Cyborg Identity Research Articles

Beyond the Organic: Rupturing Maternal Constructs and Female Cyborg Identity in S.B. Divya’s <i>Machinehood</i>

This research paper delves into the nuanced portrayal of female cyborg identity and its intersection with motherhood in S.B. Divya’s novel Machinehood. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s foundational work “A Cyborg Manifesto,” we examine how Divya’s narrative navigates the complex interplay between technology and gender within the context of a futuristic society. Haraway’s concept of cyborgism serves as a theoretical framework to analyse the multifaceted nature of female cyborg characters in Machinehood. The paper explores how these characters negotiate the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, challenging traditional notions of femininity and motherhood. Haraway envisions the cyborg as a hybrid entity with the potential to subvert normative categories that becomes a lens through which we scrutinise the female cyborgs’ agency in shaping their identities and relationships. Central to our analysis is the examination of motherhood in the context of technological augmentation. In conclusion, the present paper aims to contribute to the evolving area of scholarship on science fiction literature, feminist theory, and cyborg studies. By leveraging Haraway’s ground breaking ideas, we illuminate the significance of female cyborg identity and its portrayal in Machinehood, shedding light on the transformative potential of technology in reshaping traditional gender norms and familial structures.

‘You Never Thought about Me, Did You?’ Cloning and the Right to Reproductive Choice in Eva Hoffman’s The Secret (2001)

This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility.

Cyborg Identity, Trauma, and Online Learning

The integration of technology into the individual’s sense of self has changed our identity. The cultural shift to a digital landscape of learning has not lived up to its original expectations as a space where everyone is free to learn without the racial, gender, and socioeconomic identities that are tied to cultural trauma. The utopian view has given way to the knowledge that algorithms are coded with bias, and discussion posts are responded to with the same bias we find in traditional classrooms. Faculty are becoming, and resisting, being experts in the integration of technology into representations of self. The cyborg approach to learning encourages each of us to ask new questions about learning in environments that free us from the need to be physically present, but can imitate markers of identity that replicate societal trauma.

Human/Machine Fusions and the Future of the Cyborg

In 2019 the US Department of Defense (DOD) published a report describing cyborg soldiers equipped with powerful implants, to be deployed by 2050. The DOD’s cyborg enables transhuman fantasies of controlling, augmenting, and weaponizing the body and the environment. The Cyborg Foundation, non-profit organization run by two artists, offers a different approach. These artists identify as cyborgs who aim to perceive the world differently, connect with nature, and expand normative human bodies and senses. In these human/machine fusions, and in cyborg theory, hybridity is an essential part of the cyborg’s appeal. Hybridity, however, can also reinforce binary oppositions or provide the veneer of choice under the mantle of self-regulation and governmentality. Calculated illegibility might afford a different vantage point into cyborg politics, negotiating the sites at which the body is identified and known, and the possibility for opacity, sousveillance, or subversive misrecognition. The Cyborg Foundation offers a useful illustration of calculated illegibility, a way of performing cyborg identity and embodiment that runs counter to traditional cyborg narratives. This article engages a close reading of the DOD report and the Cyborg Foundation, and an interview I conducted with one of the organization’s founders, Moon Ribas, to argue that illegibility better aligns with Donna Haraway’s call for a cyborg politics that disrupts and recodes the hegemonic communication systems and militarized control over the body and the planet.

Transhumanism, Posthumanism, And The “Cyborg Identity”

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief analysis of two confusable philosophical positions, Transhumanism and Posthumanism, and compare their approaches in terms of their social and ecological concerns through an examination of Donna Haraway’s “cyborg identity.” Haraway introduces a ground-breaking approach in A Cyborg Manifesto and her later works, which blurs the formerly defined, distinct categories and identities that underlie the oppression of animals, humans, men, women, machines etc. By using postmodernist deconstruction, she wants to challenge Western dualisms and all kinds of oppression it causes. While Transhumanists, who inherit anthropocentrism from Humanism, support technological advancement to enhance the human condition, Posthumanists draw attention to the harms of the anthropocentric approach in terms of social and ecological justice and offer a more comprehensive and compassionate approach to other species inhabiting the planet. Since both Transhumanists and Posthumanists promote enhancement, Transhumanists need Posthumanist insights to really enhance the human condition concerning her environment.

Redefiniciones: Los Otros góticos

This article addresses a redefinition of the Gothic genre as a “Red Gothic,” a term that I coin to define the visceral traits of literary and artistic productions of the “horror” genre in Latin America. I center on the works of Mariana Enríquez, placing them in dialogue with those of visual artists Ana Mendieta and Teresa Margolles. This is an initial proposal for further discussion on political uses of the Gothic in Latin America. In response to the violence and discrimination produced by different implementations of Neoliberalism in the region, a growing field of artists and writers work with Gothic imagery in a flexible, hybrid way to create new representations of “monsters” and “cannibals.” By looking at feminist critiques on post-humanism and cyborg identities (Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway), I propose that “Red Gothic” embodies those gaps and erasures of different populations that still claim a place in Latin American societies.

