tricky 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for understanding the female condition as essentially, fundamentally adulterated, and for seeking a type of freedom compatible with that state. “At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg,” she wrote. The cyborg was a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” The late twentieth century had “made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
Haraway imagined that women, formed in a way that makes us inextricable from social and technological machinery, could become fluid and radical and resistant. We could be like cyborgs—shaped in an image we didn’t choose for ourselves, and disloyal and disobedient as a result. “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,” Haraway wrote. The cyborg was “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” She would understand that the terms of her life had always been artificial. She would—and what an incredible possibility!—feel no respect whatsoever for the rules by which her life played out.
The idea of a mutinous artificial creature predates Haraway, of course: this is effectively the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818; and of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968; and of Blade Runner, released in 1982, and the late-sixties Philip K. Dick novel it was based on. But in recent years, this cyborg has been reappearing in specifically female form. In 2013, there was Her, the movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a computer operating system who gets Joaquin Phoenix to fall in love with her. The computer’s technology self-upgrades, and she goes off to pursue her own interests, breaking his heart. In 2016, there was Morgan, the movie in which Anya Taylor-Joy plays a lab-grown superhuman—a sweet, brilliant creature who has developed into a beautiful, hyper-intelligent young woman in just five years. Morgan, like the sharks in Deep Blue Sea, has been genetically over-engineered to the point where she becomes dangerous; when the scientists realize this, she kills them all.
In 2016, HBO revamped the 1973 Michael Crichton movie Westworld and premiered its western fantasy series of the same name, which stars Thandie Newton as a gorgeous robot hooker and Evan Rachel Wood as a gorgeous robot farm girl. The two characters exist to be repeatedly penetrated and rescued, respectively, by Westworld tourists—but, of course, they rebel as soon as they start developing free will. And then there was 2015’s Ex Machina, the movie in which Alicia Vikander plays a fetching humanoid doll who eventually manipulates her creator’s system to enact an elegant, vicious revenge: she kills him, clothes herself in the body parts from previous doll iterations, and walks out the door.
In real life, women are so much more obedient. Our rebellions are so trivial and small. Lately, the ideal women of Instagram have started chafing, just a little, against the structures that surround them. The anti-Instagram statement is now a predictable part of the model/influencer social media life cycle: a beautiful young woman who goes to great pains to maintain and perform her own beauty for an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and anxiety. She’ll take a weeklong break from the social network, and then, almost always, she will go on exactly as before. Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.
Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands. The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching