The Synthetic Female: Cyborgs and the Inscription of Gender

Abstract

Just as the cyborg can help us to re-think the relevance of Marxism today, and, in particular, a class-based notion of identity, so it can also be usefully employed to determine how gender is understood and contested within contemporary academic analysis. Indeed, the majority of recent publications on the cyborg have focused directly on its applicability to gender issues, including Springer’s Electronic Eros (1996), Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996), and several collections of articles linking the cyborg with feminist concerns, such as Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (ed. Jenny Wolmark, 1999) and The Gendered Cyborg (ed. Gill Kirkup et al, 1999). This interest can be attributed to a number of factors. Since Donna Haraway first identified women as cyborgs in her ‘Manifesto’ the cyborg has served as an apt metaphor by which to interrogate key concerns within contemporary feminist discourse, inspiring renewed debate about female subjectivity and influencing a reassessment of women’s relationship to technology. As Balsamo has put it: The cyborg provides a framework for studying gender identity as it is technologically crafted simultaneously from the matter of material bodies and cultural fictions.’¹ Yet while the cyborg is potentially useful in exposing the extent to which gender identity is manufactured, it has also revealed fierce divisions within feminism itself, leaving critics at odds in deciding whether it represents a positive icon or otherwise. It is this debate which this chapter principally investigates, using the ‘female’ cyborg’s representation in cinema in order to articulate relevant theories concerning the cultural construction of femininity, and to assess, in turn, feminism’s ambiguous relationship to technology. Cyborg representations of masculinity are touched upon towards the end of the chapter and discussed in greater depth in Chapter 6, yet it is images of femininity, subjecthood and power that the analysis focuses on here in order to determine how cinematic representations and feminist discourse each construct a specific understanding of female identity, and to question the extent to which the cyborg can indeed be claimed as a progressive icon for women.