Bluespace, Senses, Wellbeing, and Surfing: Prototype Cyborg Theory-Methods

Bluespace, where water people immerse themselves for thrills, therapy, or thalassography, is constantly fluctuating, influenced by materials, nature, and discourse. Drawing on onto-epistemological aspects of embodied theory-method, we report entangled prototype “cyborg” in situ strategies (mobile, sensory [auto]ethnography, and self-interview) to notice, record, and ultimately create human–water relations, from the perspective of a surfer. Audio/-visual evidence, from multiple perspectives, folding time, and several point-of-view devices, enabled unique insights into voiced thoughts, sights, sounds, and conscious/subconscious practices that occur in surfing. Such insights into the relationships, experiences, and movements of surfers inform research, such as to wellbeing and to the challenges of investigating bluespace. We offer cyborg theory-method for further methodological and onto-epistemological consideration in such relationships, contributing to a growing understanding of more-than-human engagement with watery worlds.

Sappho and Cyborg Helen

This chapter explores Sappho’s depiction of Helen through the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory. The epic Helen is presented as a mixture of the human, the divine, the animal, and the artificial, but this interstitiality marks her as an ‘illegitimate fusion’ (as Haraway would put it), an object to be controlled. Sappho, by contrast, depicts Helen (as a number of scholars have noted) as full of agency. The argument is set forth that Helen is for Sappho a cyborg fusion of poet and poem, and indeed an embodiment of the paradoxical nature of lyric poetry itself, which ever mediates between the specific here-and-now and the universal. Sappho’s reclaiming of Helen thus parallels Haraway’s revaluation of the cyborg as a site of feminist resistance.

Unsmoothing the Cyborg: Technology and the Body in Integrated Dance

<p><span>Contemporary cyborg theory tends to approach the integration of human bodies and technology innovations as if the cyborg were a unified whole. And, because of the potential of the cyborg body to help ameliorate disability, the cyborg has been suggested as a way to restore function to individuals living with disabilities. We investigate the deployment of the cyborg integrated dance company using theoretical concepts provided by Gilles Deleuze. Rather than observing a smoothly integrated whole, our ethnographic research reveals tensions within the cyborg body. Our analysis revealed three types of creative/reactive forces. Each of these forces comes from the effects/functions of the three striations of the cyborg body: (1) the effects/functions from the machine stria; (2) those from the human stria; and (3) those from the animal stria. Although together these striae constitute the assemblage of the cyborg, as each one takes on greater intensity such that the others are of decreased intensity, the hybridized whole of the cyborg becomes less functional as one is becoming-machine, becoming-human, or becoming-animal.</span></p>

Posthuman Podiums: Cyborg Narratives of Elite Track and Field Athletes

This paper examines the cyborg identities of 7 elite track and field athletes using a paradigmatic analysis of narratives (Polkinghorne, 1995, 1997). Following a discussion of philosophical and cultural studies conceptualizations of technology, and a brief overview of various types of sport technologies, I present several themes that emerged through an analysis of the collection of stories told by participants during in-depth interviews. In general, while participants engaged with a range of technologies, their stories dealt predominately with the tensions within world-class athletics between modernist notions of the “natural” body and postmodern conceptualizations of corporeality. The paper concludes with comments about the ongoing politics of sporting cyborg bodies and the increasing relevance of cyborg theory to critical sport studies work.

eXistenZ: bio-ports/boundaries/bodies

In focusing on David Cronenberg's film eXistenZ this paper interrogates the place of cyberpunk and the cyborg in understanding and challenging law's bodies and embodied subjectivities. The genre proves descriptive of the gendered bodies of law's imagination, yet it also contains the possibility of dissolving the prescriptive binaries of law and other discursive fields. The essay works with Donna Haraway's contention that the cyborg in its boundary transgression is a metaphor for gender obsolescence. Relating cyborg theory to law, and noting how law has colonised other discursive fields, the oppositional/binary construction of men's bodies as bounded and safe whilst women's are constructed as fluid and dangerous is examined. To illustrate this the essay considers the industrial bodies of law's imagination, an area which replays this bounded/fluid binary. Reading eXistenZ, the essay attempts to sketch an alternative analysis which recognises and challenges the gendered bodies of law's imagination. In focusing on the issues of permeability, of boundary pollution and fusion, the analysis privileges a recognition of bodies as both bounded and fluid. In this the analysis challenges the construction of gendered bodies within these policies and hence the construction of gender appropriate employment, behaviour and environments.