Fashion and globalization

Bradbury strives to remain on neutral ground, but it is obvious right from the beginning that he holds a disparaging attitude towards the radicals’ hysteria and hypocrisy in pretending to be democrats while they make use of power whenever they are in the position to do so. This happens even in the radicals’ families: “your idea of a good party is to invite the universe. And then leave me to wash up after!” (ibidem: 7), Barbara Kirk accuses.

If one contemplates the best known campus novels in England it is apparent that David Lodge’s academics happily and promiscuously indulge in the perks of their professions. The justification for their expensive research style is that they represent the postmodern facet of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table. Their pretentions pitted against their hedonism and careerism constitute a source of comedy in his novels. Martin Amis’s Lucky Jim mocks the affectations and the bombastic language of the faculty staff. Miles away from these humorous intentions, Bradbury studies the process of twisting ideas into ideologies. The relationships, too, are built upon constructs of power, even if they are wrapped up in democratic rituals. Howard, for instance, consumes people with the pretext of setting them free.

Barbara: “You’ve had all the people you can eat! We need some fresh ones, says Howard.” (ibidem: 8)

Barbara: “how this heart bleeds for victims. And he finds them all over. The only ones he can’t see are the people he victimizes himself” (ibidem: 10).

Another accusation brought to her husband is that he changes according to the fashion as if careful not to fail as the leading role in a special play. In complete contrast to the handful of mediocre academics of David Lodge and Martin Amis, Bradbury’s personages suffer not from professional mediocrity, but from emotional and interpersonal handicaps. What they follow is the globalization of the community in conformity with their rules. The implications of globalization for identity are many:

Globalization […] produces different outcomes for identity. The cultural homogeneity promoted by global marketing could lead to the detachment of identity from community and place (Woodward 1997: 16).

Inner and outer architecture

The process of a corrupt identity is insidiously accentuated with the support of architecture. The modernist context created by the Finnish Jop Kaakinen clearly indicates the differences between sciences. The distinction between the old, decorated and cosy buildings of the university and the new, purified, glass-and-steel ones is highlighted with the occasion of Howard’s interview for employment. He is received in the panelled Gaitskell Room of the Elizabethan hall which had been

the original starting place of the new university, before the towers and the pre-stressed concrete and the glass-framed buildings that were now beginning to spread across the site (Bradbury 2000: 37).

The architectural differences between the old and new buildings are concerned with style, shape, materials and functionality. Sociology studies are the stars of the moment, as people are more interested now in building relationships and increasing their influence over the minds of others than in interpreting texts or finding hidden meanings. Propaganda and political upheaval eclipse hermeneutics and arts. The insurgent spirit of sociology is backed up by the explosive dynamism of technical and new management approaches. There is only a small portion left to humanities. The mechanization of purposes is internalized in the narration through the use of alliteration, repetition and parallelism. The pages of the novel appear as a block, without relaxation or graceful indentations. Jop Kaakinen’s programme: Creating a Community / Building a Dialogue engages personal options into a wholesale march enflamed by Marxist- Freudian views.

Henry and Myra Beamish are condemned as bourgeois because they settled “outside Watermouth, in an architect-converted farmhouse, where they were deep into a world of Tolstoyan pastoral, scything grass and raising organic onions” (ibidem: 41). The Beamishes and the Kirks changed Leeds for Watermouth, the former being a working class environment, while the latter was “built on tourism, property, retirement pensions… (and) French chefs” (ibidem: 41). Education did not transform Howard’s mentality: he still belongs in the slums. Not only is he against luxury, but he fights all forms of tranquil life. That is why he contributes to the dismemberment of the Beamish couple. Howard develops a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1981: 6–7; 34), without manifesting an intellectual irony towards “final vocabularies” (Rorty 1989: 73).

