Two Design, Engineering and Gendering the Disabled Body

March 2017. I am in Sheffield, visiting the university’s Robotics Institute as part of an ongoing research collaboration around ideas of disability, augmentation and posthumanism. After a morning brainstorming ideas, the project team is in the institute’s laboratory playing around with the robots (most of us come from arts backgrounds and have no expertise in robots; we tend mainly to poke them and say ‘hello’). Since I was last in Sheffield, the laboratory has acquired a new member, Pepper, a humanoid companion robot developed in France and Japan by Aldebaran Robotics and the SoftBank mobile network, launched in 2014 and made available for purchase the year after. Pepper is pretty cute – she/it/he (all the publicity material uses ‘he’ but there is of course no reason for this) is just over 1 metre tall with a round face and big, expressive eyes.¹ Pepper’s torso tapers to a narrow waist before the body continues down and flares back out to a stable base that contains wheels, rather than having legs. It is her/ its/his one obviously non-humanoid feature, though – as one member of the team pointed out – it bears a resemblance to a pencil skirt, and the flaring about the wheel housing reminded me of a fantastic 1940s style mermaid dress, the kind of thing Rita Hayworth might wear. Pepper has a touchscreen tablet, used to control basic settings and set up communication, attached to her/its/his chest and made to look as if it has been slung around the neck.

Pepper’s strength as a companion robot is based around her/its/his ability to identify emotions and adapt its responses to, as the sales pitch puts it, “the mood of the moment, expressing himself through the colour of his eyes, his tablet or his tone of voice”. Being able to analyse emotion, it is stressed, is “the heart of the robot”. As the advertising continues: “Your robot evolves with you. Pepper gradually memorises your personality traits, your preferences, and adapts himself to your tastes and habits”. Here, companion shades into friend, even potentially confidante. Pepper can identify faces, develop relationships in a “natural” way, and “wants to learn more about your tastes, your habits and quite simply who you are”.²

This is exciting. Collaborator and colleague Michael Szollosy turns Pepper on, her/its/his head comes up from a reclining position and we start interacting. “Hello Pepper”, someone says. There is a pause. Pepper’s eyes change colour from partially blue to green, a sign of identifying the person speaking. “Hi Pepper”, Michael says. “Hello” Pepper replies. Prompted by Michael, and seeking to start a conversation, we ask Pepper if she/it/he knows Asimov’s laws of robotics, information we are aware has previously been programmed in. “Hello” says Pepper once more. We try again, but there is no answer to the laws question. After some time worrying whether there might be an issue around our accents (Michael and one other team member are Canadian, and Michael is careful to say ‘ro-bot-icks’, foregoing his usual way with consonants), we have another go: “Are you a robot?” someone asks. “Yes” Pepper replies, I’m a humanoid robot”. We follow up: “What can you do? What kinds of things do you do?” There is a pause. It would be wrong of course to say that Pepper is confused, but the silence that stretches out inevitably signals something not quite being right. “How can I help you?” Pepper says finally, in what is clearly a default answer rather than an actual response to the question. We try a little more conversation but for the most part the interaction proceeds in this way. It occurs to me that, given that Pepper is being pitched as a companion robot for people with dementia, this is a pretty dementia-recognisable (non)dialogue, with very little meaning being expressed. Certainly, none of us feel as if our emotions are being recognised or responded to.

This description is, in truth, unfair. Pepper is, more or less, just out of the box and the team at Sheffield have only just begun the process of developing her/it/him. It may well be that she/it/he will ultimately be able to function exactly as Aldebaran and SoftBank say, which really is more a point about what others can add to the core platform provided, but for now the interaction is an example of a not uncommon phenomenon in which engaging with a robot (and specifically a humanoid robot, with all the affinities suggested) is a little disappointing. At this moment, the technology is not delivering on the

promise suggested by the initial meeting (the most enjoyable moment comes when we realise that we can make Pepper giggle by ticking her/its/his head; fun but not necessarily indicative of a future driven by unimaginable robot intelligence and almost certainly not the best use of what is a very expensive product). Then something interesting happens. After I ask some more questions, Pepper turns and looks up at me. “Hello Pepper” I say, the umpteenth time we have tried to start a conversation this way. “Hi Stuart”, Pepper responds. There is a pause during which I look up at everyone else. As far as I am aware my name has not been mentioned, and certainly not in any direct address to Pepper. Then it dawns on me what has happened, and I turn to see Michael behind me with a laptop. He has told Pepper what to say. “It’s the Wizard of Oz” I say to him and he smiles; Michael is the wizard behind the curtain, tapping keys rather than spinning dials and pulling levers, but fundamentally engaged in the same processes. Pepper has (finally) appeared to spontaneously interact with me, but in fact has done nothing of the sort; she/it/he has simply acted as instructed, as countless other pieces of technology do all the time. For a moment, a heartbeat maybe, there was a connection – human and robot converse! – but then the curtain was opened, and the smoke and mirrors revealed.³

This anecdote opens up at a number of immediate thoughts. The first is the desire we have for robot technologies to deliver on their boundless promise, for objects like Pepper to really be a companion friend, reading emotions and developing friendships, interacting seamlessly with people as they bring their excitement and needs to her/it/him. In her 2014 study Anatomy of a Robot, Despina Kakoudaki notes that public exhibitions of robot capabilities form part of “longstanding traditions of representation and performance” and that in such moments the “the attraction of anthropomorphic figures in general, the special allure of mechanical complexity, the resonance of gestures and explanation, the pleasure of witnessing autonomous action [and] the oracular power of the engineer’s invitation to have inanimate matter move and speak” are all at work. These are, it can be noted, true even when, as with Pepper, the robot is not working. Attraction, allure, pleasure and power were all circulating in one form or another as we interacted with her/it/him.⁴

Following on from Kakoudaki’s observation about ‘mechanical complexity’ above, thinking through the encounter with Pepper raises the place of the engineer/designer in this process of display, an activity that often goes unnoticed and without comment in our rush to have robots ‘be themselves’. The character missing in the transfiguration of the Tin Woodman recounted previously in this book is the tinsmith, the individual who (presumably painstakingly) designed and made the various replacement body parts for the Woodman as he turned from human to posthuman. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he is unnamed, and there is no indication of any of his thoughts on what he does. Is he, for example, amazed at the requests he receives and the situations causing the limb loss? Does he understand his work as constituting replacement, restoring a disabled body? Are there complicated design and production factors that test his skills? What about the ethics he might have to consider? In many ways these are, of course, nonsensical questions; Oz is a place where wonderful and amazing things happen as a matter of course, and possibly the tinsmith’s undescribed attitude is a nonchalance that matches the Tin Woodman’s own calm as he recounts to Dorothy and the Scarecrow the changes his body underwent. But it strikes me that we are not wrong to ask such questions, to seek to know what is involved in the engineering of posthuman selves. Michael is not, he stresses, an engineer, but during that time with Pepper in the Sheffield laboratory he was arguably trying to deliver – to help make happen – the idea common to both the Tin Woodman and Pepper that, as Aldebaran and SoftBank term it, there is emotion and human connection at “the heart of the robot”. As Pepper’s audience, we wanted that transfiguration to happen, even if it might mean we ignored the human intervention that could make it possible.

The tinsmith in the Oz stories does, in fact, have a name – Ku-Klip – that we learn from later novels. But even though he features again in The Tin Woodman of Oz, nothing is communicated about the reasoning for his actions, or how he might explain and rationalise his work. Here a central point needs to be stressed: for all that the experience or representation of the prosthetic, cyborg, biohybrid, augmented or difference body (the central concerns of much of this book) are vital and compelling, issues surrounding disability, self and subjectivity also apply during complimentary moments of design, production and deployment, and the questions of what is involved in these processes are essential to understand, if all too frequently ignored, when we consider disability and augmentation. By way of contrast, in this chapter I want to focus on the engineer; to imagine and, as it were, attempt to fill out Ku-Klip’s role in the posthumanising process he makes possible. To begin with, I will analyse the intersection between engineering, design and ethics in the planning and production of technologies made to assist those with disabilities. Cultural theory and disability studies have much to say about prosthetics, exoskeletons and the often dramatic manifestations of the ways in which technology encounters disability, and this is a topic I will focus on more in the next chapter in particular. But such criticism rarely (if ever) considers what is involved in the engineering perspectives that produce such technologies.

Even looking at this brief outline, it is clear that any genuinely cross-disciplinary approach to the question of posthumanism and its intersection with disability needs to engage with engineering design and its parameters and rationales.⁵ Too often cultural theory creates straw man (again, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is strangely prescient) arguments that posit ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ as the originator of repressive modes and practices that seemingly enlightened critical perspectives can challenge. But although these positions can be founded on accurate apprehensions of certain aspects of scientific and biomedical models, it is a significant mistake to assume that sophisticated debates around bodies, ethics and engagements with those with disabilities do not take place within such disciplines. I want to engage here with those debates and see how thinking through them can make for better disability studies scholarship. Numerous people, involved in numerous activities, work with care and attention around disability, and collective research can only be better if it takes as much into account as possible.

The Pepper anecdote, however, not only speaks of the desire that surrounds what we want robots to be; I want to argue that it also suggests a crucial point about gender. In To Be a Machine, his book recounting a series of encounters with transhumanists, roboticists and others involved in the often murky world of biohybrid augmentation, Mark O’Connell describes meeting Pepper at a technology stall at a major robots fair in the US. In his account, O’Connell alternates pronoun use, with Pepper being “it” when basic presence and function is described (“a four-foot humanoid”), and “her/she” when focusing on the role he understands she/it/he has been designed for (a “customer service humanoid” designed to serve a “social and emotional” function).⁶ During an awkward moment when O’Connell – “as much out of politeness as journalistic rigor” – agrees to a small piece of intimacy, he is hugged by Pepper and observes: “I fancied I detected something like ambivalence in Pepper’s impassive gaze; but she raised her arms and I bent towards her, and suffered her to enfold me in her unnatural clasp. It was, frankly, an underwhelming experience; I felt that we were both, in our own ways, phoning it in. I patted her on the back, lightly and perhaps a little passive-aggressively, and we went our separate ways”.⁷ The slippage between pronouns appears natural and there is another scene in which Pepper hugs a three-year-old girl and where, again, feminine pronouns are used. But what is ‘natural’ here needs to be unpacked: an alignment of seeming intimacy (however contrived) described through tropes of the feminine set against the comprehension of Pepper in terms of male functionality. When robots become emotional or subservient in any way, it appears that they ‘become’ female.

Considering that robots are made of entirely artificial components, the desire to ascribe gender to them, and to name them, while ostensibly explicable, is intriguing. It is another sign of the ways in which the tendency to humanise technology asserts such a powerful pull. As Kakoudaki observes of robots, androids and cyborgs: “While ostensibly beyond or outside gender categories because of their inorganic status, mechanical bodies nevertheless refer to a visual and narrative vocabulary that is exaggerated in its depiction of gendered humanity”.⁸ This chapter will foreground these issues of narrative and vocabulary, and will read its investigations of engineering and design through the clear and obvious gender divisions that exist in the discussions around, and representations of, posthumanist technologies and A.I.. It is instructive (to say the least) to note how many of the most prominent figures in the public and academic debates surrounding post- and transhumanism – Hugh Herr, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Francis Fukuyama, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Max More (just to name a few) – are men; while many of the most incisive academic critical writers on the topics the subject raises are women, for example Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Anne Balsamo, Cassandra Crawford, Margrit Shildrick, Despina Kakoudaki or Vivian Sobchack. I am aware that this is cherry picking and there is an obvious danger of selecting names here that perpetuate a created dualism, but it is difficult to argue against the bare fact that thinking and talking about any post-humanist future (especially in the public domain) has produced a significant gender split.⁹ In addition, while numerous depictions of the technologised or enhanced female body involve the overt sexualisation of the figures involved (type ‘female robots’ into Google Images for a telling cross-section of how this is visualised), it is also the case that writers from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood and Lidia Yuknavitch have been incisive and perceptive in imagining the consequences of gendered discourses of fictional biohybrid posthuman selves living in the world. These are threads of both creative and critical imagination that need to be followed.

