CYBORGS, HOT AS HELL?
Normalcy, Heterosexuality, and the Cyborgization of the Disabled Subject
A 2010 post on io9 by Charlie Jane Anders is titled “The Sexiest Mutants, Cyborgs and Posthumans of All Time.”[i] The post begins by stating, “Our post-human replacements don’t care if we find them sexually attractive, because we’re a throwback as far as they’re concerned. But that doesn’t change the fact that mutants, cyborgs and other post-humans are hot as hell. Here are the sexiest,” before going on to list fifteen mutant, cyborg or posthuman characters from popular fiction the author finds particularly sexually appealing.[ii] While this post is clearly throwaway clickbait, the opinions expressed within it are not uncommon, and in popular representation, the cyborg is a figure who, like Anders’ post suggests, possesses a sexuality so strong that its status as “hot as hell” is seen as an indisputable fact.
In this paper, I would like to juxtapose the way the cyborg body is cast as hyper-sexual, while the disabled body is seen as abject, and lacking any sexual desirability. Especially, as Alison Kafer (2013) notes, in conjunction with the way cyborg theory, mainstream news, and fiction consistently cast disabled people as those who experience the most intense forms of cyborgization and the way disability is seen as a cyborg potentiality. I’ll first show the abject and queer nature of disability through Robert McRuer’s (2006) reformulation of compulsory heterosexuality by connecting it to compulsory able-bodiedness. Then, looking at readings of the cyborg by feminist scholars Mary Ann Doane (1999) and Sarah Cohen Shabot (2006) who show the ways the cyborg has been used as a normalizing, “savior” figure, who saves humanity by reinforcing a patriarchal structure of power, I will show how through cyborgization, the disabled body is normalized. The previously disabled and queer body is made able-bodied and heterosexual. This (hetero) sexualization of the disabled body into a cyborg body not only transforms the body into one with a hyper-sexual heterosexual and nondisabled identity, but further dehumanizes the body as the cyborg is cast as a different “species,” allowing the body to be seen as tool for heterosexual desire.
The Queer/Disabled Body
The power of normal, which assumes and caters to specific ways of being and ostracizes those who do not embody and practice those ways, provides the disciplinary function of compulsory heterosexuality that, as McRuer (2006) puts it, “seemingly emanat[es] from everywhere and nowhere.”[iii] Compulsion is the disciplinary tool of normalcy, and therefore the intersecting ways of being normal — through race, gender, sexuality, or disability to name a few — are all not only intertwined, but mutually constitutive. As McRuer puts it: “The system of compulsory able-bodiedness that produces disability is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness; that — in fact — compulsory heterosexuality is contingent upon compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa.”[iv] The definitions of heterosexuality and ability are equally contingent upon their Other to define themselves: heterosexuality is “the opposite of homosexuality” and able-bodiedness is “free from physical disability.” Both these definitions mainly function as ways of defining normalcy; “able to participate in normal human relations” would work equally well as a definition for both. Being heterosexual means embodying a normal gender properly and practicing the proper, “normal” (sexual) relationships with other humans, while “being able-bodied means being capable of the normal physical exertions required in a particular system of labor.”[v]
The disabled subject is queer in that she fails to properly embody her gender, and fails to properly enact heterosexual relations. She is unable to properly perform the physical and sexual labors required of the normal, heterosexual, nondisabled subject, and therefore her body is an abject one; it threatens the lines of subjectivity and must be cast out.
Julia Kristeva opens her treatise on abjection by describing it as partially consisting of “violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.”[vi] The abject is what is cast out and thrown away by society, what does not fit into the ontology of the symbolic order, and what is, in its very existence, a threat, because according to the laws of order it cannot exist. It is also that which reminds of the frailty of that order. Upon viewing the disabled body, the nondisabled subject is reminded of her own temporality and the degradation of her own body, that what she thinks of as natural and right, that which simply is, is perhaps not. Encountering the abject, which Kristeva illustrates by describing tasting a loathsome food object, involves such a strong rejection of that other, that which the subject cannot assimilate into herself, that the self is cast out in order to retain the subject’s identity. Kristeva writes:
Since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself… that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that “I” am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.[vii]
The nondisabled subject understands the disabled subject to be human, yet this decidedly human subject is not properly performing able-bodiedness and heterosexuality, and therefore should not be human. The disabled body not only puts under pressure her conception of what a human body does and is, but of what she, as a human being, does and is, as the disabled body reminds her of knowledge that she does not wish to remember: that she also fails, as everyone does, to live up to the standards of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality. Therefore she must cast not only the disabled body she is viewing, but her own self, in order to constitute herself anew, forgetting the inevitable “land of oblivion” the abject body has reminded her of.[viii] Therefore, the nondisabled subject desires the disabled body to be “fixed” far more than the disabled subject does, as to the nondisabled subject, the disabled body is a threat to the continuation of her existence and it must, if not “fixed,” cast out of her realm of being.
