by Nina Zhuo
The Cyborg, as defined by Haraway, exists somewhere between the human and the nonhuman and, as a result, fits into neither of those categories. Politically, it is an outcast, at once natural and artificial, but singular in a way that no Artificial Man (in the Hobbesian conception) can be. It is at once collective and individual, unable to serve a human Leviathan because it also serves a mechanic one. The Cyborg challenges the Leviathan, acting as a controlled reproduction of the natural Leviathan using the artificial and is thus a product of the Anthropocene according to Lakitsch. It is a call to the state of nature the Leviathan is meant to be antithetical to, giving agency to both human and nonhuman in one body. The coexistence of the two can be understood using Grewal’s reading of Hobbes and the domestic analogy, separating the human and the nonhuman into two well-organized entities, one natural one artificial, that are able to cooperate with each other because each side serves itself in order to serve the complete body.
As Boucher writes, it is the erotic that drives human passion and the philosophic that allows physical and intellectual pleasure to merge. The cyborg, however, cannot be truly erotic in the same way that a completely human entity can because, for Hobbes, the erotic is at least somewhat biologically functional, whether that be reproductive or otherwise. Because parts of the cyborg cannot adapt to natural bodily functions, it will always be grounded in the material, its eroticism diluted by the presence of something unnatural and Other. However, desire and the very human pursuit of it coexists with the Other, creating a yet more unnatural hybrid of the acceptable and the unacceptable. In other words, the Cyborg takes the normative and distorts, creating an entity that is completely new and completely disruptive. The Cyborg forces the reinvention of the Leviathan, calling for it to adapt to the shifting realities within its citizenry.
What comes immediately to mind for me is the cisgendered gay white man. When the cis gay white man entered into popular culture, he embodied the normal-abnormal dynamic inherent to Cyborgs, taking a normative social identity (cis white manhood) and Othering it with his nonconformity to traditional doctrines of heterosexuality. He was shocking as a presence until he was adopted as a larger media phenomenon, especially through the creation of the GBF (Gay Best Friend) archetype. He has since become a new normal, his performance of femininity and loyalty to his image as an accessory for the “woke” heterosexual making him a caricature of actual gay people while simultaneously making him representative all of queer cultures. His specific brand of queerness is adopted into popular culture as a normative and acceptable version of queerness because he still centers on a strictly heterosexual narrative. Similar caricatures of marginalized people are represented across all medias to be adopted as a normalized abnormality, but this particular caricature—because he remains cisgendered, white, and male—maintains a level of humanity and perceived eroticism that allows him to Other queer people who are may not be cis, white, or male. This creates a never-ending process of redefinition and subtextual marginalization that, much like law, refuses break out the dichotomy of normal and abnormal.
Video on pinkwashing and the “norming” of gay pride: https://youtu.be/J4LP0z493oY