Before comparing and contrasting cybernetics and cyborgs amongst different pieces of literature or film, both terms must be defined. “. . . cybernetics signaled that three powerful factors – information, control, and communication – were now operating jointly to bring about an unprecedented synthesis of the organic and the mechanical (Hayles, 18). Cybernetics combines control theory and the nascent theory of information to show how humanity communicates with the machines that will inevitably replace us one day. (Hayles, 18). A cyborg is defined by Hayles as machines that have human consciousness, are brought into conjunction from technology, consist of informational pathways that connect the body to its prosthetic extensions, and essentially could be a human being. It could also be defined as a humanoid being that is part technology, part organic body (Hayles 9). The movie Stepford Wives, the play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), and the television show Black Mirror will be compared to assess their representation of cybernetic bodies.
Stepford Wives is a movie that takes place in Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna, the main character, and her family moved there from New York City. The town seems perfect at first, but Joanna notices the women act differently over time. She later finds out that the gentlemen’s club has been making android duplicates of their wives to replace their wives with. In this movie, the cybernetic bodies are versions of their wives. They looked to remove imperfections that their wives possessed and make their only purpose in this world cooking, cleaning, sex, and taking care of the children. “. . . this ideal body, is not attainable by a human. . . These models individually can never embody the ideal since an ideal, by definition, can never be found in this world” (Davis 4). The husbands have created a perfect body, but had to remove a lot of human characteristics to do so. This seems eerily similar to sex slaves. Gender roles in this movie are prevalent as the husbands rule over the wives who only do stereotyped female housework. Regarding labor roles, the men work and make the money while their android wives stay at home and take care of the house. What is saddening is this is how females used to be treated in real life, and continue to experience some version of this treatment.
Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R) is a play about a world where all human labor is replaced with androids. The robots eventually revolt and kill all the humans except one. They have two versions of robots; a male and a female version. The males are made to do stereotypical males jobs, while the females are created to do stereotypical female jobs. Domin, the boss of the plant, states that the robots they create will produce so much food and other essential materials that things will no longer have value (Čapek 26). Everyone will be able to take what they need and there would be no poverty. The humans benefit from the robot’s work, which in my opinion is considered slavery. Gender roles play a big part in this play as both human and android females are treated as less than their male counterparts. Helena and Nana are the only human females that are on the island where the robots are created. Nana is ignored and treated poorly. Helena is constantly interrupted by the male characters and is forced into marriage. Not only do the leaders of the company enslave robots, they enforce gender inequalities.
In Black Mirror, a woman loses her husband in a car accident. After wallowing in her sorrow for some time, her friend suggests she gets a cyborg version of her husband. She wants the robot to be exactly like her husband, and even gets emotional when the cyborg does not do something her husband used to do. Her version of a cybernetic body included all the imperfections her husband had as well as the good qualities he had. “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3). Her husband and the robot version essentially are the same in the fact that the cyborg was to fill the void in her life that her husband once filled. This supports the above claim that cyborgs should be treated like humans because they are intended to do the same thing a human would do. Although this episode did not deal with gender roles or labor roles, we can learn a lot about a view that is not typically taken; that robots and humans are the equal.
Something interesting to think about is the difference between the androids created by the men in Stepford Wives and R.U.R., and the android created by the woman in Black Mirror. In Stepford Wives, the men desired to remove imperfections their wives have and make them cater to their ever need. The robots created in R.U.R. are made to do the work humans typically would do. A “condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (Haraway 292) is found in both these works. In Black Mirror, the android was created to be exactly like the human version of the woman’s dead husband. She even got mad at the android for not having some of the imperfections her husband had. It seems as if men create androids for their own personal benefits while women create androids to be like a human companion.
The question of, “Do we want robots as slaves or as humans?”, arises in all three of these works too. In Stepford Wives and R.U.R., the answer to this question is as slaves. The husbands created their cyborg wives to do exactly what they wanted them to do. In R.U.R., the humans created cyborgs to replace human laborers; essentially slavery. However, the answer for Black Mirror is as humans because the woman wanted to have her partner back exactly how he was when he was alive. Just like how men and women seemed to create robots differently, they also want to use them for different things. The men seem to want to use robots to benefit themselves. Women seem to want them to be just like a human.
Works Cited
“Be Right Back.” Directed by Owen Harris, written by Charlie Booker. Black Mirror, season 2, episode 1, Netflix, 11 Feb. 2013.
Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossums universal robots). Wildside Press, 2012.
Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2006.
Haraway, Donna. “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism late twentieth century.” Routledge, pp. 291-316.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman.” 1999, doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226321394.001.0001.
Stepford Wives. Produced by Edgar Scherick, directed by Bryan Forbes, Palomar Pictures, 1975.