monstrosity

Shelley Jackson’s hypertext, Patchwork Girl, offers a cyborgian reading of reproductive technologies that challenges the dominant discourse of fetal imaging.

Part male, part female, part animal, 175 years old, and “razed” up through hypertext technology, the patchwork girl is a different type of cyborg than discussed thus far; she is a reproductive freak whose story only comes into being through hypertext and who embraces her flaws at every turn of the story

One of the ways the story posits a concept of new reproductive technologies outside the norm is by having the monster aware of how her birth was assisted. The monster knows that she is an assemblage of body parts rather than a unified self because she carries memories of her own creation as well as those she is made up from.

When I first started writing hypertext I discovered that the link was not neutral, but was itself a kind of argument, one that I should not duplicate in my prose. I had to learn to allow the link to make points that I would formerly have spelled out in words.

In a multimedia piece images also begin to do part of the "writing"--though it would make as much sense to say writing does some of the imagining.

...when you allow syntax to fracture, when you flaunt the bits you've cribbed from other books and let them clash with other bits, when you create unresolvable ambiguities or multiple solutions--the reader can't help feeling piqued and disoriented.

Email is so sexy that one might fear it would replace sex itself were it not for the fact that it has led to so much of it!

People who fear the "inhuman" in technology should trust their imaginations a little more.