertisement is selling computer technology for the classroom, yet this confident young man, who will be one of those learners to later change the world, presumably as a leader, has no computer pictured near him. So where is the computer? With the teacher, of course. One can safely assume that the teacher is female in an elementary school setting. The teacher needs the computer to aid her so she can enable this confident and inquiring young man to live up to his potential. The discourse then reads that for strong male learners to live up to their inscribed social roles as leaders, they need good instruction. Good instruction with a female teacher seems improbable here, so technology with code and hardware engineered predominantly by males will enable this empowering (for him) and disempowering (for her) in a technologically enhanced educational transaction. In fact, the remarkable exclusion of the teacher envisions a straightforward transaction between the individual male learner and the curriculum (most likely designed by males as instructional designers and curriculum specialists). The female teacher could hardly be more marginalized. Moreover, the individualization of the male learner works from the discourse of the strong, self-reliant male of the Enlightenment -- the man of reason -- a hallmark of liberal, Western education.

<12> The trope of the man of reason is an invocation of the cultural truth, an assumed idea so stratified with layers of tradition, or common sense, as to be taken as a fact by many without ever realizing it. Cultural truths are so entrenched in cultural lore that they are as invisible and taken for granted as water is to a fish. In order to determine how truth is socially constructed and favors those already in power Foucault (1980) posits in Power/Knowledge that power, knowledge, and truth exist as a triangular, self-reflexive matrix in which the rules of right provide a formal limitation of power and counterbalancing this are the effects of truth that power produces and transmits, and subsequently reproduce power. By invoking traditional truths, we reconstitute regimes of truth:

I would say that we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or discover the truth, Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionises, professionalises and rewards its pursuit [sic] (p. 93).

Power not only limits as a negative element in discourse, but also produces, induces pleasure, produces forms and norms of knowledge. It is above all else, inescapable.

Figure 4: "Dangerous girl," Gateway, 2002.

<13> Figure 4 speaks the truth of gender binaries as an exercise in power. This figure institutionalizes the classic Cartesian gender binary in the digitally enhanced classroom. On the digital frontier, little girls are dangerous: they keep your IT staff running. The female learner, unlike our confident, future leader male (Figure 3) is not a subject looking us in the eye, but an object being observed from behind. In fact, one could argue, we (as the audience) act as Panopticon (Foucault, 1979), the all-seeing eye of discipline here to regulate her activity with rewards for permissible acts and punishment for aberrant behavior. We assume the privileged position of the inserted male director for technology watching over this girl's shoulder. He, unlike the girl, engages us as a subject speaking to us through his testimonial. Moreover, we can readily read his name and his title as a director of technology. Naming himself and speaking for himself accord him much more agency than the girl. The social institutions of female student as observed object and male technology director as observing subject seem appropriate, if not natural thereby reinforcing belief in this regime of truth [2].

Figure 5: "Cyberteacher," Alphasmart. 2002.

<14> Figure 5 stresses the role of teacher as cyborg. As opposed to Haraway's (2000 [1991]) "Cyborg Manifesto" calling for permeable bodies and flexible categorizations, this figure invokes the trope of teacher as necessitating aid and observation. The classic narrative of rationally incapable woman resurfaces in this figure as an example of regimes of truth. The computer she holds promises to "make teaching easier" which serves as a common script with technologies for women teachers. Moreover, "a simple click of the mouse lets you configure a classroom of thirty AlphaSmarts" so the machine does the thinking for the teacher. Due to the teacher's embodied intellectual incompetence, she needs a computer to act as her rational intellect. Additionally, the students are conflated with the machines. Haraway remarks in modern culture that machines often take precedence over people, "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" (p. 505). The advertisement reads, "It not only unlocks students' potential, it unlocks their teacher's potential" predicating entelechy -- the "unfoldment" (Bobbitt, 1918/1997) of predetermined potential. This technology determines the teacher's ends and serves as her guide, perhaps even her mind. In many respects, this masculine technology replaces the teacher's feminine intellect. She retains her maternal nature while the machine serves as her brain. Finally, the advertisement is marketed towards administrators, not teachers (certainly, no teacher could realistically afford to buy thirty-one Alphasmarts) thereby marking the administrator's role to discipline the teacher's behavior in class. It hardly needs to be noted that most administrators are male (Spring, 2002), being that leadership and control are masculine social scripts in the West and that gendered bodies are laden with cultural signs.