The Cyborg
The cyborg of Haraway’s text is a transgressive figure, whose work is to challenge norms, blur boundaries, and subvert binaries. Within this figure, Haraway saw the potential to formulate new, liberating methodologies and epistemologies through taking “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and [taking] responsibility in their construction.”[ix] In Haraway’s words, the cyborg is “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.”[x] The cyborg’s origin as something emerging from militarizing and colonizing techno-science provides it with its non-innocence, and this is what makes it such a potentially powerful tool for feminist thought. The cyborg is equally as powerful a tool for domination as it is for liberation, and it is this dual capacity that allows it to provide new possibilities of resistance. [xi] The ability to see from both perspectives at once is precisely the power of the cyborg, because each perspective “reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”[xii] If every perspective reveals something entirely different, then the perspective of assembled partialities from multiple perspectives, the perspective of the cyborg, is the one most suitable for political action.
The cyborgs that have emerged from popular fiction, however, do not resemble Haraway’s proposal of what the cyborg should be. In fact, much of the time, they act as figures to reinforce binaries, and strengthen boundaries. As Shabot puts it:
Since its first apparitions in fiction (see, for instance: Gibson, 1984; Rucker, 1980; Sterling, 1980, 1986; Swanwick, 1987), it has become clear that the cyborg is not intrinsically challenging or liberating, and that it may also function as a figure which reinforces patriarchy and other structures of power, and which may take us back to the traditional categories of dominating Western thought.[xiii]
Perhaps this is not something Haraway had imagined, or perhaps this is the potential for a cyborg world to be “about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” that Haraway noted.[xiv] Here, I will take a look at popular portrayals of cyborgs in fiction, and subsequently look at the ways feminist scholars have seen the cyborg in fiction as a figure of oppression and normalcy.
Case Study: Three Fictional Cyborgs
RoboCop
First is the titular character of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop. Police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is killed by a gang in near-future Detroit. His body is seized by Omni Consumer Products (OCP) — a private organization contracted to run the Detroit Police Department — for use in their RoboCop program, citing the release forms Murphy signed when he joined the police force as providing them legal ownership of his dead body. As RoboCop, “Murph” is equipped with superhuman reflexes, speed, strength, and sensory capability, advances intellect, anti-ballistic carbon frame and titanium plates and a series of guns designed specifically for him — this cyborg narrative closely resembles that of Hirai Kazumasa and Kuwata Juro’s 1960’s manga and anime superhero 8 Man, who is said to be a possible inspiration for RoboCop. RoboCop appears as a hyper-masculine, hyper-able-bodied white man with chrome plate armor covering most of his body and a helmet with a visor that covers his eyes.
Major Kusanagi Motoko
Second is Major Kusanagi Motoko from the Ghost in the Shell media franchise. Major Kusanagi Motoko, or “The Major,” is a cyborg with a fully prosthetic body, the only remainder of her former self being her “ghost” — something akin to a soul — inhabiting her cyberbrain. The Major works as the squad leader of Public Security Section 9, a division of the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs specializing in counter-cyberterrorism. Many of the series’ iterations and timelines give no hint as to what caused The Major to come into her cyborg form, but in the episode of the anime series Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG titled “IN: Kusanagi’s Labyrinth — AFFECTION” reveals that as a child, Kusanagi was one of two survivors of a plane crash, the other being a boy her age. After being taken to the hospital, Kusanagi was comatose for weeks before taking a turn for the worse, and being rushed to the OR, where she was provided with a fully prosthetic body. The boy was stable, but paralyzed except for his left hand, and Kusanagi went to the boy to convince him to get a prosthetic body as well. She was eventually successful in this, and subsequently lost contact with the boy. She appears as a voluptuous Japanese woman in her 30’s with short, purple hair. She bears no physical markers of being a cyborg.
