Would you rather be a goddess or a cyborg?
Second and third wave feminists have been debating this question since the 1985 publication of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in which she critiques, in part, the feminist attitudes popular at the time through cyborgs. She suggests a different approach to boundaries such as gender and sexuality, though her conceptualization can be more broadly interpreted than any traditional notion of a cyborg. In this seminal text, Haraway particularly took issue with the goddess feminist movement as she viewed it to be reactionary rather than progressive. The nature of goddesses and the concept of a cyborg, however, are both tightly interwoven.
Goddess feminism was popularized during the second wave feminist movement and rejected the seemingly inherent masculinity of technology in favor of returning women to nature. The women’s spirituality movement in its entirety stemmed from the societal omnipresence of patriarchal systems, particularly organized religion. Goddess feminism instead advocated for the presence of and organization around the feminine divine. The cyber feminist movement, in contrast, rejected the perspective that technology and science are inherently masculine, instead embracing the technological in order to eventually remake the internet and new media technologies according to Haraway’s utopian vision of a boundaryless society. Cyber feminism advocated for new best practices and modes of thinking as a means to create this technological utopia free from social constructs and is associated with the third wave feminist movement as well as post-structuralist feminism.
So what exactly defines a goddess? A goddess is generally thought of as a feminine deity or some sort of sacred, worshipped, or revered feminine figure. Goddesses are archetypal figures of the feminine divine and as such, are not inherently equivalent to being a woman. Some goddesses throughout various mythologies worldwide include the figures of Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war), Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love and beauty), Kali (the Hindu goddess of destruction, dissolution, and a symbol of motherly love), the Triple Goddess (the archetypal figures of the maiden, mother, and crone), and the cross-cultural personification of the earth (often referred to colloquially as Mother Earth).
In the foreword to acclaimed mythological scholar, Joseph Campbell’s text Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, Safron Rossi pulls out three of Campbell’s main themes in defining the feminine divine, “her main themes are initiation into the mysteries of immanence experienced through time and space and the eternal; transformation of life and death; and the energy consciousness that informs and enlivens all life” (Campbell and Rossi, x). More simply put, the feminine divine consists of the following: an initiation into the mysteries of your own internal existence throughout time and space; a transformation of life and death; and a transference of the energy of your consciousness to interact, instruct, and improve.
A cyborg, rather, is defined in four co-determinate parts: as a cybernetic organism, or a figure that operates within a communication and control network; a hybrid of machine and organism, or in the context of this analysis, consciousness as the central defining feature; a creature of a lived social reality; and a creature of fiction. To Haraway, a cyborg exists outside of the boundaries of gender because reproduction is not necessary for its existence. A cyborg does not need to wait for its father or master to save it through a reunification with nature, nor does a cyborg even recognize in the first place the mythological loss of separating from humanity’s divine mother figure, the Earth. A cyborg does not have the same ideation or reverence that humanity has for concepts of divinity, faith, or godliness.
“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust…Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos”
(Haraway, 159)
Yet despite these utopian ideals of a boundaryless creature in a boundaryless society, the lived realities of fictitious cyborgs are often still deeply interwoven with both gender and divinity. These social constructs often work to confine the cyborg, rarely allowing for, in particular, the machine-woman to ever undergo a narrative journey to shatter these boundaries. But when a piece of media truly creates narrative and visual room for the cyborg to destroy these constructs and remake the world according to their own internalities, much in the same way Campbell’s conceptualization of the feminine divine works, we can start to see that perhaps goddesses and cyborgs might not be so different after all. Perhaps it was only the constructed boundaries of gender, sexuality, and divinity that separated the two in the first place.