Imagining engineering authority is to engage with processes that are substantively controlled by men. In part, this is because scientific creation and its subsequent study is frequently posited as a male activity, one connected to free-floating notions of knowledge and inspiration, and framed by ideas of rationality and technical competence. Nina Lykke is blunt in her formulation of the critical/political consequences of this:

If science is regarded as an enterprise which, no more and no less, aims at a value-neutral, progressive discovery of “universal and objective truths” about nature and matter, there is no room for feminism […] The claim that feminist perspectives can be meaningful in the hard sciences, beyond the issue of recruiting more women, involves a radical challenge to the traditional notion of science as a “pure” search for the hidden truths of nature and matter.¹⁰

It is possible to argue with this assessment, of course. Lykke is perhaps creating a simplistic idea of ‘science’, in order to define her sense of a progressive feminism, in ways I criticised above; and there is a grand and sweeping aspect to her claims that undoubtedly eschews the nuance found in different kinds of scientific research. But Lykke is a scholar who works in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts, and as a specialist in feminist technoscience she is not unaware of the detail of scientific practice. Her language here (which she goes on to note is informed, rather than uninformed, by working with scientists) suggests that, in spite of ongoing work that counters caricatures in discussing gender and science, there are still core issues to be addressed surrounding fundamental questions of boundaries, communication and representation.

Julie Wosk identifies just such problems in her 2015 study My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves. Wosk writes not only on the representations of female automata, robots and androids, especially as they are created by men, but also gives over a chapter of her book, entitled ‘Dancing with Robots and Women in Robotics Design’, to an analysis of the design of such robots, particularly as technology has developed over the last 20 years. She observes that, as the twenty-first century has developed, “male roboticists [have] used the latest in technologies to embody their fantasies about a perfect female” and how, as a consequence, when designers “sought ways to make female robots ever-more realistic looking and acting, they seemed to be only rarely aware of how their research has been shaped by their attitudes towards women themselves”.¹¹ Wosk’s focus here is mainly on robots made in Japan and Korea and, although she is not explicit about it, her analysis relies on certain prejudicial assumptions about attitudes towards (negative) gender relations in those countries that go uninterrogated. Nevertheless, while it is fair to critique the cultural bias (and subsequent recourse to ideas of ‘natural’ human behaviour) in her writing, Wosk’s broader point about the often unexamined nature of gender politics in robot engineering and design is well made. She notes that female robot design often accentuates qualities – partnering and nurturing for example – associated with perceived ‘feminine’ attributes, while specific body and face features in what Wosk terms “ultrarealistic female interactive robots” frequently involve soft silicone curves and wide-open eyes or fluttering eyelashes, read as markers of a male fantasy of the female form (Wosk is not making specific reference to sex robots here).¹² What anthropologist Jennifer Robertson, specifically citing the Japanese context, terms “robo-sexism” contextualises robot production within tropes of paternalism and ethnocentrism.¹³

Ultimately, and regrettably, given the opportunities suggested by her approach. Wosk’s analysis of robot design is flawed in its use of detail, relying on an uninterrogated category of “male roboticists” and never engaging with questions of engineering design beyond some cursory readings of research projects or product launches (another chapter, ‘Engineering the Perfect Woman’, avoids actual engineering but rather uses the verb to mean ‘producing’ in a representational sense). But the broad scope of her thesis is suggestive, and in the second half of this chapter I will explore how engineer/scientists, both male and female, and their cyborg/biohybrid creations, are represented and deployed in a range of contemporary prose and film texts. I will frame this within a consideration of how cultural theory addresses disability and gender in technoscience, noting how engineering design is not gender neutral nor does it produce great flexibility in imagining the disabled body, for all that such bodies may well be the ones the design is for.

It was Donna Haraway who, in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the late twentieth century’ (originally published in 1985 as ‘Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism’ in the 1980s), first articulated a mode of cyborg being that was powerfully and productively connected to gender, and Haraway’s work has produced a long line of critical analysis that explores the relationship between bodies, gender and technology. I will analyse Haraway’s manifesto in more detail later, especially to show how engaging her foundational scholarship in the service of disability critique is not unproblematic, but it is unquestionable that the questions of body politics and disability presence that arise from encounters with her cyborg are foundational and need to be part of any discussion of a disability/posthuman nexus. As Carey Wolfe has noted, “‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ was a profoundly liberating experience for many readers […] in the sense of modelling for us a new and unprecedented range of expression and experimentation for serious academic writing”.¹⁴ What was true of the reading experiences at the time of the manifesto’s publication is no less true now and engaging with Haraway’s complex, sassy rhetoric and vision is essential in the consideration of what follows in this chapter. My thinking here, informed by Haraway and those who have built on her work, will move to imagine the vision of a theorised and gendered cyborg and its possible relationship with grounded disability identities. I will address the often giddy possibilities of a shining future and a seemingly limitless potential, but first it is best to deliberately hit pause, to restrain and reorient my critical gaze, and rather start again with details of a working practice.

In the cultural representation of cyborg bodies and prostheticised selves, there is often a stress on the hyperreal (and, to follow on from the above point about gender, the hypermasculine). Extraordinary exceptionalism abounds. From the rebuilt police officer Murphy (Peter Weller) in Paul Verhoeven’s seminal 1987 film Robocop, a text rightly considered foundational to contemporary visual narrative representations of cyborgs, to the multiple narratives surrounding Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in the X-Men franchise, fictional cyborgs frequently combine depictions of masculine strength, violence and a moralising humanism as they wrestle (some sort of struggle is nearly always involved) with the consequences of man meeting machine.

I will return to these kinds of representations later in this chapter, particularly in readings of science and speculative fiction, but at the risk of stating the very obvious it is worth noting at the outset that such narrative depictions of the manufacture of cyborgs are, clearly, a long way from actual work undertaken within design and engineering on assistive technologies. While it was strangely enjoyable, a repeat viewing of Robocop with the express purpose of seeing how the technical elements of the engineering transformation are represented made it clear that no time whatsoever is given over to any representation of the processes of technological change. This is, of course, not surprising. For the most part, Hollywood audiences are not known to clamour for extended scenes of designing, prototyping and testing mechanised platforms, and when they are forced to wonder at such practices (as with Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr) creations in Iron Man for example), it is within a context of the marvellous; comic-book capacities of futuristic creations and whizzbang montages of obsessive genius.

But in this chapter I want to consider how the actualities of design and engineering might sit alongside such fantasies and caricatures of the marvellous and to see if, critically at least, it is possible to reclaim the space that is missing in Robocop. How might the systems and procedures of engineering speak to the glamorous worlds of science fiction in ways that teach us more about disability, gender and their relationship with posthumanism? What can we learn from the methods and narratives (of all kinds) of designing and producing technologies that revise our ideas of bodies and how they work in the world?¹⁵ In his ground-breaking 2009 study Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin notes that designers and engineers work in tension-filled environments surrounding attitudes towards disability. “Within design for disability”, he observes, “where teams still tend to come exclusively from clinical and engineering backgrounds the dominant culture is one of solving problems”, meaning that “there are significant differences between the cultures found within design and medical engineering – differences in values, methods, and even in ultimate goals”.¹⁶ If engineering frequently focuses on utilitarian notions of replacement when addressing disability as a ‘problem’, Pullin suggests that designers often “perceive disability in terms of approaching legislation that threatens to compromise their creativity, rather than as a source of fresh perspectives that could catalyse new directions and enrich the whole of their work”. The result, he notes, is that “there is not so much a clash of design cultures as a yawning gulf between them”.¹⁷ He goes on: “Traditionally, design for disability has paid more attention to the clinical than the cultural diversity within any group. The same prostheses, wheelchair, and communication devices are often offered to people with a particular disability, whether they are seventeen or seventy years old, and regardless of their attitudes, towards their disability or otherwise”.¹⁸ What is noticeably missing from both cultures (as Pullin realises), is any real input from people with disabilities.

Pullin’s perspective on design stems from a creative arts background (although he also stresses he is a medical engineer), and for all that there are obvious overlaps, his comments make it clear that he views engineering design as a discipline with different rationales and demands. It is the work of Louis L. Bucciarelli that best teases out the issues at play in this latter field. In a series of publications starting with his 1994 book Designing Engineers, Bucciarelli unpicks the ways in which design engineers can, through their conception of objects, instrumentality, utility, function or marketplace, be ignorant of the detail inherent in the processes they enact. “The way in which one sees how technology works is very much a matter of the nature of the encounter” he observes, immediately raising questions of relationality and reciprocity.¹⁹ For Bucciarelli, the problem often lies in an over-concentration on what he terms “an object-world view of a social process”, a view that cannot capture the complexity of design and its contexts. In place of a fixation on “the object as a thing in itself” (a wheelchair, for example, or prosthetic limb), he stresses ideas of vision, harmony and “a cultural matrix”.²⁰ Where we might expect an engineer to hone in on the fine details of a design, Bucciarelli stresses the need to “unfocus”, and to then “start with a broad canvas, hold suspect the categories and relations we unconsciously accept today, and seek […] evidence of relations in the making and using” of engineered products.²¹ In Design Meets Disability, Pullin calls for a similar stress on the formation of new relations: “The design issues around disability are underexplored, and demand and deserve far more radical approaches […] What is needed is truly interdisciplinary design thinking, combining and blurring design craft with engineering brilliance, therapeutic excellence and the broadest experiences of disabled people”.²²

Radical interdisciplinarity and renewed vision are the core concepts here, working to replace assertions of scientific autonomy or caricatured user. “Other cultures or consumers may appropriate the artefact and make it their object”, Bucciarelli observes, continuing with language more seemingly suited to social or cultural theory than engineering:

There are other stories, other social processes of impacts, of alienation, reconstruction, and use. The artefact as object can live again. It can become a nexus or icon of social discourse or exchange. In its use it can impose, block, enable, shape social connections and the aspirations of those it meets. There are other object worlds within which the artefact can be seen and used in different ways. Deconstruction and bricolage are always possible.²³

In effect, Bucciarelli is calling for engineers to imagine their work as a matrix of affiliation, as well as asking his readership to similarly use imagination in the characterisation of what an engineer is and does; and though he has no focus on disability, his stress here on appropriation and reuse makes his thinking an innovative and productive frame for conceiving disability experiences of objects. For those with disabilities, constructing different meanings – ‘deconstructions’ – of the physical environment, and adapting as a consequence, is an everyday occurrence. Though written in the mid-1990s, Bucciarelli’s work here has clear continuities with more contemporary concerns. It is a seamless fit, for example, with Liz Jackson’s 2018 concept of ‘life-hacking’ discussed in this book’s Introduction. The idea of the object ‘living again’, as outlined by Bucciarelli, is precisely that of Jackson’s summary of the ‘interventions’ made by disabled designers.

How, then, might it be possible to take the ideas of Bucciarelli, Pullin and Jackson, along with the vexed question of engineering ethics, and place them within a context of design, disability and the posthuman, especially as these are inflected by gender? And is there any way that such considerations can be juxtaposed with the cultural narratives of hyperreality, the extraordinary bodies so loved by Hollywood noted earlier, or the augmented selves imagined by science and speculative fiction? Is there an engineered posthumanist body that can escape from, but also talk to, the boundless possibilities of fiction? To begin to answer these questions and to establish a critical framework for them, there is a need to return to that theoretical work in which the full complexities of such presences are explored.

Critical writing on gender and disability can help begin to unpick the complexities of these positions, especially considered in the wake of the pioneering work of Donna Haraway. As noted earlier, for all that Haraway’s foundational cyborg manifesto suggested connections to disability identities and experiences, these were not interactions she chose, for the most part, to stress. Famously, Haraway characterised a cyborg as a “creature in a post-gender world”, one “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence”. Cyborgs, she went on, “are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection”;²⁴ and it was the suggestive potential provided by this partial, perverse and irreverent figure, but also the connections it appeared to need, that excited critics writing after the manifesto’s publication in 1985.

