Cyborg Femme-ifesto
Responding to A Manifesto For Cyborgs, by Donna Haraway, and Automating Gender, by Jack Halberstam
Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto presents a post-gender, post-species approach to feminist praxis. She makes the argument that evolution has blurred the boundaries between humans and animals, nature and technology, and the organic and artificial. Haraway critiques mainstream feminism for being essentialist, she says “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women”, and also calls out mainstream feminism for excluding people of color and queer people. Her proposal of a ‘cyborg’ consciousness attempts to create space for hybridized, intersectional, and/or otherwise marginalized identities.
Haraway’s piece was written in 1983. It is interesting to think about what a modern understanding of a ‘cyborg’ is, 33 years later. One of the ways in which I tried to recontextualize Haraway’s piece was by Googling images of “cyborg”, and I was struck by the results. There are four main categories of images that I was able to discern: very masculine/superhero representations, biomechanical half-human half-robot figures, highly sexualized “cyborg porn” images of female bodies, and fantastic illustrations of an outer-space post-apocalyptic society.
Viewing these images from a gender lens made us wonder why and how these tropes emerged, particularly those that related to representations of women or the female form. Going back to our very first blog post, Emily and I made the claim that technology was gender neutral. However, after reading Halberstam’s piece, we are reconsidering that idea.
Halberstam says that the “fear of an autonomous technology has lead to a gendering of technology as female. The machine itself was seen to threaten the hegemony of white male authority” (444). With that quote in mind, we were able to see some connections between women’s access to machines and technology as being threatening to men.
The image below is Christina Aguilera’s album cover for her album “Bionic”. She is presented in a feminine way, but she has not constructed this image to appease the male gaze. Her makeup and facial expression are sexualized, but the juxtaposition of the mechanical parts on the other side of her face make the image more authoritative, as though she is asserting power over the viewer.
Her unfocused eyes would normally be seen as seductive, but in the context of this photo, they look more dominant, as if to say that she is not an object. Although she is beautiful in this image, her sexuality is intertwined with technology, which transforms her into a cyborg.
This image is probably not what most heterosexual men would find attractive — they would not fantasize over this representation of Aguilera — because she looks a bit scary. She is ‘scary’ because she looks intelligent, commanding, competent, and not someone you want to fuck with. It is interesting to contrast this with the stereotype of a “hysterical” woman, who is controlled by her “irrational” emotions. The hysterical woman is easy to dismiss: easy to ignore and easy to invalidate. The cyborg (woman) is not.
What happens when a woman is not controlled by her emotions, but by technology? Technology is intelligent, and most men respect technology — they even might claim it as a ‘masculine’ invention. So, we wonder, how do cyborgs disrupt narratives about submissive women, or innate gender roles?
Even though the images that appeared in our Google search were heavily stereotypically ‘gendered’, they also gave us insight into the extremes of the performativity of gender. However, even within a highly stereotypical performance of gender, there is some room for subversion. Is there power in leveraging gendered or sexualized images, or re-appropriating them? This is a much larger question, of course, even outside of the scope of the cyborg, but it helps to resituate this conversation with a discourse of media and popular culture.
