Rocío Carrasco Carrasco
The term “posthuman” has proved difficult to define. Over the last few years, the impact of digital, cybernetic, and biomedical technologies upon our understanding of what it means to be human has been widely debated within the fields of cyberculture, gender studies, feminism, and the history of science and technology. These academic disciplines refer to the posthuman as a symbol of change that reshapes the traditional concept of the human subject, as it breaks with past bodies, past modes of subjectivities and past humanisms. From implants to prosthesis, the human body has integrated new technologies, which makes it be conceived as non-authentic and vulnerable to change. Moreover, the organic body can be “dematerialized” into information patterns, interacting with other forms of information. Hence, and as it will be debated here, the posthuman implies a new configuration of our identity, a re-inscription of our own bodies in technologically driven societies, urging for a new economy of power relations. Precisely, the very idea of a contradictory and/or fractured identity has allowed gender theorists to equate the posthuman with a boundless creature in a post-gender world, challenging dominant configurations of power.[1] Indeed, the posthuman—if we understand it as a new relationship between technology and humanity—destabilizes old codes of the body, offering different possibilities of becoming female or male outside traditional gendered power relations.
Visual culture has articulated this new ontology. As perceptual knowledge, the visual is responsible for the creation of meaning. It is also a space of power. Visibility is, after all, aligned with power. Science fiction (SF) cinema has especially contributed to visualize images of the posthuman, offering a new configuration of the human self as inscribed in cyborgs, hybrid figures, digitalized characters or genetically manipulated beings. These fictional figures constitute a considerable and valuable means through which the notion of the posthuman is made available to a considerable number of people. The present paper stresses the importance of critically approaching cinematic representations of the posthuman, since they reflect contemporary anxieties and interests fuelled by the creation of artificial life, genetic engineering, the replacement of body parts, or mind control over technology and identity.
What I want to emphasize, however, is that the posthuman as it appears in mainstream SF cinema fails in offering a challenging image that resists binary constructions of gender, despite its transgressive nature. Drawing on contemporary feminist criticism and media studies, the present chapter deals with three popular dimensions of the cinematic posthuman—the aggressive gendered cyborg, the virtual hero/heroine, and the genetically manipulated subject—to argue how cultural codes of gender intersect with the technologies of the posthuman body to reproduce familiar patterns of masculinity and femininity. The muscles of the human flesh are intermixed with steel or mechanisms in the popular figure of the aggressive gendered cyborg. Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) or Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) offer violent male cyborg figures whose exaggerated bodies and patriarchal behavior favor their consideration as gender ironies. Another visual depiction of the posthuman is the figure of the virtual character, a hero or heroine whose body is “dematerialized” in the spaces provided by the latest information technologies like virtual realities, video games, or the Internet. In these films, subjectivities are, in one way or another, controlled and/or manipulated by media or computing technologies. Precisely, the motif of the human body as information pattern has favored the exploration of topics like subjectivity, body materiality, and identity, creating spaces in which the gendered body is somehow (re)defined. This human-information amalgamation has been represented in many recent films, like The Matrix (1999), eXintenZ (1999), Avatar (2009), Inception (2010), or Tron (2010), offering an image of the posthuman that weakens the boundary between organic and inorganic but that, nevertheless, finds it difficult to cast off cultural constructions of gender. Also, genetically manipulated human beings evoke the anxieties over the developments in biotechnology, as it is suggested in films like Blade Runner (1982), Universal Soldier (1992), Judge Dredd (1995), Gattaca (1997), or The Island (2005), generating debate concerning the ethics on the alteration of genes for certain purposes and the social consequences of gene science. Sexed and gendered identities are visibly articulated in the altered/manipulated body, instantiating familiar gender codes.
