Abject Cyborg Woman
Whatever else it is, the cyborg point of view is always about communication, infection,
gender, genre, species, intercourse, information, and semiology – Haraway, “Cyborgs
and Symbionts Living Together in the New World Order”
The female-monster is frightening and
scary for very different reasons than her malemonster counter-part. Woman, Barabra Creed
argues, is typically defined in terms of her
sexuality, signalling the centrality of gender to
the understanding of female monstrosity.1 The
history of the female cyborg figure spans decades of film:2 Metropolis (Fritz Lang,
1927: Maria), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982: Rachel, Pris and Zhora), Cherry 2000
(Steve De Jarnatt, 1986: Cherry), Cyborg (Michael Schroeder,1989: Dr. Pearl), Eve of
Destruction (Duncan Gibbons, 1990: Eve), T3 (James Camerson, 2003: T3000),
Technolust (Lynn Hershman-Leeman, 2003: Ruby, Marine and Olive) the Stepford
Wives (Bryan Forbes,1974: town women; Frank Oz, 2004: town women). Cyborg men,
though often infused with excessive strength, power, and aggression are rarely (if ever)
sexualized. Supra-intellectual, the male cyborg is often charged with fulfilling some
meaningful and order-restoring mission on behalf of the State (Blade-Runner, Robocop,
Six Million Dollar Man) or humanity (Terminator, The Matrix). Conversely, the female
Cyborg has traditionally been constructed as hypersexual, dangerous, and disruptive.
Barbara Creed (1993) uses the phrase ‘monstrous-feminine’ to describe an array of
1
Creed, Barbara (1993). The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New
York: Routledge, 3.
frightening women ranging from the vampire and the
witch -- to the monstrous primordial mother (1).3 In the
conclusion Creed notes, “[critical] neglect of the
monstrous feminine in her role as castrator has led to
serious misunderstanding of the nature of the monstrous
woman in the horror film and other popular genres such
as film noir and science fiction.”4 This essay attempts to
address this neglect, and considers the female cyborg in relation to her monstrous
dimensions. After considering the various conceptions of Cyborg, this essay will apply
Creed’s conception of the monstrous feminine through Julia Kristeva’s theorizing of the
abject and Freud’s concept of the castrating woman to (re)consider the Cyborg woman
within science fiction film. I will argue that Creed’s list of monstrous women be
expanded to include yet another monstrous woman, the cyborg, both abject and
monstrous.
The Cyborg: As Medical Fact, As Feminist Construct, As Film-Fantasy
“Cyborg. Cybernetic-Organism. The melding of the organic and the mechanic,
or the engineering of a union between separate organic systems.”5 Although this essay
concerns itself with feminine cyborg representation at the level of popular culture, it
must stated that the cyborg is complex figure existing simultaneously as a medical
reality, a metaphoric feminist construct, and an enduring icon of science fiction films
2
I have used images from these movies throughout this essay, courtesy of Fembots on Film:
www.gynoid.dreamhost.com
3
Creed, 1
4
Creed, 157
1
and literature. The origin of the term Cyborg can be traced back to the 1960s when
scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used the term to describe the “adaptation
of the human body to extraterrestrial environments.”6 Even before this time however,
traces of cyborgian lineage can be found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and L. Frank
Baum’s Tin Man,7 as well as the automatons of the mid 1700s.8 The medical-Cyborg
refers to, “…a scientifically or medically constructed organism composed of humanorganic and machine parts.”9 “Myoelectric arms, synthetic bones, the development of
electronic retinas and bionic hearts, the reprogramming of the body’s hormonal
system”10 characterize this category of Cyborg.
Cyborg as a metaphoric feminist construct
gained popularity through Donna Haraway’s, A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.
Written in 1985, Cyborg Manifesto proclaims that
people living in developed countries in the late
20th century are already hybrid human-machine (cyborgs), and as such are capable of
(re)imagining and (re)constructing gender and sexual identity in new ways. “By the late
twentieth century, our time, a mythic time…we are cyborgs.”11 Cultures of developed
5
Gray, Chis Hables, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds.) (1995). The Cyborg Handbook.
New York and London: Routledge, 2.