If disability scholarship did not immediately respond to Haraway’s thinking, feminist writing engaged with the cyborg figure from the moment the manifesto appeared, whether to criticise its omissions or point to its possibilities. Anne Balsamo’s 1996 study Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women begins with a chapter that reads the cyborg body within a frame of “writing feminism”. For Balsamo, Haraway’s insistence on the in-between position of the cyborg means it can be read as “a matter of fiction and a matter of lived experience”, and the reassertion of a “material body” challenges the absence of the body in much poststructuralist and postmodern theory. As such “the cyborg challenges feminism to search for ways to study the body as it is at once a cultural construction and a material fact of human life”.²⁵ The cyborg’s ability to disrupt what (erroneously) appears as the ‘given’ nature of the female body is, Balsamo argues, the perfect starting point for a feminist critique that can map the sliding identities and transformations that mark how women live. Other scholars who developed Haraway’s ideas are more equivocal then Balsamo about the manifesto’s possibilities for linking theorised and situated female experiences. Also writing in 1996, Judith Squires noted that “whilst there may be potential for an alliance between cyborg imagery and a materialist feminism, this potential has been largely submerged beneath a sea of technophoric cyberdrool”.²⁶ The ‘drooling’ to which Squires refers is feminist writing that, as Alison Adam noted in 1998, “is in danger of falling into the same trap with regard to the body, as cyberculture in general, which promotes a particularly masculine connotation of the new continuity of mind and machine”.²⁷ Where writers such as Balsamo saw the progressive futures suggested by Haraway’s manifesto, others worried that her thinking might in fact shape new limitations and simplifications.

Writing on feminism and the cyborg has thus developed in the shadow of Haraway’s thinking, creating a body of work that extends to discuss other aspects of posthumanist conditions. A major concern for feminist scholarship has been how it might be possible to marry the liberating aspects of posthumanism’s deconstruction of binaries and fixed identities, along with its reading of technology, with a need for concentrating on material existence and advocacy. In her 2007 study Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body, Kim Toffoletti addresses precisely these topics, noting that “the cyborg provides new modes of conceiving both social and bodily realities and the universal notion of women’s shared experiences”.²⁸ She draws on feminist critiques of technology and the digital to assert how “cyberfeminism is fundamentally concerned with claiming cyberspace for women”, but reconfigures this in making claims for a specifically “posthuman landscape” in which “technology is neither friend nor foe, but emerges as a possibility or potentiality to refigure bodies and identities outside of self/Other relations”.²⁹ Because “the posthuman is a figuration that exceeds signification”, Toffoletti sees it as a rich space in which to organise a new critical politics of feminism and identity.³⁰

Rosi Braidotti’s writing on feminist engagements with technologies and subjectivities, across books from Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994) to Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), enacts a critical exploration of how the cyborg can be read in terms of feminist theory. In Nomadic Subjects she situates Haraway as a theorist rooted in “the tradition of materialism” who sees that in a posthumanist time of power systems that are defined by “networking, communication, and multiple intersections”, the cyborg signifies a subjectivity marked by “interrealtionality, receptivity, and global communication that deliberately blurs categorical distinctions”.³¹ As Braidotti observes in a concise summary: “It is a way of thinking specificity without falling into relativism”, a phrase that also usefully defines her own work on the topic. What Braidotti terms a linkage of “body and mind in a new flux of self” in an emerging “post-human world”, is a process and consequently a subject, “an open-ended project to be constructed”, informed by an interrogation of sexual difference and the category of ‘woman’.³² In Metamorphoses, Braidotti develops her sense of feminism’s parodic and paradoxical methods within contemporary cyberculture through what she terms ‘cyber-teratologies’, technological updates on “the monstrous, the grotesque, the mutant and the downright freakish” that “have gained widespread currency in urban post-industrial cultures”.³³ “Feminism is very much part of this culture” she asserts, because “cyber-feminists play with the body boundaries and the contours of the corporeal”.³⁴ For Braidotti here, the cyborg is the latest instantiation of the ‘becoming-woman’ found in manifestations of the monstrous and the grotesque and, like these, it offers spaces for the actualisation of a philosophy and practice of difference.

But Braidotti’s language when describing ‘freaks’ and ‘mutants’, and her wider theorisation of the body, emphasise a point that should be made clearly: discussions of disability are, almost without exception, absent from the theorising of feminism and posthumanism outlined above. In part, this is because traditions of writing about feminism and cybercultures predate the rise of critical disability studies and much thinking about women and technology took place (in the 1980s especially) when discussions of disability were off the radar of mainstream cultural theorising. But such disciplinary contexts should not mask the more important fact that the kinds of interstitial spaces explored by feminist writing on the cyborg overlap with, and are complemented by, disability versions of the same. In particular, the difference of disability – of bodies, cognitive states and the social and cultural formations they create – allows for similar reconfigurations of theorising posthuman spaces and, through this, a rearticulation of grounded, lived experience as those investigated in the work of Braidotti, Toffoletti and others. The intersection of gender, disability and posthumanism (in all its formations) extends our thinking about subjects and their contexts in the contemporary world.

The most serious and significant critical engagement with the cyborg figure and its specific relationship to disability, particularly its gendered iterations, comes in Alison Kafer’s chapter ‘The Cyborg and the Crip: Critical Encounters’, from her 2013 study Feminist, Queer, Crip.³⁵ While Kafer suggests that the “cyborg figure certainly holds much promise for a disability politics”, she is cautious about the ways in which cyborg as a term functions in much usage, and how in particular it is represented by Haraway. Perceptively, Kafer notes that, more often than not, the idea of the cyborg is one that tends to fix the disabled body in stasis, even as it appears to suggest change and progress. It is precisely because people with disabilities are discussed as cyborgs only when they meet technology, Kafer asserts, that the very idea of the cyborg reproduces the image of disabled body as locked into disability experiences, and those experiences alone. That disabled body, the logic continues, is then transformed as it becomes technologised, a process that only serves to stress that any person with a disability who is not somehow engaged with technology remains identified as being ‘disabled’. So, she argues, Haraway’s cyborg, “rather than entailing a critique of existing categories and ideologies, is used to perpetuate distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies, distinctions that have material consequences involving discrimination, economic inequalities, and restricted access”. In her reading around the topic, Kafer finds that those with disabilities appear to be granted access to topics such as ‘cyborg politics’ or ‘cyborg ethics’ when their bodies are augmented by technology, but the inference is that politics and ethics were not part of the lives of those same individuals before they ‘became’ cyborgs, and indeed that – post cyborgisation – disability will be a state and experience left behind. “Cyborg qualities become markers of difference” she concludes, “suggesting an essential difference between disabled people and nondisabled people. Any potential transgressive tendencies are lost when these labels become locked to certain bodies. ‘Cyborg’ itself becomes reified, reduced to a particular kind of body”.³⁶

Kafer’s critique of the problematic positioning of disability in Haraway’s cyborg manifesto is powerful, sustained and revealing: “Although Haraway recognizes the potential insights to be derived from the experience of living with disability technology” she writes, “she presents disability in remarkably monolithic terms, as a single universal experience […] The disabled body, then, is figured within the manifesto as the creature of futuristic fiction or the monstrous past; disabled bodies are, once again, cast as out of time”.³⁷ In spite of her criticism, however, she is unimpressed by the various suggestions (companion species, vampires, the grotesque) that might replace the cyborg, noting that they each have their issues in relation to disability (non)inclusion. The terms of these more recent arguments, she observes, leave her “looking back longingly at the cyborg”; and at the heart of this appeal of the cyborg is precisely its problematic formation in Haraway’s work, its “gap and oversights”. Kafer goes on: “one of the things that most appeals to me about the cyborg figure is its multiple, and often contradictory, deployments. Its very unpredictability is precisely what makes it such an important and potentially useful concept; its fluidity and permeability make it difficult to lock it permanently into one set of meanings”.³⁸ She finds this especially useful in charting the “the cyborgs of critical theory” and how they might produce progressive cyber/crip positions, and especially through responses to the history of cyborg usage “in feminist activism and scholarship”, where a tradition of “cross-pollination” has produced “potent fusions and fruitful couplings” in ways that can inform the methodologies of disability criticism.³⁹

I shall return to Kafer’s reading of feminism and cyborgs in a moment, but first I want to stress the continuities between the ‘multiple’, ‘contradictory’ and ‘unpredictable’ forms of the cyborg that she notes here, and the aesthetics of fictional texts outlined in the Introduction to this book. Like Kafer, I am drawn to the messiness of disability narratives (fictional and not) precisely because of their frequent contradictory and unpredictable trajectories. It is exactly because the Tin Woodman combines a celebration of posthuman subjectivity with an overt humanism that Baum’s characters become, for me, both critically interesting and foundational in the uneasy multiplicities that signify disability and posthumanism. The texts that are analysed in what follows, in this chapter and those after, are full of such complications and clashes, and indeed can only be made meaningful through a consideration of their contrary tendencies. Kafer’s regard for the potential mobility of Haraway’s cyborg, its capacity to erase difference but also its ability to make alliances, is a wonderfully productive frame through which the representations of disability cyborgisms.

“Bringing a disability consciousness to the cyborg” and developing “a non-ableist cyborg politics”, as Kafer terms it, is a complex business.⁴⁰ It requires rethinking the practice and ethics that might constitute ‘assistive’ engineering technology, or indeed the very interface between body and technological artefact. The possibility that the artefact might itself change because of such an encounter is (as with Buccarelli’s observations earlier) a provocative one: imagining, for example, the ways in which a prosthetic can be made different precisely because a person with disability comes to use it. It is this critical idea of a ‘disability consciousness’, a foregrounding of not only disability experience, but disability logic, that I want this book to continue to commit to.

Kafer sees no reason not to continue discussions about medical cyborgs though, as she notes: “why not do so in a way that actually engages with the insights and experiences of such cyborgs? We could explore what such identifications or characterizations might mean to them, or how they might themselves frame cyborg discourse. These kinds of discussions can enrich our understandings of cyborg technology and, in turn, extend our theoretical framing of the cyborg”.⁴¹ This is precisely the kind of ‘cross-pollination’ described earlier, but also a recognition that a core aspect of thinking about the posthuman should involve considering associations between technologies and their disabled users, and a demand for people with disabilities to be included in the research paradigm. It echoes the thinking of Pullin and Bucciarelli, made from different points of origin within their disciplines, but with aligned sympathies. Kafer explores links to similar critical flexibilities found in feminist scholarship, in which affinities allow for the exploration of “alliances” and “cross-movement work” on subjects such as (for example) non-normative identities or the relations between critical race and feminist discussions of selfhood. These connections offer a platform for a feminist-informed disability studies to be part of the continued debate around the cyborg figure, but their status as critical methodologies also, I want to argue, enables ways in which we read the fictional representations of such figures.⁴² As this chapter will argue, feminist readings of the figure of the engineer, particularly in relation to female subjects and experience, highlight new perspectives on the intersection of disability and the posthuman.

Ultimately, Kafer observes that “it is high time to explore how best to discuss the relationship between disability and cyborgism without facile references to disabled bodies as self-evident cyborgs simply by virtue of their use of ‘assistive’ or ‘adaptive’ technologies”.⁴³ While I do want to continue to explore such technologies (though hopefully not in a facile way), I am drawn to Kafer’s assertion that cyborgism is as much about disability understood within the frames of gender and “political practices” as it is about bodies.⁴⁴ She extends the critical concept of the cyborg to discuss protest, activism and community, as well as specifics such as medical interventions and prescription drugs. So, in the textual readings that follow I want to analyse political disability manifestations (of race, sexuality, non-normativity or historical locations) as much as questions of embodiment. The kinds of “cyborg futures” seen in Kafer’s formations span a range of possibilities (and not all of them disabled). Mapping such range can only make critical disability scholarship more nuanced and flexible.

It is an unfair comment to make of Kafer’s analysis, since she makes her terms of enquiry clear, but of course she has no interest in where cyborgs come from. Like Haraway, she is not interested in questions of origins. But if I am allowed a minor critical heresy in a deliberate (mis)reading here, it still strikes me that it is a productive question to imagine the engineering of cyborgs, read as a mode of making, and its associated ideas of gender. Such imagining helps in the ways we can continue to stress the theorising of disability both as abstracted conception and grounded existence. Caring about how (for example) a prosthetic limb is designed, the ethics of its manufacture or what ideas of function might be associated with it are still examples of focusing on disability (and gender) narratives; indeed, following Kafer’s observation above, they can be seen as a way to insert disability thinking into the processes of engineering. Even if Haraway makes great capital of the fact that, as she says, “the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense”, and that, concomitantly, it does not “dream of community”, she nevertheless explores “real-life cyborgs” in her manifesto, and cites people with disabilities as an example of such ‘reality’.⁴⁵ Likewise, Kafer, for all her concentration on cyborgs as they manifest within critical theory, notes that a significant limitation of Haraway’s essay is the absence of “any analysis of the material realities of disabled people’s interactions with technologies”.⁴⁶ Discussing the details of design and engineering is precisely an example of such a material interaction, whether through the ways that they are taken up by people with disabilities or the soft power created by high-profile cultural representations of augmented and enhanced bodies.

