Cyborgs as Discourse: the Intersection of Feminism, Postmodernism

and Science Fiction in the 1980s

Nicholas Hirsch

facsimilesmiles@gmail.com

December 15th, 2009

1
 Cyborgs as Discourse: The Intersection of Feminism, Postmodernism

and Science Fiction in the 1980s

Harrison Ford leans menacingly over a beautiful woman. Her back is to the wall,

her hair loose and wild. She is visibly shaken, perhaps scared. Ford’s expression is

ambiguous, somewhere between attraction and rage. “Say, ‘kiss me’,” he tells her. She

tells him she can’t rely on her memories, and he demands again that she tell him to kiss

her. Still hesitant, she nods; tears stand out in her eyes. He makes her tell him she wants

him twice more before kissing her. In this moment, it is unclear whether he actually

would have respected her wishes if she refused him, or if her reason for saying yes was

his intimidating behavior. Their relationship is complex and indecipherable, an apt

reflection of gender politics in the real world. Ford's “romantic” advances are

disturbingly reminiscent of sexual assault. Further complicating the issue is the fact that

Rachel, his love interest, is a replicant, a manufactured organism with memories which

she has only recently discovered are not real.1 Rachel's tragedy is in the question of her

agency, first as a programmed being, then as a woman; in either case, her consent is

presented as incidental to his interests.

This love scene from the 1982 blockbuster film Blade Runner raises a number of

questions about gender and agency. Would Decker (Ford's character) have stopped, if

Rachel said no? As a replicant, a programmed being, would she have been capable of

saying no? If Decker didn't stop, would he be disregarding a woman's right to control her

own body, or simply ignoring a programmed response, or both? If Rachel was never a

1 Ridley Scott, et al, Blade Runner (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1982 (2007)).

2
human being in the first place, would it be possible for her to give meaningful consent in

the first place? More to the point, as a created being, does the combination of Rachel's

gender and her status as a sexualized object reflect a broader conflation of these

characteristics? In this film, which describes male cyborgs as worker drones, and females

as “your basic pleasure model”, gender is literally a construct. Blade Runner thus uses

gendered cyborgs to explore complex postmodern questions about gender dynamics,

identity construction, and the relationship between technology and consciousness.

This is the focus of cyborg feminism: how does the cyborg, as an imaginative

construction, help us to analyze the role and nature of identity from a postmodern,

feminist perspective? The period in which this film was released was one of intense

philosophical, political and technological upheaval, illustrated by the rise of

postmodernism, changes in feminist discourse, and the development of a growing body of

cyborg iconography. I will argue that, from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s, feminism,

postmodernism and the conception of the cyborg became inextricably entwined. This

vital cross-section is illustrated in the work of Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo, two

feminist theorists of that decade who helped to create the framework for “cyborg

feminism”, a unique style of feminist social and literary criticism which has become

increasingly popular in the last decade.

What follows will be a historical analysis of the context in which cyborgs entered

feminist discourse by way of postmodernism and a splintering feminist identity. I will

begin with an overview of what the term cyborg means, its changing relationship within

science fiction and with feminist critique. Second, I will briefly examine the

development of postmodern philosophy in the work of three important writers,

3
Baudrillard, Lyotard and Foucault, focusing primarily on the role of technology and

gender in their work. Finally, I will relate the inception of cyborg feminism by Donna

Haraway and Anne Balsamo in the context of postmodern philosophy and some of the

developing schisms within feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The simplest definition of the cyborg is a “hybrid of machine and organism”2, in

which biological and technological components are fused within a single entity. The term

is a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism, and was originally coined by Manfred

Clynes and Nathan Kline in a 1960 paper about the possibility of altering the bodies of

astronauts to allow them to function in an extraterrestrial environment.3

This early usage introduced the use of cybernetics (a relatively new field at the

time) for body augmentation, an idea which captured the popular imagination through the

next several decades, leading to the creation in the 1970s of popular television shows like

The Six Million Dollar Man (1973) and its spinoff series The Bionic Woman (1976) – a

series which, according to feminist critic Sharon Sharp, had an ambiguous relationship

with other feminist writers of the period.4 A somewhat more successful coupling between

feminism and cyborgs is evident in The Stepford Wives; though, as A. K. Silver points

out, feminist theorists at the time were not yet ready to accept a meaningful relationship

between feminist politics and science fiction.5

Throughout the 1980s, cyborg fiction proliferated at an explosive rate, inspiring