6
Clough, Robyn. (1997) “Sexed Cyborgs?” Social Alternatives, January 1997, Volume 16, Issue 1, p 20.
7
Gray, 1995, 5
8
Gonzalez, Jennifer (1995). “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes From Current Research.” In The
Cyborg Handbook, Gray, Chis Hables, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds.), 268
9
Klugman, Craig M. (2001). “From Cyborg Fiction to Medical Reality,” Literature and Medicine, 20(1),
42.
10
Clough, 20
11
Haraway, Donna J. (1991) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist – Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Rouledge, 150
2
nations have become so completely enmeshed and intertwined (perhaps fused) with
technology that it is quite impossible to
fully assess the impact technology has
on our “sense of self” and our lived
experiences which are increasingly
mediated through intimate coupling and internalisation of technology. “For Haraway,
the realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and
technology so intimate that it’s no longer possible to tell where we end and the
machines begin.”12
Science fiction is the domain of the fantasy-Cyborg and is the primary site of
interest for this essay. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, James
Cameron’s Terminator, the Wachowski brother’s Matrix, and William Gibson’s
Neuromancer offer an abbreviated chronology of literary/cinematic engagement with
the cyborg. “Linguistically and materially a hybrid of cybernetic device and organism,
a cyborg is a science fiction chimera from the 1950s and after.”13 While Haraway’s
metaphoric cyborg promises liberation from longstanding Cartesian dualism, various
feminist critics, having considered widely circulating images of the cinematic fantasy
Cyborg in relation to Donna Haraway’s emancipating cyborg, identify contradiction and
tension between the two constructs. Haraway’s cyborg resides in a “post-gendered
world”14 and “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity…is
12
Kunzru, Hari (1997) “You are Cyborg,” Wired Magazine,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html. Accessed April 7, 2004.
13
Haraway, Donna J. “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order,” In The
Cyborg Handbook, Gray, Chis Hables, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds.).xi-xx.
14
Haraway, 1991, 150
3
oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.”15 Still, theorists such as
Mary Doanne point out that “when technology intersects with the body in the realm of
representation, the question of sexual difference is inevitably involved.”16 Sexual
difference emerges when comparing the female Cyborg against her male counterpart
(Dekkar/Pris and Terminator/Terminatrix or TX). These differences situate both male
and female cyborgs within a decidedly gendered world, with the female cyborg body
more often portrayed as objects “of masculine technofetishism or a sexually monstrous
embodiment”17 rather than genderless beings with a multiplicity of identity options
available to her. Fulton suggests the limitation of the metaphoric Cyborg is found in
Western culture’s persistent return to the physical “real” world, a world that continues
to be understood through the residual ordering principles of the past (i.e. binary
codification’s), regardless of how arbitrary or inaccurate these principles may be.18
While Haraway’s cyborg “precisely disrupts”19 binary codification, Joost Van Loot
cautions,
[This] does not inevitably mean that the gendered and sexed modalities
of being human can therefore be changed at will. The power set into
work by discursive constructions, materializes reality – effects and
engenders particular possibilities for anchoring identities which are
thus simultaneously limits of transgression. In fact, notions of gender,
sex and human being are saturated with discourses, whose very
multiplicity might even actively pursue contradictions as the groundless
grounding of ‘new identities.’20
15
Haraway, 1991, 151
Doanne in Dietrich, 1997, 109
17
Fulton, Elizabeth. (1996). “On the Eve of Destruction: Technology, Nostalgia, and the Fetishized
Maternal Body”. Critical Matrix, Volume 10, Issue, 92
18
Ibid, 94.
19
Clough, 1997, 21
20
Van Loot, 232
16
4
Monstrous-Feminine Cyborgs
Barbara Creed begins her exploration of the monstrous feminine by posing the
question: “What exactly is it about woman herself, as a being quite separate from the
male monster, that produces definitions of female monstrosity?”21 Informed by the
Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and a reworking of the Freud’s notion of the
castrating woman, Creed develops a sustained taxonomy of monstrous-women in horror
film. Simply stated abjection is “that which disturbs identity, system, order.”22 In the
first part of this essay, abjection, understood in relation to the monstrous cyborg
woman, will be discussed in terms of the following aspects: border transgression,
ambiguity, and the body. It is my contention that cyborg women as portrayed in
popular science fiction films are abject, and therefore monstrous, because they are
transgressive and ambiguous border creatures.
