With the shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism, our culture has become increasingly concerned with the problem of how to represent subjects in a technologized world. Traditionally, dominant conceptions of the subject have relied on Western metaphysics; naturalized monolithic categories arranged in hierarchic binary oppositions: male/female, human/machine, subject/object, etc. In this system, the discourse of science maintains an isomorphic and mutually reinforcing relationship with the discourse of heterosexuality, since each posits an active, masculine subject and a passive, feminine object.
However, the sciences of contemporary capitalism are marked by technologies of reproduction and simulation which transform the world into a web of interconnected, overlapping information codes, asking us to reconsider our “natural” binary distinctions. While these questions have sparked a lively debate concerning technology and the representation of “naturally” gendered bodies, there has been less discussion about the specific ways in which the term “reproduction” links the discourses of science and gender.
Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, test tube conception, and genetic manipulation challenge our concepts of human reproduction, transforming bodies from unified organic units to strategic and manipulable systems. Furthermore, these new ways of thinking about human bodies undermine the biological justification for traditional heterosexual gender identities: if all reproduction is redefined as technological, then normative or “natural” gender roles must be reconsidered as well.
Understandably, this denaturalization of bodies provokes a great deal of both hope and fear about the status of gender relations. Borrowing from Donna Haraway, I argue that contemporary narratives explore this ambivalence though the metaphor of the cyborg, the part-organic, part-technological creature whose hybrid body marks it as a “signifying monster. ” This monster occupies a “destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives” precisely because it reminds us that identity itself is a mere construct, something which is performed rather than essential.
Furthermore, by its very nature the cyborg is intimately linked to issues of reproduction. Cyborgs are constructed rather than born; as such, they are potentially subject to the programming of their creators. At the same time, the cyborg is freed from “biology as destiny”; its ability to regenerate and recombine its own components allows for the possibility of new identities and ways of connecting with others.
While the cyborg has long been a standard science fiction trope, I argue that this figure has enjoyed a renewed popularity in the last two decades, as advanced technologies become increasing available to the general public. In particular, the cyborgs of popular films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park reflect our complex and sometimes contradictory hopes and fears about reproduction and sexual identity in the postindustrial episteme.
In these movies, the technological replication of bodies is presented as a threat to humanity, as androids and dinosaurs usurp “traditionally” human cognitive abilities and blur the boundaries between animals, people, and machines. Significantly, these “signifying monsters” function as a critique of postindustrial reproductive technologies, playing on traditional anxieties about scientific pride and its potentially disastrous effects.
In doing so, the films reassert the distinction between technological and biological reproduction: Blade Runner’s androids infiltrate Earth in a desperate attempt to find and control the codes of their own DNA, while chaos ensues in Jurassic Park when the previously single-sexed (female! ) dinosaurs spontaneously change sexes and begin breeding. Since these cyborgs are ultimately coded as feminine objects, this critique of technology entails a disruption and denaturalization of traditional gender codes.
The new crisis is met and overcome by the (human) protagonists’ ability to work together as a team, a team which is only effective after the couples become romantically involved. In order to imagine an effective individual agency in a technological era, then, both films ultimately must make such agency synonymous with heterosexual union and traditional gender identities. Blade Runner and Jurassic Park seem to equate successful subjectivity with traditional notions of gender and biology; however, this reading alone is only part of the story.
Film itself is a kind of cybernetic narrative, with codes of information interacting both diachronically and synchronically to produce meaning. Thus, while some codes do work together to reinforce traditional subject positions, historical shifts in one may alter the ways in which we interpret others. By extending my examination of these movies to consider the interplay of technology and gender at the technical as well as diegetical levels, I argue that we gain a better understanding of the contradictory ways that “gender” signifies in our culture and its representations.
Both Scott and Spielberg make specific editing choices and juxtapose historical styles (such as cyberpunk, noir, and Victorian) that undermine the seamless reality of their films, consistently reminding us of their status as artificial reproductions. In turn, this asks us to question the seemingly natural cohesion of the romantic plots, to consider the ways in which gender positions, especially as linked to “biology,” are cyborg artifacts constructed and naturalized by discursive structures.
Finally, I briefly consider these two films vis-a-vis the larger problem of identity and agency in the postindustrial era. To a certain extent, both Blade Runner and Jurassic Park leave their viewers at an impasse: while the newer discourses of technological reproduction reveal the limits of gender identity as prescribed by biological narratives, they offer neither new identities nor new forms of agency to replace our old models.
Unlike the films’ protagonists, we do not have the luxury of retreating from the postindustrial world; how, then, are we to re-imagine our relations within it? While neither Blade Runner nor Jurassic Park offers answers to this question, I caution against dismissing them as merely ambivalent embodiments of “postmodern angst. ” Instead, we must acknowledge them as genuine efforts to speak the complexity of cybernetic existence, and, as cyborgs ourselves, use them as a starting point from which to read — and perhaps reweave — the cultural webs of power.