Session 4a: The Cyborg I: Evolution and Revolution of the Human Body
Chair: Adrienne Massanari

Surgically Altered Bodies in The Female Man
Cristina Alfonso-Ibanez
UNED, Spain

The Female Man, a dystopia written by Joanna Russ in 1975, takes place in four worlds, or universes of probability, inhabited by four very different women who share the same genotype: Jeannine Dadier (who lives in 1969 in an impoverished America that never recovered from the Great Depression), Joanna (who also lives in 1969, but in an America like the one we know, and who merges at times with the author), Janet Evason (who lives in the all-female utopian future of Whileaway), and Alice Reasoner, christened Jael (who lives in the dystopian future where Womanlanders are at war with Manlanders). These worlds constitute “worlds of possibility”, but are not linearly related, so neither Whileaway nor Jael’s world is “our future”.
Jael herself is part robot, a cyborg, with surgical claws and steel teeth hidden under plates that look like human teeth (181-82) and with which she can coolly rip apart men who annoy her while calmly proclaiming: “I don't give a damn whether it was necessary or not .... I liked it” (184). But she is not a monster, Jael is the ultimate guide in the book, she brings together all the
other aspects of herself, “It came to me several months ago that I might find my other selves out there in the great, gray might-have-been” (160). These other three selves find themselves in a near future in which men and women wage a cold war, according to Jael “The only war that makes sense” (164). They wonder at this world in which men and women are separated and no men are allowed into Womanland, nor women into Manland. But while Womanland does have male robots, such as Jael’s “toy boy”, Manlanders alter human beings in an attempt to escape homosexuality “All the real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal”.
The one who wonders most at this new world’s peculiarities is Janet Evason, from Whileaway, for men disappeared centuries ago from her world and the only relationship she has known has been with other women. Thus, unlike Whileaway, Jael’s world reinscribes the straight mind and in Wittig’s terms, it is an unsuccessful revolution against heterosexual institutions because it merely “substitute[s] women for men (the Other for the One)” (Ayres).

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"Your Body is your Battleground": Lust-Machines, Cyberflesh and Man-Meat in the Film "Tetsuo" (Shinya Tsukamoto; Jap., 1989)
Heinrich Deisl
Vienna, Austria

Out of some specific reasons, the B/W-movie “Tetsuo. The Iron Man” (1989) by the Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto (b. 1960, Tokyo) indicates one of the most powerful and stringent articulations in contemporary cinema concerning the topos of the “Man-Machine-interaction”. Chronologically, Tsukamoto’s third full time movie “Tetsuo” is on the verge to a period, when cyberspace became a Neuromancer’s virtual reality, formerly known as Oz-Land.
After a car crash, the protagonist in “Tetsuo” starts to transform himself, he inserts metal-parts into his body and mutates to the perfect symbiosis of the constructivist man-machine, born out of some post-nuclear Manga hallucinations.
“Tetsuo” deals with the simple – yet not fulfil-able – proposal of a “perfect” body through the integration of fragments of nowadays’ technology. This constructivist idea is one of the leading topoi of (post-)modern times, thus still subversive in its sociological, communicative and psychological frameworks. “Tetsuo” is an erotic dream about steel and flesh, where pain transforms into pleasure and vice versa. Irritating and beautiful, is “Tetsuo” a visually highly dramatized example of a coherent “Man-Machine-Interaction” (MMI). It is an artistic articulation between analogue and digital body-relations in time and space: The act of transformation equals a re-birth through technology.
“Tetsuo” proposes a view how to argue sociologically and in terms of film history the ongoing debate of the MMI in the context of cyberculture.

Agenda/ Proposals:

1) Historical (film-)background of the “Man-Machine-interaction”: “Metropolis”, Russian Constructivism, “eXistenZ”, “The Wizard of Oz”, Japanese Cyborgs, “Matrix” etc.
How was/ is the topic of the MMI treated in film as an artistic, yet mass-appealing articulation?
2) But, by the way, what’s a Cyborg? Sociologic, communicative, economic, psychological and aesthetic arguments for/ against cyber orga[ni]sms.
Some framework ideas about cyborgs: How’s the controller and who’s the controlled? Do cyborgs dream of electronic flesh?
3) The communicative-narrative setting of the MMI: “Tetsuo” as a strategy for the transformation of the body to a rational – but yet subversive – communication.
The MMI means an alternative to the canonized interactions between individuals: How to become your own metal god.
4) Transformations of the body: “Tetsuo” in the framework of historical relations (Vienna’s Actionism, Industrial music, Virtual Reality, Mangas) to deliver arguments for a better tomorrow’s understanding.
How to re-territorialize our bodies.