This Content Downloaded From 190.82.154.137 On Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC

Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines
Author(s): Anne Allison

Source: Cultural Anthropology , May, 2001, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 237-265
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/656538
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
American Anthropological Association and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology
This content downloaded from

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
In The News
Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and

Bodies with Queer Machines
Anne Allison
Duke University
A new killer drug has hit the streets of Detroit and the cyborg RoboCop is hunting
down its creator. Entering the warehouse where his computer tells him "nuke" is bein
made, RoboCop sees the druglord and tells him, "Dead or alive, you're coming with
me." Cain laughs as his underlings emerge from the shadows. Carrying guns, they
move in and shoot; a boy blasts off RoboCop's hands and a woman lacerates hi
stomach with laser fire. Forced to his knees, RoboCop vows, "I will kill you" to Cain.
The thugs now encircle him and one, maneuvering a huge magnet, picks up the
cyborg' s metal body then drops it onto a bed of warehouse scraps. Before RoboCop
can move, he is pinned down at his hands and feet with metal stakes. Standing over
him, Cain holds up a vial of Nuke and plunges it rapturously into his neck. Arme
with tools, the minions approach RoboCop and start dismembering him. They hack,
saw, and drill his body; a fade-out follows the severing of his left leg.
The fragments of RoboCop are delivered to the precinct police station. What re-
mains of him forms a pile that a technician moves to her lab to start rebuilding. Bu
her bosses-executives at Omni Consumer Products (OCP) who own the police
force as well as the cyber-cop-have not yet decided whether RoboCop is worth th
cost of reconstruction. Saying he's "just a machine," they halt his repair. But the po
lice who have gathered around the cyber-cop see this differently: "It's like you'r
killing him."
Two scenes later, RoboCop has yet to be reassembled. His body is strung up in the
lab; the torso with attached head is hung eerily on a line. The police chief pleads for
OCP to save him because he' s "one of ours" and needed back on the job. A corpo-
rate executive responds to this that they may just sell him as scrap. When OCP does
decide to fix him, they pay particular attention to weeding out any human remains
in the cyborg. Yet, when asked who he is at the end, RoboCop answers "Murphy"-
the person he was before and whose remnants were used to build the cybercop. Told
this is an illusion, he is rewired to identify himself as "RoboCop."
Shortly afterward, RoboCop walks out the door. When he is greeted by his fellow
cops, they call him "Murphy."
-Scenes from RoboCop 2, Directed by Irvin Kershner
The Media and Kids: Violent Connections?
When first writing this paper in June 1998, the U.S. news media was awas
what was then reported to be the latest episode of "teenage rage." Predatin
much more spectacularly horrific events at Columbine a few months later
Cultural Anthropology 16(2):237-265. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association.
237

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
238 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
was a shooting by a fifteen-year old boy on the premises of h

Springfield, Oregon. In this case, a boy who had been expelled the
for harboring a gun, opened fire at his school and, shooting rando
two children and wounded twenty-two others. As in my local pape
and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina), the press represented th
a national "rash": shootings that took place at schools, in "unlike
(backwater towns and, with Columbine, in the upscale suburb o
Colorado), with brutal results (twenty-six dead excluding parent
where and scores wounded), and at the hands of white, teen-age bo
by the savagery of these acts, people across the country were also
their eruption in the "bedrock" of America and by homegrown boy
murder over alleged slights and rebuffs. Although commentary str
explanations (getting little further, though, than "boys caught up
rage" [Cannon 1998:19A]), more profound was the incessant q
"WHY?" as posed by the News and Observer in its headline followin
field (Cannon 1998:19A).
Making the same query two days earlier on National Public Radi
a reporter suggested the answer lay in today's culture of violen
view, recourse to violence, particularly with guns, has become insin
everyday life in the United States like a national habit. Citing the
two Hollywood movies, Die Hard (1988) and RoboCop 2 (1990),
litanies of shootings (61 in the case of RoboCop 2), the report noted
malization of such violence and how its presence in mass culture m
spread in real-life. Gun usage has now become commonplace;
movie like RoboCop 2 has been watched by millions of kids;' and
school shootings have occurred in "middle" America rather than th
ies (where the everydayness of violence goes unnoted). As picke
story, it is the mainstreaming of violence that seems disturbingly
many people in the United States today. And, with this perception, c
cism of mainstream media, a staple of everyday life here and well-
its diet of violence.
But how are these two forms of common violence actually related? Re-
search on what is called "violent entertainment" or "media violence" was pro-
liferating already when stimulated by the recent shootings. To date, the bulk of
this has been conducted by people who assume a clear-cut definition of media
violence, use quantitative methods in studying the effects it has on various
audiences, and conclude that violent media is harmful for viewers, particularly
children. In this research (conducted predominantly by scholars and officials in
the fields of public policy, violence prevention, law, medicine, education, psy-
chology, communication, and media studies),2 media violence refers, as it does
in Sissela Bok's and James Hamilton's recent studies, to any media coverage
or representation of bodily damage, destruction, or death including graphic re-
portage of murder in the news, video games that feature killers and killing, and
the constancy of attack scenes and shoot-outs in movies and television includ-
ing children's cartoons (Bok 1998; Hamilton 1998). Focusing on the effect(s)

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 239
violent media has on various audiences, research such as Bok

primarily four: increased fear or anxiety about one's world,
more violence (in whatever form), desensitization to violence, a
Where it has been most conclusive is in showing how children,
der the age of six and particularly for the medium of televisio
demonstrate higher levels of aggression after viewing scenes o
struction (Hamilton 1998). The most common explanation for t
children, incapable of distinguishing the fantasy of mass medi
mimic the former in socially inappropriate ways in their behavio
But the mimicry of violent images and scripts goes far bey
young childhood, many suggest, and is at root in the new genu
tality erupting in the (school)yards of middle America. In his r
ing the Springfield shooting, for example, President Clint
youth today in the United States have become desensitized to v
degree it inhabits their world(s) of (video) games, television, an
view was even more strongly endorsed at the conference Clinto
lence after Columbine-and in the report on "Marketing Vio
ment to Children" by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC
where Hollywood's role in inciting youth to violence is treated
conclusion (unjustified, as a number of studies have show
dence").4 The premise here is that media violence, even wh
mimicked, engenders a mindset that sees violence as not onl
"cool." As Sissela Bok (1998) has argued for children's shows
Morphin Power Rangers, fighting that leads to obliteration of
is normalized, glamorized, and made fun. Kids laugh when enem
and come to associate aggression with excitement, pleasure,
a dangerous message, Bok concludes, for how children view
and themselves.
It is this conceptualization of violent entertainment and the impact it has

on youth I wish to challenge in my paper by considering a specific genre-vio-
lent cyborgs popularized since the 1980s by such blockbuster hits as RoboCop
and Terminator. By almost any definition, these movies are violent. But it is
the meaning and organization of this violence I wish to pay attention to here as
few in the category of killer cyborg-cyborgs are hybrids of living matter
melded with cybernetic devices; and killer cyborgs, often indistinguishable
from cyborgs, are cyborgs programmed to fight, kill, or attack-are as neatly
and unambiguously drawn as critics like Bok would suggest. Although their
bodies both are and bear lethal weapons, the cyborg's identity is complicated
beyond that of mere aggressor. Created themselves out of body-parts from
dead (often killed) human beings, these cyborgs undergo constant attack and
continual reconstruction. Who or what the cyborg is, in fact, is a concern that
both troubles and constitutes the plot, and establishing one's identity is a desire
that drives as much as eludes the cyborg subject. Destruction then, though a domi-
nant trope in cyborg stories, is intrinsically linked to another theme-identity con-
struction-as cyborgs not only produce violence but are produced themselves

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
out of violent acts. Thus while images of cutting, exploding, and sp

(re)cycle in this genre, "life" is both destroyed and reemployed as
In considering a movie like RoboCop 2, I propose that we look a
as a force that not only "inflicts injury" (as the Oxford English Dic
fines violence) but also produces identity in a realm of media enter
where destruction is particularly enmeshed in the making of a new
cyborg. Such an emphasis on what is productive rather than merely
in mass culture differs considerably from the standard concept
violence within scholarly and public discourse on media violence
ple, in his recent book, Channeling Violence: The Economic Mar
lent Television Programming (1998), James Hamilton defined violen
number of incidents of the exercise of physical force so as to infli
damage to persons or property. By this definition, violence is somet
quantifiable, visible, and willful. The assumption is that we kn
when we see it, and its meaning is limited to one thing-it destroys
what is said about violence within media is also said about the impa
viewing audiences: violence attacks viewers by breaking down their
and resistance to aggression. Hence we get the NPR description of R
as a movie with 61 shootings and the explosive statistics, much circ
the 1990s, that the average child in the United States will have view
murders and more than 100,000 acts of violence by the time they le
tary school (Bok 1998:59). Reduced to such numbers, there seems lit
say except that media violence holds a meaning for kids that is only
This position is not unlike that of the anti-pornography contin
1980s feminism spearheaded by Dworkin and MacKinnon that treat
raphy only in terms of the violence it renders on women and failed
why and how it produces other effects, such as meaning and pleasur
lar consumers. As critics (including Williams 1989; Kipnis 1992; Bri
F.A.C.T. Book Committee 1992; Ross 1989; and Allison 2000) argu
havior with mass or popular appeal is drawing in people for reasons
be understood rather than merely condemned. So too, I argue, abou
lence where research to date has been narrowly confined to interro
fects using an apriori definition (quantifiable, injurious acts) that lim
swers we get. Such an approach cannot account for the vast appeal
media across what is a broad spectrum of children today in the Un
Nor does this approach adequately examine the terrain and land
violent worlds so intensely imagined in movies like RoboCop 2 w
sies of disconnected and reconnected body-parts are speaking s
children and of something(s) in the lives they are leading today. My
paper is to start making these connections-between the worlds that
in and their imaginary worlds of violent play populated with the c
disintegrating and reintegrated body-parts of humans, machines, kil
roes. What I will propose is that fragmentation centers the viol
genre of media entertainment-cyborgs-and that this trope bot
("real") world of flux, migration, and deterritorialization, and

