Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation

Abstract

Although Alan Turing has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rhetoric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

Notes

¹ I owe many thanks to the editor and reviewers of Rhetoric Review, including Elise Verzosa Hurley, Hugh Burns, and the anonymous reviewer whose comments and support significantly improved the clarity of my arguments and encouraged me to see the significance of this research. I am also indebted to Steven B. Katz for his mentoring, guidance, and intellectual generosity in helping me to complete this research, which began as a doctoral dissertation. This article was adapted and revised extensively after graduation with the support and care of a writing group of scholars who embody Anzaldúa’s words, “A woman who writes has power” (33).

² Turing’s status within computer science has been contested. Copeland and Hodges have actively defended Turing’s contribution to the invention of digital computation, especially Turing’s article “On Computable Numbers” as a foundational text that John von Neumann builds upon (see Copeland 21-27). Others have argued that Turing never invented a computer and base these arguments on a strong distinction between theoretical and applied computer science. Turing’s contributions are placed exclusively within theoretical framework, which only later were used to reconstruct a theoretical tradition of computer science (Haigh; Bullynck et al.).

³ The original publications can be found at turingarchive.org. “On Computable Numbers” is indexed AMT/B/9. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is indexed AMT/B/19.

⁴ In 2013, the U.K. issued a royal pardon to Alan Turing. In January 2017, the U.K. passed a law that posthumously pardoned all victims of laws criminalizing homosexuality.

⁵ See the recent film Hidden Figures for a popular representation of women computers.

⁶ The popular book Turing’s Cathedral is an excellent example of the social network surrounding Turing in the U.S., which I hope to extend with archival research regarding British digital computation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Fancher

Patricia Fancher is a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she teaches and researches digital media, technical rhetoric, and feminist rhetorics. In addition to her research on digital media, she also designs and produces feminist digital media, which can be found in the Fall 2015 and 2016 issues of Peitho journal. Readers are welcome to contact her at [email protected].