<15> Our bodies prompt social scripts thereby naturalizing expected socially constructed gender attributes. Bowker and Star (1999) claim "to classify is human" (p. 1). We make sense of the world around us by giving it meaning, provided by internalized social scripts: "Basic categorization of others and the subsequent positioning of self in an interaction happens instantaneously" (p. 84). Bowker and Star designate three premises for classification that strengthens the move from initial biological identification (i.e. sex) to socially proscribed expectations (e.g. gender): (1) consistent, unique classificatory principles guide the logic of categorization, (2) categories are mutually exclusive, and (3) the system is complete. These points mean that classificatory systems make sense and this logic seems natural because they are internalized. Their claim builds upon Barthes' claim that photographic decoding (connotation) is often taken as unbiased (denotation) that pictures do not lie. Additionally, the power inherent within systems of categorization segues with Foucault's regimes of truth in that categorical systems serve to direct how we make meaning within preexisting systems and that educational institutions inscribe such systems and systematic thinking in the disciplinary technology of grading. For example, children learn early on that binaries are the norm, so what is masculine cannot be feminine (what Barthes calls boundary events, such as cross-dressing that tends not to question boundaries but reinscribe them by the reaction of normal people). Stimuli that do not fit into systems will be shoehorned into systems or considered meaningless or even blasphemous, necessitating eradication or normalization.

<16> The gendered narratives shape and constrain the ways in which students and teachers can use educational technologies and how researchers can probe into the supposedly proper use of such technologies. Bryson and de Castell (1998) write that "a species of metanarrative which informs and is informed by practitioner's first-order accounts (also construed as stories) of the nature and proper function of computer technology in the classroom" [emphasis added] (p. 67) script the supposedly natural categorizations and subsequent actions of gendered computer usage. The stock tales told about educational computing form an unquestioned folklore, which regulates and limits gendered activities. The assumptions of how males and females should use computers in schools guide activity so that these assumptions become self-fulfilling prophecies that are revealed in research. Most research fails to question such gendered narratives thereby giving scientific credence to gendered uses not as social constructs based upon norms and values, but as biologically determined and final ends. Bryson and de Castell refer to this form of reflexive research as preconstructing the human subject.

<17> The technicist's vision for the information-age frontier is based upon an uncritical, consistent, and even zealous belief in the inherent good of technology in education. Moreover, the faith is based upon the machine's ability to allow for pure reason to fuel progress. The computer represents the catalyst for a quantum leap in scientific and subsequently social and economic progress. The aim in education is to prepare students for effective participation in an information based economy and society -- a neo-liberal culture. This narrative relies on Utopian Enlightenment ideals of transcending earthly and embodied restrictions. What technicists fail to note in their enthusiasm is that their ideal is a masculine ideal that seeks to circumscribe the body, the feminine. The highly gendered frontier myth is one such narrative that inscribes gendered transactions with computers.

<18> The frontier narrative functions as a metanarratives for Cyberculture, so understanding the frontier narrative will aid deconstructing Cyberculture narratives. Nina Baym (1998) contends that American frontier narratives cast men and women in binary social roles. Men represent rugged individualism and the free spiritedness of the frontier, whereas women signify a return to domesticity and civil order:

The myth narrates a confrontation of the American individual, the pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances, with the promise offered by the idea of America. This promise is the deeply romantic one that in this new land, untrammeled by history and social accident, a person will be able to achieve complete self-definition. Behind this promise is the assurance that individuals come before society, that they exist in some meaningful sense prior to, and apart from, societies in which they happen to find themselves. The myth also holds that, as something artificial and secondary to human nature, society exerts an unmitigatedly destructive presence on individuality. (p. 1546)

The net-nanny or virtual schoolmarm protecting children from cyberrogues fulfills this binary myth. The period of rugged individualism of rogue hackers (the cyber equivalent to gunslingers) has given way a period of increasing domestication (Miller, 1998): "In the Western mythos, civilization is necessary because women and children are victimized in conditions of freedom. Introduce women and children into a frontier town and the law musty follow because women and children must be protected" (p. 101). Figure 6 illustrates how the schoolmarm oversees the civilizing/moralizing of the cyberfrontier for the protection of youth. In this advertisement, the teacher can practice her profession without fearing that students will encounter any (unspecified) dangers: "provide Internet access for your students and protect them from dangers." The teacher's nurturing attention coupled with Cyberpatrol's protection (i.e. the cybermarshall) assures that the children will be safe sojourning about the virtual frontier town.

Figure 6: "Protective schoolmarm," CyberPatrol, 2002.