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 241
("imaginary") new subjects whose queerness bears the seeds of a co

potential for U.S. children today.5
Postmodernism
Today's world of global capitalism and proliferating technologies is ofte

described in terms of flows. Flows-of people, goods, money, ideas, imag
move between borders-of nations, economies, cultures-making this an
of deterritorialization as much as reterritorialization. Production has shifted
from the Fordist model (Harvey 1989) of a rationalized labor force: of core
workers who stay in one place and earn enough wages to consume what they
produce-the mass produced goods that embed both the desires and disciplin
of a modern lifestyle. Today, production is based on "flexible accumulation
where, geared to quick turn-over and a constantly changing market, companies
have downsized their core workers, diversified their holdings and produc
lines, and rely more on subcontractors, peripheral workers and out-sourcing.
Increasingly there is a gap between those who produce and consume brand
name goods-Nike or Adidas shoes, for instance-and continually, in the
United States at least, the gap is rising between the so-called haves and have-
nots accompanied by a shrinkage of the middle class in-between.
The condition of postmodernity in which we live is one of shifts and dis-
persals, instability and movement, speed and ephemerality. Ever more our
world is being remade and redrawn through various technologies-image and
information production, medical and genetic advances, military and starwa
networks. Our connections are quicker (whether by travel, phone, email, or
CNN) to places and peoples further away; disconnections are quick too-rup-
tures of families, communities, workplaces, schools. David Harvey (1989)
speaks of time-space compression and the increased attention placed on the im-
mediate and instantaneous in postmodern lifestyle. Consumption is more im-
portant than ever in advanced capitalist economies and images not only sel
commodities but are commodities themselves, operating in an economy tha
reifies the surfaces and impressions of things. Major consumer values are in-
stantaneity-fast food and speedy services-and disposability-goods that can
be easily and quickly thrown out. Reproductions or simulacra are valued over
originals and the cultural logic of postmodernity, as theorized by Frederic
Jameson (1984), is marked by an aesthetic of the pastiche-the jumbling of
mixed genres and past and present time periods-and schizophrenia-the ex-
perience of life as disjointed, incoherent, and lacking linear continuity.
It is against this backdrop that I want to read children's play and, in par-
ticular, a form of play in which the media in the United States has taken such a
keen interest: violent entertainment. Within this category characterized by a
prominence of attacks, shootings, ruptured body-parts, and hyper-weapons is a
sub-set in which the explosiveness of violence is coupled with another, far less
studied dimension, the making and remaking of a new kind of subject-the cy-
borg. Following Donna Haraway (1991), I take cyborg to be a fusion of artificial
machinery and living (animal, human, or alien) organism that confuses prior

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
identity borders. This confusion is marked by both a dislocation and

tion of bodies and body parts (of and between nature, nation, race,
gender, commodity, and/or culture)-what I trace here through vio
queerness. The figure of the cyborg has become exceedingly po
circulates between) two sites I pay attention to-mass produced play
and the United States since the 1980s that spreads across the m
comic books (manga in Japan), cartoons (anime), film, live actio
video (and gameboy) games, and merchandise such as action fig
cants, terminators, RoboCops, and power rangers are the figures o
world. And all are identified as not only cyborgs but also fighting
beings whose bodies-amalgamations of weaponry, machinery,
are programmed to fight, eradicate, disintegrate, splatter, shoot,
kill. The stories, what there are of them, are orchestrated around th
staging of excessive destruction. In the RoboCop movies, for instan
of slaughter or mutilation occur ritualistically about every 10 min
The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, based on a live action tele
that has run continuously in Japan since 1973 and in the United St
1993, the team of clean-scrubbed teenagers who morph into power
rior rangers, battle and defeat at least one grotesque-looking beast ev
What is the pleasure engaged by fans with such programming
violence conceptualized? My own son, recently turned 15, was a co
player of the violent cyborg genre for years. He delighted in the
the RoboCop and Terminator series, loved all the masked warr
when he lived in Japan as a young child, and played continually (unt
with his cyborg action figures that he mobilized into intense battl
with an arsenal of blaster guns and fantasy super-weapons tha
downed figures, severed limbs, and scattered body-parts. Adam is
monly sweet, gentle, feminist boy, yet he was drawn to a fantasy p
warriors with heightened powers and killer instincts. When as
liked in this play-world, his answer was simply "it's cool." Whe
elaborate, however, Adam described not only the thrill and exciteme
tiple explosions, fast action, and powerful heroes, but also more st
aesthetic pleasures taken in knowing, discriminating, and appreciat
tails of this universe-the plots and particularly the makeup of cha
ies that fuse with weapons, powers, and vehicles.
In research I have done on children's mass culture in both Japa
United States, I am struck by a similar pattern: fascination with bot
down and make-up of key characters. This is true in the case of Sa
for example, a highly popular, long-running (1992-97) manga
and television anime (cartoon) in Japan that, exported to several ot
tries including the United States, features a group of teenage girls
form into the superheroines, the Sailor Scouts led by Sailor Moon,
evil Negaverse. As to the appeal of Sailor Moon, fans are most likel
composition and array of characters-five different girls who shift
own version of normalcy (one is smart, another lives at a temple, the le

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 243
is a sleepyhead who loves to eat and play rather than study) to sup
(each with distinctive powers, costumes, and names).7 And yet, wh
ing children actually watching episodes of Sailor Moon in the Unit
noticed how attentive they were to the action scenes-the moments
when, threatened by destruction, the girls upgrade their powers an
to zap, blast, cream, or otherwise eviscerate their foes. In asking l
any of the kids had found these battles to be "violent," one 12 year
"yes," adding that this was his favorite part of Sailor Moon. Becom
animated, he went over this and other attack scenes from the show
bodies break apart, disintegrate in mid-air, and mutate their f
changes into a blade or what looks human transmutes into a monster,
Of the other twelve children in this particular group, only one
the characterization of Sailor Moon as violent, adding that she like
in entertainment (as in slasher films like the Halloween series, whic
1978). The others, as is the far more typical reaction, thought
"cute" better described Sailor Moon given its gentle story and subd
ics. Yet, for all these viewers (and fans in general), the appeal of the
the shifts and multi-partedness of the characters: girls who transfo
at either end, a complex of attributes. As a girl, Serena (the ma
whose name is Usagi in the Japanese version) has a mixture of traits
superhero, Sailor Moon, a constellation of powers-weapons (tia
prism wand), strengths (the ability to shift form, impersonate oth
multiple attacks), and a make-over appearance (that, with new clea
els, and a uniform that is now mini-skirted, turns her sexy and beau
the latter, it is important to note, are only revealed in the course o
means that transformation, the keyword in Sailor Moon, is always
cably linked to destruction;8 the girls transform only with the arriv
counter-attack) the destructive Negaverse, and, as superheroes, the
powers to destroy. As the full name of the show (Bishojo Shenshi
[Pretty Soldier, Sailor Moon]) suggests, the construction of superh
is coupled to, and dependent on, the persona of warrior-destroyer
this mild, sweet version of a cyborg killer, violence defined as act
damage or destroy others is fundamental to the identity and appeal
character(s).9 As I pushed this point with the children in my study,
ted that they found the action scenes interesting not only for the t
tions that reconfigure the heroes but also for the disaggregation t
the enemies-a slow dissolution, as one gave the example, of a m
crumbled first with her hands, then arms, next the head, and final
the body. "Cool" was the reaction.
What the above responses by fans of violent cyborgs and transform
heroes point to is a fascination in what could be called the dissectio
human characters whether the focus is on the make-up or break-dow
ject-a distinction that becomes, itself, indistinguishable. Hence, an
the composition of how cyborg bodies are built on and from multiple
plates, armor, power belts, tiaras) bleeds into an interest in the de

