Text page
Plant - On the Mobile (2001)
"Plant - On the Mobile (2001)" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 10
on the mobile the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life Dr Sadie Plant on the mobile title page page 19 on the mobile blank page page 18
Definition · paragraph 38
The mobile can make an enormous difference to regions where fixed-line telephone services are unavailable, inefficient or prohibitively expensive. In remote parts of several developing countries, including Swaziland, Somalia and the Côte d’Ivoire, the mobile is being introduced in the form of payphone shops in villages which have never had land-lines. In rural Bangladesh, these shops, and the women who run them, have become new focal points for the community.
History · paragraph 43
Sadie Plant has published articles in publications as varied as the Financial Times, Wired, Blueprint, and Dazed and Confused. Her work has been discussed in much of the UK press and several overseas newspapers and journals, and she was most recently interviewed as one of the ‘People to Watch’ in the Winter 2000–2001 issue of Time.
History · paragraph 43
She published Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture, with Fourth Estate in London, and Doubleday in New York, and her most recent book, Writing on Drugs, was published in 1999 by Faber and Faber in London, and in 2000 by Farrar Straus and Giroux in New York. Sadie Plant has published articles in publications as varied as the Financial Times, Wired, Blueprint, and Dazed and Confused.
Method · paragraph 43
about the author Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham, UK in 1964, and read Philosophy at the University of Manchester. She graduated with a 1st class degree in 1985, and completed her PhD in 1989.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.