Changing the Myth Itself: Cybergrrrls

<19> At this point, I believe it is appropriate to not only identify and deconstruct the role the frontier narrative plays in constructing a mythos for e-learning and cyberculture, but to posit, however far-fetched, an alternative frontier mythos, one that rectifies the role of women on the frontier. To aid my reconstruction. I turn to cyberpunk narratives that negotiate a woman's place on the cyberfrontier. Barthes' challenge to change the social myths that guide our connotations of stimuli provides a means not only to deconstruct the frontier narrative in Cyberculture but also a means to construct alternative frontier narratives for Cyberculture -- ones that do not reify traditional gender decoding and discriminatory binaries. In "Change the object itself: Mythology today," Barthes (1971/1977) revisits Mythologies (1957/1972) to claim that the work of deconstruction is not the reductio absurdum of infinite regression of deconstructing sociolect meaning. He describes sociolect as the thickness of language by which language's deepest social myths "present an unshakeable homogeneity . . . woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and key-words" (p. 168). Critical theorists need to move beyond merely critical decipherment to evaluation. In this evaluation of myths, we need to replace those dominant myths that are most oppressive by writing against them. This writing is not only creating critiques of mythical figures as oppressive social constructs but also informing others thereby increasing the likelihood for changing the world we live in. This reconstructive move should be the preeminent goal for a new semiology.

Figure 7: "Cyberknight," Heavymetal, 2002.

<20> In this section I will examine how cyberpunk culture in some cases reifies frontier narratives and in others questions them, concentrating on figures of male cyborgs. Figure 7, for example, signifies the oppressive male cyborg construction in that he protects the woman, her genitalia in particular, from an angry mob, notably comprised of women, with his technically enhanced arms. Like the knight-errant or the cowboy, the male protects the hapless female from harm. The fantasized cyberpunk frontier can be as sexist as medieval and Old West depictions of the frontier; however, this is not always the case. In the following section, I will examine how male cyborgs represent two forms of hypermasculinity: the one being the hyperphysical killing machine, the other being the hyperintellectual male as computer.

<21> Using cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, is fraught with pitfalls, as Mary Ann Doane (2000 [1990]) points out:

Science fiction, a genre specific to the era of rapid technological development, frequently envisions a new, revised body as a direct outcome of the advance of science. And when technology intersects with the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference is invariably involved. . . technology makes possible the destabilization of sexual identity as a category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology that work to fortify -- sometimes desperately -- conventional understandings of the feminine. (p. 110)

Many cyborg figures in science fiction represent conventional gender roles. Yet Sadie Plant (2000 [1996]) remarks that the "cyberfeminist virus" (p. 265) offers the potential to destabilize and reinvent gender boundaries:

Complex systems and virtual worlds are not only important because they open spaces for existing women within an already existing culture, but also because of the extent to which they undermine both the world-view and material reality to two thousand years of patriarchal control. (p. 265)

The cyborg represents the body as frontier between the known and the mysterious, the female and the male, the real and the unreal, the machine and human. This represent of boundary transgression coupled with the frontier myth as expressed in Alphonso Azpiri's graphic novella "Ark" offers a seductively disruptive conflation of texts to explore for a feminized frontier.

Figure 8: "Purifying the female body," Azpiri, 2002.

<22> In "Ark," a strong female protagonist battles two male cyborgs: one representing (Figure 8) the purely physical male cyborg ideal (likened to the Terminator); the other (Figure 9) representing the purely intellectual cyborg ideal (likened to 2001's HAL). Jackson Katz (1998) remarks how the powerful cyborg figure is incorporated into Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies as a hyperviolent and hypermasculine killing machine. Morevoer, the caption in Figure 8 signifies the importance of Cartesian cleansing of the corrupt feminine body (Boler, 2002). Sophia (1998) critiques 2001 and the computer HAL as an Athena motif -- pure intellect in feminine form born from the masculine mind of Zeus. The computer, like many in science fiction genre, acts like a hyperrational female (the Athena figure) whose job is to nurture the crew and has been created by male scientists and engineers. However, playing on social scripts for females, the computer acts irrationally killing almost the entire crew of the Discovery. In 2010 Jupiter space explodes into a new, virgin world prohibited from corrupting human civilization. These examples illustrate the masculine desire to control space -- the final frontier -- without a feminine civilizing presence to corrupt the ironically feminized, virgin frontier. As Sophia (1998) writes,

The rationality of "hard mastery" harbors its own irrationality in that "dream of Reason" which seeks pleasure from possessive command and control of a programmable microworld, an ideal and idealized space where a disembodied consciousness might escape anxieties about lack of control over contingent and messy actualities of physical and social lives, and enjoy the sense of domination that comes from achieving total mastery of a partial, virtual system. (p. 31)

These male cyborg tropes represent a romanticized narrative of frontier as a totally controllable feminine space; a feminine space, moreover, that represents male adolescent erotic desires for ultimate control and feminine pliability.