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
(splattering, smashing, chopping, firing) bodies undergo as a

violent fighting. Thus, though coming at it from opposite ends
the constructive and destructive components of cyborg violenc
parcel of the same geometry: power as it fuses and defuses in bo
ing and exploding borders of identity. That is also to say, viole
the end to things, but also the beginning. In the case of cyborg
terminates the life of one kind of being (human) but also initiate
other (cyborg).
David Harvey (1989:311) has written critically of the "cre
tion" fostered by the cyberpunk movie Blade Runner (1982),
cord with the common criticisms of media violence, that its vi
sive and encourages an aggressive stance of dealing with advers
and whacking one's opponent. With this perspective, violence is
terms of its destructiveness: as acts that injure, damage, or
things and get glorified in the mass media by hyped-up special e
tion to the consequences of violence, and the heroization of vio
(Bok 1998). Yet, as fans of cyborg action have suggested to me,
is a far more complicated operation and has implications for th
of new kinds of subjects as well: subjects who, made in the nex
emerge with their lines of "humanness" and "selfhood" redrawn
from the semblance of monolithic roots, these new subjects exce
ters of a singular identity and, in this sense, are queer. In t
Moon, for example, the supergirls have bodies/identities that (
ness with warriorship and have desires that roam towards each
toward boys."
Accordingly, my position is that it is important to consider what might be
productive as well as counter-productive for children today in the "creative
destructiveness" of cyborg fantasy. In this I am guided by what Donna
Haraway (1991) sees as the progressive potential of cyborgs: artifice that can
help overcome the power inequities bred by worldviews that treat bodies as
naturalistic, where nature of one kind is taken to be inherently superior-self
versus other, white versus black, male versus female. Today's cyborg heroes
have bodies that complicate, rather than reduce to, nature and are possessed
with powers that are far more contingent and diffuse than those of earlier cul-
tural heroes-the Superman of the 1950s television show, for example, where
his powers were centered in and secured by a holistic, natural (male) body.12
If that was the Fordist model of fantasy phallicism, today's cyborgs are the
flexible, postmodern model despite, or precisely because of, the fact they con-
tinually explode.
Unlike those who commonly argue that heroes of violent entertainment,
including cyborg violence, are drawn according to a modernist model of stable
coherency and "invincible" machoism (Springer 1993; Balsamo 1996; Bok
1998), I stress the ruptures, slippages, and excesses to which cyborg heroes are
not only subjected (through the constant attacks, incisions, intrusions, and
penetrations to their bodies) but also assume subjectivity itself.'3 To do so, I

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 245
use the example of a movie series, the RoboCop trilogy (Rob

RoboCop 2 [1990], RoboCop 3 [1993]), in which the volatility o
portrayed and the cyborg it produces are particularly clear if also
My attempt here is to scrutinize the dimensions of both the viole
jectivity in this specific text before speaking more generally of the
borg violence and its situatedness within the world of media entert
the socio-economic conditions of late capitalism.
Robo-Violence
The movie RoboCop, the first in a series of three, starts off with a sce
violence.14 Set in the crime-ridden city of Detroit where a newscast anno
that three police officers have just been killed, executives at OCP discuss
to build what is to be a corporately run new city. Hoping to arm this city
fail-safe police who can maintain order over the rising, alienated undercl
OCP designs a robotic cop, Ed 209, whose test-run dramatically fails, bru
killing an executive. It is the next design, this time for a cybernetic cop,
constitutes the story of RoboCop. These plans require a model policeman
must die in order to be rebuilt as a lethally superior model cop. Targeted
victim, Alex Murphy is sent into an ambush with his partner, Anne Lew
savagely blown apart by a group of thugs who taunt and tease him by
shooting off his hand. The scene is graphic and gruesome, and Murphy is
nally killed by a shot to his head.
The violence of this act is not only intense and drawn out, but takes
at the beginning of the story to unfold; indeed, the protagonist's murder
very condition of and for his rebirth as cyborg cop. The need to kill Murp
driven home in the process of rebuilding that follows. When, at one poin
doctors working on him discover that they can save one arm, the OCP-ex
tive in charge tells them to "kill it, shut him down, we want total prosth
and, leaning over Murphy's still human-looking body, barks "you're goin
be one mean motherfucker." By the next scene, Murphy has become
chine: a fact we experience through RoboCop's perspective, looking up
where he's lying on the table having his monitor adjusted, and seeing, as
he, through the scanner of his computer. RoboCop's position here and ou
we identify with it, is one of vulnerability and unease: a state that conti
when RoboCop is soon programmed, as a machine, to obey the directives
tated him by OCP. He repeats back his orders: serve the public trust, prote
innocent, uphold the law.
Immediately, however, his weakness shifts to strength as the comple
RoboCop walks powerfully now down the hall of the police precinct
bulky armature. His appearance and performance in the police shooting g
impress all the human cops; the citizens of Detroit are similarly awed wit
superlative feats. As we see (all in a few seconds of movie-time): Rob
stops a hold-up, saves the mayor being held hostage, and rescues a rape v
In all these acts, RoboCop performs with both the accuracy and dispassion
machine; the hostage-taker is thrown out of a window and the rapist is s

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
(significantly) in the crotch. Although RoboCop's phallic powers

nized by all, the question of his identity is far more troubling. As
newscaster, "Who is he? What is he? Where does he come from?" In
answer, "He is OCP's new warrior," RoboCop is identified as bot
power and corporate property. What we learn from this statement is
ever and whomever RoboCop is, he is controlled by someone else
state of alienation. This state and the unease and resistance it provo
only the threads of the narrative but also the sites compelling the m
cles of violence that explode rhythmically throughout the film.
It is the struggle to gain control over his life and the remnants o
man identity that launches RoboCop into the line of fire time and tim
the Frankenstein trope formulaic in many cyborg stories,15 the mac
by humans develops a mind of his own thereby turning on its creat
with RoboCop who rebels against OCP by developing an identity
that elude their control. This starts with his gun, made originally by
neers as a high-tech machine, that is "remade" by RoboCop who
signature gun-hold.
It is this gesture (a twirl before returning the gun to its holster)
recognizes as that of her old (and now dead) partner, Murphy. Shari
sight with RoboCop triggers his own recollection of a past that he n
but only sketchily, through two memories, both involving guns, tha
cling (in Murphy's head and on the screen). The first is of Murphy'
that is a replay of the onslaught of guns and shots that killed him.
less to say, is a terrifying image-of savage penetration and obliterat
self. The second memory also calls up great loss: recollections of his
child who Murphy remembers from the time his son, watching his c
twirl his gun on television, asked, "Hey, Dad, can you do that?"
As a father, Murphy appropriated this gesture to impress hi
RoboCop, the mimicry stands for even more: a performance of manh
his only link to human memory, relationality, and will. This is a po
move, if there ever was one: a television image copied by the father
cize himself in the eyes of his son and by the cyborg to humanize hi
own eyes and those of the viewer. Of course, RoboCop's gun stands
more than the traces of his human self. It is also the tool that stands
cally for, and metonymically in for, his cyborg system. Unlike any
RoboCop's gun is not only more potent and deadly accurate, it is als
inside his cyborg leg-literally a part of the body of cyber-cop.
Twirling then firing his gun, RoboCop has both the powers of a
and, as the narrative develops, the sensitivity of a human. It is the
quest of truth, justice, and vengeance-that compels him to discover
tity of Murphy's killers and the complicity of OCP vice president,
in the murder. This discovery re-exposes RoboCop to danger as Dick
cides to eliminate him, programming Ed 209, to do the kill. Bein
model, though, RoboCop survives, disabling the robot. In the mo
scene in the film, he is attacked by masses of armed police who have b

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 247
by their chief through OCP, to take him down. As they encircle

firing guns, the scene resembles the earlier one when Murphy
shot. This scene too gets drawn out and RoboCop incurs incredi
til he is whisked off to safety by Lewis.
In a scenario distinctive to the cyborg genre, RoboCop r
wounds, using tools brought to him by Lewis to open up his co
retool his insides. In the end, RoboCop removes his helmet, the
his hybridized head-half human, half machine-in which stat
fers to himself as Murphy. After another blow out encounter
where Murphy was originally shot, the finale has RoboCop con
officials with proof of Dick Jones' crimes. The president fires J
lowing RoboCop to kill him (which his directive against kil
OCP official would otherwise have blocked). Turning to Robo
dent says "Nice shooting. What's your name, son?" RoboCop ans
ending the movie.
The Sensuality of Violence
One of the most obvious and memorable aspects of Robo

members of the fantasy cyborg genre (whether film, anime, car
is its kinetic energy, fast-paced action, and intense explosions of
killing, and carnage. Some describe this, of course, in terms of
lence that is over-the-top, gratuitous, or excessive-an excess
yond what the narrative needs or is all about. Yet it is precisely
violation that repeatedly cuts apart and into body lines as w
known them that defines the genre, lending it the flashes of in
sate jaggedly rather than conjoin smoothly in narrative linearit
earmark of a postmodern aesthetic: one, as Jameson (1984) h
that displaces a sense of history with an overload of sensations
and with various surfaces. The fact that machines constitute one of the main
surfaces in this genre, assuming exciting if troubling new interactions with and
for humans, categorizes cyborg fantasy also as science fiction: stories that
imagine a time and space other than the here and now, usually with primacy
given the theme of technology. In the science fiction imaginary, a world of in-
creased or different machinery is envisioned with images that, while futuristic,
also serve to re-imagine the present. Again, according to Jameson, science fiction
works to "defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present" and
does "so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization"
(1982:150).
Cyborgs, in the forms populating mass culture today-RoboCops, termi-
nators, androids, morphin rangers-both are and are not imaginable. Or, better
stated, while cyborgs like this are not yet real, the reality they represent of th
interpenetration of machinery into the lives, homes, and bodies of people is
certainly familiar to us all. Cyborg fantasies all bear worlds heavily inlaid with
machines: both familiar-like phones, walkman, answering machines, and televi-
sions-and unfamiliar-new kinds of vehicles, imaging screens, communicators,

