Performing cyborgs

Abstract

Emerging in American, Science Fiction films in the 1970s, the figure of the cyborg has become the site upon which ideas of postmodern experience and identity are played out. In the 1980s the cyborg became a mainstay of Science Fiction film and mainstream cinema bombarded the viewing public with images of hyper-masculinity in the presentation of characterisations like the Terminator, Robocop and the universal soldier. Since then, many different forms of cyborgian identity have appeared in films and, more recently, have provided the spectator with a startling array of cyborgian configurations. These have not necessarily been limited to the playing out of white masculinity but have also offered depictions that more readily bring into focus issues of female representation and images of racial difference. Not all of these films have been mainstream, Hollywood productions (many of my examples are more low budget, direct to video fare) but all offer the opportunity for focusing upon perceived shifts away from a traditional, humanist subjectivity. In an age in which humans appear to share centrality with machines, with the various technologies of the postmodern era, the cyborg-hybrid can therefore be understood as an important figuration 'standing at the threshold separating the human from the posthuman' (Hayles, 1995).

Through the filmic image of the cyborg, this thesis examines the ways in which issues of sexuality, gender and race are being depicted within Science Fiction cinema. By drawing upon a wide range of disciplines (e.g. feminist theory, postcolonial theory, film and genre theory, postmodern theory and sociological theory) the thesis aims to explore both residual and emergent inherent in these dramatisations of postmodern subjectivity. In particular, emphasis is placed upon precisely how the cyborg is performed and, in this respect, reference is made to performance theory as an illuminating tool in the analysis of cyborgian figurations.

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