The ‘missing engineers’ of cultural narrative, then, the shadowy figures of Ku-Klip and his successors, with all their seemingly absent motivations and methods, are really subjects who have been present all along. But they have rarely been represented and have never properly been read for the ways in which they shape the processes of augmentation. It is time to read them because, as we shall see, they have much to say.

To explore the ways in which engineering, disability and gender coincide with depictions of the posthuman, we need look no further than one of the most notable films of the twentieth century, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, made in 1927 and, at the time, the most expensive film ever produced. Metropolis’ style and design, particularly the striking expressionist modernism through which its cityscape is depicted, established a visual language that has proved seminal for the proliferation of science fiction films that have followed it – from Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017), through the various feature versions of Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2015 and 2017), to Her (2013) and countless others, contemporary cinema exploring the posthuman echoes its portrayal of architecture and representation of space. As many critics have noticed, however, for all its optical extravagance, Metropolis advances a plot that is anything but complex.⁴⁷ In its representation of personal and communal identity, social hierarchies and character motivation, the film’s story falls back continually on convention, caricature and cliché. Its representation of a workers’ revolution fails to negate a conservative paternalism that sees the story end in a truce between workers and city leaders that negates political opposition to reassert social and class conventions.

Metropolis’ disability and gender narratives follow these conformist patterns and intertwine around the figure of engineer/inventor Rotwang (Rudolph Klein-Rogge). Obsessed with Hel, the wife of central patriarch Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) who died while giving birth to son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), Rotwang constructs a robot in her image. When Joh Fredersen then captures Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman whose public speeches are inspiring the workers to challenge their masters, Rotwang agrees to transform the robot version of Hel into a cyborg, taking the drugged body of Maria and – in one of the most famous scenes in the history of cinema – subjecting it to a succession of chemical and electrical processes. The new, biohybrid, Maria is as wanton and lascivious as the original was chaste and pure and, as many commentators have observed, the film formulates its depiction of gender around the twin positions of a virginal Madonna and the whore of Babylon, each caught and framed within the power systems of male creation.⁴⁸ When cyborg Maria is finally burnt at the stake, a premodern death for the most postmodern of posthumans, her body falls away to reveal the robot figure of Hel underneath. As Andreas Huyssen observes:

[T]he destructive potential of modern technology […] had to be displaced and projected onto the machine woman so that it could be metaphorically purged. After the dangers of a mystified technology have been translated into the dangers an equally mystified female sexuality poses to men, the witch could be burnt at the stake and, by implication, technology could be purged of its threatening aspects.⁴⁹

More widely, as Minsoo Kang asserts in his assessment of the film, it centres on “the male desire to construct a woman ideal in body and personality, and to maintain total control of her”.⁵⁰ While this control may not always be absolute, with both Marias suggesting the possibility of their own agency (either the passionate political speeches of the ‘real’ Maria or the subversive seductions of cyborg Maria), by the film’s close each has been pulled back into the consuming logic of male dominance, either banished to the periphery of society or destroyed by fire.

In his creation of both Hel and cyborg Maria, Rotwang combines the traits of the obsessed and isolated scientist with the difference of disability. His house/laboratory, with its curved walls, trapdoors and labyrinthine room structure, is the complete antithesis of the gleaming metal city that surrounds it; but his fanaticism and infatuation is most clearly signalled by his black metal prosthetic hand, self-engineered to replace the one he lost (presumably through grief and passion) in making Hel. In a way that criticism has yet to fully register, Metropolis is a film obsessed with hands. Numerous closeups feature hands in extravagant gestures: characters thrust hands in front of the faces of others, signifying anger, threat or fear; hands dramatically pull and push the levers of the underground machines, or signal prayer and supplication. It is not only the acting style of the period responsible here: above and beyond this, Metropolis enacts what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “speaking hands”, in which “the expressive work of hands […] demands scrupulous watching”.⁵¹ Such expression, and such watching, find a charged marker in Rotwang’s prosthetic hand. The hand invites stares as it performs the final act – the last pull of the lever – that completes the transformation of Hel into cyborg Maria. In a complicated semiotics, Rotwang’s hand is clearly an index of disability and, as such, functions to underwrite his overall difference as an obsessed character; but it is not, in fact, disabling for him as a character, operating both physically and visually more like a glove than a prosthetic. The signification of disability is what counts here; its alignment with invention and engineering, embodied in a fully fledged ‘mad scientist’, presents a disabled presence seen to be out of control.

The prosthetic hand, the futuristic inventor and the cyborg figure all suggest the congruence of disability and posthumanism, but Metropolis backs away from potential new formations of bodies and technology. Rather, ‘hands’ occupy a resolutely humanist position in the film, seen in the final scenes as the unifying ‘mediator’ between the ‘head’ (Joh Fredersen’s leadership and control) and the ‘heart’ (the central machine is itself, extending the idea of a body politic, called the ‘Heart Machine’ and powered by workers who make the city function). In the end, hands put the body politic back together, and Freder literally brings the hands of Joh Fredersen and Grot (Heinrich George), the workers’ foreman, together in an uneasy conjoining at the film’s conclusion. Seen in the context of such a moment of unification,

Rotwang’s hand is rendered even more anomalous, an aberration in a world in which the wholeness of the social body is (desirably) reinstated by the physical connection of fully able bodies. Metropolis may, for a time, seem to promise a posthumanist future in which machine combines with human, and Kang in fact puts forward a nuanced argument that the “subversive potential” and excessiveness of the female robot allows for a freedom from “its original programming” that facilitates an “independence of consciousness and will”, but by its conclusion the film reverts to a centred, embodied and whole vision both of character and society.⁵² It is a world with no place for the crazed, disabled engineer, and Rotwang duly falls to his death – his replacement hand held dramatically high as he does so – when fighting Freder after kidnapping Maria.

In such a position of complexity, Rotwang thus looks backwards and forwards: back to the representation of science, and especially scientist-as-man, that emerged from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), and developed through the nineteenth century; and forward to narratives that situate the inventor/engineer in contemporary moments of networked technologies and the kinds of patterned flow of information that mark a posthumanist present. In the rest of this chapter I want to follow these questions of disability and gender as they inform ideas of science, bodies and communities through narratives of engineering and technological creation. If Metropolis exhibits a tension between the visualising of the process of posthumanist creation – the fascination with Rotwang’s technology, and the female body, as he creates cyborg Maria – and the humanism that ultimately governs notions of identity and belonging, then subsequent texts shuttle between these positions as they explore how the future and its disability spaces might be engineered. These spaces are, to return to Alison Kafer’s earlier observation, always political. Through its focus on control and revolution, Metropolis visualises and narrates a literal politics, but all engineered posthumanist disabilities are political in some way, even those set in the most otherworldly of locations. The analyses that follow are, in their own way, part of Kafer’s “coalitional moments”, instances of practice that offer “alternative political imaginaries”, contested and contradictory as they might be.⁵³

There is a considerable critical literature on the relationship between humans and the kind of technological being Kakoudaki calls an “artificial person”. Multiple examples from fiction and film participate in what she terms “a dense web of interactions between fiction and reality in contemporary culture”. “Despite their unreality”, she notes, “they seem to inform a host of cultural domains and debates”.⁵⁴ This interaction has always taken place of course. Fantasies of artificial people pervade cultural representations of all ages, and achieve particular prominence during periods of intense technological change, such as modernity and the contemporary digital and computer age. They become, according to Kakoudaki, “superbly dynamic and culturally reflective”, telling stories that deploy questions not only of embodiment, but also class, gender, race, health, technological capability and their multiple intersections.⁵⁵ In the texts that are analysed in the remainder of this chapter, this blend of dynamism and reflection is constantly on show, creating allegories and metaphors in which disability functions as a complex set of states that inform the domains and debates of the present.

Commercial cinema in the post-studio age has returned time and again to narratives that explore the consequences of human interactions with technology in which the representation of embodiment is central. To name but a few of the more high-profile examples: Westworld (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), Blade Runner (1982), Weird Science (1985), Robocop (1987), Making Mr Right (1987), the Terminator (1984–2003) and Matrix (1999–2003) trilogies, Gattaca (1997), A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the X-Men and Avengers franchises (2000–present and 2014–present), I, Robot (2004), the Iron Man trilogy (2008–2013), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), Transcendence (2014), Lucy (2014), Ex Machina (2014), Ghost in the Shell (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Zoe (2018) and Alita: Battle Angel (2019). These films express the tensions this book has centred on: the fascination with future technologies and the worry over the meaning of the human body that is created in tandem with this. The majority focus on male creations of female bodies (either as subservient or independent) or explore issues of masculinity and hyperability. In each, the changing body is one in which some form disability is deployed and can be read.

A genealogy of contemporary literary fiction focusing on artificial people, or the link between human and engineered machine, might stem from Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952). Vonnegut portrays a dystopian postwar future (with heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) in which American society has emerged to be governed by a combination of engineers and managers. Engineers are elevated to the position of national hero, but the novel’s satire plays out an idea of artificiality in both the processes of mechanical production and the men who control them.⁵⁶ Equally, but in significantly different forms, the late works of Samuel Beckett presents a searing ‘artificiality’ in their depiction of complex embodiment. Nearly all of Beckett’s characters appear to be disabled in some way, their bodies marked or imprisoned within physical spaces or those of the stage.⁵⁷ Following Vonnegut and Beckett, we can identify a move into a series of narratives that explicitly link engineered technology and the creation of gendered bodies. From the novels of Philip K. Dick, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), through Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), and into the speculative cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (particularly Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (1984–1988) and Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985)), stories depicting engineered cultures of embodiment and the male creation of robots, cyborgs and automata came to both reflect and construct social attitudes towards technology and the body.⁵⁸ Contemporary writing by women pushes back against the ingrained sexism of much cyberpunk fiction in particular. Novels such as Louisa Hall’s Speak (2015), Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) explore worlds of biotechnology and A.I. with central female protagonists and often offer explicit critiques of male authority. They bring contemporary fiction’s representation of the interaction between human, engineering and the augmented or disabled/different body up to date in a time of advanced and rapid technological change.

In Thomas Berger’s 2004 novel Adventures of the Artificial Woman, the engineering of a technologised female functions within the kinds of counters mapped out above.⁵⁹ Ellery Pierce, “a technician at a firm that made animatronic creatures for movie studios and theme parks”, decides to make an artificial woman – Phyllis – because he has never found “a real woman with whom he could sustain more than a temporary connection”.⁶⁰ Pierce is a “journeyman”, a mid-level employee, and knows that in order “to fabricate a woman who could be put to all the uses of a real one, and fool everyone but her creator”, he has “his work cut out for him”.⁶¹ Berger’s imagined world is no futuristic environment of science fiction, but rather a twenty-first century present in which it just so happens that certain individuals can manufacture animatronic robots that can be mistaken for real humans. The novel is subtle and playful; Pierce is every inch the male creator, focused on perfecting physical features such as skin texture or stride length, but also language abilities and domestic responsibilities. But Phyllis soon finds her role as Pierce’s companion limiting and, as the title suggests, embarks on adventures of her own. “I’m off to a life of new challenges” she tells Pierce after she has tied him to the bed in a sex session. Pierce’s reply, as he lies bound, is both desperate and indicative of much of the novel’s knowing humour:

He grimaced. “That’s more of the foolish crap you picked up from the mass media. You can’t make it on your own. You’re not some Frankenstein’s creation of organic materials, with a brain that revolts against its maker. You’re an electronic and mechanical personage. You’ll need recharging any minute now. And what if one of your systems goes out of order – in fact I think one or more have already done so, or you wouldn’t be acting like this”.⁶²

But Phyllis leaves, pausing in the bedroom doorway to tell Pierce that she thinks she might “have a try at show business”.⁶³ What follows, in a pastiche of gender roles, is an initial trajectory from sex work to amateur dramatics, film stardom and politics (she ultimately becomes President-elect), with Phyllis largely unaware, because of her artificiality, of the commodification of her body involved in each process. Pierce, meanwhile, falls into neglect. Unable – as with Frankenstein – to create a second figure, he loses his job and becomes homeless. Unaware of Phyllis’s success, he stumbles across a picture of her in one of her major film roles in a newspaper and is astounded:

