Ubiquitous Women: Everywhere, Everyware and Everywear

Abstract

Ubiquity, like complexity, is too easily and perhaps too often regarded as a thing-in-itself — an objectively occurring phenomenon of iworlds rather than a mechanism for making them or even remaking them in the image of the past. This chapter examines ubiquity as a mechanism for remaking the past in the future and, specifically, for containing potentially unlimited possibilities for women in domestic and urban environments in which they are everywhere (hypervisible, luminous), everyware1 (bound up in the lustrous luminosity of smart glass technology) and everywear (in wearables whose regulatory role is oriented to the reproduction of women as sexual objects and hyperproductive subjects). Through the gendered configuration of ubiquity, technology and time, I highlight not just the remediation of images and ideals from the 1950s in futuristic industry visions of the early twenty-first century but the strategic value of indecision, or undecidability in feminist time-telling. If it is the case that ubiquitous women emerge both in time — historical time, clock time, structured time, productive time, optimized time — and as time — where time is understood as creative evolution or as life itself — then it is necessary, I suggest, for feminist time-telling to incorporate conflicting concepts of women as potential and as potentia. I argue that potential and potentia are co-constituted and co-constitutive of ubiquitous women. It is not possible to choose between them, or to carry on choosing between them on the basis of a feminist ethics or politics.