Footnote #49 - Cyborgs

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Footnote 49 looks at the fascinating figure of the cyborg as an embodiment of hybridity, resistance, and rebellion, interrogating the role of cyborgs as surrogate figurations that representing disparate forms of identity within both popular media culture and social reality. Chris and Alex begin by discussing the cyborg as the provocative integration of artificial components and technologies with the human, before asking where and how the image of the cyborg appears throughout cinema history. This includes a look at its metaphorical role within and beyond science-fiction and fantasy; the cyborg as the increasing locus for current cultural debates about race, gender, and sexuality; and the politics of the cyborg as a reflection of the possibilities of liminal identities that are ‘caught between’ the normative.

 **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Haraway, Donna J. 2000. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” In The Gendered Cyborg, eds. Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, and Kathryn Woodward, 50-57. New York: Routledge.

• Haraway, Donna J. 1990. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge.

• Kang, Minsoo. 2005. “Building the Female Sex Machine: The Subversive Potential of the Female Robot.” Intertexts 9, no. 1: 5-22.

• Nishime, LeiLani. 2005. “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (Winter): 34-49.