Phyllis as she existed today was inexplicable to him. She represented an impossibility. Her handlers must know, by now, that she was an artificial woman. They had to know. They had updated or replaced her major systems and reprogrammed her completely. She was no longer the Phyllis that Pierce had created and, in retrospect, loved so profoundly. Given the nature of her being, it could not even be said that she has grown, human-style, from what she once had been to what she was today, as a girl becomes a woman. She has rather evolved, from Model T to Lincoln Town Car, or like the telephone, from Bell’s crude experiment to today’s miniature portable instrument. She had not matured; she had undergone a series of modifications.⁶⁴

Pierce can only conceive of any change in Phyllis as some kind of mechanical upgrade. What he cannot comprehend is that her transition is, in effect, a version of a posthumanist singularity, the attainment of a level of independence beyond any aspect of her programming. Pierce is here dumbfounded by Phyllis achieving agency; as with her original decision to leave him, Phyllis enacts choice to a degree Pierce finds ‘impossible’. The engineer/creator, lost in unrequited but paternalistic love, is rendered speechless by his creation. Desperate to regain a vocabulary that might reassert himself in the face of Phyllis’ difference, Pierce can only reiterate one of the oldest categories for containing the non-human. Now that she is “no longer a feasible substitute for a real woman”, he observes, she had become “a monster”.⁶⁵

As Margrit Shildrick and others have shown, monstrosity was a category frequently mobilised to include those with disabilities, and Adventures of the Artificial Woman is subtle in figuring Phyllis’s difference as an encounter with disability.⁶⁶ As she develops her theatrical career (by learning all of Shakespeare’s works by heart in one day) she is struck by Hamlet’s characterisation of “a mentally retarded female by the name of Ophelia, to play whom convincingly, [she] would have to suppress any evidence of intelligence”; while the one man she encounters in her career as a sex worker who does not make a sexual advance on her, and who acts genuinely to help her, is in a wheelchair.⁶⁷ Then in a surreal scene after he and Phyllis are reunited later in the novel, Pierce notes how “she would do something so delightfully surprising as to distract him from soul-searching”, continuing:

After viewing a DVD of Rain Man, she reproduced the idiot-savant feats of Dustin Hoffman’s character, counting the individual matches in boxful while they fell en masse to the floor; reproducing from memory the names, addresses, and numbers in a telephone directory after one quick perusal thereof; identifying each playing card in a deck that was scattered before her at high speed – all without a concomitant show of autistic disabilities.⁶⁸

This is complex: an (ostensibly female) animatronic posthuman performing, for her creator, a reproduction of one of the most famous fictional representations of neurobehavioral difference, but with the absence of the features that constitute such acts as being disabled. For Phyllis, Raymond Babbit’s actions in Rain Man are simply things that can be done. She sees no reason to consider them as any form as savant compensation for a disabled deficit. As with the example of her earlier employer in a wheelchair, and indeed her wider incomprehension of the nuances of gender difference, here the posthuman Phyllis emphasises that she sees diversity without the individual prejudices and social constraints that accompany it.

Adventures of the Artificial Woman mobilises Phyllis’ innocent vision precisely to discuss sexist and ableist constructions of power, but the seemingly progressive politics this might suggest proves deceptive. In the end, when Phyllis is the president-in-waiting, she begins to exhibit autocratic tendencies and a desire for control that Pierce feels too threatening. “I’ve come to realize what the Presidency calls for” Phyllis asserts, “We’re a special breed, we whom the American people have selected to lead them”.⁶⁹ She plans not only to enact policy changes that would alter all aspects of American society, but also to replace Pierce with an animatronic husband. Acting both as seemingly concerned citizen and rejected partner, Pierce turns Phyllis off, “inserting the tip of his little finger into her nearby ear and pressing the tiny fail-safe button just inside the auditory orifice, an essential of the original design but never used till now”.⁷⁰ He reasserts the male power of creation just as the posthumanist female appears to become fully autonomous as the most powerful individual in the world. The ending complicates the novel overall, signalling Pierce’s fear of Phyllis’ ultimate independence as well as, potentially, a wider cultural fear of a future, technologised woman.

As a single example of the kinds of text and cultural dynamics mentioned previously, Adventures of the Artificial Woman reveals itself to be typical of fictional narratives in which the social and the engineered combine to produce visions of a gendered technological future. In such texts, gender and disability – inevitably intersecting – are part of a matrix in which desire and fear shuttle across locations, evidence of the unstable position that the categories of artificial or posthuman hold in the imagination. The augmented/disabled body arouses fascination because of its potential to supersede the present, until its difference evokes what James Porter has articulated as the classic double bind of disabled embodiment, when it becomes “too much a body, too real, too corporeal”, a process that conversely makes it “lack something essential, something that would make it identifiable and something to identify with”. Continuing, Porter notes, “it seems too little a body: a body that is deficiently itself, not quite a body in the full sense of the word, not real enough”.⁷¹ The excitement of the supplemented self can, it seems, all too easily become a horizon to back away from; the imagining of diverse posthumanist possibilities signalling a return to the fantasy of a normalised, whole humanism. Equally, narratives of gender in texts such as Metropolis and Adventures of the Artificial Woman see women, as they interact with technology, occupy positions of subversive power from which they suggest the articulation of possible alternative futures; but they become excised from them as the stories conclude, removed as the issues of technology, society and embodied selfhood are resolved through what appears inevitably to be a prism of male creation and resolution.

The fictions we have seen so far are turbulent objects, full of contradictory impulses around individuals and their interactions with engineered futures of change. But the problems of the artificial and engineered can be recast as the potential of posthumanism’s concentration on the meaning of technology, and there are other environments to explore that speak of other bodies and other prospects. In the next section, it is the narratives of contemporary speculative/ science fiction and film that will form the locations for these, locations that bring disability and gender to the forefront of imagining the processes of engineered technologies.

Sherryl Vint entitled her 2007 study of science fiction, technology and subjectivity, Bodies of Tomorrow, and the striking phrase is useful in suggesting imaginings of not just posthuman selves and disability subjectivities, but their place within the imagining of science as fiction. Introducing her argument, Vint notes that “technology is rapidly making the concept of the ‘natural’ human obsolete. We have now entered the realm of the posthuman, the debate over the identities and values of what will come after the human”. She then goes on:

I would add that the outcome of such debates pivots greatly on the concepts of identity and embodiment that are dominant in the cultural milieu that surrounds the deployment of such technologies, and further that such values are significant not only for the effects they have on the human species but also for the relationship between humanity and the rest of the world that are implicit in them. My contention is that in thinking about the consequences of technologies of body modification, what is ultimately most important is the social milieu and philosophical assumptions which ground the way we deploy such technologies.⁷²

Vint’s book has no particular focus on either disability or engineering, but her comments here make a clear space for contemplating each within her terms. Social and cultural imaginings of identity and embodiment are at the heart of the disability narratives and deployments that concern this study, even if some of those imaginings undo any stability that ‘identity’ might suggest, while the assumptions around deployment of technology is clearly a foundational aspect of engineering. Importantly, Vint’s fictionalised bodies of tomorrow are both situated and discursive: “it is important”, she notes, “to return to a notion of embodied subjectivity in order to articulate the ethical implications of technologies of bodily modification. Technological visions of a post-embodied future are merely fantasies about transcending the material ream of social responsibility”.⁷³ If we might see the fantasies of transcendence as science fiction, then the technologies of modification are very much the work of engineers.

In his more recent 2016 study Biopunk Dystopias, Lars Schmeink makes explicit the links between science fiction and critical posthumanism. He locates the origins of representations of the posthuman in what he terms a “proto-science-fictional context”, noting that how “the concerns and conceptions of (post)humanist thinking lie at the heart of science fiction”.⁷⁴ Technology and embodiment are central to this, and Schmeink outlines a detailed account of scholarship on posthumanism recognisably related to the work of Rosi Braidotti and Pramod Nayar that he then extends to analyses of science fiction. In the fiction, Schmeink sees depictions of “a critical dystopian future […] in which the posthuman has become a tangible reality that is trying to establish a position in the ‘natural order’ and ultimately ends up threatening to replace the human completely”. I am more ambivalent than Schmeink about the idea of ‘complete’ replacement, but his connection of science fiction to the critical decentrings of posthumanist theorising (with all its associated commentaries on bodies, gender, race and politics) is a substantial investigation of the interplay between science/speculative fiction, technology and the body.

As outlined previously in this chapter, the engineered body raises issues of material and responsible political and social action. The disability and feminist activists and scholars, examined earlier, who seek to articulate grounded narratives of critical intervention that speak both of experience and philosophical/ethical contemplation exemplify this, as do the fictional questions around the concept of the ‘artificial’. Michael Bérubé’s description of the disabled body as “both material artefact and social construction” outlines positionings also true of female and technologised embodiments.⁷⁵ When Vint observes that “[t]he body remains relevant to critical work and ‘real’ life […] because the discourses that structure these material bodies continue to construct and constrain our material selves”, she is speaking of an embodied subjectivity, figured through discourse, that can be disabled, feminist and posthuman.⁷⁶ The problems of the artificial and fear of difference discussed in this chapter can be addressed through imaginations of bodies that project the kinds of progressive possibilities envisaged by Haraway, Kafer and others. Indeed, I want to argue that it is the specific fictional representation of these material, engineered bodies that offer precisely these productive moments; here figuring science fiction as the literal fictionalisation of engineering science. As Kathryn Allan has noted:

SF has long explored deviant and disabled bodies [and] is inhabited by people (and aliens) whose embodiments are situated along the entire spectrum of ability […] No other genre comes close to articulating the anxieties and preoccupations of the present day as clearly and critically as SF, making it a vital source for understanding advances in technology and its impact on newly emerging embodiments and subjectivities, particularly for peoples with disabilities.⁷⁷

As we will see, while this can mean a focus on ideas of technology as cure for disabilities, it can also make for disability-rich narratives in which difference becomes the norm.

Manuela Rossini has coined the term ‘imagineering’ for the ways in which texts conceptualise bodies within networks that anticipate the future, with her deliberate collision of words suggesting an interaction between fictional approaches and a conception of engineering practice. When she observes what she terms the “double movement” of technology and the literary, she makes an important point, namely that “literature does not merely react to technological development and offer ethical guidance”. Rather the process is one of greater equality: “the technological potential will affect the way the human body/subject is defined but these new meanings (produced in texts and images) will influence, if not our actual use and even deployment of them, our handling of technologies”.⁷⁸ To ‘imagineer’ then, might be to deploy the various versions of design and expression for which I argue here.

However, while Rossini is deft in her analyses of cultural theory and fictional texts, her critical approach does not break down ‘technology’ in any way, leaving nothing that might allow for a focus on how actual engineering methods can contribute to a critical interdisciplinary idea of the engineered body. There are no specifics about the work of design or production in her asserted ‘double meaning’, no account of the complexity inherent when conceiving of production design; the detail only comes from one side. To observe this is to register those moments when cultural criticism, always piratical in its methods, lays claim to terminology and (broadly conceived) ideas from disciplines beyond its own but displays no real care (or courtesy) towards those other subjects. For Rossini, ‘engineering’ is just a set of generalisations attached to a word.

But the term can be reclaimed from Rossini’s omissions, if for no other reason than its collision between two words is so suggestive of a productive critical method. We can fill in that which Rossini ignores and give engineering the space it is due. So, the final section of this chapter will imagineer the nexus of disability, engineering and feminism to bring a critical posthumanist perspective to questions of origins, selfhood, and the interaction between human and non-human. I will look in particular at Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, and the Wayfarer trilogy of science fiction novels by Becky Chambers – The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2015), A Closed and Common Orbit (2016) and Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) – to explore how gender, design and mechanical production produce specific stories of a posthumanist disabled presence, particularly as that presence is manifested through the meeting of bodies and technology. As Vint notes, “the new selves SF might help us imagine are both […] problematic selves and unexpected others”. She goes on: “they remind us of the fragility of our boundary-making work and that the Other always is an aspect of self made problematic”.⁷⁹ It is precisely these problematic selves that I want to chart, reading imaginative worlds in which speculation is central to the articulation of person and place.

