Sandy Stone
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Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone) is an academic theorist and artist, currently Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the New Media Initiative in the department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone pursued successful multiple careers in film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming.
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[edit] Biography
Allucquére Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone) was born Zelig Ben-Natan in New York City. Her date of birth is uncertain but was probably in the late 1940s. She has stated that while a teen she was intensely averse to formal education, preferring to travel in the New England area auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired. Stone received her B.A. in 1964 from St. John's College, Annapolis. During summers she interned at Fordel Films, a New York production company, and was peripherally involved in the formation of NABET Local 10. Later she worked for a time in experimental neurology, then left the field for a career in music recording on the east and west coasts. In the early 70s under various pseudonyms she recorded artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, Crosby & Nash, Marty Balin, the Grateful Dead, and other groups of the period. In the early 1980s she was a freelance programmer, writing medical software for such firms as Greenleaf; and later engineering manager for Sequential Circuits, a manufacturer of musical synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines.
In 1974 Stone settled in Santa Cruz, California, and undertook gender reassignment with the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto. During this period she published pseudonymously in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" and "Galaxy" magazine. Later she became a member of the Olivia Records collective, a popular women's music label.
[edit] History of the Posttranssexual Manifesto
In 1979, the lesbian feminist scholar Janice Raymond mounted an ad hominem attack on Stone in "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" (New York 1979: Teachers College Press). Raymond named Stone specifically and accused her of plotting to destroy the Olivia collective and womanhood in general with "male energy", which was at the time a common opprobation. In 1976, prior to publication, Raymond had sent a draft of the chapter attacking Stone to the Olivia collective "for comment", apparently in anticipation of outing Stone. Raymond appeared unaware that Stone had informed the collective of her transgendered status before agreeing to join. The collective did return comments to Raymond, suggesting that her description of transgender and of Stone's place in and effect on the collective was at odds with the reality of the collective's interaction with Stone. Raymond responded by increasing the virulence of her attack on Stone in the published version of the manuscript. The collective responded in turn by publicly defending Stone in various feminist publications of the time, e.g., On Our Backs, etc. Stone continued as a member of the collective and continued to record Olivia artists until political dissension over her transgendered status, exacerbated by Raymond's book, culminated in 1979 in the threat of a boycott of Olivia product. The collective believed the threat to be credible and potentially ruinous. After long debate, Stone returned to Santa Cruz.
In 1987 Stone was accepted in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, where she studied with Donna Haraway and James Clifford. Stone wrote the seminal essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" while Haraway's student. The paper was influenced by Haraway's A Manifesto For Cyborgs (later retitled "A Cyborg Manifesto" and first published in Social Text, 1984) and by the turbulent political foment in feminism of that period, but primarily as a reaction to what Stone perceived as a transphobic strain in feminist academia exemplified by Raymond's book. "The Empire Strikes Back" later became the center of an extensive citation network of transgendered academics and a foundational work for transgendered researchers and theorists.
The central point of the essay was that transgendered persons were ill-served by hiding their status, and that coming out -- which Stone called "reading oneself aloud" -- would inevitably lead to self-empowerment. Thus Empire Strikes Back rearticulated what was at the time a radical gay-lesbian political statement into a transgendered voice. The importance of this move lay in the political circumstance of the 1980s vis-a-vis mainstream gay and lesbian political action at the national level in the United States. During this period, mainstream gay and lesbian activists generally suppressed transgender issues and visible transgendered activists, fearing that they would frighten the uncertain and still shaky liberal base during a delicate period of consolidation. At this critical juncture, and against mainstream efforts to silence fringe voices, Empire Strikes Back galvanized a largely scattered and disorganized population of young transgendered scholars and focused the attention of this demographic on the need for self-assertion within a largely reactionary institutional structure.
Before Stone finished her coursework in History of Consciousness she visited the University of California's San Diego campus. There she was offered a job as Instructor and remained in San Diego until 1992, when she became an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. She received her doctorate in 1993. Her dissertation, "Presence", which Haraway supervised, was published in 1996 by MIT Press as "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age".
Stone established the New Media program she named ACTLab (Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory) in the Radio-Television-Film department. This work, and research in virtual communities, social software, and novel methods of presenting academic topics, drew wide attention. Subsequently Stone produced interactive pieces and video loops for gallery exhibition. In the 1990s she extensively toured "Drive-By Theory", a one-person performance.
During online virtual community research in 1994 Stone met the researcher Cynbe ru Taren (Jeffrey Prothero). Ru Taren was the author of Citadel, an influential first-generation virtual community system. The couple were married in 1995.
In 2006 Stone began touring "The Neovagina Monologues", modeled on the work of Spalding Gray.
Currently Stone and ru Taren divide their time between Santa Cruz and Austin; Stone is still active in several fields besides academia.
[edit] Name
Stone has a history of evasiveness concerning the origin of her name. The name "Allucquere" appears in both edited and unedited versions of Robert A. Heinlein's novel "The Puppet Masters". Stone lived near the Heinleins from some point in the late 1960s.
"Sandy" is not part of Stone's formal name. It is generally believed that Stone wrote "The Empire Strikes Back" under the name "Sandy Stone" because that was the name by which Janice Raymond chose to attack her in "The Transsexual Empire". Stone has written nothing else of an academic nature under that name.
[edit] Selected Publications
- "Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures", in Michael Benedikt, ed., "Cyberspace: First Steps" (Cambridge, 1991: MIT Press)
- "Sex, Death, and Architecture", in Architecture- New York (New York 1992: ANY)
- "Virtual Systems", in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., "ZONE 6: Incorporations" (Cambridge 1993: MIT Press)
- "The Architecture of Elsewhere", in Hraszthan Zeitlian (ed.), "Semiotext(e) Architecture" (New York 1993: Semiotext(e))
- "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto", in Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein, eds., "Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Sexual Ambiguity" (New York: Routledge 1996), extensively reprinted in other publications. (This essay is frequently cited as the origin of the academic field known as Transgender Studies.)
- "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age" (Cambridge 1996: MIT Press)
