'You Can Resurrect Me, but Only Piecemeal': Embodied Texts and the Heterotopian Regeneration of the Cyborg

Abstract

This article explores Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg through its prosthetic and heterotopian extension in embodied text. With this fractured and ironic ‘cyborg’ figure, Haraway attempted to move feminist theory and politics into a new direction that broke with second-wave feminism’s perpetual reconceptualization of ‘the woman’ as a natural category. However, the text also became the subject of scholarly critique for dissolving the singularities and material contexts of the bodies marginalized by the categories of gender that Haraway’s abstract and utopian metaphor of the cyborg excludes. Unlike these critics’ disposal of the cyborg, this article stays with this monstrous creature and attempts to give her back some embodied singularities, whilst further elaborating Haraway’s concept of ‘cyborg writing’ and close-reading Shelley Jackson’s digital hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995). In this hypertext novel, Jackson creates a new myth from the torn-apart body parts of the monstrous female companion of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s original novel. Readers are invited to cooperate in the infinite tearing apart and stitching together of this female monster and, in doing so, form the text as heterotopian; the embodied practices of readers in actual space are, namely, co-constitutive of the text’s multiple and always changing form. The author argues that focusing on the way Patchwork Girl’saesthetics and literal uses of prostheses endlessly move this—and within this—heterotopian regeneration, makes present how Jackson’s hypertext departs from Haraway’s theoretical text and gives way to the acting out of a queerness that cannot imagine its place in utopia. Like Haraway, Jackson emphasizes the fragmentary nature of bodies and subjectivities. But Patchwork Girl’s never-resting hypertext makes these bodies, and their prosthetic extensions betray the theoretical territory of metaphor and abstraction.