Gender Roomours II

26     Astronauts are often depicted in Western cultural imagery as postmodern migrants, independently traveling or rather floating towards new territories. While the motif of the nomad evokes a clear-cut and manageable range or radius in which the individual operates, astronauts are faced with the task of conquering, interconnecting, and traversing new galaxies. Astronauts are travelers not only in space but also in time. Instead of remaining within the geographical limits of cultural affiliation, the astronaut is searching for "the final frontier," to quote the opening lines of the original Star Trek series. The starship Enterprise, the narrator tells us, sets out to explore "strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." Since the 1960s, central parameters of astrophysics have been integrated into the postmodern imagination. Galaxies - this is a key thesis of modern space research - are not singular or homogeneous objects, but agglomerations, complex structures with unstable limits and a heterogeneous distribution of mass in relation to time and space. The postmodern subject has recognized in the metaphor of the "new frontier" his and her own situation, which is equally marked by a multiplication and complication of life worlds. Due to fundamental changes in the ideological and social fabric of society in the course of the 20th century, the postmodern individual learned to make adaptability part of his and her body scheme. The result of this development is, as Susan Bordo has demonstrated, a type of "postmodern body" that builds its self-conception on a logic of constant transformation and assimilation:

[T]he postmodern body is the body of the mythological Trickster, the shape-shifter: of indeterminate sex and changeable gender […] who continually alters her/his body, creates and recreates a personality […] [and] floats across time, from period to period, place to place. ("Feminism" 467)

27     The image of "floating across time, from period to period, place to place," conjured up by Bordo, can equally be applied to the figure of the astronaut. In the image of the independent spacewalker, the components of spatial and temporal boundary crossing are represented in a condensed form. Like hardly any other mythological figure, the astronaut stands for the ideals of exploration and conquest of new territories. Comparable only to the courageous settler in the early phases of the westward movement, the space pioneer epitomizes the aspirations and yearnings of the American quest. Western cultural imagination has found the ideal expression for this belief in Neil Armstrong's famous words, articulated after he first set his foot on the moon: "That's one small step for man - one giant leap for mankind." The astronaut in this imagery is not only a rugged individualist. Moreover, his masculinity is a model for humanity itself. Such gendered ascriptions were confirmed in the Sixties and Seventies with the medial presence of spacemen such as Neil Armstrong und John Glenn. It was not until the Eighties that, with female astronauts like Sally Ride and Judy Resnik, a more diversified image was established. In the past twenty years, the figure of the astronaut has not only feminized visibly, it also become more "androgynous." The term "androgyny" is explicitly used by NASA experts to signify a need for balance and harmony during space expeditions. A recent study published on the official homepage of NASA, titled appropriately "Living Aloft: Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight," contains the following statement:

[A]ndrogyny appears highly desirable for astronauts, for a strong instrumentality combined with interpersonal sensitivity should be associated with both task accomplishment and social harmony. (9)

Androgynous personalities, the study concludes, are endowed with positive self concepts and the ability to develop satisfying interpersonal relations. By "androgynous personalities," the scientists define individuals of either biological sex who are capable of performing different social roles in everyday practice in space. "Androgynous crewmembers," the scientists claim, "may have the value of increasing social variety within a crew" (ibid). The question of a transformability of traditional gender roles raised in the NASA report touches upon a number of issues situated in the nexus of social and cultural practice. To the extent that the boundary lines within our imagination are altered, the figure of the mythological boundary crosser, too, becomes multi-layered.

