Body Webs: Re/constructing Boundaries in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Year 2003, Issue: 18, 65 - 79, 01.10.2003

Alexandra Glavanakova-yaneva

Abstract

A truism, a fact of our everyday lives is that technology and nature have reached the stage where they constitute each other. Traditionally, we have conceptualised technology science as the binary opposite of nature, though this particular opposition in itself is an artificial construct, as François Dagognet has argued.1 It seems quite obvious today that not only is nature becoming technologized, but that technology is nature, as Allucquère Rosanne Stone has revealed in one of the most significant essays written on the emerging cyberculture. With the development of digital technology, the process of the merging of bodies and machines has intensified and we are witnessing the increased "prostheticization" and "cyborgization" of the human body. In our postmodern hi-tech world the borderline between humanity/human nature and technology has become increasingly elusive and willingly or not we are remodeling our bodies and minds into cybernetic hybrids.

References

• Bell, David and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.