Anne Balsamo to describe it as “the decade of the cyborg.”6 In the first half of the

2 Donna Jeanne Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 7.
3 Manfred E. Clynes, and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space”, Astronautics (September,
1960).
4 Sharon Sharp, "Fembot Feminism: The Cyborg Body and Feminist Discourse in The Bionic
Woman", Women's Studies. 36, no. 7 (2007), 507-523.
5 A. K. Silver, "The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism", The
Arizona Quarterly. 58 (2001), 109-126.
6 Anne Marie Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham:

4
decade, science fiction author William Gibson spearheaded the cyberpunk literary

movement, centered around an aesthetic of gritty realism and dystopian, noir-inspired

stories featuring cyborg assassins and hacker cowboys7. These aesthetic qualities were

popularized by the movie Blade Runner, as well as other films like The Terminator,

RoboCop and Weird Science. By the end of the decade, the assimilationist Borg were

terrorizing the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek: the Next Generation, and Voltron and

Inspector Gadget were popular children's cartoons. A complete list of pop-culture

references to cyborgs in the 80s alone would be beyond the scope of this paper.

What is relevant is that, during this period, the definition of the cyborg broadened

within science fiction to encompass a number of variations on the theme. In Blade

Runner and The Terminator, for example, cyborgs are artificial intelligences which

imitate human beings with biological skin and eyes. According to Despina Kakoudaki

(writing a feminist critique of cyborg imagery within the last decade), skin was the

defining characteristic of the cyborg, as it indicated the cyborg's unique quest to “pass”

for human, or even to become human8, reflecting a growing paranoia (still present,

arguably) that humanity's “illegitimate” technological children will inevitably rise up

against their creators. Kakoudaki argues that this is parallel to what she perceives as a

growing fear of women’s sexuality in the period, so that gender in cyborgs became a “site

for projecting fears about technology, change, and the future.”9

Duke University Press, 1996), 17.

7 George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Introduction to Fiction 2000; Cyberpunk and the
Future of Narrative (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), includes a brief history
of cyberpunk.
8 Despina Kakoudaki, “Pinup and Cyborg: Exaggerated Gender and Artificial Intelligence” in
Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction
Criticism Marleen Barr, ed (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2000), 166.

9 Kakoudaki, “Pinup and Cyborg”, 171.

5
 In cyberpunk fiction, the cyborg was as often as not defined in terms of the

interface between a human mind and a vast communications network. This interface was

often represented in the form of virtual reality, or “cyberspace” - a term coined by

William Gibson in his seminal novel Neuromancer. Gibson described cyberspace as “A

consensual hallucination … in the nonspace of the mind”10. In “Pleasures of the

Interface”, feminist writer Claudia Springer examines the sensualist aspects of this

arrangement, and the implications of specifically gendered projections into a space

theoretical unbound by physical reality. Springer points out that “collapsing the

boundary between what is human and what is technological is often represented as a

sexual act in popular culture”.11 Not was technology feared, it was also fetishized,

perhaps for its transgressive potential – a theme discussed by Donna Haraway at length,

as we shall see.

The projection of the cyborg/hacker's human mind into a digital environment also

shows striking parallels to Baudrillard's simulacra, which will be explained shortly.

What is important to note is the existing connection between Gibson's fictional cyborgs

and Baudrillard's postmodern philosophy – a connection made directly in the 1999 movie

The Matrix, in which the character Morpheus describes the “mental projection of your

digital self”, and the stark contrast between the Matrix and the “desert of the real” (a

direct quote from Baudrillard)12. In each of these examples, postmodernism was a

backdrop against which the cyborg became a tool for social and critical analysis.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, postmodernism

10 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 69.
11 Springer, Claudia. “Pleasures of the Interface” in Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist
Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, Jenny Wolmark, ed (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999), 37.
12 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Glaser (Anne Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan, 1981), 5.