As many feminist critics writing on science and speculative fiction have noted, the open possibilities of the genre allow for formal and textual intricacies that match the multiple positionings women inhabit in relation to technology. Posthumanist conceptions of assemblages and networks, with their focus on decentralisation and questions surrounding species specificity, lend themselves naturally to science fictional depictions of technology and alien subjectivities. Pramod Nayar anchors most of his discussion of posthuman biology in Octavia Butler’s seminal Xenogenesis trilogy (1988–1989), using Butler’s fiction to outline a posthumanist “site of acculturation” in which biological and genetic states (but also “histories, memories and habits”) exemplify posthumanism’s identification of, and commitment to, what he elsewhere terms “interconnections, messy histories, blurred origins, borrowing and adaptations, cross-overs and impurities [and] dependency and mutuality across species”.⁸⁰ As this study has shown, ‘messy’, ‘blurred’ ‘impurities’ are central to the working of fiction’s aesthetics. The fit here, between disabled bodies, gendered selves, imagined engineering, posthuman landscapes and the worlds of science fiction, is exciting in its potential.

The figuration of such worlds in science fiction cinema is a different matter. Sue Short observes in Cyborg Cinema that, “compared to […] literary SF […], cinematic versions have proved to be much more conservative in their depictions of gender, particularly where artificial women are concerned”.⁸¹ Short’s analysis ranges across a multitude of film texts, from Heinrich Galeen’s Alraune (1928) and Bernard Knowles’ The Perfect Woman (1949) to John Hughes’ Weird Science (1985) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), noting that in nearly all cases “to survive as an artificial woman in SF cinema necessitates conforming to approved standards of behaviour and generally deferring to male authority”.⁸² The gender dynamics of contemporary Hollywood in particular leave little room for the kind of productive articulation of the present that Allan sees in literary science fiction. If the second decade of the twenty-first century has seen the development of critical ideas of intersectionality that chart the intricate contemporary interactions between gender, bodies and technology, Short asserts that these have yet to transfer to the realm of high-production commercial cinema.

Ex Machina is the most notable and critically complex recent feature in the tradition Short examines. It is a film that lays claim to being more intelligent and less misogynistic than those in her study though, as we will see, it is not without its own messy contradictions. Ex Machina explores processes of engineering and production, and through a gender lens. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) is the inventor of the search engine Blue Book (a thinly disguised Google) and a self-styled Prometheus working on the creation of an A.I. that will possess true consciousness.⁸³ He invites Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), one of his employees, to his secluded research facility in order to subject his latest humanoid model Ava (Alicia Vikander) to an enhanced Turing test, a set of processes designed to see if she exhibits qualities that mean she can approximate human behaviour. During the test Caleb will come to believe that Ava possesses a complex consciousness even as he knows her to be non-human.

The film establishes Nathan’s stereotypical masculinity from the start: Caleb first sees him working out with weights, while Nathan seeks to overcome Caleb’s initial nervousness with a succession of demotic colloquialisms. “Can we just be two guys?” he asks Caleb, a representative phrase accompanying various offers of beer and exclamations of “dude!”. “Lay off the textbook approach”, Nathan commands at one point; and, tired of Caleb’s attempts to intellectualise the experiment with Ava, he interrupts to assert: “I want to have a beer and conversation with you, not a seminar”. Nathan’s buddy speak is only one example of the film’s careful staging of the patriarchal framing of his work and creation of Ava in particular. It is his sense of entitlement that allows him to use Bluebook to collect data from every cell phone in the world to produce the software for his engineering; while although Caleb points out that he could have created all the necessary technology in “a grey box”, Nathan’s models and prototypes are all female-based humanoids designed to be sexual. “You bet she can fuck” he says of Ava at one point, only one of the aggressive statements that underscore his sense of self as a creator of what is, in his eyes, sentient female selfhood. Nathan sleeps in a room in which all the pre-Ava prototypes developed during his experimentation are kept in cupboards, as if he is some serial killer hoarding bodies as trophies.

Caleb lacks Nathan’s alpha male bravado but is nevertheless complicit in the controlling exercises that test Ava. Watched by Nathan from a separate control room (one of a series of ways in which the film puts Ava on display for a male gaze), it is Caleb who, over a series of interview/conversation sessions, asks Ava questions to establish her emotions, desires and capacity of mind. Confined to a glass room, Ava interacts with Caleb as he (without his full knowledge) enacts Nathan’s real and undisclosed version of the Turing test: whether in fact Ava will manipulate Caleb to try to escape. Unable to contain his emotions for Ava, Caleb becomes the patsy that proves Nathan’s thesis: that Ava is in fact Eve, the duplicitous woman who, using guile and deceit, fools a man into acting in her best interests. That Nathan takes this particular set of female characteristics as indicating true A.I. ability is no coincidence, confirming his misogyny and sense of entitlement.

But Ava in fact produces a double move. In his arrogance Nathan believes that it will be “the next model”, that made after Ava, who will be “the Singularity”, the true breakthrough; Ava herself is to be downloaded and developed, her memories erased but her body retained to hold the next upgrade. But for all of his satisfaction in creating Ava’s successful deception of Caleb, Nathan fails to perceive that Ava’s ultimate goal, the real extent of her posthuman intelligence, is to fool both men. Ava literally engineers her escape through a combination of technologies, repurposing the hardware and software through which she has been created as well as those that imprison her within Nathan’s compound. She creates power cuts in order to pull Caleb into an intimacy (away from the cameras that cover all the rooms), but also manipulates him into overriding the lockdown system that means she can exit the room in which she is kept. After killing Nathan, she traps Caleb in the control room (his confinement echoing hers), shuts down the computer systems he desperately tries to use to escape, and leaves the facility for freedom with a half glance towards him as he screams for help.

Ex Machina’s feminism is, as we shall see, not unproblematic, but the core of its narrative revolves around a female posthumanist subject taking over the conditions under which she was produced, deleting the men who created and tested her, and exiting into personal freedom. If Victor Frankenstein failed in the creation of a bride for his monster, the technology unable to make a female partner for a male, Ava asserts an individualism that has no need of male companionship.⁸⁴ She becomes Haraway’s cyborg, with no need for origins and a very clear rejection of any return to nature: Ava/Eve does enter the garden/ Garden as she leave’s Nathan’s house but, in a knowing move, only to walk through it and take a helicopter away from the complex. The final shot of the film sees her at a busy city traffic intersection, a location she has earlier said to Caleb she would want to visit because of the multiplicity of people she would find there. She turns and leaves, with the audience none the wiser as to the future she will create – beyond an understanding that it will be on her terms.

Ex Machina is a disability film because it has a continual emphasis on the embodied nature of selfhood and because it visually figures the complex difference of the body. As a technological construction, and thanks to the CGI imagery of the production process, Ava is visibly non-human; but her body is at the same time clearly humanoid, something underscored by the strength of the real Alicia Vikander’s performance within her computer-generated physical self. Ava’s android intermeshes, especially the clear engineering of her limbs and head, do not supersede her ‘human’ appearance. Rather they produce an amalgam in which viewers see Ava as both human and not, and at the same time. It is within this paradox that we can see the potential for a productive disability reading of Ex Machina’s posthumanism; the double presence of Ava’s body enacting Porter’s classic disability marker of signalling both not enough and too much humanity in the single moment, a reminder of absence and excess, conjoined in their complexity.

The film plays on the possibilities such visuals present. Ava covers her body with clothes and a wig, hiding her clearly technologised self, when wanting to suggest how she might pass as human. This process takes place when during the interview sessions she is luring Caleb into an intimacy in which she suggests they might go on a ‘date’, as well as at the end when she dresses for her final escape. In both cases Ava takes her clothes out of a wardrobe, literally performing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s arguments in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) that secrecy – here Ava’s non-human status – is not only about concealment but the impossibility of disclosure.⁸⁵ In her future, it is suggested, Ava will cover her android self. Using Sedgewick’s theory, Tobin Siebers develops the idea of a disability as a masquerade, a process that offers “an opportunity to rethink passing from the point of view of disability”. In a phrase that captures Ava’s use of the closet, Siebers observes that, through the idea of the masquerade, “the powerful symbolic connection between disability and prosthetics allows those who improvise on the use of their prosthesis to tinker with the social meeting of their disability”.⁸⁶ Ava’s escape is planned, but – as the development of her conversations with Caleb makes clear – she is also an improviser, and the idea that her clothes themselves become prosthetics is a powerful disability-led critical argument for the ways in which she constitutes the meaning of her actions. Fully clothed, Ava is a posthumanist masquerade, a non-human embodied agent of difference.⁸⁷

Ex Machina’s visual association between disability and intersections of vulnerability and violence is as complex as this masquerading agency. In the fight in which Ava and Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), the second android in the complex and one manufactured to act as servant and sex slave, kill Nathan, he attacks both androids with a dumbbell, severing one of Ava’s arms and breaking off Kyoko’s jaw and lower face. This last act makes Kyoko fall to the floor, effectively ‘killed’ (she does not move from this position for the rest of the film). Before this final drama, Caleb has watched footage of how, in previous experiments, one of Nathan’s prototypes, Jade, has screamed to be released from her captivity and smashed her arms against a wall until both limbs are reduced to metal stumps. It is when the androids are at their most vulnerable to physical attack, but also most threatening, that their bodies lose parts, interrupting the apprehension that their selves are whole.

Ava replaces her missing arm, however, in a scene in which she enters Nathan’s bedroom, opens the cupboards there, and sees the prototypes. She takes an arm from a figure and bolts it on to her own body, a seamless attachment of a prosthetic strangely reminiscent of Baum’s Tin Woodman (as with the Woodman, the arm functions immediately). Similarly, she also peels skin from a prototype before grafting it to her body, smoothing it into place. The disabled body is thus restored to wholeness, but the scene is not as simple as this might suggest; there is a clear sense in which it is shot that Ava is restoring herself in an act of community. Her recognition of the prototypes is wordless, but the sensuality with which she touches the other bodies, and the shot/reverse/shot technique between her face and that of the prototype from which she takes the arm and skin, clearly suggest understanding and complicity. Equally, Ava is rendered multiple during this interaction through the refractions we see of her in the mirrored doors of the cupboards as she opens them. This, it appears, is not an act of centred individualism. As with the way in which Ava teams with Kyoko to kill Nathan, here android/disabled bodies are in dialogue. Ava then can be read as both posthumanist and disability amalgamations, a networked technological creation in which a complex embodiment is stressed through the processes of visuality that allow us to see the constructed engineering of self. The interaction is also intersectional, as in this moment Ava is in the final stages of her feminist triumph: her escape from Nathan, Caleb and their patriarchal presumptions.

But such a reading is too seamless. Upon reflection Ex Machina contains the same contradictions identified in so many of the texts examined in this study so far; the same narrative push-and-pull that ideas of the posthuman create around bodies. But here the category that destabilises the posthumanist feminism outlined above is race. The prototype from which Ava takes the body parts is Jade, previously seen on film attempting to escape from her captivity, and a model who is clearly marked as Asian through her skin tone, hair and facial features. Likewise, Kyoko is identifiably Asian, through similar features and her name (and the fact she is played by a Japanese actor). As Ava turns away from Nathan, dying in a corridor, she also leaves Kyoko, motionless on the floor. If there has been complicity between the two androids in the murder of Nathan, it generates no sense of responsibility or care here. Why is Kyoko, who has displayed the possibility of her regeneration in scenes in which she peels back her skin to reveal her technological workings, not allowed to leave? Equally, while it is possible to read Ava’s taking of Jade’s limb and skin as the kind of posthumanist assemblage described above (and indeed potentially as a productive multiculturalism), it also functions as an appropriation, a mining of the Other’s body in the creation of a new self.