Figure 9. "The masculine gaze," Azpiri, 2002.

<24> From a feminist perspective, cyborgs, however, can act, not as masculine archetypes and rational females, but as artifacts blurring gender boundaries. Haraway (2000 [1991]) remarks that the postmodern sensibilities of montage, rupture, and dislocation may begin to blur the boundaries of socially constructed binaries such as reality/science fiction, masculine/feminine, person/machine. Cyborgs turn naturalized distinctions into fictions that can be negotiated. Sophia (1998) contends that social scripts of feminine, i.e. cooperation and caring, should be values seen as advantageous and beneficial, not as a weakness. I wish to emphasize that the feminine is not biologically determined but that I desire to deconstruct the power relationships inculcated within discursive binaries and highlight the positives of feminist discourses of nurturing and cooperation. Sophia notes that girls tend to subordinate the masculine logic of individual domination in game play. Girls, on average, happily negotiate rules and mutually help one another to achieve negotiated and shared goals. In Azpiri's "Ark" narrative the distinction for a masculine, controlling quest is contrasted with a feminine one of cooperation. Azpiri reverses the gender roles in the frontier narrative so that the girl saves the day, but not by assuming a masculine role of conquest: "Instead of assuming that the masculinist models are the best, we need to be sensitive to the emergence of other kinds of rationalities in computer culture" (Sophia, p. 33).

<25> Claiming that the scantily clad heroine motif embodies subjectivity proves problematic. Her lack of clothing and Barbie-like figure plays on tropes of woman as the object of masculine desire. One can also note that she is placed in a submissive position below the male cyborg, who resides in something resembling a throne or dais. I contend, however, that the protagonist is both object and subject existing in a liminal space between dichotomous extremes. While she is clearly represented in a submissive position, she uses rational dialogue ironically unlike her masculine foil. In Western metaphysics, rationality is normally considered a masculine virtue and bodily vanity a feminine vice, yet in this composition the female acts as the voice of reason interrupting metaphysical preconceptions. As being both object and subject, she denies the masculine metaphysics of presence of a/not-a analytical logic. As being both object and subject, she denies the masculine metaphysics of presence premised on a / not-a analytical / binary logic. She exists as the feminine irony that Haraway (2000 [1991]) claims in her "Cyborg Manifesto." The protagonist's juxtaposed existence as both subject and object challenges essentialist gender boundary constructs so that she makes such boundaries more permeable.

Figure 10: "Physical rape," Azpiri, 2002.

<26> Figure 10 represents the masculine desire to control the feminine, but in this ironic tale, the hapless female victim is rescued not by a man but by a fellow female. Her rescuer does not rely on cybernetic enhancements as the males do, but on her wits and by exposing their private rape to the public realm. This underscores a second irony in that the women rely on the public to expose the sadistic pleasures of ownership and rape because the normal Western discourse relegates women to the private sphere while affording men the relative freedom of the public sphere. In the trope of straightforward rape by a physically enhanced cyborg, the female needs to be saved, but in contrast to Figure 7, a fellow female saves her.

Figure 11: "Mental rape." Azpiri. 2002.

<27> Figure 11 problemitizes the previous rape scene and the method of extraction from it. In this case, a highly cerebral cyborg attempts to rape the protagonist and uses (ir)rational logic to make his case, not merely physically forcing himself on her: "I'll create a new species, and I'm counting on you for that." The desire for domination and control stands forth clearly, yet the protagonist's reply is "Wait! This is absurd." She, therefore, questions his grand scheme by ridiculing it as thoroughly irrational, which serves as yet another irony. His rejoinder is to embrace her in his phallic cybernetic tentacles and reply, "Our children will rule the world and perhaps the universe," ignoring her response by continuing his logic stream. When the crazed missionary threatens the cerebral cyborg by intending to have "my seed create a new world," the intellectual cyborg kills the missionary with one of his phallic tentacles (Figure 12). Again, the male character needs the female to "create my descendants" and the masculine trope for sole control of the female, with her body portrayed as reproductive object, figures prominently. Plant (2000 [1996]) refers to this masculine desire to use a woman as the bearer of his seed as part of the "specular economy" (p. 266):

This is the first discovery: that patriarchy is not a construction, an order or structure, but an economy, for which women are the first and founding commodities...they have been man's go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his genetic code. (p. 266)

<28> One can ascertain in Figure 12 that the frontier motif of the high-noon shootout is taking place. Here two masculine figures fight over who may spread his seed through the vehicle of the passive female body. The protagonist, the representative female body, has no agency and a lone male actor may use her body to create his heirs and establish his vision for a new humanity brought up in the pure frontier environment. Azpiri interweaves the figurative rape of the frontier as female body with the literal rape of a bound female. Both the males characters, moreover, act out Old West archetypes: the missionary / anchorite who seeks to cleanse the world and himself of embodied corruption, and the captain who represents the cattle baron or hanging judge. It is telling that the intellectual cyborg uses a cybernetic and phallic tentacle to render his rival's point moot by killing the missionary. Sole ownership, absolute control, played out in the standoff is a significant aspect of mythos of the Old West.

