Circle-ing Back to What Matters: Electronic Literature as Material Feminism

Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear is usually donned to kill dragons or multitudes of soldiers, to explore far off places and feel superhuman. But Pressman argues that the VR and augment reality [AR} work of Canadian digital artist Caitlin Fisher confronts expectations about digital media, games, and electronic literature by employing such technology to tell women’s stories and to pursue feminist storytelling. Pressman examines how Fisher’s AR work Circle (2012) embeds multimodal vignettes about three generations of women onto little domestic objects, which Pressman designates “feminism in action,” specifically in the aesthetic enactment of its female-centered subject matter and its formal glitch aesthetics. More specifically, Pressman aims to show how Circle performs the central concerns of Material Feminism: an investment in illuminating how materiality and context-based relationality are central elements of experience and meaning-making. This short work about women and things insists on the relationality of animate and inanimate objects and, in so doing, it provides an opportunity to critique such philosophical movements as Object-Oriented Ontology. Moreover, the ways in which Circle achieves this critique promotes investigation into the larger and more central intersections between the technologies of AR, VR and feminism.