Webliography

“From Frankenstein to the Visible Human Project, the body is continually reinterpreted as a limit to what it means to be human.” The spaces the bodies in Mary Shelley’s 'Frankenstein' and the Visible Human project occupy, represent the human body differently and construct different limits about the definition of ‘humanness’. In order to address these issues, certain online resources will be useful.

In Robert Anderson’s article, ‘Body Parts That Matter: Frankenstein, or The Modern Cyborg,’ he focuses on the space Frankenstein’s monster occupies and equates the monster with the ‘cyborg’ as defined by Haraway, ‘a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour…’ He talks about the monster’s engagement with borders and boundaries and argues that the border war between masculine and feminine gives us our politics. It is in this way that the representation of the monster as the ‘other’, within a space of blurred distinctions, allows us to understand what it means to be human in a Cartesian sense. We create a binary which defines what ‘is human’ by understanding what is ‘not human’ or ‘other’.

The material included in this online resource is very appropriate to the research being undertaken as it is quite detailed and refers to pivotal authors within the topic such as Donna Haraway. It was written in 1999 so it is relatively recent, and there is a list of sources provided within the site so that its perspectives and arguments may be further assessed or verified.

In Catherine Waldby’s article, ‘The Visible Human Project: Data into Flesh, Flesh into Data,’ she refers to the Visible Human Project, and focuses on the relationship between technology and the body as ‘one of the defining concerns of contemporary intellectual and ethical practice in both the sciences and the humanities.’ The body in this sense becomes an economy, and when referring to Braidotti, an analogy is made between this mathematicisation of the body and the realm of pornographic representation. Braidotti defines pornography as, ‘a system of representation that reinforces the commercial logic of the market economy.’ The body becomes a visual surface of exchangeable parts and is reduced to a ‘techno-economy’.

The ‘virtual space’ which the VHP (visible human project) occupies, allows programmers to have complete control over the human body and as Baudrillard argues, ‘make the real over in their own image, force its compliance’. This virtual simulation of the human body generalizes the body and presents a ‘perfect mathematical model’ of what the body should be, representing the body in a Cartesian sense as scientific and rational. It seems to define ‘humanness’ and the body as a perfectly mastered machine.

This online resource is extremely appropriate to the research being undertaken. It is very credible as at the time it was written (1996), Waldby was a professor within the Communications and Cultural Studies program at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. She has also extensive publications in the areas of feminist theory, sexuality, social aspects of AIDS, and the biopolitics of medicine. The article is a draft for her book which could be a negative aspect as her thoughts may have changed between the draft and publishing of the finished product. The list of sources provided at the conclusion of the article are very useful and provide further information about the topic.

A second article by Waldby is, ‘Revenants: The Visible Human Project and the Digital Uncanny’. Here she focuses on the new biotechnologies such as the Visible Human Project which aim to make the living body more productive and manipulable. The body then becomes the object of terror and fascination, because there is a prosthetic enhancement through it’s invasion and vulnerability. Again this seems to represent the body as a ‘hard edged, incorruptible and well defined space, devoid of the visceral ambiguity and sticky body fluids of the fleshly, living body’ reducing it to the rationalistic, scientific body in the Cartesian sense. Humanness here is reduced to a mechanical existence, one which can be mapped and manipulated in a virtual space.

Waldby’s credentials make this work very reliable. It provides a very detailed discussion about the Visible Human project and it’s implications for feminism and representations of the body and thus incredibly appropriate to the kind of research being undertaken.

In Donna Haraway’s prolific work, ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, she regards the Cyborg as creature of social reality and fiction. Her essay neither critiques nor celebrates cyborgs, but aims to unravel layers of meaning around their reality. She focuses on the deeply implicated concepts of nature and culture as neatly divisible fields. What we regard as ‘natural’ is dependant on the opposite category of what we regard as ‘not natural’. Language, gender and sexual practices are put into these categories. The idea of the Cyborg collapses notion that we can be natural, we are all cyborgs already and the gap between machine and human begins to close. Haraway’s work is very important in the way we define the body and humanness in that it reinterprets the Cartesian way of thinking in binaries. The binary of ‘human’ and ‘machine’ is blurred and the ‘Cyborg’ is considered an intrinsic part of who we are as humans, a defining factor of ‘humanness’.

Haraway’s work is very credible and is known as the essential essay championing ideas of the ‘cyborg’. It is extremely relevant to the research topic as it provides essential information about how the body has been reinterpreted and represented which is very important when discussing Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Visible Human Project. The online source is also credible because it is provided by the Stanford Education department which is a well known Tertiary education provider.

Finally, Jane Maree Maher’s ‘Feminism, Science, Rhetoric’ analyses works by other authors in relation to reproductive technologies and scientific pursuits and the way they impact upon representations of the body. She refers to works by Angela Wall in the journal ‘Wild Science’ and Wall’s examination of projects such as the Visible Human Project. Wild Science considers how science and embodied experience intersect. She focuses on the conformity of the contributors when they argue against the potential epistemological reductions that certain scientific methodologies will cause.

The online source is very credible as the author, Jane-Maree Maher teaches at the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University in Melbourne, a very reputable tertiary education provider, in the fields of women's studies, cultural studies and literary theory. It is also useful as by analyzing these other works, Maher provides the names of other authors who have published relevant work about this research topic however, because it is only an analysis is may not be detailed enough to use in it’s own right.

The human body has been constantly reinterpreted about what it means to be human. By looking at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Visible human project, the shift in focus on the body as ‘natural’ and not ‘other’ in the Cartesian sense to a more unnatural body which may exist in a virtual space is evident. As Haraway writes in her essay, ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.’

By Tatijana Vukic


References

Anderson, Robert W (1999) ‘ Body Parts That Matter: Frankenstein, or The Modern Cyborg?.’ http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/anderson1.htm (accessed 28 August 2008)

Haraway, Donna (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’ http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html (accessed 29 August 2008)

Maher, Jane-Maree ‘Feminism, Science, Rhetoric’ http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=104 (accessed 29 August 2008)

Waldby, Catherine (1996) ‘The Visible Human Project: Data into Flesh, Flesh into Data.’ http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/wildbiol1.html (accessed 28 August 2008)

Waldby, Catherine (1996) ‘Revenants: The Visible Human Project and the Digital Uncanny.’ http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/Uncanny.html (accessed 28 August 2008)