Without realizing it, many faculty members and students skid from ideas to ideology, thus suffocating dialogues or polemics. Henry Beamish tries to bring arguments in favour of his decent and traditional life:

I’m not wild about all this violent radical zeal that’s about now, all these explosive bursts of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this year. And I can’t see what’s wrong with a bit of separateness and withdrawal from the fray (Bradbury 2000: 43).

Howard’s response is non-argumentative and inquisitorial: “Oh, Christ, evasive quietism” (ibidem: 43). Such a fashionable anarchism enforces regulations and prescribed mentalities without proposing structures. They are not able to deconstruct, as they do not accept a dialogic formula. A structure is a constructive geometry, not only supportive scaffolding. That is why structures imply complexity and even variation. A structure cannot be dictatorial without going bankrupt.

Radicalism against pluralism

How structural are Kaakinen’s new university buildings? Robert A. Morace considers that the modernist looking university is managed like a factory. He defines Watermouth University as being less a university than a factory “where everyone must conform to the rule of non-conformity” (Morace 1989: 71). Here all the rooms are repetitiously alike and “in such an aggressively and architecturally modern environment conservatives […] appear not merely freakish but psychologically deviant” (ibidem: 71).

Malcolm Bradbury’s attacks on Sociology and the fields related to it are motivated by the limitations imposed on thinking. In Watermouth students in the sociology seminars are supposed to think, write and act in line with their academic preferences. Howard is irritated by Carmody’s meticulousness and lack of radicalism, the dialogue between them, after the reading of an essay, being a sample of non-argumentative polemics.

Howard: “this Anglo-Catholic classicist royalist stuff you import from English and want to call sociology?” Carmody: “It’s an accepted form of cultural analysis” Howard: “I don’t accept it. It’s an arty-farty construct that isn’t Sociology, because it happens to exclude everything that makes up the real face of society” (ibidem 147).

Howard justifies the low grades of Carmody using slogans: “He’s a juvenile fascist. He’s both incapable and dishonest” (ibidem: 152).

As we come to recognize, between the Sociology Department and the English Department there reigns a mutual intellectual distrust. Especially the sociologists are vehement in accusing the humanists of futility, lack of scientific method and a nostalgic approach. The embodiments of these two confrontational stances are Howard and Miss Callender. Howard’s seduction of the reclusive and independent Miss Callender at the end of the novel functions as a twisting deus ex machina and symbolizes the submissive role reserved to arts in postmodernity.

The ideological contentions between the two Departments are reflected in the architecture and decoration of the buildings that shelter them. It is like a display of forces between Apollo and Dionysus:

now the campus is massive, one of those dominant modern environments of multi-functionality that modern man creates: close it down as a university […] and you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping precinct (ibidem: 69).

This multi-purpose architectural vision is the equivalent of a novel devoid of any local flavour. There is no unique point of reference and the novel can be translated using formal and functional equivalences without any obstacle. Randall Stevenson (1976: 191)noticed that The History Man is composed especially in the present tense and that there is an antithesis in the title. History is reduced to the present and the history man is actually an opportunist, as his wife remarks: “Howard’s books are very empty but they’re always on the right side.” (Bradbury 2000: 78).

Transparency versus personality

We must admit that opportunism is a form of attention “liberated” from any defined reticence. Opportunists are people who annihilate their message or distorts it in order to endorse somebody else’s message, irrespective of its toxicity. This abdication from personality is reflected by means of intersemiotic translation in the all-purpose university architecture. The Durkheim Room in the Social Science Building is a neutralized space for the meetings where sociologists fiercely debate over contested research and theory:

It is a long, thin chamber preserved only for conference purposes; as a result, a certain dignity, a spacious seriousness, has been attempted. On two sides there are long glass windows, giving onto the distractingly good views; to prevent these being distracting, white slatted Venetian blinds have been hung […]. The other two walls are pure and white and undecorated, conceived by a nakedly frantic sensibility, open a large, obsessive hole into inner chaos. […] on the floor is a serious, undistracting brown carpet; on the ceiling, an elaborate acoustical muffle (ibidem: 164).

