Science Fiction Studies
#81 = Amount 27, Component 2 = July 2000
The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg plus the Console Cowboy
One significant part of modern technofetishism may be the intensification of y our social lust for brand new technologies. We come across such “technolust” celebrated in Wired magazine’s regular “Fetish” spot; this covers a variety of new items from technical devices including the MindDrive—a sensor sleeve that slips onto the index little finger for all those game players whom tire of holding a joystick—to brand brand brand new and much more manly means of eating ginseng. As Tim Barkow writes, “Brewing up tea as a boon to your manhood simply too femme? A means of getting your daily dose of ginseng that’s as butch as the root’s reputation at last there’s. ” (65).
Wired’s ginseng fetish is exposing, for just what has reached stake listed here is not merely a kind of commodity fetishism. Wired’s advertisement evokes a psychoanalytic framework in that the fetish wards from the danger of feminization. The sight of which can be a source of castration anxiety for the male subject in orthodox psychoanalytic readings, it is always the woman who is fetishized; the fetish masks her horrifying lack of sexual difference. The fetish stands set for the woman’s missing phallus and facilitates the disavowal of her “castration, ” protecting the male topic through the looked at his very own feasible “feminization. In this reading” The new form of ginseng as a phallic fetish in similar fashion, Wired promotes. Faced because of the castrating possibility of brewing tea, a man subject is conserved because of the brand brand brand new, technologically-advanced, and accordingly butch ginseng, which functions as a fetish that is phallic shoring within the masculinity of this implied reader of Wired mag. He, presumably, may be the brand brand new technoman in technolust along with his different fetishes or technoprosthetics, that are desirable simply because they assist to reestablish their masculinity in a continually fragmenting, decentered, and world that is chaotic.
The technoman’s home is in science fiction in popular culture. And it’s also sf that provides us most abundant in fascinating dreams by which technology runs as fetish and prop for the thought masculinity in a postmodern and context that is posthuman. The hypermasculine cyborg and the console cowboy are, in fact, both creations of fetishistic fantasies in this paper I will argue that sf offers two main models whereby masculinity is fetishized, and that, despite their apparent differences. I shall additionally claim that the fetish need perhaps not continually be phallic and therefore cyberpunk’s event of technology as a sexual and commodity fetish indicates, from time to time, a postmodern aesthetics of hybridity. Unlike the phallic fetish that creates a conservative paradigm of imaginary sexual sameness in just a sexual economy of wholeness and shortage (phallic and castrated), postmodern fetishism can create and proliferate non-normative distinctions, specially in the program for the technical together with corporeal. This will be particularly obvious in its representations associated with the “new technoflesh” that produces redundant any solitary tale in regards to the meaning for the fetish, in addition to any tries to fix absolute definitions of intimate distinction.
In Electronic Eros: systems and Desire when you look at the Postindustrial Age, Claudia Springer contends that while many popular tradition texts reproduce old technoerotic conventions centered on their equation of technology with phallic energy, electric technology (fluid, fast, and little, with mysteriously hidden interior workings) has feminized the technoerotic imagery of other texts (8-10). Springer’s argument could be extended to an option associated with the technofetish that could be phallic, leading to hyper-inflated representations of masculinity (the Terminator and Robocop, for instance), or feminized (the matrix into which William Gibson’s cyberpunk technocowboys penetrate).
A novel by Gibson has apparent distinctions of medium, market, and context from a movie like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Nevertheless, both are, as Springer points down, the main culture that is popular, where debates and anxieties about sex and sex are expressed through technoerotic metaphors and imagery. Therefore as opposed to institute a binary between “high” literary sf such as for instance Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and a “low” mass-culture movie such as for example Terminator 2, this paper is alternatively worried about the dreams of techno-masculinity since they are built within these texts. It ought to be emphasized why these dreams aren’t restricted to your texts We discuss right here; they circulate as endless quotations throughout popular tradition. Both Neuromancer and Terminator 2 because of the high intertextual resonance of their technoerotic imagery despite their differences, I have selected for discussion. The Terminator became a social symbol of male cyborgification, their hyper-muscular image endlessly recycled in cultural items from movies to toys to marketing; analogously, Gibson’s imagery regarding the womb-like computer areas within which their cyberjockeys thrive continues to move such present movies since the Matrix (1999).
These two fantasized and fetishized technomasculinities have been in more than their sex norms: the cyborg that is male a hypermasculinity and also the system cowboy is feminized through their relationship to technology. In any event, on the other hand to orthodox psychoanalytic readings that influence that women can be fetishized while males fetishize, in these sf examples it really is mainly guys who will be refitted and fetishized, and whom display a range of technoparts so that you can determine a technomasculinity that is new. Such as the dream for the fetishized girl, the dream of this technoman additionally disavows absence, although male instead of female shortage is disavowed by these technoprosthetic fetishes.
One reaction to this psychoanalytic rereading would be to object that as these postmodern narratives are typical area, to learn because it posits different layers of subjective depth (for example, conscious and unconscious) into them a masking of male lack requires a psychological model of analysis that is not appropriate. I would personally argue, but, why these narratives never constantly provide a postmodern construction of identification based on that your topic is fragmented, partial, and decentered. 1 there clearly was a stress during these narratives between representations of postmodern subjectivity and depictions of a traditional and old-fashioned action-hero masculinity that have not yet accepted its decentering. This is certainly a masculinity that the technofetish has the capacity to retain in play, no matter if from time to time notably ironically.
In classical psychoanalysis the fetish functions to repair “woman’s shortage, ” to mask her “wound, ” and also to disavow the castration anxiety it causes. As Freud writes:
Whenever now we declare that the fetish is an alternative for your penis, i will undoubtedly produce frustration; and so I hasten to incorporate that it’s perhaps perhaps perhaps not a replacement for almost any opportunity penis, but also for a specific and quite unique penis that was in fact vitally important at the beginning of youth but had later on been lost. To place it more clearly: the fetish is an alternative for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the young boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not require to stop. (152-53)
Freud, using “the little child” because the norm, theorizes that this child, whenever confronted by the truth that their mom doesn’t have a penis, fantasizes that the effective daddy has castrated her. The young boy fears his big ass middle eastern porn or her own castration and death, for to remove their narcissistically spent organ would add up to both. He fantasizes that the daddy might take revenge that he has exclusive access to the mother upon him for his patricidal oedipal fantasies, fantasies in which he imagines. This castration threat prompts the boy to turn away from the “castrated” mother and to identify with the father, taking up in the process a heterosexual subject position in normal development, according to Freud.
The fetishist rather disavows difference that is sexual a fetish item that is an alternative for the mother’s imaginary phallus. The fetish is actually an inanimate object—a fabric boot, a stiletto heel, a PVC corset. In accordance with Freud, the fetish “remains a token of triumph throughout the danger of castration and a security against it” (154). The fetish object serves to repair the thought mutilations regarding the mom; it masks lack, and therefore protects the fetishist from their worries of castration. When you look at the Freudian interpretation, once the girl wears the fetish she becomes the “phallic woman” into the fetishist’s imagination. The fetish provides a magical security from the horror of castration signified by feminine genitalia and therefore allows the fetishist to steadfastly keep up a heterosexual orientation that will otherwise be too terrifying to consider.