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The figure of the fembot has a long history in the techno-fictional milieu
of literary and cinematic cultural production, appearing in various guises as
a feminine sexualized metaphor for mechanical, industrial and electronic technology.
These textual figures include robots, androids, replicants and the more recent
cyborg hybrids of the postmodern or technotronic age.*1 The prototypical model
for techno-scientific figures is, of course, Mary Shelley's patch-work monster
from her novella Frankenstein (1818) which constitutes something of a
framing narrative for many contemporary western science fiction, techno-cultural
and cyberpunk discourses and practices. Specifically female figures include
the mechanical doll, Olympia, from E.T.A. Hoffman's story The Sandman,
analysed by Freud and filmed by George Melies (1903) and Powell & Pressberger
(1951); the female robots from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926); the replicants
from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982 and 1992) and the female cyborg
Eve 8 from Duncan Gibbins' film Eve of Destruction (1990). With the historical
transition from automata (the mechanical) to robots (the industrial) in techno-cultural
production, the significance assigned to artifical beings changed. Robots were
no longer evaluated as charming mechanical novelties; rather they were evaluated
on the basis of what they were capable of doing, either for humans or to humans.
In the late twentieth century, machines have been replaced by intricate systems
of microelectronic circuitry. Within particular masculine, dystopic modes of
discourse - including cinematic ones - techno-cultural production becomes associated
with fantasies of excessive female sexuality. Fembots become metaphors for technology
run amok, imagined as something like gigantic domestic appliances without a
'fuckin' off-switch'.*2
Blade Runner quotes postmodernly from Lang's Metropolis the idea
of the 'robot'. David Desser suggests that in both films the concept of the
double, or doppleganger, signifies 'the dark side', the other. Fear of the genetically
engineered replicants from Blade Runner is, for Desser, fear of the unconscious,
the unknown. This is typical of the explanations put forth for the prevalence
of the doppleganger motif in German Expressionist cinema of which Metropolis
is an excellent example. *3 Lang's film inaugurates the tradition of urban dystopias
in the cinema, associating technology with women's bodies to represent the threat
of unleashed female sexuality/robotics. In Metropolis the doppleganger
effect is overtly linked to female sexuality. The robot created by the 'mad
scientist' figure, Rotwang, is the 'evil' double of Maria. The human Maria is
associated with children, with virginity, and she inspires her fellow workers,
and the hero, with love. On the other hand, the sight of the sexualized robot
Maria causes the hero to faint, literally, from the very force of her libido.
This evil (sexualized) female robot incites the capitalists to frenzied lust
when she dances at the Yoshiwara club; and turned loose in the subterannean
world, she incites the workers to violence. Desser insists that this doubling
of Maria is an index of male fears and anxieties about female sexuality: 'a
reproduction of the universal ambivalent archetype of Woman: Virgin/Whore'.
Composed almost entirely of intertexts, Blade Runner reproduces the masculinist
doubling fantasies of female sexuality. Philip K. Dick, on whose novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Scott's film was modelled, constructed
the replicants Pris and Rachael as mirror images. While this is not so in Scott's
film the female droids are coded as either excessively phallic or submissive
from the enunciative viewpoint of the noir detective figure Rick Deckard. These
female machines might still be read as revealing or constructing male imaginary
anxieties in relation to female sexuality conflated with notions of 'out-of-control'
technology. Rachael is represented as the 'healing woman' who saves Deckard's
life. Zhora, represented as a stripper, and Pris as a 'pleasure' model replicant,
both pose serious castratory threats to the hero. Both are coded as killer machines
as well as sex functionary models. Noami Wise, reviewing Blade Runner
in San Francisco, has this to say of the sequence of scenes in which the blade
runner eliminates the threatening Zhora:
When Deckard discovers Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) - replicant fatale, designed for
a murder squad - conventionally employed as a snake-charming spectacle, his
smarmy cover as moral guardian is so unconvincing, his incompetence so at the
mercy of her strength, that her nude realization and terror-stricken escape
defeats the scopophilic intention to fetishize her as a castrating freak. The
claustrophobic chase and slow motion retirement of Zhora as she crashes through
the glass windows of a department store Christmas fantasy is an assassination
beyond murder.*4
In classic noir mode, only Pris and Zhora are signified as castratory (i.e.
