Katherine Hayles introduces the topic of dualism between mind and body in the first chapter of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. This concept is something that can come with confusion but in short it is the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. Hayles explains that there are many things that separate the mind and body. In media we can find examples of this concept in both the Netflix show Black Mirror, and the film Stepford Wives. Both films show how the mind and body can be separate however this separation can create conflicts when they are not working together as a whole.
In the episode “Be Right Back,” from the Netflix show Black Morror, focuses on Ash and Martha. Early in the episode Ash dies in a car accident leaving Martha alone and grieving. A friend of Martha’s suggests she signs up for a program that takes the deceased online information and social media and creates a form of communication between the living and the dead. Martha is hesitant at first but once she finds out she is pregnant with Ash’s child she is eager to hear from him one last time. Martha becomes obsessed with talking to “Ash” every day and is pushed to the point of spending money to get to the next level of the program which includes creating a body for “Ash” to live and communicate in. Martha starts to realize that although she can physically see Ash’s face and hear his voice, his online self-did not fully capture who he really was, it only captured a portion of his mind. This causes Martha to banish “Ash” to the attic. Although Ash was again able to interact with people and react to stimuli around him, it was not truly Ash reacting. Hayles describes embodied virtuality like playing a virtual game, she states the “game takes place partly in real life and partly in virtual reality.” This is just like how Ash is presented in the show. His mind was just a product of the internet and his social media, the company was not able to truly collect the real Ash because certain situations are not shared online making it hard to truly know a person based solely on their online profiles. Ash now exists in both virtual reality and in real life making him a perfect example to the concept Hayles has presented.
Another example can be seen in the film The Stepford Wives. During the movie the main character Joanna and her family move from the city to the town of Stepford. It is here that Joanna discovers that the husbands of the town are killing their wives in order to create the perfect robot wife. Similarly, to Black Mirror, the wives are not real humans but they look, act, and react like real humans however, they are the product of a simulation created by the husbands of the town. The wives lack consciousness because their real minds no longer exist and the real bodies of the wives have also been taken away making an example of how embodied virtual reality that can take a dark turn.
Ash from “Be Right Back” and the wives from The Stepford Wives are both good examples of embodied virtuality presented by Katherine Hayles. These two examples can help us understand the concept and easily allow us to see that real life and virtual reality are two entirely separate things that don’t necessarily mesh well together.