Q4. Is a cyborg queer? Discuss critical thinking on the intersections between sexuality and technology.
1. Esperanza, Miyake (2004) ‘My, is that Cyborg a little bit Queer?’
http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/Mar04/Miyake.pdf (accessed 15 March 2011)
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This article narrated Esperanza Miyake watched a film called Blade Runner that impressed her so much. Miyake thought that, although the actress is a cyborg, she is still a definite girl who is given a gendered shirt that accentuates her curves, and she depends on her ‘male’ counterparts who are wearing jeans and jumpers. Furthermore, this article focuses on the concept of Cyb(que)erland. According to Miyake, Cyb(que)erland can imagine into two cities that are Cyberia and Queerdonia. Queerdonia has three areas with their Cyberian characteristics that shall catch your eye. The first area symbolises the “conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively and enforced through boundaries and binary divides”. The second area “problematizes sexual and gender categories and identities in general”. This area reveals that “identities are always on uncertain grounds, entailing displacements of identification and knowing”. The third and loudest area shouts the “rejection of civil rights strategies in favor of a politics of carnival, transgression, and parody which leads to deconstruction, decentering, revisionist readings, and anti-assimilationist politics” (Stein and Plummer 1996, p.131). Cyberspace is indeed a space that reflects and refracts culture. Thus for “cyberqueer spaces are necessarily embedded within both institutional and cultural practices, and are a means by which the lesbian/gay/transgendered queer self can be read into the politics of representation and activism” (Wakeford 2000, p.408).
2. Nina, Lykke (2000) ‘Are Cyborgs Queer?’
http://www.women.it/quarta/workshops/epistemological4/ninalykke.htm (accessed 14 March 2011)
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This author of this article is a professor of gender studies in Linköping University. Therefore, this article focuses on biological determinism and feminist theory to explain the question -‘Are Cyborgs Queer?’. In the article, the author mentioned that the reproduction technologies were well developed in nowadays, since the sperms, eggs and embryos can be frozen, thawed and in used whenever you need. In the past, between the one who contributed the egg and the one who contributed the sperm, was a necessary precondition for conception. But with the new reproductive technologies occurred, the traditional genetic parents will be replaced. Thence, whether it is cyborg or human being, queer also become nature and begin to be accepted. Nowadays, The flood of open questions are all about nature, "natural" mothers, "natural" fathers, "natural" origins, "natural" sex, "natural" kinship, which begins to take hold of the cultural imaginary, affects biologist determinist key notions of "unalterable" links between reproductive capacities, sexual desires and subjectivity. They come to appear dubious. Undoubtedly, cyborgs are still subject to a lot of resistance in this modern year. Therefore, ‘Is there a gender for the cyborgs?’ and ‘Are they queer?’ should be continuing to research later on.
3. Julie, Levin Russo (2002) ‘cyborg sex in public, fan fiction on-line, and a fantasy of political consumption’
http://j-l-r.org/asmic/fanfic/print/TTcyborgsex.pdf (accessed 15 March 2011)
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This article was presented by Julie Levin Russo at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow in Scotland. The topic of this article discussed - ‘cyborg sex’. The author had analyzed the stories which depict two main characters had a sexual relationship must, by definition and even inadvertently, deal with non-reproductive sex and bodies, simultaneously the lesbian kind and the cyborg kind, merging the territories beyond humanity and heteronormativity into a singe erotic narrative. From within a tradition, to the most foundations of patriarchal capitalism. Cyborg was always a metaphorically queer figure, and the doctrine of public sex is at least implicitly addressed to the ways new technologies are restructuring privacy. Put together they make the cyborg sex: non-sexual reproduction plus non-reproductive sex equals a potentially powerful fantasy of a location for political resistance and change. According to the author who said that cyborg sex always played in a grey area in the past. But now, its new stomping ground, cyborg sex, is pregnant with cyborgean force that had created different opportunities to provides for social organization have made sex publicly available and fantasy publicly expressible in unprecedented ways.
4. Tania, Kupczak (2004) ‘So You Wanna Be A Cyborg Mommy? Queer Identity and the New Reproductive Technologies’
http://www.refugia.net/domainerrors/DE2g_queer.pdf (accessed 16 March 2011)
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This article talked about the author - Tania Kupczak who told his feeling that he fell in love with a cyborg. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the omnipresence of technological intervention in daily life implies conscription into the ranks of cyborg status. As women and men of a computerized society, we have the critical juncture of accepting or rejecting cyborg identity. In the book ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ that wrote by Donna Haraway who asserts that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world.” Gender identity remains and she said that reproduction is a particularly place for searching the cybrog’s identity. Therefore, Haraway’s utopian cyborg does not validate heterosexual sex as reproductively necessary, thereby widening the scope of fecund events to include those that are technologically mediated. In the article, the author mentioned that he thought the cyborg identities, which are touted as superior to biological existence, that we can begin to construct alternatives to the informatics of domination. No longer simply a physical being with mechanical and biological parts, the cyborg has become the representative or even a metaphor of a spectrum of technologically mediated identities and lifestyle choices. The notion of a genderless cyborg seems to be coupled in popular culture with the oversexualized robot, which is usually female, but does not carry the equipment for sexual intercourse.
5. Manuela, Rossini (2003) ‘Science/Fiction: Imagineering Posthuman Bodies’
http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2003/gender_and_power/5thfeminist/paper_709.pdf (accessed 16 March 2011)
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This article was presented by Manuela Rossini at Basel University in Switzerland. In the article, Rossini has selected the texts which present intercorporeal exchanges between humans and cyborgs. He had took an example for the heteronormative bias of the technological imaginary: The characters are Joseph Paul Jernigan and the unnamed woman imaged by the Visible Human Project (VHP) are nicknamed Adam and Eve - with Adam being digitalized first, of course, followed by his female companion to complete the first post human couple. In this way, the type of VHP can reduce the meaning of ‘women’ to ‘reproductive’ human. This article is about literature but not merely reacts to technological development and offer ethical guidance. Nowadays, cyborg’s identity and sexuality always exist within a moral judgment. For this, the author would like to relate these concerns to the common resentment that "third-wave" feminism, often also labeled post feminism, tends towards the abandonment of the collective ethical-political imperatives of earlier feminisms in favor of, as Rhonda Shaw puts it, an over-emphasis on "non-physical and physical identity construction, restoration, and enhancement as an option or personal choice available to all subjects" instead of addressing the racism, poverty or homophobia that continue to affect people globally. Just like the author said, we must get rid of the category "human" as a crucial difference in order to abolish gender as a decisive category or the other way around.
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