Technology as Eros's Dart: Cyborgs as Perfect (Male?) Lovers

Vlasopolos, Anca. "Technology as Eros's Dart: Cyborgs as Perfect (Male?) Lovers."Foundation 73 (Summer 1998): 59-66.

Deals primarily with Marge Piercy's novel He, She and It, Susan Seidelman's MAKING MR. RIGHT, and The Leda (film anthology segment) in Inside Out (Playboy Productions, 1991).[1]

Vlasopolos generally speaks well of Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," and praises how Haraway "has taught a whole generation to rethink issues of feminism, socialism and technology," but Vlasopolos focusses here on "bodily, sexual pleasure, the kind of desire for which we are just now developing a language, and perhaps concomitantly the technology, namely, sexual pleasure from an Other's perspective — in this paper women's, but possibly also cyborgs' and marginal' (this last a pleasure more silenced than even the pleasures to which these works direct our attention)." In these three main works particularly, "transgression of boundaries between man and machine and the covert participation of women in the programming or 'socialization' of cyborgs makes the eroticism" subvert "the New Right's heterosexist ideal of not only what constitutes manhood but of the role of 'true motherhood' in the formation of masculinity" (p. 60).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 29Mar19