Boundary Transgressors
Something that is abject, “does not respect borders, positions or rules.”23 Like
all abject things, cyborgs do not respect boundaries. They are in fact “border creatures”
who inhabit the spaces between: “1)
that between animals (or other
organisms) and humans, and 2) that
between self-controlled, self-governing
machines (automatons) and organisms,
21
Creed, 1993, 6
Kristeva in Creed, 1993, 8
23
Kristeva in Creed, 1993, 6
22
5
especially humans (models of autonomy). The cyborg is the figure born of the interface
of automation and autonomy.”24 Abjection also marks the instance in a subject’s
development when the borderland is cordoned off between human and animal, when
“primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it
from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as
representatives of sex and murder.”25 Because the female cyborg disrupts the symbolic
order of the Oedipal ordered society she is considered dangerous, abject, and
monstrous. Haraway describes the cyborg’s trangressive relationship to the oedipal and
to the symbolic:
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis…or other seductions to organic
wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts
into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the
Western sense…An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense
depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror,
represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must
separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin
potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and
Marxism26
Cyborg bodies dismantle the binary logic of dualistic culture, “Cyborg unities are
monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope
for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.”27 Thus, in addition to
transgressing of the border between human and machine, the female cyborg also
ruptures the boundary between male/female and public/private and many such artificial
binary constructions. The transgressive woman is profane as she displays her sexuality
24
Haraway, 1989, 139
Kristeva, 1983, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm
26
Haraway, 1991, 150-151
27
Haraway, 1991, 154
25
6
and makes a spectacle of herself by transgressing the traditional notions of femininity
and morality.
A central theme in the movie Bladerunner is that of blurring the boundary
between human and machine. On earth, the Tyrell Corporation has developed a new
robotic creature called the Nexus 6 Replicant. Referred pejoratively to as a “skin job,”
drawing our attention to the boundary between the Replicant and human, these new
robot is virtually indistinguishable from humans at least equal in strength, agility, and
intelligence to their creators. Implanted with false memories (in an effort to maintain
control over them), the latest Nexus 6 Replicants are unaware that they are not human,
thus encouraging the viewer to attend to the relatively minor differences between
human and Replicant. Replicants are used as slave labour for exploration and the
colonization of other planets. As a precaution to safeguard the Replicants from
becoming fully self aware and autonomous (and by extension rebellious and mutinous),
these cybogrian creatures are programmed to expire after just four years. After and
incident whereby a group of replicants rebel against their creators, they are deemed
illegal on earth, punishable by death. Charged with hunting down and “retiring”
Replicants, are the Bladerunners. Movies such as Bladerunner, Terminator, and the
Matrix are testimonial to our twin fascination with
and fear of the machines we create. “Donna
Haraway once said that the figuration of the
cyborg emerges when a society is no longer
certain of its boundaries, specifically the
7
separation between itself and other organisms, such as animals and cybernetic
machines.”28
While the humans, Bladerunner Dekard (although we are never quite sure if he
is human or Replicant) included, seem devoid of humanity, sinister, and immoral the
replicants seem vibrant, alive and empathetic. The humans and the replicants stand
opposed to one another with the replicants regarded as unstable and threatening to the
humans, though as the movie progresses and as each Replicant is brutally “retired” in
turn, we begin to regard the humans as the more sinister and inhumane beings. In a
particularly poignant scene, Rachel is made brutally aware that she is not human, but a
Replicant, as Dekard dispassionately lists her most personal and private memories. In
this scene it is Rachel who seems the human and Dekard the automaton. Standing in
Dekard’s apartment, we watch her weep as the reality of her existence is rationally,
listlessly and cruelly delivered. Once again, in the retirement sequence of Zhora, the
viewer cannot help but feel that we are watching a woman, not a “skin job” being
mercilessly hunted in the streets. As the final shots fired in her back, the camera
records in slow motion the horror of the murder. In the
end, Bladerunner raises pointed questions about what it
means to be human with three purportedly monstrous
Replicant women at the centre of the interrogation.