Jamie Sommers, the Bionic Woman
Third is Jamie Sommers, protagonist of the 2007 American television series Bionic Woman. A remake of the 1970s television series The Bionic Woman, and based on Michael Caiden’s 1972 novel Cyborg, Bionic Woman tells the story of Jamie Sommers (Michele Ryan) who lost her legs, one arm, and her unborn child in a car accident. Her boyfriend, Will (Chris Bowers), implants her with medical devices that provide her with enhanced hearing in one ear and enhanced vision in one eye, a prosthetic arm and two prosthetic legs. Will, it is later revealed, coordinated Jamie’s car accident, and is killed shortly after revealing this information to Jamie. Jamie begins work for the Berket Group, a government-affiliated private organization that provided her prosthetics and implants. Sommers eventually decides she must use her powers to save the world. She is “faster, stronger and more powerful and thus, better able to fight evil.”[xv] She appears as a nondisabled white woman in her 30’s with feathered, brown hair. She bears no physical markings of being a cyborg.
The cyborgs of popular fiction are “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” that Haraway discusses, but unlike Haraway’s cyborg, they are less blasphemous and more faithful towards their fathers. Rather than transgress boundaries, they often reinforce them, reinstating a “normal” order where boundaries are distinct and well-defined.[xvi] Even when they do reject their creators they cast off their father while retaining his ontology, further reinforcing his ontology as correct. RoboCop, for instance, rebels against Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), senior president of OCP, who orchestrated the creation of RoboCop, planning to use RoboCop to help him take over OCP. However, he is only able to successfully kill Jones after he is authorized by the rest of the OCP executives. RoboCop rebels against his father, but only one aspect of his father, allowing himself to remain in the employ of OCP. Much like RoboCop, most cyborgs in fiction work in a police, military, or security capacity for a governmental or quasi-governmental organization that turned them into a cyborg: The Major works as a counter-terrorist operative for Public Security Section 9 under the Ministry of Home Affairs, who own not only her body but her memories as well,[xvii] and Jamie Sommers works as a special operative for the Berket Group, who coordinated her accident and performed her augmentation surgery.
These cyborgs all have superhuman speed, strength, reflexes, and sensory perception. These hyper-able-bodied cyborgs all have exaggerated attributes of normative gender embodiment, and reinforce an essentialist view of gender. According to these works, even if you leave your body, you are still your assigned gender, and your new form must exaggerate that fact in order to save us from the threat of gender ambiguity. In Shabot’s words:
Reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and femininity leave the essentialist myths of manhood and womanhood untouched, and with them, they also leave unquestioned the roles that men and women are due to play in society (mostly technological domination and military control versus reproduction, respectively).[xviii]
The cyborgs, however little of their organic body they have left, still retain at least that essential aspect of themselves that makes them who they are. In the case of The Major it is her “ghost,” while for RoboCop it is the bottom half of his face along with portions of his brain. This essential aspect of their selves retains their gender, and therefore this gender embodiment continues, and is even heightened, in their cyborg body.
Doane argues that the transgression of the human/machine binary in cyborg fiction is linked to a technological fetishism that, fearing the loss of the Mother and wishing to return to her, turns towards technology to repair the initial separation from the maternal.[xix] This technophiliac fear of losing the maternal comes with a fear of the dissolution of cis- and hetero-normative categories of gender and sex, as the certainty of the Mother’s biological role in reproduction is the foundation of a heteronormative ontology.[xx] The loss of the Mother comes with the dissolution of normative categories of sex and gender, and vice-versa. Therefore, this anxiety is placated “by a radicalization of the classic, binary features of normative sexuality.”[xxi] The cyborg then comes to solve the problems its existence creates by embodying exaggerated forms of normative gender and sexuality.
Cyborgization of the Disabled Body
Cyborg theory has been the subject of much criticism regarding its use of the disabled body as a tool to further its goals. Kafer notes that it often functions merely as a metaphor to explain the cyborg condition, without any engagement with the politics of disability or “the material realities of disabled people’s interactions with technology.”[xxii] In coverage of the relationship between disability and technology, popular news media outlets almost inevitably use the image of the cyborg. Drawing on articles published in Discover and Forbes — two of which are titled “Rise of the Cyborgs” — Kafer explains the kind of rhetoric used in connecting disability to cyborgification: “The term ‘cyborg’ in these stories, associated with the forward looking ‘rise’ operates as evocative shorthand for adaptive technology, associating such technology with a promising future for ‘the disabled.’”[xxiii] And Haraway herself uses the image when she writes, “Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization.”[xxiv] Even though Haraway does not cast all disabled people as potential cyborgs, those disabled people who do experience cyborgification experience it in its most extreme form, and the assumption that disabled people are cyborgs par excellence goes unquestioned. Disabled people are, after all, one of the few ‘real-life cyborgs’ Haraway discusses in the text.[xxv] The relationship between the disabled body and the cyborg is seen as self-evident; the disabled body is inherently a cyborg figure, or at the very least has the most extreme cyborg potential. Any analysis or critique of this is considered wholly unnecessary. A disabled person is also cast as one who is inherently waiting for her cyborgification, whose only happiness lies in the thought of a cyborg future; she waits to be normalized, and emancipated from her current, “unlivable” life.
