Babies born through new techniques of in vitro fertilisation, insemination by donor or through surrogacy, disrupt far more radically than the nineteenth century could ever imagine the link between sexuality and reproduction. But it is the grotesque of our transition – the cyborg – which symbolises the total acceptance and incorporation of science and technology into our lives.
The cyborg, half-human, half-machine, has appeared in countless popular films for the last few decades, and increasingly inhabits our popular culture. Such a figure also captures anxieties and age-old fears.Through the female robot of films such as Metropolis the twentieth-century fear of technology out of control can be displaced on to older fears about untrammelled female sexuality as a threat to social order. But feminist computer artists appropriate these images and fears of female sexuality, and project powerful electronic women, deadly rays flashing from their genitalia.
Publication Details
- Type
- Book
- Author
- Publication
- Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life, pp. 244–245, 1997, English
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
- ISBN
- 0 521 49736 1
Attached Files
- Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life. Alison MacKinnon, 1997, pp. 244–245 [pdf 1.95MB]