This undistracting decoration serves as a stimulus for some ludicrous or extremist proposals and polemics. The staff want to obtain a grant for research into senile delinquency (ibidem: 174) and Dr. Zachery contemplates the efficiency of fascism: “an elegant sociological construct, a one-system world–its opposite is contingency or pluralism or liberalism. That means a chaos of opinion and ideology” (ibidem: 170).

Bureaucracy needs a protestant type of architecture with as little decoration as possible. Austerity is the concept applicable only to the arts, while for morals it is sparingly valued. Howard integrates radicalism into his life in one way, while Bradbury translates it, using architectural reflections, in another way. As D.J. Taylor underlines: “ The History Man ’s overriding theme is the ability of extreme liberalism to degenerate into totalitarianism–a disease of society” (Taylor1993: 210). For instance, in spite of the modern, interactive methods of teaching practised at Watermouth University, the enclosed, artificially lit precincts wherein the courses are held point to a deficient intellectual process. The analogy to the platonic myth of the underground cave is easily discernable. Howard teaches in “an interior room without windows, lit by artificial light” (Bradbury 2000: 136). The rooms reflect the exterior of the whole project:

the shuttered concrete of Kaakinen’s inspiration, which in its pure whiteness is intended to induce the sense of unadulterated form, and hence belongs really in some distant, utopian landscape of sun and shadow, in New Mexico, perhaps (ibidem: 125).

There is no connection between the architectural code of the university and the urban architectural code. The predominant colour of the city is dirty grey. This discordance indicates that the academic environment is a cotton-like shelter, unable to improve the surrounding dystopian world. The atmosphere inside is artificial, bunker-like, autarchic and indifferent to the problems of the real world: “The pink sodium lights of Watermouth shine in through its glass roof; this is now the only illumination” (ibidem: 93). Recesses and niches are not tolerated–everything has to be visualized and public, pretty much like blunt translation relying on functional equivalence:

There are buildings in the world which have corners, bends, recesses; Where seats have been put, or paintings hung on the walls; Kaakinen, in his purity, has rejected all these delicacies” (ibidem: 64).

Even the offices are all the same: “stark, simple, repetitious, each one an exemplary instance of all the others.” (ibidem: 66). The only academic who wants to domesticate this chilly, outrightly inhuman perspective is Henry Beamish. He brings into his office some decorative objects from home.

Abstraction and geometry

Abstraction is present everywhere, details giving in to inexpressive, depersonalized wholes. As the author remarks, with the arrival of the era of the crowd and the factory, “Gemeinschaft yielded to Gesellschaft. Community was replaced by the fleeting passing contacts of city life” (ibidem: 68). The wholeness of urban centres is specific only to academic precincts. The faculty seems to be moving to future corporatism in that they inhabit ghostly spaces which obstruct a more relaxed way of life. Their anarchic-communist attitude is supported by an environment without memory or destiny. Any reminiscences of a glorious past have been geometrized:

there are big, bare windows; beyond the windows you can see, dead centre, the high phallus, eolipic in shape, of the boilerhouse chimney, the absolute focus, the point of maximum architectural eminence of the entire university, its substitute for a tower or a spire a campanile (ibidem: 66).

If in David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World the fake bell towers attached to the university buildings were kitschified through the use of under–or overestimated materials, in The History Man the effect of comparing the chimney of the boiler house to a medieval campanile is ludicrous and degrading. The architect did not respect the least law of creativity; he simply pilfered previous styles for their details and utilized cold and transparent materials for construction. This is Bradbury’s suggestion when he studies the effects on sociologists’ behaviour and thinking. We could as well take the opposite stance and underline the modernistic principle of creativity:

to value creativity is to value less the particular products of creation than creative activity itself. If the good is the activity rather than its final products, then the creator should have no qualm leaving them behind, inasmuch as they mark the end of particular spells of creative activity (Leiter and Sinhababu 2007: 49).