Technology normalizes the disabled body. Or at least, that is all it is shown as doing. During a process of cyborgification, before having any abilities enhanced, the disabled body must first be normalized, restored to its “original function,” becoming something both more natural and more unnatural. Disabled people are the only people with the immediate potentiality for cyborgification. The desire to “regain” lost ability or appendages is supposedly obvious. A nondisabled person could not conceive of a disabled person not wanting to be “restored.” This comes from what Kafer describes as “longstanding ableist assumptions about the uselessness of physically disabled bodies and the necessity of technology to fix, even — or especially — one that destroys the disabled body altogether.”[xxvi] Additionally, to break the boundary between flesh and technology, technology must only — at first — be used to restore the body to a state considered “natural,” and then may only augment it in ways that heighten its “natural” abilities. The Bionic Woman needed first to have her lost limbs replaced with prosthetic ones, she could not have been provided technology which allowed her ease of mobility without an arm or legs, as this would put the notion of the female body under too much stress. Kusanagi pleads with her paralyzed friend to undergo full-body prosthesis; the desire to ignore compulsory able-bodiedness is an impossible one.[xxvii] The cyborg rides in on a white horse to save not only the pitiable crip from her disability, and reinforce compulsory able-bodiedness, but also to save the very structure of gender embodiment and heterosexuality. Shabot states:
The cyborg, then, is created as a hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine figure in order to save us — so it appears — from the threat of ambiguous gender identities. It may even be argued that the ambiguity of the cyborg regarding the human/technological divide is in a way responsible for the reluctance to create ambiguity in the gender and sexual realm: the reinforcement of the normative gender and sexual structures is the only way — from the point of view of the structures of power — to avoid a pervasive ambiguity that will turn everything into chaos and will strongly shake the foundations of domination.[xxviii]
If the cyborg is, as Haraway claims, radical in its own existence, she must be fully controlled and used by her father — militarism, technology, medicine, and colonization — so that her power over boundaries does not harm his ontology, but in fact strengthens it.
This hystericized gender embodiment, then, provides for the hyper-sexuality of the cyborg. The cyborg is hot as hell in part because he or she (never they) are easily identifiable as female or male, and the attributes that allow them to be read as such are hysterically exaggerated so that they become “the glorification, the supreme expression of the normative body and sexual identity.”[xxix] A metallic breastplate resembling large human boobs becomes an object of intense sexual desirability because it reminds its viewer that this body, even without its flesh and blood, is markedly female. The fear of losing the organic body is overcome by the knowledge that it will not disrupt the systems of compulsory heterosexuality and cisgendered embodiment, as well as the knowledge that in a post-organic life, the female body is still marked, and the masculine body remains as the central power, and the most normal embodiment.[xxx]
As the disabled subject is normalized through cyborgification, her body is at once made more natural and more unnatural. She is “restored” to the “natural” state of the human body, yet this is done through advanced technology — a decidedly “unnatural” tool. In becoming a cyborg she becomes no longer human, and as irony is the language of the cyborg, it is the process of altering her body so that it can be seen as more human that turns her into something more than human. Not only does she embody the sexed body in its most hysterical form, but her abandonment of flesh and meat allows her to abandon the temporality and perishability of the flesh-and-blood body, allowing her to become a timeless, infinite, “platonic idea of the sexed body.”[xxxi]
While this casting of the cyborg may list them as post-human or more-than-human, it is, in the end, delineating them as decidedly unhuman. In cyborg theory, the real-life disabled “cyborg” is listed in tandem with fictional cyborgs. Critiquing Annie Potts’ taxonomy of cyborgs, Kafer notes how she groups characters from science fiction in with actor Christopher Reeves: “By grouping him with fictional characters, she implies that his disability has rendered him less than human, or at least more cyborg than human.”[xxxii] Haraway also only provides an example of a fictional character, from Anne McCaffrey’s 1969 novel The Ship Who Sang, when illustrating who she means by “severely handicapped people.”[xxxiii] Cyborgs are characters from fiction, and as the disabled person becomes more and more closely linked to cyborgs, she becomes less and less human and more and more like a fictional character. In order to fit the abject disabled subject into her ontology, the nondisabled subject places the disabled subject among the realm of fiction, allowing her to both exist, yet at the same time be something less than real.
