Cyborg

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, an entity that is a hybrid of organic material and machinery or technology. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline first proposed the term cyborg in considering how to adapt humans to the environment of space travel, rather than adapting the environment to the needs of the body. In a sense, most living humans are already cyborgs, to the degree that they are technologically modified organisms. Individuals who use prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, pain pumps, and such commonplace enhancements as eyeglasses, contact lenses, and hearing aids would technically fall into this category. Few individuals today exist as purely organic individuals who have remained technologically and mechanically unaltered from the womb. However, there are other elements of cyborg life that have less to do with the physical embodiment of the cyborg than with the connection to information systems.

Feminists have challenged patriarchal and phallocentric ideals, calling attention to how the physical body (sex) is often presumed to be the defining factor in a person's gender. More recently, feminists have also drawn on the idea of the cyborg as a liberatory concept, suggesting that one way to escape issues of sexual inequality is to escape sex itself, assuming a posthuman, or cyborg, body that defies categorization into clear binaries. This has led to a strand of cyberfeminism that exults in the potential subversion of power structures through technology. The clearest incarnation of this stance is found in the often quoted final line of Donna Haraway's essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”: “Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” For Haraway, what makes the cyborg particularly useful is its postmodern nature, that it is neither male nor female, and that it challenges traditional binaries. Some have critiqued Haraway's notion of the cyborg, arguing that it assumes a privileged, Western, educated stance and that cyborg life is not necessarily a liberatory condition of being. Others observe that despite Haraway's celebration of the end of dualities, she instead reinforces other dualities.

Although often used metaphorically in feminist discourse, the notion of the cyborg has become almost commonplace in popular culture, especially in science fiction. Images of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) and of Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies (1977–2005), as well as films such as The Terminator (1984), Blade Runner (1982), and Robocop (1987), depict a decidedly dystopian view of the cyborg as at once dangerous, murderous, and imbued with a deep disdain for weaker species such as completely organic humans. Indeed, many films, such as the Matrix series (1999–2003) and The Terminator depict technology's eventual war and victory over humankind—a notion that goes back to Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, complete with its own feminine robot.

Some films and television shows demonstrate a particularly feminine view of the dangers of cyborg existence, such as the Borg, with its queen and hive mind. Others depict female cyborgs, or gynoids, mainly as sex objects either for their creators' pleasure or for sale, as in the case of Cherry 2000 (1987) and Pris in Blade Runner (1982). Perhaps the ultimate dystopian vision of the female cyborg is found in The Stepford Wives (1975), in which intelligent, independent women are replaced by subservient, submissive gynoids. However, there are also strong feminine cyborgs in popular culture, such as Molly in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), and the 1970s television series (reprised in 2007) The Bionic Woman (although the latter seemed mainly to be a spinoff of The Six Million Dollar Man).

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