As suggested above, the term posthuman—which emerged as a category of thinking at the end of twentieth century—can be approached from many different angles, given the complexity it entails. At the turn of the millennium, the living body no longer has an absolute identity and this results in a generalized uncertainty about the self. In relation to this issue, Dyens argues, “[b]ecause of technology, the models of the world we now create are less and less grounded in human terms. And so it becomes increasingly difficult to define life, intelligence, consciousness, and what it means to be human in a stable way.”[2] In a similar way, in How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles affirms that the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman. Drawing on theories of the body, Hayles argues that the human is constructed through incorporating practices of new technologies that affect how people use their bodies and experience space and time.[3]
This section focuses on three interrelated developments of the posthuman that have become significant to the understanding of our technologically driven society. The first one concerns the alteration of our bodies due to the incorporation of technology, which is aligned with the idea of the cyborg as postulated by Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). In its figure, Haraway contends, the boundaries between body and technology are disrupted, leading to a positive image of the cyborg identity as its condition transgresses gender dualism that privileges man over woman. This transgression of boundaries and change of perspective evoked by the cyborg body means a break with the traditional dualistic thinking that positioned women as “other.” As Haraway understands it, the technological world frees women’s representations, in a sense, from patriarchal domination: “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.”[4] From the moment of Haraway’s publication, emerging theory has dealt with this complex idea within different fields of knowledge, creating a literature on postmodernity and the so-called cyborg culture. Especially, feminist SF has emerged as the need to address all these issues. The postulates questioned and discussed by these works mirror contemporary concerns about the interface between gender and technology. Indeed, the cyborg acts as a site where anxieties over technology and gender identity can be reflected and, therefore, it has become a cultural icon.
This definition of the cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism is extensible to the merging of the human body with computing or information technologies, which places cyberspace as a realm where people can interact without having to be physically present. This is precisely the second development I want to refer to in this section, which has opened a great number of debates concerning issues of gender and identity, most of them centered on the idea of “disembodiment” in cyberspace. On the one hand, cyberspace offers possibilities for the (re)definition of the human body outside traditional boundaries, suggesting a liberation of socio-cultural constraints. This is the vision of “cyberfeminism,” a movement that celebrates cyberspace as an opportunity to liberate the body and develop new identities outside strict binary oppositions imposed by society. Sadie Plant offers an optimistic view of the relationship between women and technology in the virtual age and focuses on the potential of cyberspace to offer women spaces in which the materiality of the body is no longer a matter of subordination. In a similar vein, Claudia Springer argues that the desire of liberating the body from cultural impositions produces a pleasurable experience. According to these theories, virtual reality provides a temporarily alternative reality.[5] On the other hand, and since such space is inevitably constructed by existing social, cultural, and economic structures, stereotyped images and descriptions of bodies are normally employed in order to suggest authenticity. In line with this argument, Anne Balsamo contends that virtual reality encounters provide an illusion of control over reality, nature, and especially over a gender and race-marked body. The user experiences virtual reality “through a disembodied gaze” and although the body may disappear representationally in virtual worlds, it does not disappear materially in the interface with the virtual reality apparatus.[6] Hence, one can affirm that the dream of disembodiment advocated by many cyberfeminists causes ambivalent desires and can be read as dangerous since it implies the loss of the body’s own biology. This virtual experience may represent, in Springer’s words, a “paradoxical desire to preserve human life by destroying it.”[7] For Hayles, virtual reality is “not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific local and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis.”[8] In my view, Hayles’s idea of embodiment in digital contexts is especially useful for the delineation of the posthuman as a complex interaction between body materialism and technology.
Lastly, the third major development I want to emphasize refers to the widespread proliferation in our society of biotechnological practices and their impact on how we perceive the materiality of our bodies, raising ethical debates about the limits of altering nature. This disruption is another articulation of the posthuman since it confuses the human and the non-human as a consequence of the perfecting of biotechnologies such as genetic engineering, reproduction technologies, and the like. Specially, the techniques of cloning evoke contemporary fears—or fascination—about the blurring of frontiers between the natural and the artificial. As Christine Ross has argued, “all of these turn-of-the-millennium developments confirm the body as a materialization open to incessant reconfiguration, yet they also reveal how the incitement to reconfigure is at once creative and normative, fluid and normalized.”[9]
The SF film is certainly a genre that proposes new imaginaries by means of the use of technology and/or science. One of its main concerns has been the relationship between the human and the products of science and technology. These narratives have had the power in mirroring fears and anxieties at each specific time. In this sense, SF is an important cultural referent that foregrounds questions of power and identity. Hence, traditional models of the body are often combined with the latest technology in SF texts, evoking the posthuman imaginary. The cinematic posthuman suggests the difficulty of defining and delineating a living being precisely and scientifically in our contemporary era, a fact that echoes contemporary debates on the materiality of our bodies in technologically driven societies. Lisa Blackman’s definition of the posthuman as “the destabilization and unsettling of boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, and mind and body that digital and biotechnologies are seen to be engendering”[10] serves as a basis for the present paper. Accordingly, the blurring of stable categories becomes the essence of the posthuman. Hence, I will make use of Blackman’s definition for establishing three articulations of the posthuman as depicted in SF cinema, in an attempt to illustrate the difficulty of resisting gendered/sexed codes of the body imposed to us by culture. As films like Blade Runner, Robocop, or eXistenZ show, the figure of the posthuman remains sophisticated and contradictory in terms of gender depiction, very much like the main approaches that have considered this icon of SF.
