1. Fancher, Patricia Jean (2009) “Life Through the Lens: Cyborg Subjectivity in Cinema.” http://gradworks.umi.com/14/64/1464731.html (accessed on 11 March, 2011)
In this study, Fancher mentioned that cyborg has deconstructed the dichotomies, for example subject and object, real and fantasy, technology and culture, which made them hard to separate. Fancher used a female cyborg in science fiction films to focus on cyborg’s significance in film discourse and feminist discourse. Laura Mulvey's argument presupposed that “object indicates passive and repressed while subject indicates active and powerful”. Women were passive because they were framed as spectacles or objects. Fancher illustrated that the cyborg, as a subject of film, did not totally disrupt this filmic code, but it had presented an active spectacle. The cyborg revealed that object and subject are false distinctions, and, empowerment and victimization were not opposites. The power relations between them materialized through the cyborg’s gender performance, the representation of the body, and the context of the mise-en-scene. Analyzing the discourse with the female character in science fiction like Tomb Raider, she was undoubtedly an object according to the notion of gender. However, she was definitely not a passive woman who continuously adventured and completed tasks. Generally, female may be viewed as victims as they were gazed by the men. If it was this case, Raider showed that she had embraced the empowerment and victimization. However, with social and technological shifts, the dynamic between empowered gender performance and victimized performance will change. Instead, both positive and negative trends come into focus through the cyborg as a lens thereby creating a two dimensional perspective of gender performance. Thus, it is hard to confirm the gender world but it will be a plenty of rooms for people to imagine it.
2. Griffith, Nicola (1994) “The New Aliens of Science Fiction” http://nicolagriffith.com/aliens.html (accessed on 11 March, 2011)
Griffith in her essay firstly suggested that American and British science fiction reflects American and British culture. For examples: 1996 was an election year, the rights of lesbians and gay men will be one of the most intensely fought over and intently watched battlegrounds. As the war hosted up, much more SF with queer protagonists had rolled off the presses. Besides, in California and Florida, there were growing fear and resentment of immigrants. Then there might have some science fiction about immigrating aliens. Another hot spot was the discussions about whether or not to take away set-asides and other help for racial minorities and those with disabilities. Griffith believed that the aliens in the genre were the particular group of people who was disturbing the rest of society. However, it may not always true. It is a grievous error for a reader to assume anything about a writer’s mind. For one thing, we can never tell which bits are "true" and which bits are "fiction," for another, to assume that some particular part of the fiction is autobiographical is to belittle the writer's imagination. So, when a science fiction includes a story of the Black and the White living harmony, it may be the writer’s own thought rather than the reality. But owning to the supports Griffith has given, genre reflects culture may sometimes happen. Thus, science fiction cannot exactly foresee our future and it has already blurred the fantasy and reality.
3. Summerhawk, Barbara (1998) “He, She and It: The Cyborg De-Constructs Gender in Post Modern Science Fiction.”
http://www.davidmswitzer.com/slonczewski/summerhawk.html (accessed on 11 March, 2011)
Summerhawk in her text explained “Cyborgs” which were imagined by science fiction writers before there existed the possibility for them to be products of our material reality. The cyborgs revolted and took the first steps to reconstructing a new, more tolerant society. At the end of He, She and It text, Yod programmed a bomb to destroy Avram and his lab so that never again. Then it contributes us to think that in the far future, with the head of the union of planets a woman, where there are matriarchal cultures meeting with patriarchal cultures on a planet where a race of all-women live in perfect harmony with the natural world, a "she" machine learning compassion from a gay immortal, a happier resolution becomes possible. Then comes to the boundaries between human and machine, masculine and feminine, life and non-life become blur, not just in fiction but in our late twentieth century reality. Besides, if we can share with emerging Artificial Life new ways of being or we can submit to the imposition of the old, narrow definitions of our possibilities based on class, race and gender, we can give birth to new, nearly infinite possibilities for shaping our realities. And it may also help reshaping our mythologies.
4. Slonczewski, Joan (2000) “Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response.”
http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/butler1.html (accessed on 11 March, 2011)
Butler drew a broader message that humans need to embrace "otherness" in ethnicities and cultures foreign to our own, even if at first they seem to violate our own values. In one of Butle's stories evokes the experience of an African woman swept into slavery in the eighteenth century. A Black woman travelled back through time to rescue a white man who became her ancestor. Struggling was the fact that she owed her own existence as an individual to the oppressive cultural system in which Black women could bear children only by submitting to the advances of their white masters. This indicated the racism, identities and the power-relations concerns. People are always encouraged to accept the others and live in a peaceful world. However, sense of identity has already developed. Therefore, if there is anything happens, people of the same nation will unite together. Instead of human, aliens or robots in the science fictions do the same. Although they might be made by human beings, those aliens or robots would also take revenge may because of the genetic problem. Therefore, it will be hard to predict the degree of acceptant and the definition of otherness, too.
5. Mahrouse, Gada (2009) “Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship Malini Johar Schueller.” http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/cpi/article/viewFile/9135/7297 (accessed on 11 March, 2011)
Gada commented on Schueller’s book about the citizenship problem which we sometimes call the racial problem. For those whose motherland is colonized by another or those who are nationally or geographically cross-nation, some of the cases of identities are quite completed. For example of Rachel Corrie, a young American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who was run over by an Israeli military bulldozer in Palestine while she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. Schueller explained that because Corrie was represented as having ‘crossed over’ to being on the side of Palestinians, her death failed to incite empathy in the USA. Suller further explored that the use of the “post” in postcolonialism did not imply that colonialism was no longer a daily reality for indigenous populations. The potential of what she calls “post-colonial citizenship” to capture and invoke the possibilities for activism “in ways that purely national conceptions of citizenship or postcolonial solidarities do not. Sueller’s ambitious project succeeded at highlighting the dangers of postmodernist disavowals of racial hierarchies, and defended the utility of continuing to think of race as a central axis in contemporary societies. In the real world, the race, gender or identities are quite complex nowadays, is it still wise to reject others and practice hierarchical system? If those science fiction’s writers’ stories come true, we may construct a group call “cyborg”. However, it may leads to another “cyber-citizen” problem. Schuller’s has made a good statement that “race was not transcended though it, but rather points towards the precariousness of trading with race privilege in an era of fiercelyracialized nationalisms.”
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