In being stripped of their humanity, cyborgs become even better objects for sexual desire. Their brief existence in the realm of human subjectivity is removed again, but rather than abject they now become objects, hyper-sexualized, hyper-real bodies that lack human autonomy and feelings. The cyborg is now merely an object for the projection of heterosexual desire, something akin to a realistic sex doll.[xxxiv] No longer existing in the realm of humanity, she has become the ideal that compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness — those disciplines that previously caused her abjection — force people to strive towards.
Conclusion
If the disabled subject is a potential cyborg, it is only because the nondisabled have written her as such. While the use of technology in order to assist a disabled person with her labor can certainly be beneficial, it is no different from the use of any tool or technology by any human, regardless of ability. It is the desire of the nondisabled to “fix” the disabled, to bring them into the realm of the subject so they no longer threaten the symbolic order, that causes the disabled subject to be seen as fully embodying her tools, and the linkage of this to her potentiality to become a cyborg. While the cyborg certainly can be a revolutionary figure, the way it is used in relation to disabled people is as a technology with which to normalize abnormal bodies. Disabled people’s “potential” as cyborgs is simply compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness at work, saying that because, through the use of technology, these bodies can be normalized, they must be, and therefore their cyborgification is seen as an inevitability, rather than a possibility. Yet even after they are normalized through cyborgification, they are once again stripped of their humanity, becoming the agents of the very powers they had previously threatened. However, if the cyborgs power to reify existing structures of powers is equaled only by its power to destroy them, how might the cyborg be reclaimed as a revolutionary figure for a disability rights movement? In other words, what could a crip cyborg be, and what could she do to further crip the world?
[i]. Charlie Jane Anders, “The Sexiest Mutants, Cyborgs and Posthumans of All Time,” io9 (blog), May 6, 2010 (2:50pm), http://io9.com/5529443/the-sexiest-mutants-cyborgs-and-posthumans-of-all-time/
[ii]. Ibid.
[iii]. Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” In The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed, edited by Lennard J. Davis (London: Routledge, 2006), 92.
[iv]. Ibid. 89
[v]. Ibid. 91
[vi]. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1.
[vii]. Ibid., 2.
[viii]. Ibid., 8.
[ix]. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” In International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, ed. Joel Weiss et. al (1985, reprint, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006), 118.
[x]. Ibid. 119
[xi]. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 103.
[xii]. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, 122.
[xiii]. Sarah Cohen Shabot, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs,” Journal of Gender Studies 15, No. 3: 224.
[xiv]. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, 122.
[xv]. Margaret M. Quinland and Benjamin R. Bates, “Bionic Woman (2007): Gender, Disability, and Cyborgs.” Journal of Research in Special Education Needs 9, No.1 (2009): 48.
[xvi]. Shabot, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs,” 224.
[xvii]. Ghost in the Shell, dir. Oshii Mamoru, Animated by Production I.G (1995; Beverly Hills: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1998), DVD.
[xviii]. Shabot, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs,” 226.
[xix]. Mary Ann Doane, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup et. al (London: Routledge, 1999), 119.
[xx]. Ibid. 120.
[xxi]. Shabot, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs,” 226.
[xxii]. Kafer, Feminist, Crip, Queer, 105.
[xxiii]. Ibid., 107.
[xxiv]. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 144.
[xxv]. Kafer, Feminist, Crip, Queer, 111.
[xxvi]. Ibid., 112.
[xxvii]. Kusanagi’s childhood friend, it is later revealed, is the second-in-command of the terrorist group Section 9 is trying to take down. When he and Kusanagi meet, and realize who each other are, the tragic nature is in part due to the fact that now, when they have both obtained “normal” bodies, they are unable to consummate the love they felt for each other for the last fifteen years. These normalized, heterosexual cyborgs are unable to engage in the activity that they underwent cyborgification. No matter how hard they tried, circumstances got in the way of their heterosexual relations. Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, dir. Kenji Kamiyama, animation by Production I.G (Cypress: Bandai Entertainment, 2004).
[xxviii]. Shabot, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs,” 225.
[xxix]. Ibid., 225.
[xxx]. Ibid., 226
[xxxi]. Ibid.
[xxxii]. Kafer, Feminist, Crip, Queer
[xxxiii]. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 144
[xxxiv]. The relation between cyborgs, androids, and sex dolls is well-explored in the 2004 film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, dir. Mamoru Oshii.
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