Page 168 - Cyberculture and New Media

Leman Giresunlu 159
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not eat, drink, cry, sweat, urinate, defecate, menstruate,
ejaculate: a body that does not suffer any illnesses and does
not die. This Puritanical body without secretions and
indiscretions incarnates a fantasy of omnipotence. The
mechanical parts that replace ordinary anatomical parts are
supposed to enhance the body’s power potential and
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repudiate its association with leaky materiality.

In addition to the variants of masculine appearance, cyborgs have
also assumed the ideal form of the full-fledged, voluptuous female persona.
To radical feminists who object to objectifications of the female body, such
one-dimensional characterization may be problematic. Against this
hyperbole, Donna Haraway’s genderless cyborg body, possessed of an
oppositional voice, strives for recognition in the manifold realms of
technology, science and politics. As it is, Haraway’s cyborg is both highly
topical and timeless, being both a response to the Star Wars space project of
the1980s in the United States, as well as a specific statement on the attitudes
of the new right towards women in the same era, and in general:

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of
dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our
tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common
language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an
imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear
into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It
means both building and destroying machines, identities,
categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are
bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a
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goddess.

Differently than Haraway’s oppositional cyborg, I insist upon the
cyborg goddess imagery, one more amenable to a playful stance. The cyborg
goddess image in the contemporary science fiction film appears as a being
capable of inflicting pain and pleasure simultaneously, echoing historical
roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition of the creator god, a being equally
capable of loving and destroying. Gradually all through history of
technology, such belief system produced a human understanding striving to
become a godly creator willing to attain redemption while reaching
perfection:

…the religious roots of modern technological enchantment
extend a thousand years further back in the formation of
Western consciousness, to the time when the useful arts