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
and weapons. Typically these stories are set in large cities such as D
Los Angeles, and Tokyo, often following a world war or apocaly
Their time-frame is the future, but within two or three decades of t
and an emphasis is placed on space, visualized in terms of a pastiche
bles high tech with low tech, and signs of material progress abutte
those of social, moral, and environmental decay. Akira (1988) and Bl
ner are both classics in this sense with landscapes littered with g
crumbling buildings but also sophisticated machines; where eve
bleak and somber, almost entirely devoid of nature (which itself is
guishable from artifice); and whose inhabitants are affectless, aliena
and often alone, strained and divided by limited resources that are
by corrupt authority figures-politicians, military commanders, and
executives.
When the tone is so dark, the impression rendered of a technologized cy-

ber-world is dystopic and the warning given is that technology breeds violenc
and corruption, and its seepage into our lives and bodies must be watched, even
resisted. Yet not all cyborg sci-fi is dystopic. And even when this is its overt
message as in RoboCop-with its vile cyborg-makers and the cyborg's nosta
gia for the humanness it has lost-cyber sci-fi still yields a pleasure and ae
thetics in its techno-craft. Constance Penley (1991) has described this as "tech
noir": where, while the narrative in RoboCop is critical of technology, the aur
of its technologized images is celebratory undercutting the text's dystopia at
the level of cinematic pleasure. Yet others writing about cyborg sci-fi pay little
attention to the narrative altogether, concentrating instead on the sensory inten
sity and sensuality of the visual and sometimes aural presentation. Dan Rubey
(1997), for example, in writing about Star Wars (1977), George Lucas's block-
buster trilogy, speaks of its "machine aesthetic": the spectacle made of sci-fi
machines enhanced, indeed produced, by the cinematic technology of spec
tacular special effects. Rubey argues that this fetish of Star Wars machinery
creates the sensation of mergence in viewers with the machines on the screen
The emotions this conjures up are ambivalent; the rush of mastery from feelin
one's body and powers augmented yet also a sense of vulnerability, even obliter
tion, when imagining machines as controlling, dominating, or wiping out one-sel
In either case, of course, there is a play with the borders of human powers
existence, and mortality in fantasizing new machines. And, as anthropologists
have known for a long time, borders always provoke a mixture of danger and
pleasure, and border-crossing is steeped in rituals, tinged often with violence
as in initiation rites. Carol Clover (1992), in her study of the violent genre of
slasher films watched primarily by adolescent boys in the United States, has ar-
gued, similarly to Rubey, that viewers shift in their identification with the
characters (or machines) on the screen. Viewers delight in both the predatory
pursuit of victim by the slasher, and the fighting back of the "final girl" in
defending herself from attack. There is also what Clover takes to be gender-
shifting in that boy viewers identify with not only the male slasher but also th
female heroine on the screen. Film theorist Steven Shaviro (1993) has pushed

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 249
this point even further, proposing that viewers of horror, violen

films identify or invest with the victims of attack not only when t
riously overcoming their attackers (as with the "final girl") but a
importantly, when they are being pursued, dismembered, and slau
Shaviro, following the work of Bersani (1986), Battaile (1994),
and Guattari (1983, 1987), cinematic pleasure is structured mor
masochism than mastery. Viewers less identify with lead characte
are brought into contact with images through a process of contag
sis; the dissolution of fixed identities and borders transfixes view
that are horrific yet "strangely attractive" (Shaviro 1993:53). A
"Anxiety over the disruption of identity is concomitant with, and
essary to, the very intensity of sensual gratification" (1993:56).
Such shifts, fluidity, and ambivalence are also at work in a cy
like RoboCop. The destructive action in the film continually explo
also, and more interestingly, implodes into the key figure, Ro
whom most viewers I have spoken to center their attention. Righ
start, Murphy/RoboCop is the object as much as the subject of br
a human, he is savagely killed, and, as a cyborg, he is cruelly rem
petually hunted, shot, sawed, sliced, blasted, maimed, and retooled
RoboCop is hardly a passive victim and is aggressive himself in pu
who transgress the codes of civil obedience that he has been progr
uphold. Accordingly, RoboCop uses his cybernetic powers and
subdue, disengage, or otherwise eliminate criminals in acts tha
breaking limbs and throwing people out of windows to shooting,
ploding, and cracking bodies. Thus, while eruptions of force const
throughout all three films in the RoboCop series, the flow is cons
ing-emanating from as much as targeting both the "good" and "ba
ters in the films. Not only does this make the explosiveness in th
morally and ontologically variable-it is connected to good as
forces and to both destructive and constructive ends-it also portr
as someone whose powers are far more fluctuating and fluid than
set: a character whose state-of-being constantly shifts between in
and destruction, potency and impotency, and immortality and deat
Phallic Powers/Gendered Self
Despite the volatility (and viability) of its powers, the violent cyborg
consistently described in metaphors of gravity, denseness, and stability-a
"fortress" with "rock solid masculinity," for example (Springer 1993)
stance is held by media scholar Claudia Springer who, writing of the Rob
and Terminator films (Terminator [1984] and Terminator 2: Judgmen
[1991]), argues that cyborgs in mass culture are dominantly figured as not
violent, but also bulked up and macho.17 The choice of Arnold Schwarzen
as lead cyborg in the Terminator series seems prima facie evidence fo
thesis: an actor whose "aggressively corporeal" body literally signifies pow
as physically large, visible, and phallic. To Springer, such a bodily image is

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
retrograde on two scores. First, it misrepresents today's postind

modern technology that, unlike the massive steam and hydrauli
earlier era, runs on micro-electronic circuitry that is more pass
from view. To impersonate the labyrinthine technological ne
computer age with the beefed-up body of a Schwarzenegger is n
rate but also reactionary, signaling an unease with the technolog
day's world.
The "externally visible musculature" of RoboCop is also masculinist, sig-
naling a second way in which it is regressive, according to Springer (1993).
The gendering of the cyborg here relies on tropes of conquest, aggression, and
bulk-trademarks of the modernist male hero played by a John Wayne or
Sylvester Stallone-which are old time survivals, superimposed onto, rather
than radicalized by, the newness of cyborg technology. This view, common
amongst those writing about cyborgs in mass culture, is that, despite cyber-
technology's promise to rewrite human flesh, identity still gets drawn using
rigid, naturalist, and masculinist notions of body and gender.18 Anne Balsamo
(1996), Constance Penley (1991), and Fred Pfeil (1990), for example, all agree
that, while certain borders get dissolved in cyborg fantasy, the border of gender
remains "stuck," as Pfeil puts it, "in a masculinist frame" (Pfeil 1990:88). And
in her study of a cognate to cyborgs, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on tele-
vision, Marsha Kinder (1991) has similarly observed that, while the mutant
turtles variously border-cross, the borders between female and male, and good
and evil stay unbendingly fixed.
But how static or stable is the identity of a RoboCop so commonly de-
scribed as holistically "male"? Not very, was the response given by under-
graduate students I taught in a semester-long course on cyborgs at Duke in
spring 1998.19 According to them, RoboCop is a far more ambiguous and mud-
died character than clear-cut along any plane-hero, public citizen, man. The
strongest reaction evoked by watching RoboCop (shared for the other most
graphically violent cyborg movie we viewed, Akira) was a sense of discomfi-
ture, experienced as stimulating, both viscerally and intellectually, by about
one-third of the students, but repulsive and distasteful by another third (almost
as many males as females). None of the students (including the third who felt
less strongly either way) said their viewing of RoboCop inspired feelings of
unequivocal mastery or reassurance, and those who said they identified with
the lead character did so in ways they described as complex and ambivalent (I
will come back to this point later). As one student stated it, the film is "troubling."
As such reactions suggest, masculinity construed as "rock solid"-with
its evocations, I will later suggest, of the very bedrock of middle America felt
so transgressed upon in the recent school shootings-misidentifies RoboCop
as (dis)embodied in these films.20 Aggression is central to his character(ization),
without a doubt, but RoboCop is as much a violent figure-the macho warrior
bent on old-time revenge and killing one's foes-as reconfigured by violence
into something else-a bullet-holed carcass, a remade machine, a pile of scrap.
Violence, in other words, works here to not only portray the cyborg as a