Conclusion

Irrespective of the stand we take, History Man has resisted temporal corrosion owing to its ability to conjugate architectural purity with ideological convulsions. The fact is that abstraction cannot become so metaphysical as to escape biased reasoning. More than this, architecture as structure restructures human substance. Exaggerated careerist involvements simply boost the pre-eminence of the environment by rendering sparser the contact with the inner strata of personality. The transparent architecture highlights a dim, incomprehensible human structure.

Sources

Bradbury, Malcom. 2000. The History Man. London: Picador.

References

Hall, Stuartand Paul Du Gay (eds.). 1996. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity. 1–17. London: Sage.

Leiter, Brian and Neil Sinhababu (eds.). 2007. Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lash, Scott and John Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.

Morace, A. Robert. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcom Bradbury and David Lodge. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul (ed.). 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stevenson, Randall. 1976. The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction. London: Greener Books.

Taylor, D.J. 1993. After the war: The Novel and England since 1945. London: Chatto & Windus.

Woodward, Kathryn. 1997. Identity and Difference. London: Sage.

Chapter Nine

The Human Body: Are We Becoming

a Hybrid?

Cătălina Ioana Petre

Introduction

In this continuously changing world, where science and technology advance very fast, man tries to improve the way he lives, taking advantage of all transformations in the name of progress. What is the human body turning into? The thinking behind this question is very simple: new technologies have turned humans into consumers of many devices the principal functions of which are to make life easier. These technologies incur, however, some negative effects on the human body, tending to transform it into a hybrid or a cyborg.

The present article examines the “hybrid body” and especially the mechanical human type. With regard to specialized literature, this chapter will present some of the main ways in which humans have adopted or attempt to obtain a hybrid body. Whether we are talking about an amputated arm or leg which has been replaced by prosthetic ones or a pacemaker for the heart or the genetic alterations that can appear in the case of in vitro fertilization, all of these transformations constitute ways in which humans become potential cyborgs.

The first part of this chapter will focus on the theoretical aspects of a hybrid body. After a short definition of this term, in the second part I will describe two important cases connected to this issue: Marylin Manson and plastic reparatory and aesthetic surgery.

Between a hybrid and cyborg

This section will try to differentiate a hybrid body from that of a cyborg, drawing upon examples which throw light on these two concepts. For the first notion I have drawn upon Bernard Andrieu’s writings and for the second I refer to Rod Giblett’s paper, The body of nature and culture.

2.1. What is a hybrid body?

There exists diverse research on the hybrid body. One of the authors on this subject, Bernard Andrieu has considered the “tech body”–a body that has become hybrid by integrating technological novelties. The author gives a definition of the hybrid body as “hybridization takes a part of the functional body and performs tasks in its place. Hybridization introduces technology in the body producing an unconscious incorporation by the use of procedures and techniques” (Andrieu 2007: 36). He goes further in defining this notion stating that “hybridization transforms the body, alters genetic heritage, and invades our body with chemicals from our non-biological food” (ibidem: 36). The hybrid body is incorporated in an individual’s life, both in his movements, gestures and in his habits, the replacement of a limb or organ by grafts, implants or other devices, hence transforming a normal body into a hybrid body, still a body that manages in the end to perform all his functions (ibidem: 37).

Advancements in technology have made possible the lab replication of human organs, by the means of animal research, or by using chemicals, which transform the human body into a hybrid. A hybrid body has a prosthetic leg or arm, or has an implant whose function is to aid sight or hearing. There are numerous examples of individuals who have a missing limb, having a high tech prosthetic device or not, even taking part in Special Olympics. There is one person who has provoked much controversy, the Paralympic Oscar Pistorius, who possesses two prosthetic devices which replace his legs and allow him to perform his daily activities, even win numerous athletic competitions.

