Technoculture: Volume 3

Like all anthologies, this book suffers from uneven quality. One or two essays are mediocre at best, one or two are great, and the rest fall somewhere in between. I find Haraway unreadable, the ultimate in academic hype (write enough gibberish and people will think you're a genius), and the interview with her isn't much better, but fortunately she isn't the whole book. Hartouni's thoughts on reproductive discourse are worth reading, and Penley's piece is great -- it revealed a really nifty subculture I'd never realized existed in addition to clarifying just what it was about Mr. Spock that made him so desirable to men and women alike. Overall,I thought this was a fun book to read, although I don't think it'll ever achieve classic status.

Collected under the theme of technoculture Constance Penley and Andrew Ross have collected various case studies circulating around the promises and threats, facts and fictions of contemporary technological culture. This book is, of course, a classic for fans of Donna Haraway since it contains an inteview with as well as an article ("The Actors Are Cyborg, Nature Is Coyote, and the Geography Is Elsewhere") by the famous author of "A Cyborg Manifesto"(1985/1991, see also Haraway 1997). Constance Penley has also throughout the 90s written extensivly in the heterogenous field of feminist cultural studies (of science and technology). Don't miss out on these tips!