Interestingly, we encounter no “real” women in this movie
at all except one old, seemingly oriental woman.
28
Angerer, Marie-Luise “Space Does Matter: On Cyber and Other Bodies” European Journal of Cultural
Studies. 2(2), 213
8
Ambivalence and Ambiguity
The abject is never simply located on the border between order and meaningless,
“it is located wherever there is ambivalence, ambiguity, the improper or the unclean, or
the overflowing of boundaries, fusion and confusion.”29 There is always ambiguity
arising from our oscillating attraction and repulsion to the abject resulting from the
abject continually calling to us from across the border of meaninglessness.30 Thus,
ambiguity and ambivalence signal the tension that arises from our fascination and fear
of cyborg monsters seductive and subversive potential. We are both drawn to and
repelled by her monstrousness. The dissolution of clear boundaries, and the danger
associated with the loss of meaning, in the symbolic order, represents a site of both fear
and pleasure.31
Scenes such as the opening sequence of T3 where the female Terminatrix or TX
is juxtaposed with the Billboard which asks the cyborg and asks the viewer, “What is
sexy?” and the T1000’s flawless male form situated in a site of excessive female sexual
desire (ladies night at a strip club) signals a moment in which the Cyborian perfection
maybe preferable to a real body. Like a symbolic “key party” the ‘Other’ is desired,
preferable to the self. This theme is replayed and recycled again and again in science
fiction narratives that center on the body. Micheal Heim explains this desire:
Our love affair with computers, computer graphics, and computer
networks runs deeper than aesthetic fascination and deeper that the play
of the senses. We are searching for a home for the mind and heart…The
computer's allure is more than utilitarian or aesthetic; it is erotic. Instead
of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or amusements, our affair
29
Bourfield, Christine (2000), “The Abject Space: Its Gifts and Complaints,” Journal of Gender Studies,
9(3), 331
30
Creed, 1993, 10
31
Kay, Lucy (2002), “Frills and Thrills: Pleasurable Dissections and Responses to the Abject: Female
Pathology and Anthropology in Deja Dead and Silent Witness,” Mortality, 7(2), 157
9
with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and
ultimately a mental marriage to technology.32
But this “mental marriage” is also frightening in that it ultimately requires us to let go of
our individualist nature, our identity, in order to enter in to this symbiotic relationship
with the machine. Films such as Bladerunner and the Terminator explore our fear
(Replicants and Terminating machines) and attraction to a merger with technology.
Replicants and cyborgs are frightening because they are indistinguishable from humans,
indeed they could even be immortal if not programmed to expire.
The horror of complete sublimation into our machines in pushed still further, in
a 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, wherein Captain Picard is abducted
from the US Enterprise and assimilated by the Borg Collective through a process in
which he is “simultaneously absorbing and punctured by multiple inorganic implants.”33
As the Borg travel through the universe assimilating various species and cultures,
recurring themes of sublimation of individual identity into the collective and
simultaneous penetration and absorption of the body occur. Following the assimilation
of Picard, we encounter a new creature Locutus who represents “a white male body in
crisis, contestable, without desire or agency, and spectacularly incorporated.”34 35 Thus,
from the perspective of the monstrous-feminine the Borg Queen is abject and monstrous
because she signals the eroding boundaries between self and other and nature and
culture. Yet, an alternative reading through Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto however,
32
Michael Heim, “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” Cyberspace: First Steps, Ed. Michael Benedikt,
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), 61
33
Fuchs, Cynthia J. (1995), “Death is Irrelevant: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male
Hysteria,” In The Cyborg Handbook, Gray, Chis Hables, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds.), 282
34
Ibid.
35
Bostic, Adam (1998). “Automata: See Cyborg Through the Eyes of Popular Culture, Computer
Generated Imagery, and Contemporary Theory.” Leonardo. 31(5), 357-361.