In the article Se ‘ transcorporer.’ Vers une autotransformation de l’humain?, Bernard Andrieu interprets the hybridization process in a favorable light, stating that “the improvement of our nature through technology implies a development of the natural body, for the delay of diseases, aging and death represents a victory of the human species over its environment’s variations” (Andrieu 2010: 36). The author considers that this dehumanization of the human body has two reasons: the first is linked to what has been mentioned before: “a biotechnological dependence of the physiological and movement functions (such as prosthetics, implants and other walking aids, repelling death and artificial breathing)” (ibidem: 35), the second being linked to the “neurophysiological, pharmacological or even genetic (contamination, cloning, behavioral neurobiology problems)” (ibidem: 35). Hybridization could offer a more humane aspect to the individual, as long as some criteria are considered, such as its dignity and integrity (ibidem: 40–41).

As long as the individual has a positive image of being restored through these instruments of hybridization, society will keep on creating new ways and technologies to help the body function in a suitable way, or replace its main functions and turn it into a cyborg.

2.2. What is a cyborg?

In this section I will discuss Rod Giblett’s description of the cyborg. In The body of nature and culture, Gibblett states that the cyborg is both a product of science and science-fiction, as well as culture and nature: “the cyborg is the creature of the opposition of culture to nature” (2008: 141), a creature that crosses the boundary of the capitalist opposition of culture to nature and that hybrids the two” (ibidem: 142). Giblett gives another explanation to the notion of “cyborg”, saying that it is not just a mix between machine and organism but

also of soldier and civilian, or perhaps more precisely it embodies or empanels the colonization of the civilian by the soldier, the grafting of the soldier on the civilian. The cyborg is a creation of modern militarism and militaristic modernity. The cyborg is a creature, figure and product of the militarization of civilian life (ibidem: 144).

Further on, he brings into the discussion the definition given by Featherstone and Burrows (1995: 2), namely that the cyborg is “a human-machine hybrid”. Using this definition and developing on it, Giblett offers a subtle definition of cyborg, maintaining that it “is a hybrid that crosses the culture / nature, mind / body and male / female divides” (2008: 142).

We can see for ourselves some cyborg examples, both male and female, in a documentary from the Extraordinary people series.[39] This documentary is about a woman named Sheril Robertson, who lost her eye sight in an accident when she was young. In 2004, 20 years after the accident, she underwent a revolutionary intervention. She received an implant connected to her brain, which allowed her to see, making her the first woman cyborg.[40]

An example of a cyborg, this time male, is the famous case from the Terminator series. In this movie there are two male cyborgs, both from the distant future each with a clearly determined mission: protecting or killing a young man who will play a major role in the future of mankind. The body of the two cyborgs is revolutionary, closely resembling the appearance of humans, yet having regenerative abilities. The details in the movie show us that their metal skeletons replicate the human body very closely. Another example is Jesse Sullivan, the first person to undergo a bionic limb transplant.[41]

Giblett (2008: 143) deals with the arguments of Harraway (1985), Featherston and Burrows (1995), and Denys (2001), according to whom man has already become a cyborg, this being visible in many aspects of day to day life, communication technologies playing a major role in creating a dependence of man on media of communication, such as the mobile phone, internet and the television. Quoting Harraway, Giblett thinks that “the machine is not something outside us that we control and manipulate, and then stow away or dispose of, but something that becomes us” (2008: 143).

3. Marilyn Manson: a hybrid case

After a short review of the two key concepts of the article, we will move to some examples, taken from society and related literature. The first of these examples is Marylin Manson, a rock singer, who has made a name for himself principally through his looks, most of the time using flashy make-up and other methods, the result being an image easily remembered by the public. The reason why I have chosen Marilyn Manson as an example comes from his appellative combination of the woman’s name, Marilyn, referencing the Hollywood diva Marilyn Monroe, and the man’s name, Manson, as in the mass murderer Charles Manson (Toffoletti 2007: 88). In Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body, Kim Toffoletti has analysed the cover of his Mechanical Animals CD where the music artist is photographed naked, interpreting the image of Marilyn Manson as a cross between a man, a woman and an animal. Toffoletti offers the following insights:

both troubling and fascinating are the small mounds on Manson’s chest and his indeterminate genital bulge, which are emphasized by his pose.[…] Despite clearly suggesting sex organs, these body parts show no trace of the inversions and extensions that typify the human body. The characteristics of the abject self are absent–protruding nipples, coarse hair, the vaginal cut, the eye of the penis, or the umbilical remnant of birth (Toffoletti 2007: 82).

