"I want to be a machine" Andy Warhol

If popular culture has taken up the cyborg as a figure of progress, what happens to the way race is represented?

As Science Fiction is a precursor for defining the post-human, most of my research is based on Cyborgs in Science fiction because I believe it offers us an interesting way of considering the future of topical issues like race.

Isiah, Lavender III (2004) ‘Technicity: AI and Cyborg Ethnicity in The Matrix’, Extrapolation, Academic Research Library, Vol. 45, No.4, p.p. 437-458, (Accessed 6 September 2010)

Determining what happens to ethnicity in the post-human is Isiah’s main objective, he turns to the film The Matrix, that installs a belief that there can’t be a future without race and discrimination, to examine the way ethnicity and race is depicted in the future, and argues that with post-humanity comes a post-ethnicity. He creates a new term for this post-ethnicity and calls it “technicity”, a technological constructed ethnicity. He finds this new ethnicity very apparent in The Matrix in the form of the discrimination and annihilation of the Cyborgs by the AI. He establishes that The Matrix creates a “new paradigm of supremacy and discrimination” (p.p. 440). His focus is to make us question our preconceptions “of the old and new ethnicities” (p.p. 439) and challenges our accepted categories of difference (p.p. 440). Although The Matrix does show how race is changed through technology he also explains that our stereotypical view of race is still very apparent, within the movie through “naming, the prophecy and visual coding” (p.p. 440). This article densely suggests and depicts the possible evolution of race with technology and gives us a good indication of how our future might be.

Kirby, David A (2004), ‘Extrapolating Race in GATTACA: Genetic Passing, Identity, and the Science of Race’, Literature and Medicine, Vol. 23, No.1, p.p.184-200, (Accessed 4 September 2010)

The “biological based dystopian narrative” (p.p. 185) Gattaca depicts a future based on genetic discrimination and thus a new type of racism; genoism. The film shows how this new racism has created a social division and new hierarchy based on those who have been genetically altered, the privileged and those who have been unaltered, the oppressed. Although Gattaca displays an interesting alternative to racial and ethnic discrimination, Kirby argues that the film portrays a “racial blindness” (p.p. 191) and ignores contemporary issues of race. This is made evident when the oppressed groupe is only constituted of white males, which in today’s society is the dominant group. The genetic discrimination in Gattaca is comparable to the treatment of minorities in the US today; they experience similar difficulties and their identity is defined by their difference. Kirby refers to Bernadi’s statement that one cannot overlook the past and present issues of race when thinking about the future (p.p. 186), and that the utopian multicultural vision (p.p. 110) created in Gattaca is not representative or realistic. With progression arise new difficulties and divisions especially in terms of contemporary issues like gender and race, but this article reminds us that racial discrimination is and will most definitely always be an issue.

Nishime, LeiLani (2005), ‘The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 34-49, (accessed 7 September 2010).

This article defines three different types of Cyborgs found in Science Fiction movies, the most interesting one of them being, the Mulatto Cyborg. Depicted as a Cyborg that is “neither one nor the other” (p.p. 45) he does not strive to be human nor defines himself as a machine, rather he deals and embraces his hybridity, and breaks down the boundaries of the “organic and inorganic” (p.p. 45). Leilani suggests that the Mulatto Cyborg is a technological parallel and allegory for the way we perceive mixed-race people, a combination of both human and machine without a defined singular identity. “For much of the modern era, mixed-race people were the living embodiment of crossed boundaries” (p.p. 35) very much like the Cyborg is today. The Mulatto Cyborg is found in the Science Fiction film RoboCop, as Murphy “is barred from passing as human and re-fuses to pass as machine” (p.p. 46) he is the creation of a new type of “race” through the progression of technology. Leilani stresses the importance that Science fiction and Cyborg films offer us in questioning and imagining difference, especially racially.

Silvio, Carl (1999), ‘Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell"’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, p.p. 54-72, (Accessed on 7 September 2010)

Silvio defines the Cyborg as a means to “dismantle the binaries and categorical ways of thinking that have characterized the history of Western culture” (p.p. 54) and in that sense break down the division and discrimination caused by race in our current society. He argues that the idea that the Internet and other forms of technologies, create a utopian and idealistic space where issues like race, gender and identity are no longer factors that contribute to discrimination and that “it brings us closer to a world free of inequity” (p.p. 54) breeds potential for a new cultural domination and supremacy based on who has access to those technologies and who does not. Silvio exemplifies how the Japanese Anime Ghost in the Shell challenges the stereotypical depiction of white men as action and cyberspace heroes (p.p. 57) as the main protagonist of the narrative is an Asian Cyborg woman. Not only is she the hero but she is also characterized as the dominant and more prevailing figure, as she is more mechanically constructed than her male partner. This reinforces the previous idea of a possible discrimination of supremacy based on technological access, an issue that arises with progress some are left behind.

Wilkerson, Abby (1997), ‘Ending at the Skin: Sexuality and Race in Feminist Theorizing’, Third Wave Feminisms Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 164-173, (Accessed 4 September 2010)

In this reading Wilkerson challenges and examines Haraway’s presentation of sexuality and race in her Cyborg theory, arguing that her analysis of these issues are to some extent avoided and deceptive. She stands from a bisexual feminist perspective and embraces the Cyborg “myth” as a boundary crosser and because it “challenges the familiar values that marginalize and restrict various social groups” (p.p. 164). However she does make the observation that Cyborgs can be seen as an evasion of race, of whiteness and of power by not having a defined identity (p.p. 170), and by forgetting about the issue itself and assuming it just blurs into ones social context. This evasion of race can become “an obstacle in recognizing and dismantling racism and white privilege (p.p.169) as it reminds us that human agency exists. This article gives us a good indication of how Haraway’s Cyborg is still a figure of progress and how social issues like race are still trying to be explored through the post-human.