Cyborg or Goddes?

This article works on the premise that critical posthumanism both exposes and calls into question the criteria by which Western modernity has defined the boundaries between nature, humanity, and technology. Yet the religious, cultural and epistemological developments of what is known as the ‘postsecular’ may signal a further blurring of another set of distinctions characteristic of modernity: between sacred and secular, belief and non-belief. Using Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, I consider whether critical posthumanism’s valorisation of cyborg identities is also capable of negotiating this ‘final frontier’ between immanence and transcendence, secular and sacred, humanity and divinity. In essence: is there space for a religious dimension to visions of the posthuman?

A [White] Cyborg’s Manifesto: the overwhelmingly Western ideology driving technofeminist theory

‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a required reading in many graduate programs to explore technofeminism, transhumanism, and studies of science and technology to explore notions of gender, race, and other minoritized identities. However, in this essay, I note the ways that Haraway’s piece still exacerbates categories of difference, and my own difficulties and critiques of the cyborg identity. I encourage readers to not only consider its importance, but also the limits of the cyborg identity, and how the concept of cyborg itself is fraught with a Western, patriarchal violence that cannot be ignored in the greater context of technology and technological innovation. Although useful in imagining a departure from traditional categories of difference, I inquire as to whether it upholds the very things it purported to dismantle, and explore other scholars’ works in challenging the concept. Ultimately, ‘cyborgs’ are not outside of the politics within which they exist, and must be interpreted in relation to other identity categories without upholding whiteness and Western epistemologies as the center.

The Anatomy of Frank and Stein. An Ontological Exploration of Cyborg Identity, Culture, and Education

This contribution aims to unpack the ontological nexus of cyborg identity and culture. It highlights a set of core assumptions driving its operations that merit critical attention as cyborgic and AI discourses continue to unfold and penetrate societies deeper, ultimately questioning the normative and conceptual logic and social distribution of these core assumptions.

Female Cyborgs, Gender Performance, and Utopian Gaze in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

The cyborg as a metaphor for cultural encodings of the interaction between humans and technology has been an accepted trope since the publication of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina shares many of its key themes and motifs with earlier science fiction films, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. A first viewing of the film thus suggests an interpretation that focuses on the film’s portrayal of its female cyborgs Ava and Kyoko as another version of the “pleasure model” in the mode of Lang’s Maria or Scott’s Pris. However, it is the tension between Ava’s intelligence and visual attractiveness and her performance of a female gender identity that invites a closer investigation of the film’s visual encoding of the female cyborg. As the film shifts its focus from the young male programmer Caleb and his encounter with his employer Nathan and the cyborg Ava to Ava’s self-portrait, this chapter will take a closer look at the embodiment of cyborg identity.

포스트휴먼 주체로서 사이보그의 정체성 찾기 - 루퍼트 샌더스의 고스트 인 더 쉘 2017 중심으로

본 연구는 2017년에 개봉한 루퍼트 샌더스 감독의 영화 <고스트 인 더 쉘>을 토대로 포스트휴먼 주체의 정체성에 대해서 고찰하고자 한다. 이 영화의 원형은 동일한 제목의 시로 마사무네의 만화(1989)와 오시이 마모루의 애니메이션(1995)이다. 오시이 마모루의 애니메이션은 첨단과학기술의 결정체로서 사이보그의 탄생과 진화에 집중하고 있다면, 루퍼트 샌더스의 영화는 포스트휴먼 주체로서의 사이보그 정체성 확립 과정을 강조하고 있다. 다시 말하자면, 그는 로봇 골격과 인간 고스트가 결합한 킬리언 소령이 어떻게 정체성을 형성해나가는지에 대해 초점을 두었다. 따라서 이 영화는 우리에게 감각이 사라진 사이버네틱스 신체와 사라진 기억이 제기하는 정체성의 위기의 의미가 무엇인지를 사유할 기회를 제공해 준다. 본 연구자의 화두는 감각이 없는 사이버네틱스 신체가 인간과 기계의 경계선상의 존재의 정체성에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 그리고 인간의 정신이 사이버네틱스 신체와 결합하는 방법이다. 이를 살펴봄으로써 본 논문은 루퍼트 샌더스의 사이보그는 첨단과학기술 사회가 생산과 통제할 수 있는 살아있는 인형이 아니라 미래의 새로운 존재, 포스트휴먼의 주체임을 밝히고자 한다.

