Working Title: “Cyborg Bodies: The Body, Technology and Disability Discourse in Pop Culture”

Working Title:

“Cyborg Bodies: The Body, Technology and Disability Discourse in Pop Culture”

The special issue of Cultural Studies on Disability, through or against a methodological framework of genealogy, focuses on “the ways that specific ‘experiences’ of disability come into being and are articulated within specific cultures, institutions and practices” (Diedrich 651). In other words, each article in the issue is concerned with how discourses of disability are enacted and articulated “within specific cultures, institutions and practices.” Building off this focus, my aim is to explore the ways the relationship between body and technology in popular culture has been used to enact and articulate discourses of disability. What I’m particularly interested in is how these discourses shape our cultural understandings of disability.

For this reason, I turn to representations of cyborg bodies in popular culture texts as my media object in focus. In particular, I look to cyborg bodies in science fiction texts. Margrit Shildrick in “The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability” argues that disability signifies vulnerability, and thus creates a “deep anxiety…at the level of both the individual psyche and the cultural imaginary” (765). In other words, the self’s fear of the other within the self creates a deep anxiety of difference that is played out both individually and in the cultural imaginary. Thus, it is through these science fiction texts, I argue, that our deep anxieties about disability in the cultural imaginary, as noted by Margrit Shildrick, are played out.

One such text is a short film called True Skin. The film imagines a future of cyborg-bodied humans, where technologies have gradually replaced the organic matter of human bodies, thus creating a dichotomy between cyborg-bodied humans and organic humans, in which organic human bodies are framed within discourses of disability (and devalued), and technologically enhanced bodies are framed within a notion of the normal.

Furthermore, technologies are employed in the everyday as enhancements to social and cultural practices of the body. Technologies, within a framework of disability, are often deployed as assistive technologies, functioning to assist or repair bodies marked by difference. With the rapid development of technologies, bodies marked by difference are subjected to technological interventions. It is here that a notion of the “normal,” as delineated by disability scholar Lennard Davis, can allow us to broaden our understandings of disability discourse.

In addition, I want to use Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self,” as outlined below, to explore how technologies are deployed in the representation of cyborg bodies to articulate notions the self, the “normal,” and power, as they intersect with discourses of disability.

…technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (16).

Thus, by using representations of the cyborg body as my media object, I aim to explore the ways a relationship between body and technology in popular culture is used to enact and articulate discourses of disability and how these discourses shape our cultural understandings of disability.

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Diedrich, Lisa. "Introduction: Genealogies Of Disability." Cultural Studies 19.6 (2005): 649-66. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "Technologies of the Self." Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1988. 16-49. Print.

Shildrick, Margrit. "The Disabled Body, Genealogy And Undecidability." Cultural Studies 19.6 (2005): 755-70. Print.