Kristin Scott

I’ve been very interested lately in what seems to be a fairly recent proliferation of cyborg advertising for things that have nothing to do with the internet, cyberspace, and/or advanced technology.

I ran across two such ads within a few blocks of the Columbia College Chicago campus recently. One was an ad by Svedka Vodka, with the “fembot” as the cyborg model (on top) that I found under a glass case at the bus stop near State and Jackson, while the other (on bottom) was by Heineken, with just a cyborg hand opening a beer (though the hand was obviously feminine) near the parking lot next to one of our buildings (33 E Congress). Each, of course, is just an example of a much larger ad campaign using female cyborgs to advertise their alcohol. And while I’ve seen multiple cyborg advertising for films, computers and/or computer software, and other techno-treasures, this is the first time I’ve seen cyborgs used to advertise something totally unrelated to techno-culture.

While Donna Haraway’s infamous “Cyborg Manifesto” originally suggested that the cyborg body held the potential to be one of the most potent and favorable of (female) bodily figurations, I wonder how these representations of digitalized (usually female) bodies are heavily coded by commodity culture and/or virtually infected with a lingering capitalist and patriarchal cultural pathology. Though others (and Haraway herself) later recognized how problematic this Utopian figure may in fact be, it seems to me that we’ve moved from this idea of the possibility of a new trope for feminist politics of resistance and/or transgression to a new way of coding the female body that blurs bodily boundaries to the point of a near irreversible disembodiment, ironically while managing to maintain all the cultural and historical ideologies of “the feminine.”

Note, for example, the highly sexualized “come hither, I’m waiting” posture and the curvaceous metallic lines of the body in the advertisement above by Svedka. The name”fembot” only serves to reinforce this overly-feminine vision, while the twist on the old saying “Make Love, Not War” that is so clearly referenced here in this ad, suggests that a few cocktails may just lead to cybersex (with a woman like this, of course).

This cyborg here, despite possible protestations of a “new body free from gender constraints,” represents all of the contemporary tropes of the perfect, Utopian, female body. But the danger here is the threat of disembodiment from the actual body - can’t do it for real, let’s go virtual! Though this concept also seems rather apropos, given the challenge to women, each and every day, of achieving this kind of perfect body in real life.

The recent proliferation of the digitalized/virtual body within a variety of cultural and media (con)texts seems also to suggest a form of commodification that supports, rather than subverts the homogenization of identities. For example, I wonder whether this new cyborg/digitalized body (as we are beginning to see in the advertising of multiple products) might be an attempt to represent some contemporary vision of a politically and socially uncontaminated ethnicity that avoids all the various debates over multiculturalism, as well as the challenges these issues often present to advertisers (do we use two black people, a white, and an Asian? Or three . . . ?). I can almost hear the musings of ad execs in a meeting.

And yet, how might posthuman virtual and digitalized anthropomorphisms, in their various (con)textual manifestations, attempt to ignore or simply dismiss issues of multiculturalism, race, ethnicity, and gender? An over simplified version of that question would be: are these (often silver coated) digitalized bodies rapidly proliferating within advertising and media culture representative of a new androgynously homogenized, global ethnic and/or racial identity?

In the ad to the upper right, by Svedka, we read: “Thank you for making the gay man’s fashion gene available over-the-counter in 2003,” which suggests what? While it may be a tipping of the hat to gay men (great job, boys!), what might it suggest about women? An inability to be fashionable enough? The need for some sort of genetically engineered female body? The digitalized amalgamation of the “best” of all possible gender/sexual characteristics (the masculinity of technology, fashion of gay men, curves of perfect - but nearly impossible to find - female, mixed with just the perfect amount of heterosexual overtones)? Sounds a bit like a new cultural form of breeding to me.