10
suggests such reconfiguration of subjectivity must surely represent the cyborg’s ability
“to build new kinds of networks or collectives for increased agency and cooperation
across lines of culture, language, race, and gender.”36 Thus, the female-cyborg is abject
when she exposes the “fragility of the law”37 or when she draws attention to the
masquerade of scientific discourse and its charade of authority. Cyborgs then seem to
offer an alternative to binary subjectivity, “one that allows self-relation and selftransgression in the creation of a new, incongruous, and multiple subjectivity”38 which
are simultaneously attractive and repulsive.
The Corpse
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of
decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat
encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No,
as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show
me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids,
this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my
condition as a living being.39
“Etymologically, monster is derived from the Latin, monstrare, ‘to show,’ and
most monstrous beings represent something horrible to behold.”40 Abjection,
powerfully evoked through the image of corpse, is the image around which Creed
argues monstrous-feminine creatures emerge. Creed describes the soulless vampire,
the animated cadaver, the zombie, and the cannibalistic goul.41 The monstrous female
cyborg, in relation to the abject corpse seems to be a composite of several monstrous
36
Bolton, 732.
Kristeva, 1983, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm
38
Fuch, 1995, 282
39
Ibid.
40
Clayton, Jay, “Concealed circuits: Frankenstein's monster, the Medusa, and the Cyborg.” Raritan,
Spring 96, Volume 15(4), 53-70.
37
11
characters, a hybrid figure with characteristics of
both the soulless-ness (vampire) and the animated
cadaver (zombie). Yet, unlike the vampire or the
goul, her origin cannot be located in the sphere of
the supernatural nor the gothic. The cyborg is the
creation of science, “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,
not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly
unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”42 The cyborg, like
abjection itself, “populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.”43 The cyborg is
abject because it is “in-between, the ambiguous, the composite…abjection…is
immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a
passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it…”44 Cyborgs, like the
Were-creature, collapse the boundary between human and machine. The cyborg is
also soulless, requiring borrowed “skin” with which to pass as human. The Cyborg
woman’s surface obscures the truth beneath her skin, and as such threatens. “The
corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death
infecting life. Abject.”45 The corpse is an exceptionally potent signifier46 because it
stands as the embodiment of a rupture between distinctions between self/other,
subject/object – thus, disrupting our position within the symbolic order.
In Terminator 3 (T3), two cyborgs return from the future; one’s purpose is to
eliminate John Connor and Catherine Brewster and the other’s mission is to protect the
41
Creed 1993,
Haraway, 1991, 151
43
Ibid, 150
44
Kristeva, 1983 http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm
42
12
pair at all costs. The T1000, portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger is coded (literally
and figuratively) to represent order and structure in the tradition of the all cyborgs
programmed to serve the State. The other cyborg, the Terminatrix or TX completes
the oppositional logic of this dyad in that she represents the evil, destructive and
incomprehensible Other. As the Terminatrix crosses the border between the future
and the present, she arrives as a beautiful, petite, and naked young woman. Delivered
from the future into a department store window amidst a group of mannequins, the
TX’s transgressive presence immediately signals the constructed (ness) of the
feminine. This theme is pushed still further as she appropriates the clothing and car of
an attractive, but aging woman. Now sporting a sexy leather outfit the Terminatrix,
elicits audience desire, while inviting the voyeuristic gaze.47
Castrating Cyborg
Creed’s theorizing of the monstrous feminine also interrogates aspects of the
male anxiety related to fear of castration.48 “Male castration anxiety has given rise to
two of the most powerful representations of the monstrous-feminine in the horror film:
woman as castrator and woman as castrated.”49 Freud argued that male castration
anxiety emanated from the fear of the castrated mother. Creed re-reads key case studies
of Freud’ analysis and argues that the mother is “terrifying not because she is castrated
but because she castrates.”50 Cyborg women are also represented as dangerous, deviant,
45
Ibid.
Creed, 1993, 9
47
Mulvey, Laura (1988). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In C. Penley (Ed.), Feminism and Film
Theory. New York: Routledge (first appeared in Screen, 1974).