The aggressive gendered cyborg is a clear example of how gender codes are inscribed into the posthuman body, echoing the artificiality of gender. At the same time, this figure corroborates Rossi Braidotti’s idea of the techno-body postulated in her influential Metamorphosis, whereby the new technologies, far from abolishing the body, strengthen the corporeal structure of both humans and machines.[11] Thus, I want to argue that the hyper-muscular cinematic cyborg that inhabits the posthuman body inscribes social codes, suggesting the hierarchical power of gender over technological practices. If we concentrate on the popular image of the aggressive gendered cyborg represented in influential SF films, it is not difficult to perceive how it is ironically based upon traditional gender conventions.
Films like Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) or Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) offer violent male cyborg figures whose bodies are considered as gender ironies. As Cornea argues when referring to the cyborg film of the 80s, “because the cyborg is defined by a breakdown in the boundaries between self/Other, the hypermasculinity on display becomes a hysterical attempt to recuperate the traditional distinctions that this figure threatens to erode.”[12] The posthuman body relies on—or exaggerates—classical patterns of gender representations, what problematizes the utopian permissiveness of these cyborg figures. Indeed, a generalized tendency in mainstream cinema has been to associate cyborg imagery with violence. Springer argues when referring to films like The Terminator or Robocop that what separates cyborgs from humans is the cyborg’s greater capacity for violence, combined with enormous physical prowess. Thus, “[i]nstead of representing cyborgs as intellectual wizards whose bodies have withered away and been replaced by computer terminals, popular culture gives us muscular hulks distinguished by their superior fighting skills.”[13] The insistence on this association of powerful cyborg with masculinity has resulted in its commodification and its subsequent mockery. Moreover, these cyborg couplings, in spite of their reflection of high technology and scientific development, still follow patriarchal conventions when dealing with role assignment. Apart from this, they have been also interpreted as embodiments of the political ideology of the times, offering visual pleasure to mass audiences.[14] Jeffords is justifying the visual need for these “demonized” hard bodies during Reagan times. Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator (1984) contributes to shape the popular vision of masculinity in Reagan times. The Terminator’s cyborg body epitomizes the mood of the times while hinting at the constructed nature of masculinity. His techno-body reflects the incredulity of masculinity, considered as something abstract and hard to find. In this sense, the “ungendered” ideal proposed by Haraway is far from reach.
The artificiality of the gendered cyborg is clearly depicted in the Robocop films (1987, 1990, 1994). In the original movie, police officer Murphy (Weller) is brutally assassinated and mutilated by criminals. His remains are used by a company working for the Detroit Police Department to literally build a man-machine hybrid. This is done by adding powerful mechanical units to a human upper body and by implanting software programs that can be controlled by the company. This resulting cyborg of flesh and machinery suggests notions of superiority, rightness, and reassurance for Detroit’s corrupted society. Robocop’s constructed nature becomes evident from the very first moment he appears on screen and this fact is constantly emphasized throughout the whole series. Indeed, Robocop is initially presented by one of the creators, Bob Morton, as “the best of both worlds. The fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, on-board computer assisted memory, and a lifetime of on-the-street law enforcement programming.” Moreover, we are also told “it doesn’t have a name. He’s got a program. He is product.” Robocop becomes this way the embodiment of masculine law. Yet this law is socially constructed and this is reinforced precisely by the movie’s emphasis on Robocop’s mechanical nature. In relation to this issue, Cornea argues that this mechanized masculinity is especially acted out in the succinct use of his dialogue and the way he moves. Thus his movements are separated from his speech and “when he turns corners, his head or his body turns first, like an articulated truck.” Moreover, “these movements are underlined by ‘hydraulic’ sound effects which further emphasize the character’s alignment with construction and transport machinery.”[15] His mechanical side is emphasized, then, by means of his robotic appearance, which ultimately suggests masculine strength and power. Robocop is, then, the embodiment of a created masculine law.