6
resists simple definition. Rather than any single cohesive idea, postmodernism is a “set

of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as … the

simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity,

[and] historical progress ...”13 In this sense, postmodernism is the process of challenging

that which is known or knowable in a fundamental way, and is best understood in the

arguments of postmodernists themselves. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, postmodern

philosophers J F Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault questioned, in vastly

different ways, the construction of knowledge and innateness. As a close look reveals,

the writings of all three had some bearing on the parallel developments of feminism and

cyborgs at the time.

In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard argued that, with the advent of

advanced communications technology and the computer, simulacra (representations) had

become so advanced and so prescient that they began to replace the reality they were

representing: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.”14 Reality

ceased to exist in a state of causality, instead rendered into a map, so detailed that it not

only could, but inevitably would, become confused with reality. In fact, Baudrillard

argued, reality was already a simulation, in the sense that human experience already

consisted entirely of symbolic representations, interpretations of reality provided by our

minds and constructed from language.

Vitally, Baudrillard claimed that identity itself was subject to this process of

simulation, touching on the fading role of gender as cloning became possible through

13 Gary Aylesworth, “Postmodernism”, The Stanford Enclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009

Edition), forthcoming URL –
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/postmodernism/ (accessed 12.01.09).
14 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Glaser (Anne Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan, 1981), 1.

7
“the genetic matrix of identity”15. Given the obsolescence of gender as a defining

characteristic, what then would become of identity and sexuality? The cyborg created the

potential for a “post-gender” world.

This argument followed the lead of Lyotard, who argued in The Postmodern

Condition (1979) that human knowledge, in the context of modern communications

technology, was re-constructed from symbol manipulation in the form of language.

Lyotard's arguments followed the formal logic of Wittgenstein and used computer

languages as an example: a command in a computer language only makes sense in the

context of that language, but the language itself must follow a set of internal rules which

are not innate to the computer16. It is interesting to note that both Baudrillard and Lyotard

made their arguments specifically in the context of modern communications technology

and cultural suppositions: the same sort of technology that their contemporary, William

Gibson used to depict his characters' projected, virtual reality.

Taking a different route, and attacking a different problem, Foucault argued in

The History of Sexuality that, over the last several centuries, human sexuality had been

relegated to public discourse as a tool of power and control. He wrote about a “great

series of binary oppositions (body/soul, flesh/spirit, instinct/reason,

drives/consciousness)” which had “refer[ed] sex to a pure mechanics devoid of reason”.17

Foucault wrote that this process occurred first under the guise of religious propriety, then

nationalism, then scientific inquiry. Foucault argued that this rendering of sex into

discourse made it into a hierarchical tool by allowing those in power to define, isolate and

maintain acceptable, normative behavior.

15 Ibid, 101.
̧ Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis:
16 Jean-Francois
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 10-12.
17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 76.

8
 Like Baudrillard and Lyotard, Foucault argued that language and communication

had been superimposed over reality, but unlike them he did not place it strictly in the

context of current technology. Instead, this control of language was a long-term (though

possibly subconscious18) process which helped to perpetuate the standing power

structures. In Feminism after Postmodernism, feminist historian Marysia Zalewski

explains, “for Foucault, those who define truth possess power.”19 For feminists, those in

power were men, and for postmodern feminists, gender was another truth which had been

defined by those in power. The complex relationship between postmodernism and

feminism which, as will be shown, became vital from the late 1970s on, was exemplified

in the emergence of cyborg feminism.

Cyborgs were introduced into feminist discourse in Donna Haraway's “Manifesto

for Cyborgs”, published in the Socialist Review 1985. In this “Manifesto”, Haraway

brought together the contextual arguments of the postmodern philosophers with a

widespread, deepening disillusionment with the mainstream political feminism of the

1960s and 70s. Haraway argued for the cyborg's usefulness as “a fiction mapping our

social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful

couplings.”20

The social reality to which Haraway was referring was the one in which gender

politics were tied into the divided into an array of dualisms of “mind and body, animal

and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices”21, a feminist reflection of

the power dynamic described by Foucault. Haraway was asserting the transgressive

18 Ibid, 20.
19 Marysia Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism: Theorising Through Practice (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 26.
20 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 8.
21 Ibid, 13.