The composition of posthuman bodies

ABSTRACTA collision of two thoughts on prostheses provides a point of theoretical ignition for this article: the first is that ‘the musical instrument is a prosthetic augmentation of the human body, enabling the body to exceed itself’ [Johnson, Julian. 2015. Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press]; the second is that ‘the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate’ [Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press]. I consider how musical prostheses critically bring into focus the cultural and material conditions of recent modernity. I suggest that by compositionally engineering bodies in posthuman terms, one may dissolve the body into its nonhuman extensions, such that it may be, paradoxically, located therein; through engaging, for example, cyborg identities, bodily extensions enable the body’s possession, in transformed terms, during a historical moment when the embodied nature of the subject is in crisis. Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study cycle (1971–1977), in which the composer entangles performers with technological networks, provides a principal frame of musical and historical reference.

Female Body in the Postmodern Science Fiction

The female body is still the focus of different and multifarious schools of feminist criticism. How does this relate to the post modern sci fi? Through examining the interactions between female bodies and technologies in close readings of William Gibson ’s Neuromancer and Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels , we see an interesting paradox in action. On one hand naturally female body is culturally constructed according to dominant codes of femininity and racial identity, there is no way to consider the body without cultural influences coming through, but on the other, we see that the roles of women aren’t the traditional, socially conditioned, and arbitrary sex roles. And often times we see an active rewriting the texts of the female body and an inversion of sexual roles. Historically the female body was constructed as a hybrid case, thus making it compatible with current notions of cyborg identity. Even today, the ambiguous constitution of female body is strongly related to cyborg identity. To contribute to the feminist studies of science and technology, this paper offers an alternative narrative of sci fi identity and argues that the female body is always gendered and is subordinated within systems of power, yet it is not fully determined by those systems and instead, always interacting with and resisting against these systems.

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

Value in brokenness: fractured subjectivities in contemporary American Telefantasy

This paper analyses the articulation of diegetic value in broken subjectivities represented in recent American Telefantasy programmes. In Fringe (2008- ) and Dollhouse (2009-2010), protagonists and main characters articulate a sense of worth in their fractured, multiple, and/or cyborg identities, though this narratively articulated value is often couched in an ambivalence created by the narrative. This article attends to the questions of gender and agency in these shows’ post-humanist configurations of subjectivities.

Chapitre 4. Cyborg identities and contemporary techno-utopias: adaptations and transformations of the body in the age of nanotechnology

The possibility of improving the human body through a closer relationship with technology in order to overcome the human species toward new stages of evolution is a constant element of techno-utopian visions, among other transhumanism. This projection to a radical transformation of the body - and mind - as a result of technological action is based on the concepts of adaptation, or non adaptation, of a human being to a world constantly changed by technoscience. The belief is that not only the body has to change, but that identity is not a stable concept. This mobility in the relationship between body and identity is typical of the post human thought, which inherits from the informational model the conviction that the biological embodiment of human is to be regarded as an accident of history rather than as an essential condition of life. Hybridization is therefore valued by the post human thought as a condition which has "made" the human as he is today, and it appears as a fundamental topic in any discourse on nanotechnology, biotechnology and development of human-machine interfaces.

Traversing the Matrix

Despite the growing body of sport studies literature engaging cyborg theory, and notwithstanding the significant amount of work within sport sociology interrogating sport and space, few scholars have attempted to situate the lived experiences of cyborg athletes both within the wide range of indoor, often more technologized settings, and outdoors in what have been considered “wilderness” environments. Furthermore, little work has examined the relationship between sport identities, sporting environments, and environmental politics. Therefore, this study qualitatively examined the lived sporting experiences of 12 competitive athletes who trained and competed both indoors and outdoors while using an array of sporting technologies. Results showed that athletes negotiated the boundaries between human, technology, and nature in complex, often contradictory ways, and made moderate connections between their cyborg identities and their impact on the environment.

Wi-Fi Colour in Real World and Cyberspace: Cyborg Identity in Urban Wi-Fi Networks

Wi-Fi Colour in Real World and Cyberspace: Cyborg Identity in Urban Wi-Fi Networks

Material cyborgs; asserted boundaries

Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, generates and is in itself generated by.

Developing/development cyborgs

The paper takes as its starting point Donna Haraway’s suggestion, “The actors are cyborg, nature is coyote, and the geography is elsewhere”. It discusses first the understanding of the cyborg promoted by Haraway as illustrating an ontological non-humanist disposition, rather than a periodizing claim. The second part of the paper examines some instances of low-tech cyborg identities, which have emerged in developing countries (elsewhere) as a consequence of development initiatives. The paper argues that the quite literal attempts to develop cyborgs in such countries gives rise to developments not foreseen or controllable by the development industries. If cyborg identities are developing and minds and bodies shaped in the frictions between culture, technology, economy, and development projects and activities then what are the implications for cognitive studies. In the final part of the paper this question is considered and it is suggested that cognitive studies would do well to expand their analytical foci to take into account cyborg bodies and minds found “elsewhere”.