independent, excessively sexual) in relation to the subject position constructed
for the hero. Rachael, in spite of her question(s) as to whether the Voigt-Kampff
test is designed to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian, is oedipalised
linguistically and gesturally by Deckard, and for the spectator, in later scenes
as a properly 'feminine' woman /machine (i.e. submissive, heterosexual). Despite
the often complex deconstructive hybridizations of combinatory signification
enacted generally across male and female replicant bodies in this film (i.e.
both can be phallic or submissive); humans and replicants (both can be rational
or emotional); and the intertextual, supposedly destabilizing, generic coding
(sci-fi, noir, romance), Desser's observation of the doppleganger effect overtly
linked to the problem of female sexuality remains in Blade Runner. In
other words, some fembots are coded as sexually excessive (Pris-Zhora), and
some are coded as submissive (Rachael) in relation to the discursive fantasies
and cultural practices of masculinist subjectivity.
Eve of Destruction continues the cinematic tradition inaugurated byMetropolis.
Claudia Springer argues that even when a film incorporates feminine metaphors
for electronic technology, it can still enunciate a misogynistic position.*5
The film combines electronic imagery from the late twentieth century with the
industrial imagery of Metropolis to condemn female sexuality. The discourse
on sexual difference is introduced into the film text when the scientist Eve
Simmon's young son points to the outlines of naked male and female figures and
announces: 'This is a man. This is a woman. This is a vagina'. He also identifies
the organ-signifiers 'balls' and 'tits'. Anatomical lessons are extended in
the film's diegeses to create fear of the interiority of female bodies. Eve
8's, the doppleganger fembot's, body represents both steely industrial strength
and the mysteries of microelectronic circuitry. She is constructed as a fetishized
phallic woman with dangerous internal workings. The Defense Department has installed
a nuclear device at the end of a tunnel inside her vagina in order to use her
as the ultimate wartime weapon. The threat is explicitly sexualized in that
Eve 8 uses her body seductively to lure her male victims. Again associations
are mapped across the female cyborg body: female sexuality is linked to destruction
in the tradition of Metropolis, and both are associated with the inner workings
of electronic technology.
As a counter to the ubiquitous cinematic vision of the mechanical woman/ fembot,
the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix spurn the 'big hoover sucking up/off
mere mortal men' option and imaginatively enter the big body of technology via
the 'micro' option. In their computer game Game Girl, the player is invited
to idenitify with a virus that can penetrate and disorder the data banks of
Big Daddy Mainframe. One might join the DNA Sluts in the Alpha Bar for a cocktail
of G-Slime, served by a male robot, to lubricate the process. *6
© Jyanni Steffensen,
1996 Footnotes
1 For a critique of the interchangeable use of the terms robot, android and
cyborg, see Claudia Springer, 'Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Amored Cyborg
in Cinema', in Genders 18 Cyberpunk: Technologies of Cultural Identity
(Winter 1993), p. 87.
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media
Arts
2 Masculine potency is articulated in Eve of Destruction through Special Agent
Jim McQuade's ability to locate the rampaging female cyborg's 'fuckin' off switch'.
3 David Desser, 'Race, Space and Class: The Politics of the SF Film from Metropolis
to Blade Runner', Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's Blade
Runner and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? ed. Judith
B. Kerman (Bowling green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,
1991), pp. 113-14.
4 Naomi Wise, San Francisco 24/8 (August 1982), p. 23.
5 Springer, 'Muscular Circuitry', p. 97.
6 Game Girl was part of VNS Matrix's multi-media art installation All New Gen
at the Experimental Art Foundation, S.A., 21 Oct.-21 Nov., 1993.