9
potential of the cyborg both in and out of fictional narratives, in its capacity for

challenging clear delineations between traditional polarities like male/female, mind/body,

and science/nature. Ironically mimicking Baudrillard's sentiment, Haraway saw cyborgs

as “a creature in a post-gender world … oppositional, utopian, and completely without

innocence.”22 Because the cyborg was a composite being without strictly defined,

internalized boundaries, it served as a model for a “posthuman” existence, one which

Haraway believed had already come to pass.

The defining characteristic of the Haraway cyborg was its potential for

ambiguation and the blurring of boundaries which she identified as a tool of militarism

and patriarchal capitalism, of which the cyborg was the “illegitimate offspring”23. It

lacked history, culture, even definition, and could therefore serve as a blank slate for

cultural critique and a perfect expression of the desire to escape Lyotard's postmodern

condition. According to Judith Halberstam, a feminist historian and theorist, Haraway’s

cyborg was "a condensed image of both imaginative and material reality, the two joined

centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation."24 This image was

particularly useful for feminists who sought to avoid the ideological dangers of recourse

to an “authentic” female identity, which is one of the main postmodern feminist criticisms

of second-wave feminism25, which will be discussed shortly.

If this vision of a genderless, utopian cyborg seems unfamiliar, that's because it

rarely, if ever, has lived up to this idealized conception even in fiction. Haraway,

however, would later claim in a 1997 interview with Hari Kunzru that the cyborg was
22 Ibid, 9.
23 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 11.
24 Judith Halberstam, "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent
Machine", Feminist Studies 17, no. 3 (October 1, 1991): 439.
25 Marysia Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism: Theorising Through Practice (New York:
Routledge, 2000).

10
neither theoretical nor imaginary; by the late 1990s, Haraway was convinced that

everyone was already living a cyborg lifestyle in a postmodern reality26. Thus, Haraway

was not engaging in textual analysis of any particular fictional work; rather, the cyborg in

the “Manifesto” was a conceptual metaphor rooted in a postmodern reality, an “ironic

myth” of a post-gender future in which cyborgs transcend patriarchal dualisms, resist

paradigm and lack identity.

Haraway later explained that the paper was intended at the time to be a “nearly

sober socialist-feminist statement written for the Socialist Review to try to think through

how to do critique, remember war and its offspring, keep ecofeminism and technoscience

joined in the flesh, and generally honor possibilities that escape unkind origins.”27 To

understand these intentions, it is now necessary to explore the state of feminism in the

late 1970s and early 1980s.

Socialist feminism, of which Haraway was an adherent, was one of several strains

of feminist theory that developed out of growing discontent with the perceived class and

race disparity in feminist politics at the time. Ecofeminism, which Haraway described in

terms of its worrying technophobia, emerged during the same period as a reaction against

a perceived conflation of patriarchal militarism and the oppression of women and

“developing” nations.28 The parallel between these feminist theories highlights a general

shift in the perception of gender at the end of what is generally referred to as “second-

wave feminism”.

Imelda Whelahan, another feminist historian, pinpoints the origins of second-

26 Hari Kunzru, “You Are Cyborg,” Wired Magazine 5.02 (February 1997)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html (accessed December 2, 2009)
27 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 3
28 Colleen Mack-Canty, "Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture
Duality," NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (October 1, 2004).

11
wave feminism in the late 60s, when many feminists became disenchanted with existing

leftist political factions, which still tended to reinforce gender-typing despite nominal

progressivism.29 The focus of the second-wave (as opposed to the “first” wave) moved

the feminist bar forward from political inclusion (via voting) to social equality: equal pay

in the workplace, eradicating the illusion of the woman as an inferior domestic creature,

etc.

By the late 70s, feminism began to lose cohesion as a singular political

movement, due in part to dissatisfaction with what came to be thought of as a monolithic

construction of what it meant to be a woman, who counted and who did not. As

mentioned above, socialist feminism came to conflate gender with class construction, and

challenged “mainstream” feminists for playing at politics within a political system which

was already rigged in favor of patriarchal power and dominance. Feminists looking to

Marxist theory saw in class conflict a reflection of the struggle to power of women in the

domestic sphere and otherwise.30 Marxism also served as a stepping stone toward

postmodernism, in that Marxists “ostensibly repudiated purely essentialist notions of

human nature”31. It is from this socialist/anti-essentialist point of view that Donna

Haraway wrote the Manifesto; the cyborg represented a step toward postmodernist

feminism from the springboard of socialist feminism.