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 251
(traditional) aggressor, but also to dislodge, explode, and redraw th

ries/boundedness of this very portrayal. Thus while the corpo
Schwarzenegger may well trigger a set of associations in viewe
masculinism, this grammar is disrupted when that body is also a m
is owned, engineered, and continually fractured apart-condition
phallicism here far more fragile and unstable than sturdy and fixe
RoboCop lacks the very body-part-a penis-central to the (Weste
cation of not only maleness but (genital-based) meaning, subjectivit
cial order as well. In this sense, RoboCop exceeds rather than acced
tity, and is less a gendered than transgendered (queer) subject.21
What makes RoboCop a "man," after all? If, as Springer asserts
"fortress" of his body, this is a body built from "technological ado
(1993:95)-an artifice of cyborg construction that, as Haraway (1
gued, breeds bodies and body parts no longer constrained or dictated
This makes RoboCop's body mechanical rather than natural: a t
engineering that can be used on anybody (any body) no matter the
ethnic, corporeal) condition of birth. As RoboCop says to Lewis aft
been shot at the warehouse in the blow-out scene near the end of t
film: "They'll fix you. They fix everything." RoboCop himself is a
having had a pile of metal dropped on him, a stake driven through
and his body riddled with bullets. But in his words about technolo
ing-a process that can remake Lewis, the woman, as it once did Mu
man-there is more caution than celebration for, as we all know by
in the story, a "cyborgian" make-over entails savagery and loss as
does mastery and gain.
Powers, what the cyborg's identity is critically founded on, tr
displace human flesh. Not only is the "natural" body remade with
chinery, however, the cyborg subject also decomposes and segment
tiple parts, none of which holds or centers the "self." The visual r
given cyborg killers-RoboCop but also others such as Terminat
Tetsuo (in Akira as well as Tetsuo in Tetsuo, the Iron Man [198
Power Rangers-is of multi-parted beings who keep shifting and tr
according to which parts are being activated or retracted. For mos
volve human-looking components (fleshy faces, human proportions
and two legs) that fuse with, disaggregate into, or transform to n
materials, mainly machines but also demons, monsters, or any phy
(as with the T-1000 and its liquid alloy in Terminator 2). Powers fo
tures are organized more as circuits than "fortresses" and include w
machines that are often melded into or with the body (such as in t
warrior show Kamen Raida where the hero's powers crystallize on a
emerges from the boy's stomach when he transforms), making the
tween "inside" and "outside" blurry and unstable. As complex
parted the machinery of the cyborg, so is its overall coherence tha
stant flux triggered mainly by violent attacks; RoboCop loses
reconstructed) hands, legs, brain-parts, circuits, and various operatin

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
all the time. In this, the cyborg's powers are far more diffused
than popular heroes in the modernist mode-Superman, for ex
phallicism was signified by a single costume change that drew at
wholeness and corporeality of his masculine physique. By contra
of RoboCop are multiple, detachable, and artificial, which ma
more scattered, contingent, and transferable.
The issue of agency (as well as alienation) is also significan
such a flexible model of detachable, contingent powers. Its a
weapons, machines, body parts, and powers are rarely in the cyb
Not only are there the risks of break-down, shut-down, or attack
typically serve an owner and lack the qualities depicted in the m
tially" human-independence, agency, family, home, and emotion
this often delivers a dystopic message: that the loss of humanne
it will inevitably accompany an increasingly technologized world
subjectivity still gets portrayed in terms of wounds, gaps, and lap
ity (RoboCop aches at the loss of his family-more so, interest
than the loss of his penis and sexuality-and struggles to recaptur
Murphy he can) and this depthlessness often mirrors, in a movie l
a human landscape strewn in moral, physical, and social decay. In
the cyborg is not only a metonym but a metaphor for the state of
at large: for the humans who, in Blade Runner, are even colder a
tional than the replicants, and, in RoboCop, are the victims or ma
porate hedonism living in a world where all life has been reified a
things. Technology as encoded in the popularization of cyborg
tinged, though muddied, with phallic and masculinist overlays) t
with multiple meanings and referents. It stands for the type of h
gized world we now live in; for the embeddedness of this techno
everyday lifestyles, identities, and skins; and for the fluctuations
of a postmodern existence, both because and apart from technolo
Exploding into New Borderlands

Violence marks all this with the signs of rupture and disorder
namics are far more ambiguous than merely nihilistic and cybor
who perpetuate and fall victim to violence, yet are also vulnerable
to damage. I read this volatility, mapped through violence both i
cyborg bodies, as not only plotting destruction but also emplotti
tion in ways that bear a productive potential for helping viewers
thinking particularly about children) navigate, experience, or
their own way in this postindustrial world. I propose two suc
possibilities.
First, as Appadurai has argued, in today's world where new forms of media
and migrations have produced an intense level of rupture, the role played by the
imagination is critical (and, according to him, stronger than ever before). As he
presents it in Modernity at Large (1996), this role, most importantly, is cohesive:
images of places here and there connect people to imaginary communities that,

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 253
in this deterritorialized world, may no longer even exist. The emp

how the imagination works to overcome what seems "rhizomic
oid" (1996:29) by (re)constructing the collective (in various, i.e
forms). Yet, imagination in the sense of imagining the world and
(any of us) assume in it, also works the other way, I suggest, by r
mimicking the very sense of rupture and disconnectedness so par
the times in which we live. Kids are drawn to violence in an imag
because, in part, it simulates fracturation in their own lives and c
when a model of/for survival-queering the world and the self-
well, for dissimulating the sense of pain and isolation that can acc
How rocky life can be even for youth in America's "heartl
apparent to me in the reactions my "Introduction to Cultural Ant
class (of 140 Duke undergraduates) had to the Columbine shootings
discussion the day after the shootings occurred, I was struck by h
these Duke students identified with, if not the acts themselves, the
rage and isolation they attributed to the killers. Speaking of the p
perform and fit in, they remembered how anxiety-provoking and
school could be, particularly for those picked on for being differe
the most basic sense of the word). That such feelings could boil ov
and aggression as with fights, back-biting, or "tricks" played o
something many recalled from their own days of middle and
Home was often no solace, some added, because parents tended to be
"clueless" about their children's worlds: mainly where they were "in their
heads"-what they thought and talked about with their friends and enjoyed in
the way of music, pastimes, and games. A couple of students added that parents
should learn how to communicate by not immediately rejecting their children's
imaginary worlds (and thus further distancing kids) as incomprehensible, dis-
gusting, or perverse. Being attracted to something dark like Gothic fandom
(shared by the Columbine killers) did not, in and of itself, signal psychic or so-
cial pathology these students largely agreed; indeed, several admitted to simi-
lar attractions.
In cyborg violence, the world is imagined through a grim concatenation of
explosions: bodies are ripped open, split apart, smashed to pieces, and reduced
to pulp. And, not included in the definition given media violence by scholars
like Hamilton (1998) is the fact that the "hero" is split apart as well; we see as
many scenes of RoboCop battered, punctured, and splintered as we do of him
whole, in control of situations, and conquering foes. In Freudian language,
RoboCop often appears castrated;22 he loses body parts, comes apart at the
waist, is lain prone on a table where he is operated on by technicians, and gets
multiply wounded and attacked throughout the duration of all three films.23
This state of fluctuating powers would suggest a different kind of fantasy and
spectator involvement than that usually associated with film with its fantasies
of plenitude that tend to reassure and comfort viewers (in suturing over the
threat of castration, for example, in Laura Mulvey's classic articulation). The
interactions here seem more akin to what happens in the case of television

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
where, as Beverle Houston has argued, viewers are kept at a "near p

of activity and take something like pleasure in the "terror of desir
1984:183-184). Video games-whose main players are adolescent
for whom issues of body and identity are particularly tinged with f
tration-have been described similarly where excitement stems f
nary battles, attacks, and killings that target not only others but
(Kinder 1991; see also Jenkins 1997; Piot n.d.). Cyberpunk litera
been characterized by the same dynamic where, in authors like Bru
and William Gibson, the body becomes a "battleground," whose con
vasions and (re)inventions by mechanical alteration keep erodin
blance of human identity-a state readers experience as the thri
what Ross has called "cyberpsychosis" (1991:161). Ross reads furthe
psychic dissolution a retreat of (white) masculinity in 1980s and 19
States given that most of the authors and readers of the cyberpun
white males.
The question, of course, is what is the relationship between experiencing
psychic frenzy (Kirby 1988) in the imaginary format of a video game, cyber-
punk novel, or violent cyborg movie and dealing with similar emotions in the
context of "real" life-at school, for example, when one is being picked on or
ignored by other kids? That identity disintegration can get expressed in dis-
memberment of flesh, both imaginary and "real," was brought home to me in
seminar one day when a student admitted that, as a suicidal junior in high
school, he had contemplated going to school and shooting all his enemies be-
fore killing himself. This story was (surprisingly) told two weeks following
Columbine and by a student, who, while a fan of violent-tinged popular cul-
ture, was strongly against-as have been almost all the college-aged as well as
middle- and upper-school youth I have discussed this with-the perception
that media violence causes violent behavior. More than anything, he spoke of a
personal disequilibrium-within himself and within the world he was living-
that became enwrapped (for whatever reason) in scenarios of violence. It is this
sense of dissolution and disconnect(edness) that strikes me as increasingly
common in U.S. youth today and is at work, I believe, in the fascination that
bodily rupture holds for so many children in media entertainment. Rather than
deny such feelings, kids must learn how to face and deal with them (his inabil-
ity to do this seems more likely an explanation for my student's death plots
than over-exposure to violent media) and it is here that the genre of violent cy-
borgs has something, I argue, to offer youth.
The constructive possibility I propose is that, in movies like RoboCop,
viewers are being offered protagonists whose very fluctuation between states
of empowerment and disempowerment, coherence and disintegration, helps
children balance their own anxieties (about vulnerability) and desires (for con-
trol) in a way that refuses to get anchored in either spot. Bruno Bettelheim
(1976) has made a similar argument about the value of violence and evil in
fairy tales as strategies useful to kids in accepting their own feelings of aggres-
sion and impotency, and also in learning to cope with a less than gentle or perfect