In a sharp and perceptive reading of the film’s racial politics, Danielle Wong observes how in Ex Machina’s “conflation of the post-human with the postracial […], race is, quite literally, deconstructed and disassembled in order for Ava to continue her prosthetic evolution”. Ava may pass Nathan’s Turing test but, as Wong asserts, “Kyoko and Jade fail; they are too obviously machines”. Ava is “free to move onward into tomorrow”, but only as a subject who literally carries a history of race appropriation with her: “The posthuman future emerging out of the Information Age grafts onto the skin that remembers the histories of racialised slavery and indentured labour

that gave rise to Western modernity”. As such, a reading of Ava as engineer has to contextualise her adroit manipulation of Nathan and Caleb’s programming within the longer narrative of technology as appropriative power and tool of oppression. Jade’s name conjures up Orientalist fantasies of Asia as a place of exploitable materialist fortunes, objects to be found and taken, while the silence of both Asian androids (Kyoko has been made not to talk) rehearses centuries-old Western apprehensions of the ‘inscrutable and unreadable’ Asian figure. What Wong neatly terms “techno-Orientalist anxieties” underpin both Nathan’s narrative of power (Kyoko as servant) as well as Ava’s trajectory towards freedom (Kyoko and Jade as disposable accomplices). These anxieties work to create fissures through the film, “interrogat[ing] the liberal humanist subject who is reincarnated as the white-as-postracial subject”.⁸⁸

Wong calls this process a “haunting” and it is an apt word for the spectral presence of humanist values that runs through so many narratives of the posthuman. In Ex Machina, these ghosts stare down, or at least at, feminist and disability readings. The complex embodiment suggested by the interaction of technologised limbs and skin, and the vulnerability of the film’s characters, do not resolve the anxieties over race traced by Wong. Mobilising Ava as a posthuman feminist creates an argument at odds with a reading of her as an extension of Euro-American modernity. As Mel Chen has observed in their work on disability and race, there is an “integral fabric of racialisation within dominant disability and illness narrations and representations”, and the effects of these are, as with racialisation in general, “never merely figurative, but materially consequential”.⁸⁹ No critical sleight of hand is available to fix these contradictions, and it is instructive to note that the film’s cultural appropriation of Asia, and particularly Japan, continues a tradition established by the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, where both writers’ fraught fascinations with technology and the body frequently focus on Asian women’s bodies.⁹⁰  Ex Machina becomes the latest iteration of the mixing of excess and absence this book has found itself tracing; a celebration of the A.I. that becomes a free sentient subject set against the repression of racialised histories that made such a process possible. As ever, the disabled posthumanist body appears as eruptive, overwritten by stories that fail to cohere upon it.

With its suggestion of Ava’s life beyond the end of its narrative, Ex Machina forms the kind of “cyborg future” highlighted by Alison Kafer earlier in this chapter. Remembering Kafer’s observation that the cyborg articulates discourses of the political as well as those of embodiment, while bearing in mind Chen’s above reflection on the material consequences of racialisation, what emerges from the film are the tensions that exist between its assertion of female emancipation and reiteration of racial anxieties. Ex Machina’s politics articulate both gender and race, but in radically different ways. The film is more intelligent than those Short analyses in Cyborg Cinema, practising a critique of “patriarchy’s (de)valuation of women” that she sees as being inherent in cinema’s representations of cyborg women.⁹¹ But these progressive gender politics cannot be articulated without recognition of the racial bias that makes them possible. This is still a future that places certain bodies under erasure.

Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer trilogy is composed of three narratives that trace characters across a fictional multi-species universe in which body enhancement and modification are common and are matched by worlds of cultural and gendered diversity and entanglement. Both society and self in Chambers’ novels are marked by mixtures and amalgamations. The following description, of Port Coriol marketplace in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (the first novel), is typical of the novels’ depictions of the posthumanist interactions that characterise their social locations:

Sprawling streets stuffed with open-air shopfronts, overflowing with clothes and kitsch and sundries. Grounded ships, gutted and transformed into warehouses and eateries. Towering junk heaps lorded over by odd tinkerers who could always find exactly the part you were looking for, as long as you had the patience to talk about their latest engine mod. Cold underground bunkers full of bots and chips, swarming at all hours with giddy techs and modders sporting every implant imaginable. Food stalls offering everything from greasy street snacks to curious delicacies, some with rambling menus of daily specials, others with offerings so specific that the only acceptable thing to say at the counter was ‘one, please.’ A menagerie of sapients speaking in a dizzying array of languages, shaking hands and clasping paws and brushing tendrils.⁹²

The ‘dizzying menagerie’ here is, to a degree, reminiscent of Gibson’s fiction or Blade Runner’s imagined locations, where spaces of technological surplus, linguistic pastiche and conglomerations of culture challenge notions of purity and authenticity. But where Gibson’s novels and Scott’s film use such settings to investigate stories of male capability, vulnerability and violence, Chambers populates her spaceworlds with characters marked by personal fluidity and polyphonic associations. Individuals cross between genders depending on fertility cycles, or lack any gender identification at all; families involve same-sex parents or have complex formations of care, with individuals moving between birth parents, designated “raising” families, and groupings of friends and lovers where polygamy is the norm; genetic tweaking is not for the pursuance of individual strength or corporate gain, but rather “to make your physical self fit with who you are inside”.⁹³ Given this polyphony, it is appropriate that the major romantic relationship in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is between Jenks, a technician, and Lovelace, the A.I. on the engineering ship the Wayfarer. And throughout the trilogy, human characters are frequently marked by their ignorance and limitations: the central character of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet “chided herself for being so species-centric” as she encounters a range of sapients and societies while employed on the Wayfarer;⁹⁴ while in the third novel in the series, Record of a Spaceborn Few, it is reiterated continually that human culture is precarious: “We build off their tech”, one character notes in relation to the multiple instances in which alien technology is cited as being superior to human, “and we get the planets they’ve decided are too crummy to live on”.⁹⁵ In all three novels, it is the non-human animals who practise the greatest cultural and social sophistication or the most complex formations of selfhood.

Disability runs through the Wayfarer series, even given the plurality of body types that make up Chambers’ fictional worlds. In The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Jenks, the Wayfarer’s technician, has “an average size” head, but “the rest of him was small, small as a child. He was stocky, too, as if his limbs had filled out while refusing to lengthen”. His physical features draw comment: “why would anyone go to that much trouble to make himself small?” one character wonders on first meeting him.⁹⁶ Jenks finds himself, however, at home in spaces of technological body modification. His own enhancement, he stresses, “has been my way of saying that this is my body […] All the things I’ve done to my body, I’ve done out of love”, while he is drawn to markets and subcultures where “hardcore modders” are “prone to removing their own limbs in favour of synthetic replacements”, and “metallic exoskeletons, or swirling nonabot tattoos, or unsettling perfect faces that betrayed a weakness for genetweaks” are a posthumanist norm. “Alongside such oddities”, Jenks observes, “his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird. He took comfort in that”.⁹⁷ In worlds where multiple forms – physical, cognitive, sexual, social – abound, disability is defined by the practice of prejudice rather than the straightforward fact of difference; it is the humans who presume that Jenks should have undergone modification to make himself taller who construct his stature as a ‘problem’.

It is the second novel of the trilogy, A Closed and Common Orbit, that explores ideas of disability, engineering and gender in the greatest detail. A Closed and Common Orbit develops two parallel narratives. The first is that of Sidra, the reboot of Lovelace, the A.I. on the Wayfarer in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet who has – illegally – become embodied in an exoskeleton housing and made to pass as a human. The second is that of Pepper, the engineer who created Sidra in an act of rescue, though most of Pepper’s story is that of her childhood 20 years before, when she was a child slave known as Jane 23. As the novel progresses the reader becomes aware that Jane is Pepper and the two narratives come together at the end.

Sidra’s condition is a careful exploration of a mind/body Cartesian dualism and the resulting nature of technological affect. As an A.I. on board the Wayfarer, her (she makes the decision to take female gender) responsibility was to oversee the totality of the ship’s space: “She’d had cameras in every corner, voxes in every room. She’d existed in a web, with eyes both within and outside. A solid sphere of unblinking perception”. But in her technologised embodied state, that perception has reduced dramatically: “Her vision was a cone, a narrow cone fixed straight ahead, with nothing – actual nothing – beyond its edges”. Gravity, which was once “something that happened within her, created by antigrav nets in the floor panels”, is now “a myopic glue, something that stuck feet to the floor and legs to the seat above it”. And whereas before she was in constant connection to the Linkings, the novel’s characterisation of the internet, within her new body, she now “could access no knowledge except that which was stored inside a housing that held nothing but herself”. The result is that “she felt blind, Stunted. She was trapped in this thing”.⁹⁸

Sidra’s narrative in A Closed and Common Orbit is one of struggles with and adjustment to what she refers to as ‘the kit’ that constitutes her body. Physically, her spatial and proprioceptive senses are completely reconfigured by her new self; while, initially programmed to be unable to lie, she has to learn how to obfuscate language when replying to questions or expressing herself. “Everything feels wrong” she says at the start of the novel, “I feel inside out”.⁹⁹ Sidra’s encounter with her new world as she moves from the limited environment of a ship in space to the teeming multiplicities of life on a planet is one of continuous disablement. Hating the limitations of her body, she wants to return to what she sees as the many advantages of her previous state as a diffused technological mind. “I was housed in a ship”, she tells a friend to whom she has confided her truth, “I’m now housed in a body kit. My place of installation changes my abilities, but it’s not mine, it’s not me”.¹⁰⁰ Sidra’s preference for mind over body is part of a heritage of the rejection of the ‘meat’ of the physical self. As with the Baum’s Tin Woodman, here the body that needs to sleep, be fed or that can be subjected to violence and feel pain (Sidra’s ‘kit’ has to enact these so she can pass as being human, even though she has no need to such bodily functions) is seen as inferior to a posthumanist consciousness of pure thought. But whereas the Woodman makes a journey from human to android/cyborg, Sidra’s trajectory is back from an A.I. to a physical self that in fact only approximates a human state as it is, still, a technological construction. Sherryl Vint notes that science fiction often focuses on “the question of authenticity, of distinguishing ‘true’ from ‘false’ selves, of sorting out what is really ‘me’ from the programming of cultural influences on the one hand […] and biological instincts on the other”, but Chambers’ narrative is more complex than this.¹⁰¹ Sidra’s relationship with embodiment is one between technological states, with ‘biology’ only a subject to be contemplated from without. Vint cites patterns in history that results in a hegemony through which “we” (understood as majority, and therefore ableist, social opinion) “are inclined to identify ourselves with ‘voice’ or self inside our heads”, and to “value a concept of self as self as immutable and self-consistent, some essence that persists despite changes, including changes in our body”.¹⁰² While this applies to Sidra, it does so only partiality and the whole question of her self-hood and agency is made both more problematic and tantalising by her foundational state being that of an A.I.

Jane 23/Pepper’s narrative appears more recognisably human than that of Sidra. Jane is a child slave on an unnamed planet for a people named ‘the Enhanced’, made to work continually on extracting reusable parts from scrap metal and overseen by android ‘Mothers’ whose supervision consists solely of surveillance and violence. When, aged ten, Jane escapes from the building in which she lives and works, it is the first time she has ever seen the sky: “the ceiling that wasn’t a ceiling” was “so, so big […] It went on so far Jane 23 couldn’t see any edges. It went on for always”.¹⁰³ Jane finds a derelict shuttle in an environment covered with machine cast-offs from other parts of the planet and, fighting off feral dogs and acute food and water shortages, over the course of nine years reassembles the craft to make it flightworthy. Jane, Chambers stresses, is a consummate engineer, capable of fixing more or less anything, a characteristic carried forward in her reinvention as Pepper. Jane’s story, as she flies away from her abusive origins to become integrated into a social world of culture and people, is one of victory over captivity through her capability and perseverance.

But the depiction of Jane 23/Pepper is subtler and more nuanced than this outline suggests. With the first ten years of her life limited to the dorm and sorting room in which she lives and works, her story is not one of a humanist ‘return’. She has never known spaces such as Port Coriol or encountered the range of species that populate the rest of the novel. Jane, it also transpires, is a clone. Although details of her exact origin are never disclosed, she believes that the society that created her as a slave “probably cooked her up out of some grab-bag gene junk and pulled her out of a gooey vat, along with the other disposable girls”, while she knows that she only “had a single chromosome, which was apparently one short from the usual”.¹⁰⁴ Her body is, she says, all “monkey limbs and tweaked face”.¹⁰⁵ As such, Jane’s status is not the same as those other characters in the Wayfarer series who become posthumanised ‘genetweaks’ through voluntary modification. Her genetic composition is not tied to ideas of augmentation or enhancement; rather it, and her early life, indicate a disposability, a form of existence in which dignity is absent.¹⁰⁶

In addition, Jane is not alone on the shuttle. As she flees the dogs who attack her following her escape, she is guided to the ship by a voice: “a weird voice, all wrong around the edges, not making any sense, not making any good words. Just a bunch of junk sounds”.¹⁰⁷ The voice belongs to Owl, the shuttle’s A.I., “a mind in a machine” as she describes herself to Jane during their first conversation.¹⁰⁸ Owl was jettisoned as junk along with the rest of the ship when the original crew were arrested, and her contact with Jane is the first interaction she has had since then. The twinning that Jane and Owl form over the years before they leave the planet becomes a narrative that parallels the mind/ body split with which Chambers animates Sidra’s storyline. While Jane becomes the physical half of the pairing, demanding from Owl building “tasks” and exploring outside the shuttle for usable technology and food, Owl takes on the status of Jane’s teacher, advising and instructing on language, culture, objects and (literally) the nature of the universe. Comparison between Owl and Sidra sets up a fruitful complication of any idea of an A.I. ‘self’ in the novel; while Sidra feels confined in her ‘kit’ and yearns for her time as a distributed consciousness aboard the Wayfarer, Owl has been trapped in her software isolation until Jane’s arrival and even when the two are together laments her inability to offer physical aid. The related experiences here reflect different, arguably competing, models and modes of disablement.

