When cyberfeminism meets Chinese philosophy: Computer, weaving, and women

Abstract

Through a theoretical discussion of cyberfeminism, especially focused on Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant ’s texts, this article traces the interrelationship of women, weaving, computer, and technology from the point of constructing a ’herstory’ of technology. This ’herstory’ is woven together by threads of small stories, such as Ada Lovelace’s biography, Charles Babbage’s creation of Difference Engine, the fables of weaving in mythologies, tales of weaver in poetry, etc. I try to overcome the dualist framework implicit in Sadie Plant’s work by contrasting the vision of cyberfeminism on the representation of the digits with that of ancient Chinese philosophy. Unlike Plant, who sees zero and one—the only digits in the digital form of computer—as representative of the binary system in western civilization, ancient Chinese philosophical texts offer multiple possibilities embodied in the interaction between the ones and the zeros. As this is the first ever attempt of its kind, I have chosen only a couple of texts to begin with—Lao Zi and IChing or Book of Change.