Critical Annotated Webliography by Ellis Wong

“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” asks Donna Haraway. Discuss the idea of skin in relation to how we might imagine our future embodiment.

1. Asberg, Cecilia. “Enter Cyborg: Tracing the Historiography and Ontological Turn of Feminist Technoscience Studies.” International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (2010).

http://feministtechnoscience.se/wp/wp-content/uploads/enter-cyborg-international-journal-of-feminist-technoscience-v-1_1.pdf (accessed 12 March 2011).

• The writer first defines cyborg as a hybrid, not entirely human and not entirely woman. It is also defined as the combination of body and technology, flesh and steel. The article chases back the history of cyborg from the era of Cold War to the present. Asberg points out the trouble encountered with biology and nature when discussing the existence of cyborg. She mentions that cyborg blurs the boundary of gender. For instance, reproductive technologies like artificial insemination and gestation outside the womb were to free women from pregnancy, child birth and nurturance. The writer cites the argument by a feminist biologist and science scholar Lynda Birke that “the biological body has been pushed aside in its real, material, and fleshy dimensions; the body has been favoured merely as a cultural identity”. Birke admits that the effectiveness of representations and cultural inscriptions on the body surface, seem to have made the actual body disappear in the process. At the last part of the article, the writer explains the view of Donna Jeanne Haraway, a pivotal figure of interdisciplinary feminist cultural studies of science, towards cyborg.

2. Cordeiro, Jose Luis. “Future Life Forms among Posthumans.” Journal of Future Studies 8 (2003): 65-72.
http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/8-2/07.pdf (accessed 12 March 2011).

• Cordeiro mentions that as the world is moving fast towards the fourth wave, humans will become transhumans, and then posthumans. The writer foresees that due to technology advances, human species can be redesigned in the future. He also sees humans will re-engineer their biological constitutions, and introduce silicon, steel, and microchips into human bodies. He defines transhumanism as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the possibilities for overcoming biological limitations through scientific progress. Therefore, humans may extend their longevity and enhance their intellectual, physical and emotional capacities. Cordeiro doubts the changes in human body will raise controversy in human identity and moral status as human beings. He cites the review for the possible scenarios for humanity in the year 3000 suggested by two US futurists Jerome Glenn and Theodore Gordon. In the review, the two US futurists see in the year 3000, there will be the rise and the fall of Robot Empire. So, the future life forms of human beings may change. However, this change raises the concern about morality. The writer finally concludes that the change in human forms may be like the rapid process of caterpillars becoming butterflies, in which opposed to the slow evolutionary passage from apes to humans.

3. Gaggioli, Andrea, Marco Vettorello, and Giuseppe Riva. “From Cyborgs to Cyberbodies: The Evolution of the Concept of Techno-Body in Modern Medicine.” Psychnology Journal 1 (2003): 75-86.

http://www.psychnology.org/File/PSYCHNOLOGY_JOURNAL_1_2_GAGGIOLI.pdf (accessed 28 February 2011).

• The authors discuss the technologies in modern medicine in changing collective notions of the body. The article explains the two conceptualisations of the body, which are cyborgs and cyberbodies. The definitions of the two models have also been given. Cyborgs, in its original conception, are linked to the world of cells, neurons, blood and biological processes. Cyberbodies can be defined as wireless, inorganic entity, made of pure bits of information. The authors describe these as “post-body”, “post-biological”, or “post-human”. They argue that “cyborgs” and “cyberbodies” are characterised by a fundamental distinction. They claim that the definitions of the two models assume people no longer will have a direct sense of body, but a mediated sense of body. Moreover, some examples on adding artificial materials to human bodies are given. However, the authors cite the writing of Donna Haraway in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” about the potential of the cyborg disrupting traditional categories to explain that such artificial materials violate the difference between human and machine. On the other hand, the authors introduce the concept of the transparent body, which is the body surrounded by smart clothes or intelligent textiles. Regarding this, human bodies may be visible from the outside by embodied imaging.

4. Ivers, Christi. “(Inter) Facing the Other: An Analysis of the Role of Cyborg Partiality in Constructing Identity.” The Universal Journal of the Association of Young Journalists and Writers (2006).

http://ayjw.org/articles.php?id=598443 (accessed 28 February 2011).

• The writer agrees humans have a strong sense of identity in facial features. Humans use faces to recognize the one they know and express their emotion by giving different facial expressions. Ivers postulates that if humans’ facial features were removed and wiped way, and replaced with other things like a hybrid face, one’s ability to perceive the other’s identity may have to change. The writer cites the question, “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”, which was raised by Donna Haraway in her essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, to explain that far from being individualized, identity constantly changes and depends on interactions with external elements – humans, machines, animals, technology. On the other hand, Ivers discusses the example of Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old woman whose face was brutally savaged by a dog and then experienced the surgery of face transplant from a brain-dead woman, in order to show that human can possess a collective identity. It is because after the surgery, Dinoire has a hybrid face which combines both the appearance of herself and the organ donor. The writer finally urges humans to release their individuality and to accept the partial identity of cyborg.

5. Kull, Anne. “Symposium on Technology: Speaking Cyborg: Technoculture and Technonature.” Zygon 37(2002): 279-288.

http://hm.mtnet.org/docs/cyborg.pdf (accessed 28 February 2011).

• The author examines the definition of technoculture and technonature by investigating the relationship between human beings and animals, organism and machine, physical and nonphysical. Kull cites the definition of technoscience given by Donna Haraway and the term ‘cyborg’- the hybrid of cybernetic machine and organism - to show that there is the combination of culture and nature, technological and organic. She claims that human beings are evolutionary, emerging, changing beings, a symbiosis of genes and culture. Humans are seen as evolutionary beings because they are a combination and degree of traits. Kull also asserts human bodies are decorated, mutilated, disguised, hidden and displayed. She argues that part of the uniqueness of humans is their drive to build their own bodies and tools, and later, machines. The author sees the future that humans may enter into symbiotic relationships with intelligent machines. However, she questions that how seamlessly humans can be hybridized since machines remain distinctively different in humans’ embodiment.