Being “the mutant product of a perverted genetic code” (ibidem: 83), Manson has hoof-like feet, a bestial feature. Toffoletti understands that the singer “refuses to be categorized in traditional terms” (ibidem: 88), the body elements on the cover “suggest that Manson is no androgyny, but a more complex figuration than either male or female” (ibidem: 88).

By carefully examining the lyrics of the song Mechanical animals we can see what kind of image Manson is also aiming for on the linguistic level. Here I focus on the lyrics containing the concepts of hybridization and cyborgs. In the first part of the song we are introduced to two characters, showing the characteristics of a hybrid body, a robot that is going to rust if he cries. The two characters have lost their soul and their behavior has become automatic:

We were neurophobic and perfect
the day we lost our souls.
Maybe we weren’t so human, but
If we cry, we will rust.
And I was a hand grenade that
never stopped exploding.
You were automatic
and as hollow as the ‘o’ in God.

Here we find a description of the cyborg, as Rod Giblett defined it in his paper–“the body of culture and nature”- which considers it to be a product of war and this is reflected here in the words “grenade” and “exploding”: “the cyborg is, more precisely, the interface with an electronic machine” (Giblett 2008: 143), being also “the child of war” (ibidem: 143).

The third part of the song emphatically reveals a hybrid body:

You were my mechanical bride,

phenobarbidoll.

A mannequin of depression with
the face of a dead star

And I was a hand grenade

That never stopped exploding

You were automatic and

as hollow as the ‘o’ in God

The image of his loved one is that of a “mechanical bride”, a hybrid spouse, a combination between a mannequin transformed by its depression and a dead celebrity. The words “grenade” and “exploding” appear again to accentuate the cyborg image. In the above mentioned song we can also note the following key words: “neurophobic”, “human”, “rust”, “automatic”, “phenobarbidoll” and “the face of a dead star”–all pointing to a hybrid body or a cyborg.

4. Plastic Reparatory and Aesthetic Surgery:

Common cases of hybrid bodies

In this section I will try to show how, through surgery, society is learning to accept a hybrid body as seen through two perspectives of “normalization”: reparatory surgery and aesthetic surgery.

Plastic Reparatory Surgery

Plastic reparatory surgery helps the human body recover those abilities lost through unfortunate incidents. When we talk about limb amputation, this kind of surgery is reparatory because there is the recovery of physical ability and a wounded body image (Burloux and Dubernard 2007). A person who has suffered such an incident on return into the community can be easily singled out and may become a target of stigmatization. For example, the amputation of a limb can lead to an image deficit to the amputee. S/he may be viewed as a handicapped person, unable to perform the same tasks as before. S/he will be cast aside, due to the fact that s/he is unable to take part in certain aspects of daily life, such as an amputee who cannot run, play ball, or perform other activities. A new leg, a performing prosthetic, will allow her/him to regain self-esteem, self-belief as well as increased mobility.

Furthermore, through plastic reparatory surgery, as well as other kinds of surgery, some extraordinary results have been achieved such as when researchers succeeding in a face transplant for a woman in France, named Isabelle Dinoire, who received face skin grafts from a dying person. Isabelle was attacked one day by her dog, losing her nose, lips and chin in the attack. A team of doctors performed a break-through procedure, restoring her appearance and giving her the chance of a normal life.[42] Even if these doctors had not used metal plates, they could have obtained all they needed from a dying person. Recent advances in medicine have been immense; even a hand transplant from a dying person has been undertaken, avoiding the possibility of a hybrid body through prosthetics. Unfortunately, in that particular case the hand was not accepted by the body.[43]

Aesthetic Surgery

Through aesthetic surgery individuals manage to correct those parts of their bodies which are not as they want them to be. Some of these aesthetic procedures involve inserting foreign objects into an organism, such as breast implants. This operation is conducted either due to the wish of young women to have a voluptuous bust line in line with societal ideals, or they can arise out of necessity, especially after a mastectomy.

