The Presentation of Cybernetic Bodies
For a while now, the discussion of human like machines has been very relevant and has brought about much discussion. These human like machines can be referred to as cybernetic bodies, which occurring to Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, are the electronic technologies that will replace humans. Some believe that these cybernetic bodies should have freedom and a life of their own, while others believe that they are only good for serving humans. This dilemma can be seen played out in Stepford Wives, R.U.R, and Black Mirror. Between the three pieces, they share many commonalities but at the same time are very different. The big ideas in these pieces of media revolve around gender and labor roles.
To start out, one thing all of these pieces share is that the cybernetic bodies all resemble humans very well. You couldn’t tell they aren’t human just by looking at them. In both Stepford Wives and Black Mirror we were able to see that the cybernetic bodies looked identical to a real human, while in R.U.R we knew that the cybernetic bodies were artificial biological beings. With that being said, these human like robots in all three of these pieces had one common use. These robots main purpose was to serve an actual human being in one way or another. In Stepford Wives, the main goal was to serve your family by making food and cleaning the house to make everything look like the “ideal life”. In R.U.R, the robots responsibilities were to basically be slaves to the humans, even though humans and robots were basically exactly the same. With Black Mirror, the purpose of Ash is to support and make his wife feel better after his unfortunate death. After he dies he returns as a cybernetic body, which was an exact copy of him. Even though they all had the same basic purpose, the way they were treated and looked upon varied.
In both Stepford Wives and R.U.R we can see how the females are treated like the housemaids and were programmed to do the stereotypical women’s jobs. This can really be seen in Stepford Wives when we find out that the men of the city have been killing off the real women and replacing them with identical copies of the real ones. The purpose of this was to make sure that the wife was always looking nice and always had the house clean and the food made for the family. In R.U.R the female robots are treated as less than the men and are placed in stereotypical female jobs, like how Domin’s secretary is a female. It can also be seen how females are treated less equal when it comes to making decisions. The men are always the ones ignoring the women and doing their own thing throughout this play. All of these examples can be furthermore understood by Donna Haraway in Cyborg Manifesto when she states “I do not know of any other time in history when there was a greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘class’”(Haraway 297). This shows how there are always problems with gender and sexuality in general, coinciding with the unfair treatment of others.
Throughout these three pieces, it can be seen that the opinions on these cybernetic bodies varied from piece to piece. In Stepford Wives, the cybernetic bodies were viewed as higher than the regular humans. This was because the men wanted their wives to be the perfect stay at home wives, and the only way that was going to happen was if they programmed these wives artificially. This can be explained in Constructing Normalcy when Lennard J. Davis states “If we rethink our assumptions about the universality of the concept of the norm, what we might arrive at is the concept that preceded it, that of the “ideal”” (Davis 4). This is the idea the men in Stepford Wives were trying to create, the ideal wife who could cook, clean, and watch the kids. They were ultimately trying to create the most stereotypical house wife. In Black Mirror, Ash is treated as a normal human being until his wife realizes that it really isn’t him and becomes annoyed and angry at the incorrect representation of who she once knew. She starts out by being super surprised that he was there again, but after a while it’s just like a normal human being is there with her, nothing too special. With Ash, he is viewed as a normal human being, there is no worshiping him but there’s also no one that despises him. In R.U.R, the cybernetic bodies are valued for their resources, but at the same time the humans have no respect or care at all for them. They just see these robots as personal servants and aren’t treated the best.
When reading/watching these three pieces, the main ideas involve cybernetic bodies (the technology that will replace humans). The value and treatment of these cybernetic bodies can be seen played out in Stepford Wives, R.U.R, and Black Mirror. The general consensus is that the main purpose of these robots is to serve their human counterparts in order to make the humans lives better. We can see that the robots are worked like slaves and that depending on gender, their role is very stereotypical.
Works Cited
Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. Routledge, 2010.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 2009.