Webliography
5. If popular culture has taken up the cyborg as a figure of process, what happen to the way race is represented? (this question can be applied to any form of pop culture)
Sherman, Yael (2004) ‘Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque.’ Thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture and transgressive sexualities, 3. http://www.thirdspace.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/sherman/179
The articles use of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a course of analysis, addresses the guiding question in terms of popular culture processes. The article refers to the series as a site of popular culture consumption, creation, expression and process, where political dimensions of space and body are transformed. The Representation of race is discussed as a metaphoric device, referring directly to Buffy’s half-human, half-demon dualism as ‘the privileged site of metaphoric race’. The “dualism” of characters’ race is discussed in relation to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg oganism, directly referring A Cyborg Manifesto. Races represented in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, like that of Haraway’s cyborg, embrace partiality, is monstrous, transformative and defiant of “natural” order. The articles additional analytical platform, Gloria Anzaldua's well-known book, Borderlands, provides the article with scholarly and resourceful information. Anzaldua’s book is discussed within the article in terms of racial and cultural marginalization and exile. This further provides possible avenues of racial analysis, particularly to do with physical locations and contemporary technological territories. The article would support the guiding question, in particular, discussion concerning televisual representations of race, and contemporary themes and perceptions surrounding the cyborg, i.e. vampires and animal-human dual races.
Bailey, Cameron (1996) ‘Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace,’Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeads, ed. Immersed in Technology: Arts and Virtual Environments (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 29-46.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=7FGTVGs64RsC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=virtual+skin+bailey&source=bl&ots=Ar-MtJbIL5&sig=CbGjNDUenE2CckL52Wt011bnM6A&hl=en&ei=HV6HTPemMcbJcZnfxJ4I&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=virtual%20skin%20bailey&f=false
(accessed 6 Sept 2010)
This article is relevant to the question as it focuses heavily on virtual race as a process of representation. The representation of racial identity online is clearly outlined as a transformative process, ‘often chosen, played with, subverted or foreground as a construct’ (p. 335). The malleable nature of online identities in this case, embodies conceptual qualities of cybernetic organisms. The Internet is a prominent domain of popular culture in the contemporary digital environment. Online communication, based on representation through a textual interface, along with a mere online presence, is standard and increasingly expected of popular cultural mediums. The article details the technicalities and online tools involved in the process of identity manifestation, as well as relevant conceptual and theoretical arguments stemming from this. For example, the maintaining awareness of the physical body, within cyber environments, a virtual articulation of habeas corpus, and its connection with racial identity. The article additionally references a number of reliable and scholarly books, novels, essays and case studies. It would support the exploration of cyborg identities and bodies, within cyberspace and popular culture as a racialized environment.
McGinnis Kati (2010) ‘Gender Performance, Transgression and the Cyborg in Battlestar Galactica.’ Oculus. 1, pp. 72-76. http://www.dsq-sds.org/index.php/juros/article/viewFile/1256/1267 (accessed Sept 4 2010)
This article uses an evident form of popular culture, the television series Battlestar Galactica, as a means of analysis and is thus accordant to the question. Additionally the article addresses notions of the cyborg, directly referencing Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. The representation of one of the series’ characters, as described by McGinnis, clearly reflects the common trend in popular cultural processes of the cyborg. “She is a contradictory mish-mash of dichotomies: masculine/feminine, human/machine, active/passive, bio- logical/mechanical, rational/emotional, and so on. She is no longer the sexualized “other”, but now a recognizable cyborg” (p.75). Although the article is generally concerned with the gender performance and transgression, these concepts are discussed with an underlying context of race, in particular, the manifestation of cyber race. Race is, however discussed using a specific and credible analysis of the “Cylon” enemy, a cybernetic race created by humans. This exemplifies a fear of the “other”, a classic, apocalyptic narrative conventional to popular culture representations of race and technology. A brief passage about the author renders the article a credible and scholarly resource, acknowledging her specialised study into representations of race and gender within popular culture at the Ohio State University.
Scott, Kristina (1997) ‘The Cyborg, the Scientist, the Feminist & Her Critic.’ http://www.feministezine.com/feminist/philosophy/Cyborg-Scientist-Feminist.html (accessed 4 September 2010)
The article’s analysis of technology as discourse, environment, techno-phobia, gender, sex and reproduction, all pertain to the human race as a whole. Scott’s article further supports and explores Haraway’s perception of “natural” as highly subverted within the cyborg age, and her critique of the “false organic self”. She also notes the concept of modern forms of subjectivity, fetishized perspectives and cybernetic political vision. Race and racialized ideologies can be investigated as an extension of these ideas. Scott’s critique of Haraway’s “capitalist coding and systems theory” can similarly be used as a platform for the analysis of racial theories.
Christopher Hight (2003) ‘Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity.’ Leonardo, 36. pp. 13-17. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/stable/1577272 (accessed Sept 6 2010)
Hight’s article explores racial identity and representation through music and sound as a form of popular culture, providing an alternative avenue of racial and technological analysis. The article uses a number of supportive case studies in the discussion of “black” and “white” racial conciseness and compartmentalization in terms of music. The generic African-American rap narrative of empowerment, so common within popular culture films and music, also provides an insight into racialized processes of popular culture. Technologies of sound, are discussed with relation to the cyborg, for example the article quotes Jacques Attali's theoretical text Noise: A Political Economy of Music (1985). "Mechanisms for recording and reproduction on the one hand provide a technical body, a framework for representations, and on the other hand by presenting themselves as double, constitute a simulation of that power, destroy the legitimacy of representation” (p.16). This modern technology is further discussed in terms of the liberal, reproducing media consumer, highlighting a shift away from institutional power. Racialized ideologies and processes can thus be discussed in accordance with technology, dominance, preconceived ideologies and the popular culture music industry.
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