48
Creed, 1993, 87
49
Creed, 1993, 122
50
Creed, 1993, 103
46
13
and potentially castrating. In the instance of the cyborg-female her beauty and allure
“filters out violent, frightening, primordial aspects.”51
Pris, one of two female cyborgs, has escaped from some off-world colony. She
is one of six replicants -- three male and three female. During their escape, they are
thought to have murdered twenty-three people and stolen a shuttle craft. Three nights
prior they attempt to break into Tyrell Corporation in the hopes of having their creator
extend their four year life expectancy. Pris is described as a “basic pleasure model.” -essentially a sex-toy meant to service military personnel in the off world colonies. Pris
continually relies on her sexuality to secure the things she needs (access to the Tyrell
Corporation and safe place for her and Roy to hide). Her surface beauty is suggestive
of a vulnerable and alluring woman and Sebastian is obviously attracted to her. But as
Deckard seeks to “retire her” and they engage in a physical fight, she transforms into a
frightening castrator, maneuvering his head between her “thighs” and face contorted to
expose her devouring teeth, the image invoked is that of the castrating vagina dentata.52
Similarly, the female terminator TX is framed as a castrating woman in several
scenes. Capable of castrating men with her phallic arm, she transforms it into am
infinite number weapons. The TX is all the more frightening because unlike the T1000,
the TX no longer represents human-ness, at least as we understand it to be, “though he
is machine, Arnold’s prototype is the human body. He cuts the flesh painlessly from his
own arm, but least, like us, he requires repairing, the model for his camera shutter eye is
the human iris.”53 At another point in the movie, the TX and T1000 (Arnold) are
51
Kristeva, 1983 http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm
Creed, 1993, 117-119
53
Larson, Doran. “Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs, and the American Body Politic,” Cinema
Journal, 36(4), 63
52
14
fighting and the TX wraps her legs around the waist of T1000 and locking her pelvis
against his again suggests the possibility of castration. At the end in the final battle
scene between the T1000 and TX the synthetic skin of the Terminatrix has peeled away
to reveal her robotic frame, her legs have been severed, as she is reduced to a glistening,
enraged, razor sharp teeth gnashing death machine resembling both Medusa and vagina
dentata. The beguiling young woman has morphed into a devouring and castrating
monstrous woman.
Conclusion
Cyborg women, in the tradition of the witch, the vampire and zombie are
frightening and distressing. They belong to the category of the monstrous-feminine as
theorized by Creed. The monstrousness of the female cyborg can be partially explained
by her abject aspects. Cyborg woman is abject in that she transgresses the boundaries
between human and machine, self and other, as well as the artificial and the real. The
abjection of the Cyborg woman is also reflected in our oscillating delight and disgust of
her existence. Abjection is also evoked by the cyborg woman’s peculiar relationship to
the corpse, more specifically the skin, using it as she does as a mask to obscure her
robotic interior. Most narratives about the cyborg conclude with the skin of the cyborg
melting away to expose the metallic frame beneath. Stripped now of her alluring
exterior we are faced with her terrifying interior. The female cyborg also frightens
because she is often possesses the power to castrate and she is framed as the vagina
dantata.
15
Cyborg woman, a creature conceived in science fiction, provides a provocative
site from which to explore the social implications and issues, as well as responsibility
and ethics related to new technology.54 And even though fictional stories about
scientific possibility are most often situated in some far distant future, these are
narratives shaped by our cultures current values, anxieties, tradition and trends of the
present. Thus, in a sense, movies such as Terminator, Bladerunner and the Matrix are
the reflections of the present projected into the future.55 Donna Haraway makes an
“argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their
construction.” Defamiliarization, as an instance of cinematic subversion does not
necessarily intend to “see the female body differently, but of exposing the habitual
meanings/values attached to femininity as a cultural constructions.”56 Thus, even as
traditional film images of cyborg women are habitually repressive, making the very idea
of feminist Cyborg seems nearly impossible we can find instances whereby the female
cyborg actually performs subversive acts of (re)imagining gender roles.
54
Klugman, 40
Telotte, JP. (1992). “The Terminator, Terminator 2, & the Exposed Body,” Journal of Popular Film &
Television, 20(2), 4
56
Doane, M. (1988) ‘Woman’s stake: Filming the female body’, in C. Penley (ed.) Feminism and Film
Theory, New York: Routledge, 166.
55
16
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