Technology and Todays Woman

2015

In science fiction one of the key concerns has always been the question, "What is Human?" The cyborg, an amalgamation of organic and machine, is a frequent figure in the exploration of this question. Science fiction has considered the cyborg concept as early as the 1920s and continues to investigate this figure into the new millennium. Running parallel with considerations in science fiction, military research and development into creating a cyborg soldier, a superhuman war machine, has been an integral part of military affairs since WWII. In the 1980s, Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg as key metaphor in investigating feminism in technology and science. The cyborg in SF narratives begins with a concentrated concern with sexuality as a key indicator of what makes a human and then, into the 1980s, with the onset of general computer use in general society, the cyborg becomes a figure most often employed in the subgenre of cyberpunk. After the turn of the millennium the cyborg...

in "The History of Illustration", 2019

“… I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (Haraway 1985: 101). This statement ends Donna Haraway’s famous and influential 1985 article, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in which Haraway reconceptualises what it means to be human in contemporary society. For her, technologies are a way to reimagine feminism and to challenge and break down binary thinking based on differentiation and othering (for instance, that male and female are clear categories and opposites, with the female considered deviant from and inferior to the male ‘norm’). This provides food-for-thought for contemporary illustration by questioning how the world is represented and explained, while also providing a way to engage with pressing social and technological changes that alter the definition and meaning of being human, animal, natural, artificial, self, and other.

The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today"s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this paper will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well.

Australian Feminist Studies, 1987

2017

English-language science fiction films appearing from 1975 through 2015 featuring androids, robots, cyborgs, and advanced artificial intelligence offer fascinating examples of characters with "electric feminine bodies." The female subjects of these films include those who must fight a masculine-coded machine/robot/cyborg, become robots, or be fully android or cyborg-fusions themselves. For this research, I use the term "cyborg" and "cyborg films" loosely to include cinematic narratives which incorporate elements of robotics, cyberpunk, and artificial intelligence. Specifically, I apply María Goicoechea's broad definition of the term cyborg which she outlines in her article "The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction." Goicoechea explains: The meaning of 'cyborg' has also evolved progressively to include any entity that behaves as an enhanced human, no matter if it began its "life" biologically or not (an artificial intelligence would be a cyborg since it performs functions comparable to those of a human being, and a person who increases his [or her] physical or mental power using artificial substances can also be considered a cyborg. (4) As my title suggests, I will specifically focus on cyborg films within the science fiction genre, keeping in mind a broad and inclusive definition. Additionally, the two most important theoretical frameworks that shape my explorations are Laura Mulvey's Visual and Other Pleasures and Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" (shortened hereafter to "Cyborg Manifesto"). Both pivotal texts employ a feminist ethos in their explorations. For example, film theorist Mulvey is best known for coining the term "male gaze," and in her groundbreaking work she charts the ways in which art, specifically culture would have it, cyborg narratives on screen seem to be steadfastly gender-coded and influenced by hardened social narratives, gender stereotypes, and cinematic tropes. Is it the case then that Haraway's metaphor is merely an example, a dream, a hope that things will change? I keep this question in mind as I explore the ways in which the cyborg of each narrative adheres to, subverts, or completely ignores Haraway's political, progressive myth of the cyborg. Additionally, as many film critics in the science fiction genre and otherwise have stressed, it is seemingly impossible, even counterproductive, to divorce the social and historical context of a film from its narrative. Thus we see the propensity of many analyses of film to offer a political context in conjunction with the social themes, the mise-en-scène of the film, and the setting and location of the narrative. This analysis will chronologically consider a specific period within the science fiction-cyborg film genre. It will begin in the 1970s with The Stepford Wives (1975) and Demon Seed (1977), in a chapter titled "The Body Hijacked: Domesticity & Body/Labor Politics, the Horror in Stepford Wives & Demon Seed." The next chapter, "Deconstructing the 'Dirtypunk' City: Constructed Femininity in Blade Runner," discusses the cyberpunk genre both in literature and film, while focusing specifically on the feminine-bodied replicants of the film. Next, the third chapter will focus on the emerging popularity of killer-cyborgs in the 1980s and 1990s in the third chapter titled "Fighting the Hard, Metal Body in Hardware." Lastly, the study will examine two films from the year 2015, Ex Machina and Mad Max: Fury Road. This chapter, entitled "She'd Rather be a Cyborg: Nuanced Gender Performance in Ex Machina and Mad Max: Fury Road," will conclude that, indeed, contemporary films, especially Fury Road, are pushing towards feminist goals that Mulvey, Haraway, and many others have promoted. Overall, this analysis

European Journal of English Studies, 2008

The world around me started to tremble many years ago when I met postmodernism. After that came feminism, then postcolonialism. My world has been falling to pieces ever since, but now I am beginning to glimpse views of a place to stand on, reinforced by a net of contingent and temporal affinities across the boundaries that my society had drawn for me. This paper should be an attempt to fixate this flash, and with the help of a cyborg fantasy (and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto) to abandon or at least suspend my phenomenological “insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight”.

Postdigital Science and Education

Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2013

In this paper I will offer an analysis of cyber technology, cyberspace and cyborg from its appearance in fiction to its contemporary realizations, in order to show symbolic place of cyborg has changed, in the light of contemporary power relations. I will focus on the cyborg figure in literature and film, mainly the cyberpunk genre characteristic for fictionalization of the relations between individual, society and technology. e ords cyborg, technology, life, cyberpunk Numerous connections, relations and intersections between fiction, technology, art and life have been named through terms (such as robot, cyberspace, genetic engineering, computer virus etc.) that have been coined in various works of fiction, and are now used in science and technology. I find this important because the articulation of the term is equal with the articulation of the concept, which means that those specific concepts now operative in reality were first introduced in fiction. 2 Same can be applied to a number of technological as well as critical anticipations of social and political relations in cyberpunk dystopian societies. The anticipations at issue have obtained direct or transformed realizations in contemporary society. This is by no means reducible to the trivial claim that science fiction of the past is the reality of the future. Nevertheless, it emphasizes the political and activist potential of fiction.

Zygon®, 2002

Two ways of self-interpretation merged in Western thought: the Hebrew and the Greek. What is unique, if anything, about the human species? The reinterpretation of this problem has been a constant process; here I am referring to Philip Hefner and the term created co-creator, and particularly to Donna Haraway and the term cyborg. Simultaneously, humans have been fascinated by the thought of transgressing the boundaries that seem to separate them from the rest of nature. Any culture reflects the ways it relates to nature. Our nature is technonature, and our culture is technoculture. Our reality can be best approached by the metaphor and symbol cyborg. Donna Haraway's cyborg is not just an interesting figure of speech, it is also a description-of ourselves and our culture. Also, contemporary fiction reflects the return of ontological questions: What is a world? What is the self? The cyborg acknowledges our mode of existence and destabilizes the traditional procedures of identity construction.