Page 167 - Cyberculture and New Media

158 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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representation emerges in the shape of a little girl called Alice; the mainframe
computer V.I.K.I sporting a female look, and voice in the movie I Robot; in
Minority Report the Pre-Crime system’s inventor, the female botanist; and, in
the same film, the pre-cog Agatha, another key female figure. In this context
the movies Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence relate
questions of self and identity formation played out in the character of a
cyborg woman. Even in titles, the gender allusion carries; the Latin definition
of “Matrix” is the “female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-,
mater” or “something within or from which something else originates,
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develops, or takes form.” With the presence of so many female figures as
major carriers and symbols of technology in science fiction films, we might
probe their conceptualization as embodiments of good and evil combined into
one.

2. The Cyborg Goddess versus Donna Haraway’s Cyborg: A
Manifesto in Question
The science fiction story context, generally presenting a clean and
cold medium, might be said to complement for the inadequacies of the human
body’s watery environment, and recent science fiction movie media further
supplements female presence with superior human qualities. To this end, I
probe how female images in recent science fiction films seem to appear laden
with capacities for good and evil, amalgamated into one. In this duality, such
female representations often function to pose questions of faith, of science
and of technology from a feminist perspective and pose an alternative to
conventional androcentric codifications of power. Technologically enhanced
bodies, cyborgs, which appear in both genders, tend to possess superlative
qualia from both worlds, human and machine. The cyborg as a concept thus
constitutes a potential basis for speculative dialogue between the sciences and
the arts, promising to offer up hope within artistic imagination as well as
holding up a sign of impending scientific advancement. In short, we might
take cyborg imagery as the humanities’ and sciences’ meeting point, a site
where art’s play with ambiguities, paradoxes, and irony meet with science’s
need for precision.
Dani Cavallaro analyzes the cyborg as a principally masculine body
and points out both pure and impure qualities of the cyborg. Indicating how
powerful female characters appear to be held in check as “an ideal to aspired
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to by women who are still subjected to injustice” , Cavallaro identifies the
cyborg body as a male body and views the cyborg embodying two opposite
fantasies:

that of the pure body and that of the impure body. On one
level, the cyborg presents a sealed, clean, hard, tight and
uncontaminated body. It offers the ideal of a body that does