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 255
world.24 Advocates of the television show, The Mighty Morphin P

ers, have countered its violence on the same grounds: that the ran
ting attacked, learn to confront and subsequently overcome challe
foes but also inner fears and trepidations that show the rangers i
and weak poses; see, for example, Seiter 1999).
Although theorists of film tend to argue that either mastery
prevalent view) or masochism (the view most persuasively argued
[1993], following Deleuze [1991], but also by others including S
and Silverman [1992]) is the overarching effect/pleasure rendered
thesis is that, in the case of violent cyborg entertainment, it is bot
"unmooring of subjectivity" (1993:147) Shaviro so applauds whe
denied the fantasy of phallic optimism (and the illusion of intact
is certainly at work in the genre of violent cyborgs. But though a
macho domination may get dislodged in movies like RoboCop, it i
that cyborgs not only undergo savage attacks, but also survive th
altered/queered form. So, unlike a film like David Cronenberg's T
the man-turned-fly is "born in the excruciating rigors of an estran
out hope of return" (Shaviro 1993:147), RoboCop (re)presents a
ject whose subjectivity gets remade rather than totally wiped out
kid viewers are given something potentially constructive for facin
in their own lives: not a perfectly phallic hero who reassures wit
tudes of mastery but a far more ambiguous character whose sh
life and death, viability and danger, and (bounded) identity a
resonate with the volatility in children's lives and with their
(somehow, if imperfectly) survive.
A second way in which the violence of cyber fantasies like
potentially productive is that, in disrupting old models of phallic
macho heroism, new forms and formats of subjectivity arise. Out
ping done to phallicism, for example, a new breed of hero emerge
whose powers are both ambiguous and bodily ambiguated unlike t
clearer male victors of old. As part machine, this warrior is far les
naturalistic male body than (most) other action heroes.25 The fact
ganic) man Murphy must die in order for the cyber cop to get (r
the way for female viewers, as well as males, to identify with Ro
lines other than the traditional masculinism claimed by Springer.
from its moorings in male nature, superheroism is also broadened
ing it in terms of flux and fragility as much as surety and perform
as many scenes of RoboCop battered and punctured as we do of hi
situations and conquering foes. Power here then is truncated and
less encased in phallic infallibility than vulnerable to ups and dow
In the figure of a RoboCop, superheroism is a less certain,
manly affair. This has ramifications for both female and male vie
that Hollywood has packaged heroism and phallicism almost exclus
bodies and identities of white men, there is reason to recognize an
potential for cyborg movies to shatter these limits. Girls are

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
chance to see themselves as action heroes (as in Power Rangers)

less indulged by (or challenged to live up to) the fantasy of superla
cism. In the disaggregation of old gender lines, cyborg warriors al
seeds of gender-aggregate subjects. RoboCop, for example, assumes
tion of both the macho man in armored gear and take-charge mod
what has been the feminine or feminized position of vulnerability
ity; he is penetrated by bullets, held down on a table, and continua
over. It is in the sites of cyber-violence, in fact, that the sight
subjectivity are most apparent. When RoboCop is slashed by sa
sembled into segments, he least resembles a (hu)man and thes
both mutilation and reconstitution-are continually replayed, resho
visualized throughout the films.
In what gives new meaning to the term "male gaze," the destructi
on the body of RoboCop is lingered over as if a caress. Not unlike p
where acts of penetration are extended and repeated via different
tings, and body parts to heighten impact and visibility, the attacks
are prolonged. Viewers are thus given plenty of time to see the cy
apart, that also means seeing the parts (as they variously attach/de
selves. As Linda Williams has written about the "frenzy of th
(1989:56) in pornography, the bodily zones most spectacularize
audiences are most likely to associate with holding secrets. To "see"
"know." But, unlike pornography where gazing is mainly focuse
bodies, a cyborg like RoboCop is a different kind of object: a (hu)m
we come to know, to the extent we do, through the pulsations of v
dismantle but also dissect his body in ways that fascinate fans. So,
borg, we get tropes of both an object to be looked at and a subject
the story and plot-stances that have (hitherto) been kept gender di
Cyber fighters are also composites of multiple parts none of wh
tively houses the identity or essence of the cyborg. Thus, just as the
gle center to the cyborg's host of powers, the cyborg can be put tog
assortment of ways. In the toy model I bought of RoboCop, for ex
came packaged with neurobrain, shoulder armor, chin strap, helme
pistol, chest plate, pelvic cover, and leg armor. All these pieces are
that highlights the costuming of RoboCop's body and its mix (up) o
internal organ, and protective covering. The brain, one should note
easily removed and reinserted as any other of RoboCop's movable p
shows how all of the cyborg comes apart, and also the promiscuity
the different partedness is conceived; a tac bomb is little different
plate or leg and a chin strap is as much a body-part as is a hand or
grammar of assemblage is bricolage or pastiche. Demonstrating
flexible accumulation, the cyborg body is comprised of "widgets" (
between which distinctions, once rigid, are now dissolved. In study
habits of children in today's age of "cyborg objects," Sherry Turkl
noted this plasticity in the way kids conceive the relationship betw
and inanimate things, and see their own identities as constantly m

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 257
in Power Rangers) between different states and forms. This sens

lows children to balance a universe of disparate and changing
that change members, homes that move from place to place
Mizuko Ito (1998) has also observed in the ways children pla
what is make-believe constantly weaves in and out of what i
closure is both imposed and disrupted as part of playing the ga
Playing with cyborgs encourages not only an attitude of flexibil
increasingly heterogenous and fluctuating world, but also a wil
ceive the world and one's place in it as blended rather than ancho
and hegemonic essences. In my research on character trends-Po
Sailor Moon, Tamagotchi, and Pokemon-children both in the Un
Japan say they love the various iterations, changes, and hosts of cha
play-worlds. In Sailor Moon, for example, the main character alte
being a strong, courageous, transhuman superhero and a whiny,
14-year-old girl. It is this transformative, multisided nature of Sailo
lights fans and constructs her identity as something more than, a
to, either "superhero" or "girl"-an excess that cannot be definitiv
singular essence.26 Sailor Moon has also started a new marketing t
been called "action fashion": blending what had hitherto be
cific-action figures for boys and fashion dolls for girls. For Sailo
cessories include clothes and jewels but also tools:27 an accesorizat
come standard for all kinds of characters today-dinosaurs
Pokemon as well as warriors and fashion models. One effect is a
female/male border that has accelerated in more recent trends
otchi-the portable, digital pet lacking ostensible gender-an
world of human trainers and 250 monsters, all with a myriad of par
break down overtly by gender.28 For manufacturers, of course, ac
signs (with multiple parts, multiple characters, and multiple vers
hero like Batman) are made to increase sales. And with the increa
toys, the desire to consume is ever more deeply produced and insinu
appetites of our children to play. Yet another more salutory effect
accessorized figues is, I would argue, the shifting, diversifying,
the identity (particularly gendered) lines of consumer play.
Conclusion
The more I ponder the issue of violence and children's entertainmen

more complicated and messy the matter appears. Every day the newspaper
stories about children at risk, in pain, abused, or dead. And increasingly
are the stories about children who are violators themselves: kids who attack
others in acts that can be as shockingly casual and random as they are savag
and deadly. What in a child's world, it is repeatedly asked, would propel them
towards such violence? When children live in environments unsettled by wa
parental neglect, or hunger the answer seems obvious. And the mass me
often makes this connection: that, raised and bred in such habitats, the habit
violence comes naturally. As Mother Jones reported recently about children

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
from violent homes (calculated to be 3,000,000 in the United Sta

half will grow up to be abusers as adults and many mimic, while st
the abuse they see or receive in their dealings with others (Dowling
though the tendency in such reportage on violent kids is to blame th
ment rather than the child, there is also the inclination to associate
from certain environments as indelibly prone to and marked by viol
This makes the cases of child-killings/child-killers in the he
America, places (once) considered rock-solid in the national imaginar
turbing. Such events, miniscule (even with their "shocking" rise) w
pared to other forms of death, misery, and brutality at large in the U
today, have triggered what the New York Times has called "a se
depths of the national soul" (Egan, 1998:1). Again the question becom
possibly in the perpetuators' real or imaginary worlds could have in
violence? Not surprisingly, the inclination, for many, has been to d
nection to these incidents. The inhabitants of Springfield, Oregon, fo
posted the words "We have done nothing wrong" on the theater ma
Kipland Kinkel opened fire at the local school. In the commentary t
events, the cause is often sought in something outside the local
bug somewhere in the child's home lives or psychological make
"lethal virus" infecting our children with an alien strain of virulent
It is in this quest that media violence has been seen as a ki
spreading an attitude of predation in the United States that peaks i
kids. So too was pornography in the 1980s accused of inciting and p
sexism: a behavior that today is attributed (as I think is the consensu
of conditions that exceed, if also appear in, pornography. Violence i
larly complex behavioral pattern and can be neither reduced to a sin
nor blamed on something "foreign" that rests outside the worlds in
live, grow up, and find (or do not find) meaning and pleasure-no m
"normal" or "tranquil" these worlds appear. This is why it is im
study media violence in terms of not only its effects-with the assu
unilineal causation from "outside"-but also the factors involved in its incred-
ible power to engage, stimulate, transport, or resonate with children in their
"inner" lives-where children go to make sense of, survive, or escape lived re-
alities. To say this another way, media violence cannot alone be held account-
able for the ruptures and rages plaguing people today. These fissures exist al-
ready and a mass media so engulfed in the production and transmission of
breakage (images and stories of beings, cities, countries, and relationships broken
apart, mixed up, dispersed, attacked, and recombined) is perhaps amplifying,
but certainly speaking of, and to, the desires, fears, and realities people, includ-
ing kids, struggle with all the time.
Not that long ago when my son left for the summer-in a familial situ-
ation tinged, as it is for many in the United States, with anxiety and hostility-
he went armed with a bagful of action figures along with what has now replaced
them, a CD player on which he listens to music sometimes as explosive as the
cyborg scenarios he once replayed. In Adam's case, his weathering of many