Yet, trouble—or hope, if we consider its effects—appears when Robocop begins to show his human side and we as spectators get flashbacks of his dreams about his previous life, which means that his programming begins to fail. Apart from suggesting the human’s lack of control over science and its unpredictability, Robocop’s sudden appearance of feelings can be analyzed from different points of view. Telotte affirms that the film makes use of a SF motif (seen in movies like ET or Terminator 2) that emphasizes the importance of feelings or emotions in understanding and maintaining our sense of humanity even in the most technologized environment.[16] From coldness and apparently devoid of any emotion, Robocop shifts in the narrative to independent action and offers a sense of triumph.[17] This change has also been noted by Hassan Melehy who believes that Robocop undergoes a type of individualism which is triumphant since he finally recovers his identity and therefore “[t]he production of a cyborg identity in the corporate structure gives way to the possibility for the subjected body to become something quite different.”[18] As Telotte rightly notes, Robocop’s development of his human side becomes evident in the scene at the old factory when his former partner Anne Lewis embraces him, holds his hand, and directs his raised gun/phallus while telling him that had to be about right. From this moment onwards, Robocop becomes human again. Telotte interprets this as a collapse of the limits between matter and mind, which is a natural reflection of U.S. anxieties about the proliferation of thinking machines and biomedical engineering.[19] At the very end of the movie, Robocop’s subjectivity becomes evident when he is asked his name and he answers “Murphy.” Nonetheless, the victory of subjectivity, partly marked by Robocop’s removal of his helmet is, according to Telotte, rather weak since Murphy “remains a strange hybrid, more machine than human, a Frankenstein’s monster for a new age, and still bound by that series of prime directives programmed into his very makeup.”[20] Taking into account Telotte’s latter statement, I believe that Robocop’s dreams and fantasies entail, especially in terms of gender issues, an irony. His constructed nature remains intact in spite of his supposed subjectivity. Moreover, this device indicates that Murphy’s masculinity is also constructed and based upon another fantasy. In relation to this issue, Cornea argues that “the human Murphy is given the armored body to back up his macho posturing, at which point his ‘natural’ humanity, along with his ‘natural’ masculine identity, are shown to be questionable.”[21] With this, Cornea is implying that the body that Murphy is modeled into is also a social construction. Once more, the hypermasculine cyborg is meant to provide an ironic gap between powerful masculinity and subordinated masculinity. Robocop’s memories of his human side include Murphy’s continuous imitation of his son’s TV hero, T. J. Lazer, another mass-media product. In this sense, reality is intermixed with fantasy and mass media, resulting in the need to stress lost male privileges in a world governed by confusion.
The second enactment of the cinematic posthuman that I want to propose refers to characters that cross the boundary between physical and non-physical by entering virtual or computer-generated realms. Virtual characters are embodiments of posthuman aesthetics present in uncountable films of the mid- to late-1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contemporary cinema makes use of androgynous bodies, and consequently, the long-held association of certain external traits with masculinity and femininity are sometimes questioned in these figures. According to Springer, “rampaging muscle-bound cyborgs were replaced by slim young men and women jacked into cyberspace, inspired by ‘console cowboys’ in cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s.”[22] Hence, The 13th Floor (1999), Strange Days (1995), eXistenZ (1999), The Matrix (1999), Avatar (2009), or Inception (2010) offer significant representations of the dehumanized body, equating Haraway’s distinction of the cyborg typology. In them, simulated spaces become the home for characters that trespass rational boundaries and mingle with the latest technology. This ability to simulate our experience of reality ends up in the confusion between reality and fiction, a main motif in SF films dealing with cyberspace, in which characters—and spectators by extension—are frequently unable to perceive what is “real.”
By subverting earlier pessimistic feminist approaches that stressed the masculine nature of media technologies, films that rely on virtual reality offer a fresh relationship between women and digital technologies. Significantly, an outburst of virtual reality films appeared in the late 1990s, a time when there was a remarkable shift in power from men to women in technological development, as Sadie Plant[23] and many other cyberfeminists noted. Yet, and in spite of women’s visible engagement with various media technologies, films showing virtual heroes/heroines do find real obstacles when representing alternative subjectivities and new body politics, what echoes at existing socio-material power inequities. Indeed, these films normally explore the negative consequences of disembodiment, which can be further interpreted as the impossibility to offer a safe place for neutral gender relations within virtual spaces.
In Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) the presence of created cyberworlds allows its characters to enter and play in them as if they were inside virtual games. Characters become mere virtual reflections, and consequently, they are sometimes unable to distinguish what is real from what is not, what causes an anxiety on the male protagonist, Ted (Law). During the testing of her new virtual reality game, the popular game designer Allegra Geller (Leigh) becomes the failed object of an assassination plot. She manages to escape with corporate assistant Ted Pikul and both start an adventure where reality is mixed with fantasy. It is then when Ted is asked to have his body penetrated in order to create a new bioport—a small hole drilled into the spinal column that will allow him to play the popular video game known as eXintenZ. This fact ultimately puzzles him while allowing spectators to share his adventure inside cyberworlds. In contrast to the aggressive gendered cyborg, Ted’s body is initially represented as vulnerable and fragile and his behavior as departing from traditional codes of heroic representation, despite his evident superiority at the end of the movie. His constant doubts and fears do not end with the creation of the new bioport but they continue within the virtual game, which suggests that cyberspace is not a realm for the liberation of constraints, as Plant and other cyberfeminists have suggested.
Yet, and in spite of all this novelty when representing the male figure, the film does not break completely with traditional assumptions in terms of gender representation and men are, as we discover at the very end of the film, the real controllers of technology, and eventually of women. Lia M. Hotchkiss deals with the film’s balance between two attitudinal extremes: “she [Allegra Geller] manifests a naïve celebration of virtual reality with little attention to the ways in which it can affect materiality, and he displays a naïve paranoia over the ways in which technology does penetrate human materiality.”[24] In my view, the different attitude of the characters echoes the afore-mentioned theories dealing with the ambivalent effects of (dis)embodiment in cyberspace. However, the virtual characters depicted in the film can be better analyzed following Hayles’s embodied concept of the posthuman, whereby the materiality of the body is partly preserved in virtual contexts. Rather than proposing a model of the body simply reduced to code and information, Hayles relies on its materiality and asks “how much had to be erased to arrive at such abstractions as bodiliness information?”[25] This embodied concept of the posthuman allows for a better understanding of what it means to be human in our contemporary world.
In relation to this posthuman articulation, Teresa de Lauretis analyzes Cronenberg’s movie in line of what she denominates new gender and sexual economy. She considers the characters’ bioports as erogenous zones.[26] This bioport, she argues, “has taken over the erogenous functions of both anus and vagina, of which it is not a metaphor but a replacement, signaling a new sexual economy of the human body.”[27] This new sex economy, she argues, is made possible by means of technological innovation and also corresponds to a certain economy of gender. Yet, in spite of its technological advancement, this gender and sex economy has not eliminated the old body economy. Likewise, the old-fashioned values, masculine and feminine gender roles, are also present in a reality in which new bio and communication technologies accomplish mutation on both animal and human organisms.[28] While gender blending is, in a way, hinted at in the film, gender equality is not achieved in terms of roles and/or behavior, partly due to the presence of this embodied body. In spite of Ted’s atypical male body, his roles are well defined in the film. The film’s plot still relies on his actions, while his point of view is imposed, which favors the spectator’s identification with him. Moreover, at the very end of the movie we discover that this supposedly menaced man is but another virtual reflection, and ultimately, the killer of a—this time male—popular game designer. The fact that worlds are imitated prevents the film’s evolution from traditional gender patterns. The apparent permissiveness of cyberworlds is, then, negated in the film precisely because of its dependence on patriarchal imitations of the real world.
The third articulation of the posthuman I want to describe in this paper corresponds to the genetically manipulated subject. Contemporary SF cinema has managed to illustrate the problematic of producing altered bodies via the process of gene technology that put into question the natural or original body. By offering instances of genetically manipulated beings whose fears, thoughts and feelings are available to us, these films provide a radical image of the posthuman as it disturbs traditional notions of the “natural” body. It is during the 1980s when SF films start to explore the consequences of the manipulation of human genetics. Films like Blade Runner introduce characters so similar to their “model” that to differentiate them is sometimes a hard task. These total or partial human replicas are normally designed to strengthen some aspect of human behavior and are visually undistinguishable from their creators. They are meant to provide some sort of benefit to humans, who are ultimately responsible for their creation. Nevertheless, and in order to confer authenticity, these replicas contribute to reproduce gender stereotypes and reinstate familiar instances of masculinity and femininity.