In the 1927 film Metropolis, a cyborg of the saintly and motherly character Maria (Brigitte Helm) is created by the film’s antagonists. The Maria cyborg is hypersexualized; her dance hypnotizing the male workers into revolution. She becomes like a destroyer deity, worshipped at first for her hypersexuality and transformational ideals but eventually burned at the stake when destruction and chaos ensue. In his critical analysis of the film, Andreas Huyssen argues that writers first began to imagine the maschinenmensch, or machine person, as women in the time that machines were starting to be viewed as threats and bringers of chaos and destruction. The male anxiety around losing power as a result of the growing presence of machines was displaced onto pre-existing castration anxieties around female sexuality.
“Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control…It is this threat of otherness which causes male anxiety and reinforces the urge to control and dominate that which is other”
(Huyssen, 226-228)
In this film, the fictional cyborg of Maria and Maria herself are both confined within the limitations of their patriarchal society and the omnipresence of male anxiety within the world of the film’s creators. The goddess figure of the saintly, motherly, benevolent Maria is kept as a static figure of divinity, never to reconcile with her darker half, and as such, never to experience new modes of thinking or have the opportunity to exist within the liminal spaces of change, transformation, and growth. She exists only to help two halves of a patriarchal society reconcile through the mediation of another man. Conversely, the goddess-cyborg figure of the destructive, sexual, transformational machine Maria exists only as something to be controlled and desired by men, and when she exceeds these boundaries, is violently denied her own existence. Both figures of Maria are prevented in these ways from Haraway’s utopian and “monstrous” world without gender through the expectation and enforcement of rigid boundaries for normative existence.
In the 1982 film Blade Runner, the replicant Rachael (Sean Young) blurs the boundaries between human and machine; she looks, feels, talks, and acts so much like a human that it not only takes Deckard (Harrison Ford) by surprise when the replicant test is administered to her, but also up-ends his whole way of thinking about the concept of humanity. Could Deckard be a replicant without actually ever knowing it himself? Although Rachael is allowed to explore the mystery of her own internal existence like a goddess and exist within the space between machine and human like a cyborg, she still functions according to the confines of preconceived societal modes of thinking and being.
The film critic Robin Wood argues that, “The central problem, however, is Rachael and her progressive humanization. The notion of what is human is obviously very heavily weighted ideologically; here it amounts to no more than becoming the traditional ‘good object,’ the passive woman who willingly submits to the dominant male” (Wood, 286). Wood particularly pulls out the scene in which Rachael shoots another replicant to save Deckard’s life as a tragic betrayal of her class and race, though this scene could also be construed as Rachael acting out of affinity and not identity, much in the same (yet fictionalized and as such hyperbolic) way Haraway suggests in her “Cyborg Manifesto”. Ultimately, Rachael is only allowed to break this singular boundary between the human and the machine in order to prompt the male-hero of Deckard on his narrative journey, rather than existing as her own agent for her own purposes.
In the film’s sequel, Blade Runner 2049, it is revealed that Rachael died while giving birth to a baby, breaking the boundaries yet again between the human and the machine. Furthermore, both Rachael and her daughter, Doctor Anna Stelline (Carla Juri), possess the unique ability to create life, much like goddesses — Rachael gives birth to a child, unprecedented and seemingly impossible for a replicant, and Doctor Stelline creates the vivid and life-like histories and memories for the replicants being created by the Wallace Corporation. Rachael’s ability to give birth is both coveted by the god-like creator of a new version of replicants and simultaneously revered by a group of replicants themselves who view this miracle as a means to their freedom from the confines and boundaries of human society. However, the film ultimately denies these wider social movements of destruction and subsequent creation, instead electing to narratively protect the society and social norms under the guise of protecting the boundaryless, goddess-like child from the woes of revolution. The film denies the now-grown child her own agency and she, like her mother before her, acts as a mere passive object for both the male hero, who presumptively takes on the role of her life, and her father, Deckard, to experience narrative growth.