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 259
forms of rupture and fracture has been accompanied, and soothed

the imaginary play he has engaged with cyborg warriors. I do not
this that violent cyborgs or mass media in general are necessarily,
simply beneficial for all consumers. Far more work, of all types a
number of perspectives, needs to be done. My only conclusion is t
to do this work rather than be convinced, without doing so, that
know what effect and affect media violence holds for its fans.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This paper emerged out of an AES panel on children and vio-
lence (1997) that emerged out of an earlier panel on children and popular culture (AAA,
1996). I thank my fellow participants: Orin Starn, Elizabeth Chen, Erica Rand, Virginia
Caputo, and, in particular, Charlie Piot and Ken Little, with whom I shared delicious
conversations and the plan, that ultimately failed, to publish our collective papers to-
gether. The kineticism of these talks was tremendous and inspired my thinking tremen-
dously in the arena of children and violence. I thank, as well, the generously attentive
readings Kathy Rudy and Margot Weiss gave to this essay as well as the thoughtful re-
views provided by Dan Segal and four anonymous reviewers for Cultural Anthropology.
1. In a recent study on media violence, Hamilton cites the following figures (drawing
on Nielsen reports and Times Mirror surveys conducted in 1994): 72.8 percent of male re-
spondents and 59.9 percent of female respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 in the
United States are heavy viewers of violent entertainment (1998:55) and 80 percent of males
and 68 percent of females in the same age bracket reported watching the Hollywood cyborg
blockbuster, Terminator 2 (Nielsen Media Research 1993, cited in Hamilton 1998:60).
2. As a representative study, see the National Television Violence Study that as-
sembled three tiers of investigators (media scholars from four universities, repre-
sentatives from national policy organizations, and project administration) for a
three-year study of violence on television (its results are published in three annual stud-
ies beginning in 1996 with volume 1 (Wilson et al. 1996).
3. The full title of the FTC report is: "Marketing Violent Entertainment to Chil-
dren: A Review of Self-Regulation and Industry Practices in the Motion Picture, Music
Recording & Electronic Game Industries." The report was presented in front of the Sen-
ate Commerce Committee in September 2000 (Federal Trade Commission 2000) and is
available from the FTC' s web site at http://www.ftc.gov. For an overview of its findings,
see Hampton 2000.
4. See, for example, Richard Rhodes, "Hollow Claims About Fantasy Violence"
(2000:WK: 19).
5. I am using queer in this paper to mean the dislodging of intact demarcators of/for
identity, including but not limited to gender and sexuality. This is akin to what Eve Sedg-
wick has described as "one of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of pos-
sibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning
when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or
can't be made) to signify monolithically" (1993:8). In employing queerness here to
think constructively about the destructions rampant in cyborg entertainment, I concen-
trate more on the dimension of (gendered, transgendered) identity than of (same sex,
cross-sexed) desire which, of course, is also a central issue in queer studies/theory today.
6. My current research, which I have conducted in both Japan and the United
States, is on Japanese character merchandising (sentai or warrior heroes, girl warriors

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
like Sailor Moon, digital pets, and Pokemon) as it circulates in Japan and
export market. Although I am both aware of and interested in the specific
two cultural markets-different traditions and mythologies of the human/ma
face and different socio-cultural contexts that situate violence, youth, and v
tainment-my focus in this paper is on what is shared by Japan and the Un
mass media fixation on violent cyborgs that I take to be a symptom of the la
turn-of-the-century technologization that is remaking and reimagining the
chine border across the world. For the structure of violent cyborgs, I look
from both U.S. and Japanese mass media, but to consider how this enterta
cated within the everyday lives of children, I am only interested in the Unite
reasons of space, in this paper.
7. I did individual and group interviews (that included viewing and disc
sodes of the show) with thirty children, aged nine to fourteen, in Durham, N
lina, on Sailor Moon. I also did internet surveys (sending out my own
analyzing 100 replies from males and females ranging from age 8 to 40, main
not exclusively, from the United States).
8. Henshin in Japanese.
9. As a transformer, Sailor Moon's identity shifts and is not consisten
gian. I categorize her here as a cyborg, though, because, in power-mode, she has me-
chanical components (tiara, moon prism power-wand) that merge with her body and self.
10. By fan, I mean someone who overtly likes the genre of cyborg action and refer
here to children I have interviewed (in the United States and Japan), undergraduate stu-
dents at Duke (mainly the 40 who were in a class I taught on cyborgs), and scholars writ-
ing on cyborgs.
11. The homoerotic subtheme played in Japan (in the comic book and cartoon), but
was to be removed for the U.S. broadcast (before this became an issue however, the show
was taken off network television).
12. In these early post-war years, a strikingly different kind of popular superhero
was projected on Japanese television screens: Tetsuwan Atomu-an adorable boy/robot
created with atomic powers in the futuristic time of 2026 A.D. Designed by Japan's "fa-
ther" of comic artistry, Tezuka Osamu, first as a manga (comic book) in the 1950s and
then as Japan's first serialized cartoon on television starting in 1962, Tetsuwan Atomu
was built as a multi-powered, multi-parted humanoid robot, whose mechanical vulner-
abilities and breakdowns resemble RoboCop's composition (and decomposition) far
more than they do Superman's more naturalistic (though alien) powers. The social and
economic trauma Japan was experiencing in the 1950s and its blueprint for rebuilding it-
self as an industrial power through reliance on both technology and the industriousness
of Japanese workers is crystallized in the spunky character of "Mighty Atom"-a model
of cyborg identity and flexible labor that came later to the United States in the 1980s
with, arguably, more unease in figures such as RoboCop.
13. A superhero like Superman was also subjected to regular attack, of course, and
also displayed a "split" personality-as is true of superheroes generally-that oscillated
between the vulnerable, klutzy Clark Kent and the tough, super-strong Superman. Still,
the degree of attack and the incidence of damage and vulnerability are far greater in the
case of RoboCop disabusing this hero of what Superman arguably possessed-an intact
power-center (symbolized by his ever-ready red/blue super costume).
14. The following section is a synopsis of RoboCop based on my own viewing of
the video.
15. That is far more common, however, in Euro-America than Japan.

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 261
16. A particularly prescient choice as the home of Fordism, now p

17. Significantly, there are far more cyborg and android fighters
overtly female bodies in Japanese mass culture. These range from the m
tral or (gender-)muted power costumes worn by the girl (and boy) m
(warrior teams)-girls in the renja-series, for example, that appear in t
as The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (and started in Japan in 1973
girl motif favored by Sailor Moon (and other comic and cartoon serie
translated into English as Battle Angel Alita) to the femme fatale styl
(adopted by the boomers inA.D. Police Files). These female warriors, of
a fandom of boys as well as girls in Japan. By contrast, there is a paucit
male fighters, cyborgs, or heroes in children's entertainment in the Uni
the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess are two exceptions) and,
do appear, it tends to be with the eroticized bodies that seem targeted
for boys (such as Lara Croft in the popular video game, Tomb Raider
Jenkins (1997) on the gendering lines and debates in video games in th
well as Piot (n.d.). My comments on the macho prevalence in cyborg tren
in this light. I agree that maleness hegemonizes the form given action ch
ing cyborg warriors, in U.S. children's entertainment today. My point
this "maleness" is far more troubled, unstable, and fluctuating a categ
than commonly perceived.
18. For important exceptions, see Fuchs 1995 and Goldberg 1995.
19. Special topics for "Anthropology and Film." Class enrollment w
dents, almost equally mixed between females and males; about 70 perce
rest black, Asian-American, and international.
20. There are others who share the view I express here-that identity/
in stories involving violence and monsters/cyborgs/hybrids is unstab
(queer in my word)-including Fuchs (1995) writing about violent cyborgs, Hurley
(1995) in a provocative essay on horror films, Stone (1995) in her wonderful work on cy-
borgs, and Shaviro (1993) whose extension of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), in
theorizing cinematic body image/pleasure is of major importance.
21. As Edelman has written (1995), desire and identity always "exceed" (in being
more ambiguous and complicated than) the names/categories by which they are rou-
tinely slotted. In queerness, the fictive borders demanded by straight society are refused
rather than acquiesced to, and excesses (of body/sexuality/gender/subjectivity) are ac-
cepted.
22. I use this language here only to challenge the assumption of phallic wholeness
so commonly adopted in writings on violent cyborgs.
23. Twice his hand is chopped off which is a common trope: Luke Skywalker in the
Star Wars series, the Terminator in Terminator, and Tetsuo in Akira all lose hands as
well in what have been described as oedipal/phallic losses.
24. And ambivalence towards even loving caregivers. The constant figures of
"good" as well as "bad" (step)mothers in The Grimm Fairytales allows children to psy-
chically "split" their feelings towards mothers between love and rage, Bettelheim argued
(1976).
25. Wonder Woman was a wonderful exception to the Superman era of manly su-
perheroes though it should be noted that her creator, Dr. William Marston, intended her
sexiness and boldness to feed male rather than female desire.
26. See also Susan Willis (1987) on the genre of transformer heroes and how gen-
der gets both commodified and blended in the marketing of transformer hero toys.