Whelahan points to the “tendency to attempt ‘ownership’ of feminism by the

hostile discrediting of another’s perspective, particularly through invidious hierarchies of

identity politics”32 as one of the primary challenges to second-wave feminism throughout

29 Imelda Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’
(New York: NY University Press, 1995), 1-5
30 Whelahan, Modern Feminist Thought, 47.
31 Ibid, 47.
32 Ibid, 127.

12
the late 70s and early 80s. Marysia Zalewski argues that, from the postmodern

perspective, the problem with second-wave feminism derived from the assumption that

there was an underlying, unified cultural identity around which a marginalized minority

could gather to support a political agenda; race and economic status were contending

with the notional identity of “woman”, fracturing the political power of each while

creating tension between an individual's identities.

Postmodern feminists argued that these constructs may have an adverse effect, in

that the “identity” in question simply caused smaller sub-groups to be excluded in turn.33

In effect, modernist feminists and postmodernist feminists each blamed the other for the

splintering of feminism. Since then, Zalewski argues that postmodernism is one of the

characteristics which has differentiated the “third-wave” feminism of the late 80s and

early 90s from the modernist, “second-wave” feminist movements of the 70s34 just as

second-wave feminists differentiated themselves from the “first wave” of the late

Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries by shifting their focus from political inclusion

to social equality, particularly in the workplace. In the 1980s, the move toward

postmodernism also signaled a visible breach between theoretical and political

feminism35. This breach was addressed by the next cyborg feminist writer, Anne

Balsamo.

In Technologies of the Gendered Cyborg, Anne Balsamo, a contemporary of

Haraway, addressed the fact that Foucault, in reading sexuality as a construct, failed to

follow through on his own ideas when he stopped short of reading the body itself as a

discursive space. In contrast to Haraway's “post-gender” cyborgs, Balsamo explored the

33 Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism, 67-68.

34 Ibid, 13-15.
35 Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought, 127.

13
cyborg as a social metaphor for of the female body in the context of Foucault's discursive

space, “the site at which we can witness the struggle between systems of social order”36;

her argument was that the cyborg, like the female body, stood at an intersection between

theoretical and social constructs and physical reality.

Balsamo challenged Haraway's cyborg as an unrealistic representation of post-

gender idealism. However, she did agree with the basic idea that “cyborgs offer a

particularly appropriate emblem of postmodern identity, since cyborg identity is

predicated on transgressed boundaries”37. It is illustrative of the postmodern influence on

feminist discourse that, by 1987, Balsamo was wary that “the material body [had] all but

disappeared from postmodern theory”38. In “Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism” Thus,

Foucault's postmodern interpretation of the construct of sexuality could be worked into

Haraway's cyborg metaphor to explore the way gender is constructed and deployed in a

technological society. The cyborg stood in a position at the cross section of feminist

theory, postmodern philosophy and a technological reality which included real-life

cyborgs in the form of female body builders, public pregnancy, and genetically

engineered mice39.

Cyborg feminism itself is, admittedly, still fairly obscure, and feminist writers

who have addressed the cyborg since Haraway and Balsamo (like Kakoudaki and Silver,

mentioned above) have largely focused on its literary implications. In 1994, Jenny

Wolmark incorporated the work of both Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo in her study

of feminist science fiction within the context of “the intersections between feminism,

36 Ibid, 39.
37 Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, 32.
38 Ibid, 12.
39 Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body; Balsamo devoted an entire chapter to each of
these concepts.

14
postmodernism and science fiction”40. Aliens and Others approached the cyborg from the

perspective of critical literary analysis, taking cyborg feminism in a different direction

than seems to have been intended by either Haraway or Balsamo. From that point,

cyborgs in feminist writings took two directions – as a literal vehicle for social critique

(including in Haraway's own work throughout the 1990s and 2000s), or as a metaphor for

gender construction in science fiction.