The Cyborg as Icon of a Post-Gender World

28     This development is already foreshadowed in the conception of the astronaut as a cyborg, intimated in D. S. Halacy's 1965 study. Donna Haraway's approach, developed twenty years later, makes this parallel even more obvious. In her words, the cyborg is always a social construction, "a creature of social as well as a creature of fiction" ("Manifesto" 149). A cyborg is defined here as a postmodern hybrid who has internalized the settings of a technological culture into the bodily sphere. According to Haraway, we have all become cyborgs, integrating contact lenses, pacemakers, and implants into our bodily sphere. By effectively combining technological and organic features, the cyborg transgresses the limits of conventional identity. Like the astronaut, the cyborg has to be regarded not as a homogeneous entity, but rather as a fragmented set of possibilities, "a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self" ("Manifesto" 164). As such, he/she participates in a constant "border war" fought over the validity of traditional values and the legitimacy of new ones. Since it draws upon the permeability and transgressiveness of boundaries, cyborg identity is constantly changing, fractured and reconstituted anew (Balsamo 32). These components - namely, the continual transformation, refracturing, and re-assembling of identity - cast a characteristic light on the conceptualization of the astronaut as a cyborg figure. To see the space traveler as a cybernetic organism implies a secret recognition of the dangers underlying the concept, especially the instability and potential disintegration of astronautic identity. At the same time, however, this ambiguity also makes the concept of the astronautic cyborg so usable for a discourse on postmodern subjectivity.

29     The questioning of gender hierarchies is an elementary pattern in the cyborg's world perception. After all, the cyborg is, in Haraway's phrase, "a creature in a post-gender world" ("Manifesto" 150). In cyberfeminism, the emancipatory potential of this approach is utilized to develop new modes of identity constitution. Cyberspace, Zoë Sofoulis argues, offers ideal opportunities for an interconnection and merging of identities.

[T]he future is unmanned, that is, neither dead or collapsed, but animated by other dynamic agents, including women and machines. From the perspective of cyberfeminism […] the question is not one of dominance and control of or submission and surrender to machines, but of exploring alliances and affinities, co-evolutionary possibilities. (63)

The cyborgization of the individual thus represents the transformation of our life-world. Sherry Turkle has cogently shown in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet that identity is used by many users of the World Wide Web as a highly decentered and multi-layered feature. As digitalized cyborgs we are no longer limited to one territory, but we become boundary crossers between the galaxies. The Internet offers us, in Sandy Stone's words, a "charged, multigendered, hallucinatory space" that we actualize through immersing into what she calls "the cybernetic act" (91). "To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like a garment," Stone claims, "is to put on the female. This cyberspace both disembodies […], but also reembodies in the polychrome, hypersurfaced cyborg character of the console cowboy" (ibid). In the figure of the cyborg, we discover our own predicament as postmodern subjects, being equally torn between the temptations of self-empowerment and the restrictions of ideology. In her introduction to Cybersexualities, Jenny Wolmark argues that this ambiguity lies at the very heart of the cyborg concept, bestowing it with both an affirmative and a subversive quality:

By its very nature, the cyborg is a contradictory boundary creature: on the one hand, it is the product of the masculinist technologies that, in the 1980s, sought to produce a so-called defensive Star Wars weapon that had every possibility of leading to some kind of final apocalypse. On the other hand, because it is a hybrid creature, the cyborg marks a refusal to sustain the very dualisms that structure existing relations of power and control within science and technology. (4)

30     As a literary and cinematic figure, the cyborg is gendered, disgendered, and regendered, thereby reaching an almost absurd level of ambiguity. The symbolic challenge of the cyborg concept lies in the fact that we have to visualize an imaginary unity that resists logical reference. Born and raised in the Western cultural hemisphere, we are used to allocate the signs of cultural imagery to a clear-cut system of references and meanings. Floating signifiers necessarily pose a problem (and a threat) to any form of dichotomous and Manichaean thinking. The cinematic characters in the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet (1956) are confronted with a similar dilemma: When the crew members meet the speaking robot Robbie for the first time, they cannot specify its sex. "Hey, Doc, is it a male or a female?" the cook thereupon asks the board physician. The answer comes from the robot itself: "In my case, SIR, the question is totally without meaning." Later in the film, the creator of Robbie the Robot, an evil genius named Dr. Morbius, reveals to the scientists that he has modeled the automaton on images of his own wife. The feminization of the robot becomes especially obvious in a scene when Robbie takes the role of a housewife, entertaining the guests and pouring coffee in their cups. Faced with the robot's household skills, one male crew members exclaims with delight, "I thought Robbie had managed very charming feminine touches." Significantly, the characters are only able to position the robot within the symbolic order when they make use of the traditional dualism of feminine vs. masculine. It is only under these auspices that the identity of the cyborg can be deciphered and rationalized.