Figure 12: "Ownership fight," Azpiri, 2002.

<29> Unlike the man versus man quest for control of the female body (i.e. conquest of the virgin frontier) in Figure 12, Figure 13 highlights how females can cooperate to their mutual advantage. Sophia (1998) urges her reader to challenge "the informatics of domination, in order to act potently" (p. 35). This figure offers one possibility for challenging the masculine technicist hegemony in a potent way, but one that does not simply take on a masculine form itself. This alternate fable offers an "infiltration across leaky boundaries" (p. 35) that involves alliance building across seemingly irreducible differences. This figure, I argue, represents a form of countermyth: "feminine and feminist challenges to dominate (ir)rationalities of the information age" (p. 35). Whilst the machine-god attempts to hold and impregnate the protagonist with his purely mental and therefore Cartesian form of cybersex, her friends cooperatively cease his technological power-flow, allowing the heroine to strike at her (ir)rational assailant. One of her companions is male, but throughout the tale he never attempts to control or seduce her. He also never uses any sort of technology, but relies on mutually beneficial alliances and his wile. His goal, like the protagonist's other ally is to leave the Ark, a spaceship lost adrift full of (ir)rational dangers. This serves as an alternate trope for technology use and gender in which female is not inherently dangerous, a protective schoolmarm, a saloon slut, nor an irrational being necessitating rational/masculine intellect to keep her in check.

Figure 13: "Cooperative resistance," Azpiri, 2002.

Conclusion

<30> I have explored some of the frontier tropes that inform technology use in education and sought out alternative figures of the frontier that capture a feminine sense of discovery as an alternative to the discursive gender formations and limitations placed upon educators and the educated alike. As Sophia (1998) indicates,

Discovery has been pictured as an obsessive Frankensteinian quest for an enlightenment achieved through aggressive invasion and possessive mastery of the unknown created through various technologies that estrange the familiar and push ever outwards (or inwards) the horizons of the known -- a quest "to go boldly where no man has gone before." Computers are very much caught up in the myth of discovery through their associations with scientific and technological progress. (p. 42)

This paper points to an alternative frontier narrative, one in which stereotypically feminine virtues are not shunned as weak and overly civilizing or blasphemous in need of cleansing, but as mutually beneficial in learning environments. Nor does this paper seek to reify stereotypically feminine virtues such as nurturing and cooperation as biologically determined but as virtues that will benefit education. In this cooperative and emergent frontier narrative, gone are teleological assumptions of progress and biologically determined gender attributes. Irony serves as the primary trope, replacing analytical, binary logic. Teaching is a caring profession, and rightly so in that empathy acts as a better guide in aiding learning than conflict and mastery; it should not be, however, denigrated as a caring profession in which the inclusion of computer technology serves as a means to masculininzing, i.e. making it more rigorous, this pedagogical frontier.

<31> The invocation of the frontier narrative is a means to masculinize e-learning, a very important new educational endeavor -- the latest educational frontier. By writing this transition to digitally enhanced learning as a means to masculine control, a traditional frontier mythos serves to undermine the cultural capital of teachers, who are primarily women. The trope of exploration is also so intertwined with conquest (a masculine virtue) in the Western tradition that inscription of a feminized cooperative, non-invasive discovery can yield benefits for female teachers and students alike. The feminine frontier I posit seeks to build on the cyberfeminist virus to disrupt this conquest of the digital / educational frontier.

Notes

[1] One of the most explicit instances of the masculine desire to sexually conquer the frontier symbolized as virgin appears in Donne's "Elegie XIX: Going to bed" (1994 [1633]):

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below
O my America! My new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My Myne of precious stones, My Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be set free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. (ll. 25-32) [^]

[2] Truth also needs to be qualified as non-transcendent, but as a social function:

Truth isn't outside power. Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned...and the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault, 1980, p. 131).

Truth and power are interlinked with right: who has the right to produce truth and thereby the power to enforce that truth. However, the social production of truth reduces the argument to its skeletal form. One may be induced by reading this that a class, a person, a sovereign consciously governs this action as an oppressor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without obedience of subjects through unconscious, embodied actions, this system could not exist. [^]

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