Katherine Hayles, the noted critic and theorist, is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship of literature and science.  She is the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics and recently of Mother was a Computer . She is currently the Hillis Professor of Literature and Media Arts at UCLA, and she writes frequently on gender in electronic space.

Professor Hayles’s contribution to the “Creating Culture” conversation is titled "Do Media Determine Our Situation? Hypermasculinity and its Critique in Electronic Literature."  

Her talk will take issue with the oft-repeated claim that "media determine our situation," arguing instead that "culture determines how media determines our situation."  As a case study, Professor Hayles will analyze the world of international finance, showing how media constraints and cultural patterns together create a situation which promotes hyper-masculinity.  She will then show how some of the same constraints operate within electronic literature with very different results.