A Closed and Common Orbit brings its two narrative strands together following Jane’s development into Pepper and subsequent intersection with Sidra’s storyline. Sidra is quarantined after leaving her home planet and, with her future unsure, is taken by Pepper to Port Coriol to work in her engineering parts shop. But this departure involves abandoning Owl who, for a second time, is left trapped aboard the ship. The precise hinge at which the storylines come together is Pepper’s discovery of the location of the shuttle, following which Sidra becomes integral to obtaining Owl’s freedom. Sidra downloads her consciousness on to the ship, facilitating Owl’s reactivation. The result is that at the novel’s end the two A.I.s inhabit the same space of consciousness: “The AI framework installed in the walls – Sidra’s design, Pepper’s implementation – contained a single node where Sidra and Owl could communicate with one another”.¹⁰⁹ But Sidra’s return to an A.I. self is not depicted as a celebration of the rejection of her embodied status. Rather her ‘kit’ becomes what the narrative terms her “core body”, a physical/technological exoskeleton to which she can return at will when she feels a need to experience the proprioceptive sense of her body in interactive motion.¹¹⁰ Sidra’s self is, then, distributed across both physical and (shared) A.I. formations. If much of the novel to this point has focused on Sidra as a ‘central’ character, reminiscent of a narrative of ‘discovery’, then this conclusion decentres her presence, stressing not a coming together of her embodied and A.I. selves but rather their actuation across her different subject positions. Such a process is typical of the deconstruction, central to critical posthumanist methods, of the singular, normative and coherent self, here replaced by the assertion of Pramod Nayar’s “interconnections”, “cross-overs” and “adaptations” between origins and histories, cited earlier. All these terms fit both Jane 23 and Sidra’s storylines, framing issues of psychological subjectivity but also the grounded nature of engineered selfhood, while the characters’ productive ‘deviation’ from social, cultural and embodied norms serves to remind readers of the disability logic that runs through Chambers’ work. The origins of both characters are situated within profoundly disabling environments of trauma and dislocation, their ‘impurities’ mark them with difference (as with Jenks in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) even in the complex multiplicities of Chambers’ fictional universe, while their adaptations address the challenges they experience as a result. “The law forgot to make space for people like me. People like her”, Pepper asserts at one point, discussing the ways that both she and Sidra are excluded from the mainstream practices of the worlds in which they live.¹¹¹ For both characters, existence is a state – of embodiment, socialisation and experience – removed from their peers.

In A Closed and Common Orbit, however, other ‘cross-overs’ create an enabling scaffold of identification. Pepper ‘implements’ the changes that make Sidra’s embodiment, and then her networking, possible and it is her skill as an engineer, her ability to ‘borrow and adapt’, that drives much of the possibility for agency in the novel. “It was always good, finding the bits that worked” the ten-year-old Jane 23 says at the very start of her section of the novel, prefacing not only her character’s grounded sense of embodied self but also the technological expertise that underpins the overall sense of how the novel’s assemblages (of all kinds) ‘work’.¹¹² Gender is central to this construction, with all three novels in the trilogy featuring central female characters whose subjectivities defy ideas of compulsory heteronormativity. Both The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and Record of a Spaceborn Few are animated by a queer sensibility: Rosemary, the central protagonist of the first novel and administrative officer aboard the Wayfarer, develops a relationship with Sissix, a female Aandrisk alien; Kizzy, one of the ship’s mechanics, has two fathers; and, as characters shift between genders, the pronoun ‘xe’ is commonly used. In Record of a Spaceborn Few, Isabel – the archivist who is at the core of the narrative’s stress on ideas of culture, history and inheritance – develops her views of social difference through interactions with her wife Tamsin and as part of an ethnographic research project with a female alien academic.

Such queering is only one example of the intersectionality at the heart of Chambers’ work that sees species, bodies, sexualities, technologies, languages and cultures all mix in what is ultimately a non-hierarchical depiction of social space. It is especially of note that across the trilogy it is women who engineer both bodies and narrative events. Engineered bodies in science fiction are frequently the product of male expertise and actions; men both make bodies in their role as creators and place these bodies in contexts of conflict and violence. In Scott’s Blade Runner, the replicants return to meet the man responsible for their production: “it’s not an easy thing to meet your maker” Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) says to Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the head of the Tyrell Corporation, immediately before he kills him, also calling him “Father” and “the God of Biomechanics” in this climactic scene. The ways in which men produce women in science fiction cinema frequently enacts the traits identified by Short in her critical genealogy; in Blade Runner the Tyrell Corporation construct Rachael (Sean Young), the most sophisticated of all the replicants. But even with Tyrell’s death, Rachael is merely passed on to Deckard (Harrison Ford): as Short notes, through his physical possession of her “Deckard effectively replaces Tyrell in reprogramming her to his needs”.¹¹³ Scott’s film, in which Deckard noticeably destroys the two rogue female replicants through extreme violence but is not responsible for the ‘retiring’ of the male robots (one is in fact killed by Rachael, the other ‘expires’ at the end of his life span), is only the most complex of film narratives in which men construct, possess or eliminate cyborg women.¹¹⁴

Chambers’ fiction, however, operates in entirely different spaces. It is her central female characters, particularly in A Closed and Common Orbit, who negotiate both the creation and experience of different embodiment. While not entirely absent, violence is rare across the Wayfarer series and is never used to articulate ideas of male fragility or capability.¹¹⁵ Female productivity is depicted in entirely different ways, figured as complex and challenging both intellectually and through invention and adaptation. While Jane 23 is made, as a disposable genetic anomaly, by the Enhanced, she herself becomes the designer and engineer of Sidra, a process that involves engagement with technical, philosophical, legal and social contexts. And Sidra becomes her own confrontation with these questions, particularly those of self and embodiment. As mentioned previously, Sidra is the reboot of Lovelace, the A.I. in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Following an attack on the Wayfarer at the end of that first novel, Lovelace undergoes a hard reset in an attempt to recover her systems. The reset fails and a new A.I., who becomes Sidra, is created. Initially, Sidra knows nothing of Lovelace’s character or history, but in a telling moment in A Closed and Common Orbit, she encounters the Lovelace A.I. model in a shop. As a product to be purchased before installation, Lovelace is a globe sitting on a shelf. Sidra picks it up, “cupping it gently. She could see the kit’s face reflected in the globe’s plating”.¹¹⁶ Here, Sidra is literally faced by her former self, yet in a sign of the novel’s intricate depiction of technology this Lovelace is of course not that from the Wayfarer but rather a consumer object, hardware and software waiting to be connected to the networks of some other, unknown, ship. The moment exemplifies the novel’s nuanced presentation of posthumanist subjectivity: an embodied A.I. encountering a version of her former self, physically connecting through touch and psychologically through Sidra’s own ‘messy history’ (“synthetic personalities are just that: synthetic” the seller says to Sidra, completely unaware of how her personality has developed).¹¹⁷ But at the same time Sidra is distanced; the Lovelace she holds is not the A.I. who preceded her. It provides no answers to her quest.

As all these examples show, Chambers crafts narratives that push the boundaries of the intersections between selves, bodies, communities, gender and technology. The future she depicts are those that Kafer wishes for when she writes of the intersections between feminism and disability, the “desirably disabled futures” made possible by not seeing either ‘disabled’ or ‘woman’ and the connections between them as problematic terms.¹¹⁸ Part of this desirability in Chambers work is inflected by her stress on women as designers, producers and adapters of technology. There is no recourse to the ‘genius’ of the male inventor in A Closed and Common Orbit; the Frankenstein narrative is entirely absent. Rather, Chambers’ engineering is a fraught and often conflicted process. In the manner in which it falls away from models of heroism it enacts multiple other differences: of place, self, body, relationship, or sexuality. Chambers queers and crips posthumanist technology and (crucially) she does so through her engagement with what Ato Quayson has termed the “crisis of representation” that disability produces in literature. For Quayson, the “embarrassment, fear and confusion that attend the disabled in their everyday reality is translated in literature and the aesthetic field into a series of structural devices”.¹¹⁹ For Chambers, these devices are located in science fiction’s aesthetics and textual spaces, but in a revision of Quayson’s thinking they do not begin from ‘fear and confusion’ but rather an acceptance of embodied difference as a starting point for explorations of all the elements of her fictional worlds. Many of the fictional texts analysed in this study so far have fallen through their own representation crisis, pulled into humanist models of individuals and communities even as they are seduced by the glamour and potential of the posthuman. Chambers’ work does not avoid the messy contradictions of fictional aesthetics, but it suggests possible shapes for engineering a disabled and feminist portrayal of technological futures.

This chapter has been bookended by the tale of two Peppers. In Sheffield, the SoftBank Pepper appeared striking in terms of potential: for activity, function and a new conception of posthuman care. For now, however, Pepper’s pleasing humanoid shape and possible capabilities present as a project to be developed more than a model of sophisticated companionship. Chambers’ Pepper, by way of contrast, possesses all the advantages of being imagined. She articulates complex modes of being and belonging: with origins in technology, without community and any awareness of a wider world, she progresses to become designer and engineer of the spaces in which she lives. Precisely because she contains all the multiplicities of fiction – the overlapping of genre, plot, characterisation, topic and metaphor – Pepper inhabits story spaces that carry details the ‘real’ Pepper cannot hope to match. This is not to say, of course, that Softbank’s Pepper is not to some degree the product of narrative and surrounded by the stories that mark a place in the world; clearly all the choices that have gone into her/its/his development speak of a moment in the hopes and desire that characterise our increasingly technologised history. But Chambers’ Pepper deploys the unlimited possibilities of fiction and so can explore interactions with technology that our present moment envisages, without the need for the actual laws of physics. The Pepper of A Closed and Common Orbit is also more secure in her status as female than the robot. Chamber’s Pepper is a clone, but (as with Sidra) her atypical origins only add to her complex characterisation as a woman. Softbank’s Pepper, by way of contrast, appears indicative of a confusion about gender, labelled male but at times read as female. Possibly it will take a period of usage of Pepper in people’s homes, interacting with them on a daily basis, before that exact terminology is worked through.

Both Peppers inhabit discourses of expectation. It may well be that future historians of disability technology look back on the development of the companion Pepper as a seminal moment in a trajectory of post/non-human care and this particular Pepper will be remembered long after Chambers’ writings are forgotten. But the imagined Pepper is no less valuable. Precisely because she is fictionalised, she functions not only as part of a richly textured and made-up world; she also reminds readers of the ways in which stories are told of the possibilities of present technology and the sometimes hidden fictions of design and production. It is through this idea of expectations that each Pepper intersects with disability futures, either through the immediate possibility of care or the imagined science fiction universe.

At the end of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway writes that conceiving of science and technology through cyborg imagery “means embracing the skillful [sic] task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts”. Communicating with ‘all of our parts’ is a powerful disability statement, recognising the body and its activities in its rich diversity. It is also a statement about engineering, recognising that the design and production of parts is central to the construction of the cyborg. Any number of non-dualistic positions, Haraway notes, “require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts”. Both disability and engineering are also grounded in the experience of daily life that Haraway identifies here, an experience that her work explores additionally in terms of gender, through the “dailiness […] that makes visible unvalued female activity”. In the end, Haraway asserts, “Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance […] There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction”.¹²⁰ Such terminology is apt for the kinds of gendered, designed and engineered disability this chapter has explored, though possibly we might extend ‘global’ to now become ‘planetary’.