In Scott’s cult movie Blade Runner (1982), replicated bodies or replicants are made in the image of humans and designed to serve their creators. Intended mainly as combat or entertainment models, these replicas begin to develop emotions, which problematizes the human/clone dichotomy. Replicants come to Earth to rebel against their patriarchal creator, Tyrell (Turkell), where they are at risk of being “retired” by hunters or blade runners like Deckard (Ford). Placed in a context of visual pastiche, clones merge with humans in a dystopian future. This ambivalent boundless world does not present a visual differentiation between humans and replicants. The female replicant Rachael (Young), for instance, turns out to be “more human than the humans” and, if we pay attention to the director’s cut (1992), even the main character, blade runner Deckard is suggested to be another replicant. This confusing scenario of blending frontiers creates a general feeling of uneasiness, and leads to the film’s use of conventional gender traits. If the replicants are meant to simulate human beings, they must therefore rely on culturally accepted views of masculinity and femininity. Paradoxically, gender is stereotyped in the movie.
Replicant Rachael has been implanted memories originally belonging to Tyrell’s niece and believes herself to be human until Deckard reveals her true nature, which creates a feeling of anxiety within her. The construction of human subjectivity is made explicit by this female character. As many critics have suggested, Rachael’s “manufactured” identity is compared with the femme fatale of film noir. Like Robocop, Rachael’s behavior and her gendered identity are based upon a cultural fiction.[29] Rachael is not what she appears to be. As Williams comments, sex hierarchies in film noir are established by presenting viewers with two recognizable types of women, one sexual and treacherous, and the other good and passive, to symbolize the male’s hero conflict between himself and the world he needs to clean up.[30] While Rachael represents the good type with her innocence and frail humanity, the stereotypical threatening and sexual type is clearly embodied by replicants Zhora (Cassidy) and Pris (Hannah).[31] Likewise, Deckard’s ambivalence relies on the fact that he feels the need to exacerbate the traditional dominance of male heroes in film noir in his relationship with Rachael. In other words, Deckard’s masculinity needs to be asserted outside his role as a killer and he needs Rachael for that. In this sense, Rachael incarnates values akin to traditional femininity and becomes, throughout the film, the object of male sexual pleasure. In this way, she functions as the fetishistic object of Deckard’s desire. Deckard’s need to reassert his masculinity is explicitly seen in the scene in which Rachael and Deckard are in the latter’s apartment and Deckard uses violence to kiss and be kissed by Rachael.
As for the other replicants, while their behavior differs from the one adopted by Rachael, they still rely on gender patterns. Conscious of their nature, they take advantage of culturally accepted gender norms precisely to achieve their goal: to rebel against their creator and to live longer. The body of the female replicant Zhora provides entertainment, since she is an exotic dancer. Pris is likewise designed to provide pleasure, which she knows and uses to approach the genetic manipulator, J. F. Sebastian (Anderson). Moreover, there is a heterosexual traditional romance between Pris and Roy (Hauger). Thus, the film shows clones to be problematic figures in the sense that they do not only reverse the traditional distinction between technological and biological narratives of identity but also because they emphasize precisely such similarities. This fact seems to abolish this paradox through traditional heterosexual relations.[32] The romance between Rachael and Deckard, although blurring some significant distinctions, “does reassert social order by redefining successfully subject positions as those in line with conventional, “natural” sexual identities.”[33] The scene mentioned above stands, then, as an example of such redefinition of traditional sexual identities.
Replicants are meant to be so close to their misogynist models that they inevitable fall into gender traps. This fact becomes evident when we discover the “God” of genetic engineering, Dr. Tyrell. He lives alone and shows to have no feelings. Indeed, in the scene where the replicant Roy begs him to provide a longer life and change the DNA codes, Tyrell coldly refuses, unveiling an impassive man only concerned with science. This scene has also been commented as a retelling of the heterosexual Oedipal complex. In this sense, a disruption of the traditional conventions of sexual identity can be traced. In particular, “Baty’s highly stylized actions destabilize the sexual dynamics of the Oedipal scenario, positioning the two men as both rival subjects and the objects of one another’s desire.”[34] Yet, and as mentioned previously, Roy’s homoerotic fantasies are erased by his heterosexual relationship with Pris and by the fact that the kiss is immediately followed by the killing of his master. Moreover, feelings towards Roy’s creators have been defined throughout the whole movie as linked to hate and vengeance. Roy’s gender identity is, hence, not contested by this killing-kissing passionate act. This supposed disruption rather corresponds, I believe, to the film’s insistence on the closeness between machines and humans, which is explicit in this scene where creator and creation melt in a kiss.
