Sexy Cyborgs

For Donna Haraway, a cyborg is both “…a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 191). But her vision for the former has been lost in the prolific deviation of the latter. As a creature of social reality, Haraway envisions the cyborg as a liberating cultural phenomenon which blurs the lines between human and machine. This line-blurring serves as an analog for the kind of ideological shift she envisions regarding other social and cultural boundaries, specifically those of gender . But as a creature of fiction, the cyborg has in many ways reinforced the opposite of her vision. In her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Haraway claims that “…the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 191). Far from an optical illusion, the boundary between the representation of women in science fiction and social reality has become more defined, more deeply ingrained in American culture. In this paper I will investigate the rift between Donna Haraway’s optimistic prophecy of cyborg potential for feminist liberation and the sexist representation of women in science fiction media and popular culture.

Haraway shows that in the modern world, three crucial borders have been breached: that between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and nonphysical (Haraway 193-5). She celebrates this border erasure as progress towards such an erasure of the borders between male and female gender stereotypes. Chela Sandoval adds that “…cyborg consciousness can be understood as the technological embodiment of a particular and specific form of oppositional consciousness,” (Sandoval 408). In other words, the modern cyborg era has ushered in a challenging of power structures and hierarchies. Haraway believes the cyborg has the power to deconstruct the phallogocentric idols that have towered over Western culture. But under the tyrannical shadow of popular culture, this potentiality is as yet unrealized. Instead, the cyborg has taken two deviant paths.

The first digression from Haraway’s hope for the cyborg is the “posthuman” isolation and dependence on technology. Haraway herself exposes the negative aspects surrounding the development of the cyborg in the technological workplace:

“…[M]any women’s lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating child care, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age” (Haraway 208).

Rather than being liberated by the example of the cyborg, women are often oppressed by these technologies. As technology develops, workers in the electronic sector become increasingly dependent on the machines. This leads to the threat of dehumanization which has existed since the early Industrial age. Although Haraway celebrates the blurring of the lines between human and machine, she also recognizes that the fusion between the two can sometimes be ugly.

The other great divergence is in the gendering of female cyborgs in science fiction and popular culture. This is the failed realization of Haraway’s cyborg potential on which I want to focus. Haraway shows that “Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs” (Haraway 191), but the role of the female cyborg is blatantly stereotyped. Haraway says, “[t]here is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (Haraway 197). But this anti-essentialist philosophy is certainly not supported by the generalizations of the female cyborg in science fiction. The gendering of the female cyborg in science fiction consists in two common representations: she is sexy and seductive. There are prolific examples of this masculinist representation in many types of science fiction media, but predominantly in cinema and television.

In the 1982 Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner, the three main “replicant” (cyborg) female characters—Rachel, Pris, and Zhora—are portrayed as powerfully seductive. They are often scantily clad with heavy make-up. This theme appears in other films as well, such as the comedy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in which a gang of killer “fembots” attacks the hero. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the antagonist T-X is played by model Kristianna Loken. Another example of this representation is in the 2004 film, The Stepford Wives, which is an adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name (Wikipedia).

In television, the pattern of the “sexy cyborg” continues. Ronald D. Moore’s modern reworking of Battlestar Galactica features several examples of this pattern. Supermodel Tricia Helfer plays the character, “Number 6” a blond, seductive member of the Humanoid Cylon race. Gene Roddenbury’s Star Trek: The Next Generation gives yet another instance of the gendering of the sexy female in the form of the character “Seven of Nine” played by Jeri Ryan (Wikipedia).

I find the names of several of these characters revealing as well. The names, “T-X”, “Number 6”, and “Seven of Nine” convey a sense of the dehumanization of the characters. If cyborgs are both cybernetic and organic, these names align the female characters much more with their cybernetic, rather than their organic, heritage.

Interestingly, the writers and creators of these media are almost exclusively male. As Anne Elliot says in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, “…the pen has been in their hands” (Austen 220), and the story told by these writers is a far cry from Haraway’s vision for the cyborg. In each of these examples the fusion of biological female with cybernetic technology consistently produces a sexually powerful, seductive, and manipulative female image. This is the allocation for female cyborg characters. Whether good or bad, heroine or villainess, these gendered qualities remain.

We are left with a rift between the social reality of female cyborgs in the electronic sector and the science fiction representation of female cyborgs in cinema and television. In American culture, this gap has become so entrenched that Haraway’s optimistic vision for their liberating potential seems unattainable. In 1989, at the time of Haraway’s “Manifesto”, there had already been plenty of the same gender representation in popular culture. However, it seems that her optimism for the cyborg transcends these sexist portrayals in cinema and television and that she values the erasure of the borders between human and machine over the side effect of masculinist representation of women in science fiction. She believes that “…there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self” (Haraway 216). For Haraway, these riches surpass the sexist stereotypes embedded in the culture of science fiction film and television.

I believe that the representation of women in science fiction is more dangerous than Haraway anticipates in her “Manifesto”. While the blurring of the lines between human and machine does serve as a powerful analog for the erasure of the boundary between male and female, the representation of women in science fiction has created a powerfully regressive force. In addition to the transgressed boundaries, the new technology of the cyborg has also produced a sexist cultural icon, exemplified by the aforementioned female characters. Instead of standing out as progressive emblems in popular culture, the cyborg often falls in line with the stereotypical gendering of women in the media, contributing to their already too prevalent sexist misrepresentation.

If Haraway’s optimism for the cyborg’s liberating potential is ever to be realized, her dream of a “…powerful infidel heteroglossia” (Haraway 223) must also consist in the subversion of gender roles in contemporary science fiction and popular culture. As Haraway says, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 217). In Marxist terms, the cyborg must take over the means of production—that is, in this case, the means of information.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. pp. 190-223.

Sandoval, Chela. “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed.”The Cyborg Handbook. Gray, Chris Hables, editor. New York: Routledge, 1995. pp. 407-421.

"Cyborgs in Fiction." Wikipedia. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.. 1 Nov 2007 .