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
27. I thank an anonymous reviewer for the terminology "jewels" and "
28. Yet, driven by a market mentality that demands new products and
the time, the latest version (kin, gin [silver, gold] released in fall 1999 in
added new pokemonsters that are now genderized. If there is any consolation
that the manufacturers consider the addition of gender here to be "new."
References Cited
Allison, Anne
2000[1996] Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship
Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Appadurai, Arjun
1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Un
versity of Minnesota Press.
Balsamo, Anne
1996 Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, N
Duke University Press.
Bataille, Georges
1994 Eroticism. Mary Dalwood, trans. London: Boyars.
Bersani, Leo
1986 The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia Univers
Press.
Bettelheim, Bruno
1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New
York: Knopf.
Bok, Sissela
1998 Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Bright, Susie
1995 Sexwise. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press.
Cannon, Angie
1998 Answers Abound, Yet Culprits Complex. The News and Observer. May 31:
19A, 20A.
Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins, eds.
1997 From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Clarke, Adele
1995 Modernity, Postmodernity & Reproductive Processes, ca. 1890-199
"Mommy, Where Do Cyborgs Come from Anyway?" In The Cyborg Hand
Chris Gray, ed. Pp. 139-156. New York: Routledge.
Clover, Carol J.
1992 Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Prin
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles
1991 Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Jean McNeil, trans. New York: Zone Bo
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari
1983 Anti-Oedipus. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, and Helen Lane, trans. Minnea
University of Minnesota Press.
1987 A Thousand Plateaus. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University o
nesota Press.

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 263
Dowling, Claudia
1998 Violence Lessons. Mother Jones 23(4):32-41.
Edelman, Lee
1995 Queer Theory: Unstating Desire. GLQ 2:343-346.
Egan, Timothy
1998 From Adolescent Angst to School Killings. New York Times. June 14:1, 20.
F.A.C.T. Book Committee, ed.
1992 Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship. East Haven, CT:
LongRiver Books.
Federal Trade Commission
2000 Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children: A Review of Self-Regulation

and Industry Practices in the Motion Picture, Music Recording and Electronic
Game Industries. September 11. Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission.
Fuchs, Cynthia
1995 "Death Is Irrelevant": Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hys-
teria. In The Cyborg Handbook. Chris Gray, ed. Pp. 281-300. New York: Routledge.
Goldberg, Jonathan
1995 Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In The
Cyborg Handbook. Chris Gray, ed. Pp. 233-254. New York: Routledge.
Hamilton, James
1998 Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Program-
ming. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hampton, Howard
2000 Blood and Gore Wars. Film Comment 36:30.
Haraway, Donna Jenne

1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: R
ledge.
Harvey, David
1989 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Houston, Beverle
1984 Viewing Television: The Metapsychology of Endless Consumption. Quarterly
Review of Film Studies 9(3):183-195.
Hurley, Kelly
1995 Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott's Alien and David
Cronenberg's Rabid. In Posthuman Bodies. Judith Haberstam and Ira Livingstone,
eds. Pp. 203-224. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ito, Mizuko
1998 Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Making Sense of SimCity 2000 TM in the Fifth
Dimension. In Cyborg Babies: From Techno-sex to Techno-tots. Robbie Davis-
Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds. Pp. 301-316. New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric
1982 Progress versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future? Science Fiction
Studies 9:147-158.
1984 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left R

146:53-92.
Jenkins, Henry
1997 Video Games are Good For You (Interview). Next Generation 29:8-13, 161-

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
Kinder, Marsha
1991 Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: Fro
Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of Califor
Kipnis, Laura
1992 Male Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler. In Cultural Studies.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Pp. 373-391. New
York: Routledge.
Kirby, Lynne
1988 Male Hysteria and Early Cinema. Camera Obscura 17:113-131.
Nielsen Media Research
1993 Nielsen Television Index: Index programs by DMA, November 1993. New
York: Nielsen Media Research.
Penley, Constance
1991 Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia. In Close Encounter
Film, Feminism, and Science. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, an
Janet Bergstrom, eds. Pp. 67-84. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pfeil, Fred
1990 Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. London:
Verso.
Piot, Charles
N.d. Heat on the Street: Video Violence and American Teen Culture.
Rhodes, Richard
2000 Hollow Claims About Fantasy Violence. The New York Times. September 17:
WK:19.
Ross, Andrew
1989 No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
1991 Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits.
London: Verso.
Rubey, Dan
1997 Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away. Jump Cut 41:2-130.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
1993 Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Seiter, Ellen
1999 Power Rangers at Preschool: Negotiating Media in Child Care Settings. In Kids'
Media Culture. Marsha Kinder, ed. Pp. 239-262. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Shaviro, Steven
1993 The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Silverman, Kaja
1992 Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge.
Springer, Claudia
1993 Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg. Cinema 18:87-101.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne
1995 The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Studlar, Gaylyn
1988 In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Stemberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aes-
thetic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC
CYBORG VIOLENCE 265
Turkle, Sherry
1998 Cyborg Babies and Cy-Dough-Plasm: Ideas about Self and Life
of Simulation. In Cyborg Babies: From Techno-sex to Techno-tots. R
Floyd and Joseph Dummit, eds. Pp. 317-329. New York: Routledge.
Williams, Linda
1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Berke
of California Press.
Willis, Susan
1987 Gender as Commodity. The South Atlantic Quarterly 86(4):403-419.
Wilson, Barbara, Dale Kunkel, Dan Litz, James Potter, Ed Donnerstein, Stacy Smith, Eva
Blumenthal, and Mike Berry
1996 National Television Violence Study 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
Inc. Multimedia.
Multimedia Works Cited (Films)

Cameron, James, dir.
1984 Terminator. Orion Pictures/Hendale FilmCorporation/Pacific Western.
1991 Terminator 2. Carolco Pictures/LightstormEntertainment/Pacific Western/G
Carpenter, John, dir.
1978 Halloween. Falcon International.
Cronenberg, David, dir.
1986 The Fly. Brooksfilms/20th Century Fox.
Dekker, Fred, dir.
1993 Robocop 3. Orion Pictures.
Kershner, Irvin, dir.
1990 Robocop 2. Orion Pictures.
Lucas, George, dir.
1977 Star Wars. Lucas Film Ltd.
McTiernan, John, dir.
1988 Die Hard. 20th Century Fox/Gordon Co./Silver Pictures.
Otomo, Katsuhiro, dir.
1988 Akira. Akira Committee Co.
Scott, Ridley, dir.
1982 Blade Runner. Warer/The Ladd Co./Blade Runner Partnership.
Tsukamoto, Shinya, dir.
1988 Tetsuo, the Iron Man. Kaijyu Theater (Fox Lorber/Image).
Verhoeven, Paul, dir.
1987 Robocop. Orion Pictures.

190.82.154.137 on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC

This Content Downloaded From 190.82.154.137 On Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

This Content Downloaded From 190.82.154.137 On Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

This Content Downloaded From 190.82.154.137 On Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:16:12 UTC

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines

Author(s): Anne Allison

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/656538

This content downloaded from

Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and

The Media and Kids: Violent Connections?

Cultural Anthropology 16(2):237-265. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association.

This content downloaded from

was a shooting by a fifteen-year old boy on the premises of h

This content downloaded from

violent media has on various audiences, research such as Bok

It is this conceptualization of violent entertainment and the impact it has

This content downloaded from

out of violent acts. Thus while images of cutting, exploding, and sp

This content downloaded from

("imaginary") new subjects whose queerness bears the seeds of a co

Today's world of global capitalism and proliferating technologies is ofte

This content downloaded from

identity borders. This confusion is marked by both a dislocation and

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

(splattering, smashing, chopping, firing) bodies undergo as a

This content downloaded from

use the example of a movie series, the RoboCop trilogy (Rob

This content downloaded from

(significantly) in the crotch. Although RoboCop's phallic powers

This content downloaded from

by their chief through OCP, to take him down. As they encircle

The Sensuality of Violence

One of the most obvious and memorable aspects of Robo

This content downloaded from

When the tone is so dark, the impression rendered of a technologized cy-

This content downloaded from

this point even further, proposing that viewers of horror, violen

Phallic Powers/Gendered Self

This content downloaded from

retrograde on two scores. First, it misrepresents today's postind

This content downloaded from

(traditional) aggressor, but also to dislodge, explode, and redraw th

This content downloaded from

Exploding into New Borderlands

This content downloaded from

in this deterritorialized world, may no longer even exist. The emp

This content downloaded from

where, as Beverle Houston has argued, viewers are kept at a "near p

This content downloaded from

world.24 Advocates of the television show, The Mighty Morphin P

This content downloaded from

chance to see themselves as action heroes (as in Power Rangers)

This content downloaded from

in Power Rangers) between different states and forms. This sens

The more I ponder the issue of violence and children's entertainmen

This content downloaded from

from violent homes (calculated to be 3,000,000 in the United Sta

This content downloaded from

forms of rupture and fracture has been accompanied, and soothed

This content downloaded from