Caught in the mirror: Fictional representations of "cyborgs" and "serials" in postmodern American technoculture.

• Main Author: Lefèvre, Jocelyn.
• Other Authors: Jarraway, David
• Format: Others
• Published: University of Ottawa (Canada) 2009
• Subjects: Women's Studies.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6370; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-11236

Cultural fragmentation in Postmodern America has led to a destabilization of the political sphere and created a climate of change and possibility, one in which socialist-feminist Donna J. Haraway labours to redefine feminist politics by constructing a borderless and especially, genderless, cyborg subjectivity. "Cyborgs" and "serials" are figures of social and fictional "reality," that, together, reflect the normalizing, hierarchical, and psychologically traumatic aspects of operational Harawayan cyborgology. Chapter 1 explores the practical limits of the hybridity and fluidity characteristic of Harawayan cyborg subjectivity and politics to suggest that processes of political normalization are far less easily dismantled in practice than they are in theory. This discussion focuses on the persistent influence of sex/gender dualism on hierarchical structures in technoculture, a persistence illustrated in science fiction novels by James Tiptree, Jr. and Vonda McIntyre. Chapter 2 looks at how race influences the divergence of feminist agendas by engendering the mutually exclusive, racially influenced perspectives of both Harawayan cyborg politics and radical U.S. feminism. Two science fiction stories by Octavia E. Butler, a black American writer, illustrate the translation of gender hierarchy into racial hierarchy. A sensitivity to this rearticulation of oppression seems to be missing from cyborg politics. Finally, Chapter 3 investigates the psychoanalytic trauma of fragmentation, multiplicity, and fusion through the psychopathology of serial killers in order to question Haraway's emphasis on, what is for her, the "liberating" and "creative" quality of a psychological state that is, for these criminals, the source of psychosis and aggression. This chapter explores what I consider to be the "serial" side of Harawayas "cyborg," in a crime fiction novel by Gordon Lish.