The film’s insistence on boundary breaking is not achieved, then, in terms of gender. This gender distinction becomes necessary, on the other hand, for the film’s plot believability. As Bergstrom argues, “the representation of sexual identity carries a potentially heightened significance, because it can be used as the primary marker of difference in a world otherwise beyond our norms.”[35] Yet, she continues, the value of sexual difference is postclassical in many films, in the sense that it is unpredictable and “[t]he standard use of female identity to reinforce male (dominant, institutional) identity is no longer a regular pattern of narrative development.”[36] Blade Runner follows many post-classical devices in its depiction of a boundless world. Yet, whether unpredictable or not, it relies on culturally accepted gender rules.
As I have attempted to illustrate in this paper, the posthuman acts as a controversial site where anxieties over technology and gender identity can be reflected. In this sense, it is a metaphor of our contemporary state of mind. However, the concept of the posthuman remains limited in its cinematic articulations, suggesting the difficulty of materializing the complexity of our bodies and identities when conflated with the latest technologies. While these fictional beings do reconfigure the classical humanist mode of representation and propose new kinds of bodies, structures of domination are still articulated, especially in those figures where the materiality of the body is more apparent, as happens with the aggressive gendered cyborg. In other words, the cinematic posthuman reproduces dominant structures of power, in spite of its transgressive nature, partly due to the strict codes of mainstream U.S. cinema. It finds it difficult to simple erase traditional gender markers or to disturb classical body dichotomies, as some of the above-mentioned theories on the cyborg and the posthuman have suggested.
This is not to say, however, that the figure of the posthuman as depicted in popular SF films is not a valuable tool for analyzing contemporary gender or body politics. On the contrary, these fictional beings have been opened up through a great variety of approaches. The three articulations of the screened posthuman proposed here demonstrate that the interaction between media technologies and ourselves is possible and that new ways of understanding the reality of our bodies need to be found.
The author wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research for the writing of this essay (Research Project FEM2010-18142).
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Springer, Claudia. “The Pleasure of the Interface.” In Sex/ Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, 490–99. Edited by Anthony Hopkins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Telotte, P.J. Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Williams, Douglas. “Ideology as Dystopia: an Interpretation of ‘Blade Runner.’” International Political Science Review 9, no. 4 (1998): 379–90.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Of Fossils and Androids: (Re)Producing Sexual Identity in ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Blade Runner.’” The Journal of the Mid West Modern Languages Association 30, no. 1–2 (1997): 56–70.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1999); Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth State, 1997).
Olivier Dyens, “Cyberspace, Technoculture, and the Post-biological Self,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2, no. 1 (2007): 3.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 405.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1999), 205.
Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 81.
Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 125-7.
Claudia Springer, “The Pleasure of the Interface,” in Sex/ Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, ed. Anthony Hopkins, 498 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 498.
Christine Ross, “The Insufficiency of the Performative: Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium,” Art Journal 60 (2001): 28.
Lisa Blackman, The Body: The Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 117.
Rossi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 244.
Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema. Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 125.
Claudia Springer, “The Pleasure of the Interface,” 493.
Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 12.
Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema, 126-7.
P.J. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172.
Ibid., 173.
Hassan Melehy, “Bodies without Organs: Cyborg Cinema of the 1980s,” in The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Gill Rickman, 321 (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004).
Telotte, Science Fiction Film, 174.
Ibid., 177.
Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema, 127.
Claudia Springer, “Psycho-Cybernetics in Films of the 1990s,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Anne Kuhn, 204 (London: Verso, 1990).
Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth State, 1997), 112.
Lia M. Hotchkiss, “Still in the Game”: Cybertransformations of the “New Flesh” in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ,” The Velvet Light Trap 52 (2003): 27.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 12.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Becoming Inorganic,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 559.
Ibid., 559.
Ibid., 565.
Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema, 154-55.
Douglas Williams, “Ideology as Dystopia: An Interpretation of ‘Blade Runner,’” International Political Science Review 9, no. 4 (1998): 390.
Ibid., 390.
Lisa Yaszek, “Of Fossils and Androids: (Re)Producing Sexual Identity in ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Blade Runner,’” The Journal of the Mid West Modern Languages Association 30, no. 1–2 (1997): 58.
Ibid., 58-9.
Ibid., 58.
Janet Bergstrom, “Androids and Androgyny,” in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 38.
Ibid., 36.