At Home In and Beyond Our Skin: Posthuman Embodiment in Film and Television

Abstract

Film and television portrayals of posthuman cyborgs melding biology and technology, simultaneously ‘animal and machine’ (Haraway 1991, 149), abound. Most of us immediately think of iconic characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg assassin in the Terminator series or Peter Weller’s crime-fighting cyborg police officer in RoboCop (1987). Or perhaps we recall the many cyborgs populating the Doctor Who, Star Trek and Star Wars television series and films — including Darth Vader, surely the most famous cinematic cyborg of all time. But lesser-known explorations of cybernetic embodiment have appeared in film and television for many decades. And not all portrayals involve the sort of extreme transformations exemplified by these iconic characters. This chapter considers some of the different ways that film and television have explored the transformative relation between embodiment and technology.