Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema

'''Holland, Samantha. "Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema."' In Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Development''. Roger Burrows and Mike Featherstone, eds. London: SAGE, 1995.

Opening of the essay is on line and available without cost as of 27 May 2019 here. Many contemporary films take up and enter into the traditional philosophical debates surrounding the so-called 'mind-body problem' and the nature of the human 'self', but few do so more explicitly than those centering of the representation of [...] a cyborg. With their human/machine hybrids, these films foreground questions of dualism and personal identity [...] and highlight contemporary concerns about the effects of technology on the human 'self' [...]. The cyborg film is particularly interesting when considering the relationship between the Cartesian (or Cartesian-influenced) dualisms of traditional philosophy and those dualisms of gender that, arguably, underlie and inform such a conceptual division.

The cyborg film is a generic hybrid that draws primarily on the genres of science fiction, action[,] and horror, and uses images of the technologized body to investigate questions of 'self'-hood [sic], gender, the 'mind-body problem'[,] and the threats posed to such concepts by postmodern technology and AI [...]. I will be concentrating on films [...] because they epitomize so well the contemporary concerns about strong AI, or technology more generally, 'taking over' and rendering humans and human-ness [sic] in some some redundant.

Deals primary with THE TERMINATOR and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, ROBOCOP (1987), ROBOCOP 2, and EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Also covered: ROBOCOP 3, CYBORG, R.O.T.O.R., RoboC.H.I.C., HARDWARE, CHERRY 2000, and EVE OF DESTRUCTION.

RDE, Completing, 27May19