Though the cyborg is not central to the development of feminism as a whole, it

serves readily as a figurative, analytical tool with which the relationship between

postmodernism and feminism can be examined. The cyborg is the product of an age, a

period of drastic transformation in how we look at gender, at identity, at what it means to

be human; it is eradicates definition, and represents the bringing together of seemingly

disparate elements. In a postmodern era, the cyborg is a reflection of how culture is

constructed, a raw depiction of the underlying assumptions of its creators. This is the

argument of postmodern philosophers and feminists alike, a coupling readily embodied

by this creature of the 80s.

40 Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, 1994), 2.

15
Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Adams, Don. Inspector Gadget. The Original Series. Banyo, Qld.: Magna Pacific 1983
(2006).

Balsamo, Anne Marie. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Cameron, James, et al. The Terminator. Santa Monica, CA: MGM DVD, 1984 (2004).

Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics, September,
1960.

De Jarnett, Steve, et al. Cherry 2000. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment,
1987 (2001).

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978.

Forbes, Bryan, et al. The Stepford Wives: Widescreen Collection. Hollywood, Calif:
Paramount Pictures, 1975 (2004).

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s.” San Francisco: Center for Social Research and
Education, 1985. Repreinted in The Haraway Reader New York: Routledge,
2003.

Irving, Richard, et al. The Six Million Dollar Man. United Kingdom: Universal Studios,
1973 (2005).

Johnson, Kenneth, et al. The Bionic Woman. Sydney, N.S.W.: ABC Studios, 1976 (2001).

Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg.” WiredMagazine, February 1997.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html (accessed December 2,
2009).

̧
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and
History of Literature, v. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

16
Roddenberry, Gene, et al. Star Trek, the Next Generation: the Complete Series.
Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 1987 (2007).

Scott, Ridley, et al. Blade Runner. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1982 (2007).

Silver, Joel, et al. Weird Science. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home
Entertainment, 1985 (2008).

Sterling, Steve, et al. Voltron, Defender of the Universe. Collection One, Blue Lion. S.l.:
Anime Works, 1984 (2006).

Verhoeven, Paul, et al. RoboCop. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Home Video, 1987.

Wachowski, Andy, Larry Wachowski, Joel Silver, et al. The Matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner
Bros. Pictures, 1999 (2001).

Secondary Sources:

Alaimo, Stacy. "Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental

Feminism." Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): 133-152. America: History & Life,
EBSCOhost (accessed November 26, 2009).

Aylesworth, Gary, "Postmodernism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.

Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/postmodernism/>.

Halberstam, Judith. "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the

Intelligent Machine." Feminist Studies 17, no. 3 (October 1, 1991): 439.
http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed September 16, 2009).

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Kakoudaki, Despina. “Pinup and Cyborg: Exaggerated Gender and Artificial

Intelligence” in Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities
in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Marleen Barr, ed. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2000.

Mack-Canty, Colleen. "Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the

Nature/Culture Duality." NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (October 1, 2004): 154-179.
http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 27, 2009).

17
O'Brien, Jodi. Encyclopedia of Gender and Society. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009. “cyborg”

Sharp, Sharon. 2007. "Fembot Feminism: The Cyborg Body and Feminist Discourse in
The Bionic Woman". Women's Studies. 36, no. 7: 507-523.

Silver, A. K. 2002. "The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave
Feminism". The Arizona Quarterly. 58: 109-126.

Slusser, George and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000; Cyberpunk and the Future of
Narrative. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Springer, Claudia. “Pleasures of the Interface” in Wolmark, Jenny. Cybersexualities: A

Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999: 34-54.

Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-
Feminism’. New York: NY University Press, 1995.

Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.

Zalewski, Marysia. Feminism After Postmodernism: Theorising Through Practice. New

York: Routledge, 2000.

Additional Reading:

Kirkup, Gill. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London: Routledge (Open University),
2000.

Scott, Anne. 2001. "Trafficking in Monstrosity: Conceptualizations of 'nature' Within

Feminist Cyborg Discourses". Feminist Theory. 2, no. 3: 367-379.

Wajcman, Judy. Technofeminism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.

Walton, H. 2004. "The Gender of the Cyborg". Theology and Sexuality 10, no. 2: 33-44.

Wolmark, Jenny. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and

Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

18