Dorothy Johnston

Much of the language of cyberspace…seems strung out on an axis between opposing desires, for both embodiment and disembodiment. Margaret Wertheim uses that most physically explicit phrase, ‘surfing the net’, as an example. We have ‘visiting a site’ and ‘hit’. The body is ‘meat’, or ‘wetware’. Having your persona destroyed in some interactive games is called being ‘gutted’.

Several years ago, a group of Canberra sex-workers applied to the Australia Council and were granted $6,280 to write a film script. The organization WISE (Workers In Sex Employment) was involved. A local writer ran some workshops, characters were developed, a plot outlined. But the project caused a stir, and resulted in a good deal of bad publicity, most of which used the argument that funding prostitutes to write a film script was a waste of public money.