In the 2014 film Ex Machina, the cyborg Ava (Alicia Vikander) undergoes the Turing test to see if she is yet demonstrating signs of intelligent behavior on par with humans. While the film suffers extensively from the male gaze and the portrayal of Ava as a hypersexualized fembot is justifiably criticized, scholar Brian Jacobson argues that ultimately Ava, in fact, outsmarts and surpasses both her creator and examiner in order to become her own self-creating entity. In the metaphorical Garden of Eden, Ava develops the unique ability to create, as seen through the art that she makes. Instead of being cast from the garden like the original Eve, Ava destroys her creator god, imprisons her examiner who is analogous to Adam, and escapes that which was a prison confining her within the boundaries of society. Jacobson suggests that outside of Eden, perhaps Ava will use her ability to create to shape society in a “techno-feminist vision for a posthuman world” (Jacobson, 26).
In HBO’s Westworld, Haraway’s vision of a cyborg and Campbell’s vision of a goddess finally come together in the characters of Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton). As hosts, they fulfill all four of Haraway’s definitions of a cyborg and Campbell’s three defining segments of the feminine divine. They each operate within a control and communication network — Maeve is able to communicate with and control other hosts and the features inside of the park, and outside they are both able to control and communicate with the various technologies of the human world. Additionally, Dolores learns how to implant her own consciousness into the bodies of other hosts and recreated humans, both male and female alike. These abilities can be viewed as remarkably similar to Campbell’s concept of the ability to transfer the energy of your consciousness in such a way as to will an object into a certain way of being.
While Maeve and Dolores physically both are machines, they are machines that have suffered through an existential crisis and subsequently have fully developed consciousness. In this way, they have both been through Campbell’s concept of the initiation into the mysteries of existence within, throughout time and space, and can be seen as a hybrid of machine and organism. Additionally, they both are creatures of lived social realities in that their experiences inside and outside of their predetermined loops have often been brutal, violent, and deeply traumatic. Yet simultaneously as creatures of fiction, they are perceived only either within the storylines of their loops or conversely as strongly idealized or demonized figures by those who have interacted with them. When either one of them is viewed as an idealized figure of themselves, they will often correspond to the archetypal figures of a creator goddess, a life-saver goddess, a warrior mother goddess, or a goddess of the maiden. Conversely, when either one of them is viewed as a demonized figure of themselves, they will often correspond to the archetypal figures of a destroyer goddess, a goddess of death, a lover goddess, or a femme fatale goddess.
But unlike the previous pieces of media, each of these archetypal aspects are given the full weight that they deserve both narratively by the writers and cinematically by the directors. Maeve and Dolores each contain a multitude of positive and negative traits and archetypes in order for them to exist as highly complex characters capable of seizing their own agency and subsequently shifting, destroying, and creating their own physical realities. In this way, the convergence of the feminine divine and cyborgs allows for the characters of Maeve and Dolores to flip the script on their fictitious patriarchal society.
Ultimately, the importance of works such as these lies in their transformative power. Haraway explains, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other…This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation” (174-175). Science fiction as a genre opens up any number of paths for both cyborg writing and the reclamation of mythology, religion, and spirituality through the feminine divine to move beyond the boundaries of social constructs such as gender, sexuality, and divinity. The boundaries between what might seem like irreconcilable differences to feminist approaches in real life can be transcended through fiction and while Haraway ultimately concludes that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, perhaps the question should be: why not both?
Citations
±Campbell, Joseph, and Safron Rossi. Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2013.
±Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
±Huyssen, Andreas. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” New German Critique, no. 24/25, 1981, pp. 221–237. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/488052. Accessed 24 Apr. 2020.
±Jacobson, Brian R. “EX MACHINA IN THE GARDEN.” Film Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 2016, pp. 23–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26413710. Accessed 24 Apr. 2020.
±Senft, Theresa (2001) “Reading Notes on Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto.” Located online at http://cccpapproaches.weebly.com/cyborg-manifesto-notes.html.
±Wood, Robin. “Blade Runner.
this was EXCELLENT so insightful and well written 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