Chosen Guiding Question Number Four: If Science Fiction is a genre that imagines our future, what happens to gender and race?
Source One: Walton, Heather, 2004 ‘The Gender of the Cyborg’ The Journal of Theology and Sexuality: The journal of the institute for the study of Christianity and Sexuality, Vol. 10, No. 2 pp.33-44.
The author explores the issues of gender, sexuality and the cyborg. At the heart of the article she seeks to question in what ways the representations of the cyborg challenge or confirm our already constructed ideals of gender identities and sexual practices. The author explores, whether the figure of the cyborg can, “offer the potential to challenge our binary and hierarchical understandings of masculinity and feminity through the radical challenge it represents to all essentialist constructions of human nature” (Walton, 2004). Walton believes that the representation of the cyborg currently circulating society today has the ability to both destabilize and reaffirm depictions of gender stereotypes. It is interesting and useful to explore her ideas on the portrayal of the female stereotype and the Cyborg, in relation to the guiding question, in the light of what Walton believes is commonly portrayed as a “feminine space”. The article explores a few examples of how the female is portrayed in science fiction cinematically, providing interesting insight to relate to the guiding question. (Walton, 2004). The article explores the issue of ‘cyborg politics’ in relation to many of Donna Haraway’s ideals. In conclusion, the article explores interesting issues relating to the place of gender, and particularly female place in the light of science fiction and it is interesting to consider her views that the cyborgs can “exaggerate and heighten, pleasurably and creatively or crudely and violently” symbolise “representations of gender circulation already in place” (Walton, 2004).
Source Two: Mitchell, Kaye, 2006 ‘Bodies that matter: Science Fiction, Techno culture and the Gendered Body’ Science Fiction studies, Vol. 33, No.1 pp.109-128.
This article examines the relationship between technology and gender as it applies to a “product of our thinking” (Mitchell 2006). It looks at how this relationship has developed over the last twenty years and looks to how it may shape the future. The author believes there is a “very real impact of technological developments upon our understanding of the gendered body” (Mitchell, 2006). However, the author also believes that any ultimate change to what we define as gendered bodies will have to be influenced at the source of where it was created, a change in thinking. Like Waltson, Mitchell believes that in some ways there is a possibility that “technology may be working to perpetuate and extend the complicated network of power relations and modes of self-regulation already in place” because it is not possible to exist in “post -gender” if “our thinking still lags behind” and “we are in thrall to old mentalities” of what it means to be gendered. (Mitchell 2006). The author explores the construction of what is meant by the term ‘body’ and thus how it can be “subject to a certain indeterminacy and contingency” as it is not a term that is fixed or “easily transcended” (Mitchell, 2006). The article addresses that the role of science fiction is certainly capable however, of allowing us to ponder on what society’s understanding of the body and the gendered body means to human society. The article expresses concerns with the body and science fiction in relation to feminism and how the female is occupied and represented through science fiction, it explores this through representations of the female in science fiction in film. In conclusion, the article explores interesting concepts of what the body and thus gender represents to society, and opens our minds to the place of gender, particularly the place of the female in the future of science fiction.
Source Three: Devoss, Danielle, 2000 ‘Rereading Cyborg Women: The Visual Rhetoric of images of Cyborg (and Cyber) Bodies on the World Wide Web CyberPsychology & Behaviour Vol. 3, No.5 pp. 835-845.
The author in this piece, believes that Donna Haraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ has been very influential on crossing boundaries created by society, particularly that of machine and body. The article explores how the cyborg image has been “explored at the level of the physical body” and thus lead to “cyborg identities” and an “otherness” that is not defined by gender or the physical body (Devoss, 2000). However, like both the previous authors, Devoss agrees that the cyborg body, and thus its representation of gender is existing in “excess of the real” but also intertwined “within the real”, as though it again represents gender traits that we as, society have already created. What is especially interesting is that Devoss explores the concept of race within the cyborg representation, and questions what becomes of our “notions of race and flesh” when this is complicated by the cyborg image (Devoss 2000). The article also explores the representation of the female through images found on the world wide web and how in the image of the cyborg, the female is commonly sexualised, and in this analysis argues that they are in fact “cyber bodies” asserting the norms of “femininity and female sexuality”(Devoss, 2000).
Source Four: Clough, Robyn 1997 ‘Sexed Cyborgs’ Social alternatives Vol. 16, No.1 pp. 20-24.
Clough, expresses the view that “technological innovation makes it harder for us to draw distinctions between human, animal and technology, challenging the coherence of the human body as a discrete organic unity” (Clough, 1997). The article also looks at the cyborg representation and its relationship with feminist theory. The article explores the issues if sex and gender and says that they are “oppositionally placed and are associated with nature-body and culture-mind respectively” she argues,as Mitchell did of the body that gender is a social construct (Clough, 1997). Thus, she believes the cyborg image is capable of influencing these culturally constructed traits related to gender. The article provides some information in relation to the guiding question and can be seen to correlate with many of the other author’s points on the idea of gender, and the cyborg figure of science fiction.
Source Five: Nishime, LeiLani, 2005 ‘The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future' Cinema Journal Vol. 44, No.2 pp34-49.
The core of this article argues that “Science fiction films seem to be the perfect genre for exploring mixed-race representations and subjectivity” and that the Cyborg itself offers a safe realm in which to explore “the controversial issues surrounding multiracial identity” (Nishime, 2005). The author believes that the world portrayed in science fiction cinema is a way of camouflaging real racial tensions felt by society. The author analyses the different representations of the cyborg figure that appear in Science fiction film genre and explores different narratives of the Science Fiction film and provides insight into what Science Fiction film might be portraying about racial constructs.
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