Apart from plastic and reparatory surgery which suggests medical recovery, aesthetic surgery represents, according to sociologists and other specialists, a further method for an individual to fix an image problem. Some researchers such as Kathy Davis (2003: 8) believe women to be victims of aesthetic surgery who sacrifice their body to beauty standards. Following this argument it emerges that women who opt for breast implants essentially constitute a case of a hybrid body. According to a study by The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, these kinds of interventions were among the second most popular type of plastic surgery for women in 2011.[44] Both aesthetic surgery and reparatory surgery deal with a hybrid body because both involve inserting a foreign object, scientifically produced, into the human body.

Conclusion

Starting with some theoretical elements regarding the concepts of a “hybrid” and “cyborg”, this chapter has illuminated certain key aspects regarding these notions and how they lead to a novel, futuristic construction of human identity. I have brought into the discussion two significant cases which illustrate this trend. On the one hand, there is Marilyn Manson who represents both a hybrid body and a cyborg and, on the other hand, we can capitalize on plastic, reparatory and aesthetic surgery which transforms the human body into a hybrid. Taking the theoretical aspects mentioned above into account, it is not too far-fetched to conclude that the human body has already become that of a hybrid. Just how far away we are from becoming cyborgs is a matter of conjecture but the signs are that this transformational identity is imminent as scientific advances become increasingly appropriated for and adapted into human existence.

References

Andrieu, Bernard. 2007. “Contre la désincarnation technique: un corps hibridé?” Actuel Marx, 41. 28–39. (accessed 16 Aprile 2013).

http://www.cairn.info/revue-actuel-marx-2007-1-page-28.htm

--. 2010. “Se ‘transcorporer’. Vers une autotransformation de l’humain?” La pensée de midi, 30. 34–41.

http://www.cairn.info/revue-la-pensee-de-midi-2010-1-page-34.htm (accessed 15 Aprile 2013).

Bourloux Gabrie and Jean-Michel Dubernard. 2007. “A propos de la greffe de mains.” Les cahiers du Centre Georges Canguilhem, 1. 123–132. (accessed 16 Aprile 2013).

http://www.cairn.info/revue-les-cahiers-du-centre-georges-canguilhem-2007-1-page-123.htm

Davis, Kathy. 2003. “Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences.” Cultural studies on Cosmetic Surgery. 1–19. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Dyens, Ollivier. 2001. Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Featherstone, Mike and R. Burrows. 1995. “Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction.” In Cyberspace / Cyberbodies / Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited byMike Featherstone and R. Burrows. 1–17. London: Sage.

Giblett, Rod. 2008. The body of the nature and culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing House.

Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review, 80. 65–107.

Toffoletti, Kim. 2007. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls. Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. London: L.B. Tauris &Co Ltd Publishing House.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20493572 (accessed 12 March 2012).

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(accessed 12 March 2012).

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(accessed 15 March 2012).

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(accessed 29 June 2012).

http://www.mansonwiki.com/wiki/Mechanical_Animals_%28song%29#Albums (accessed 29 June 2012).

http://marilynmanson.com/discography (accessed 30 June 2012).

http://www.mtv.com/artists/marilyn-manson/photos/1542312/

(accessed 2 July 2012).

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(accessed 7 July 2012).

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veZFVjOvngo

(accessed 15 July 2012).

Chapter Ten

Work and Intellect

in Women’s Lives

Remina Sima

Introduction

The aim of the paper is to present the concepts of “public” and “private life.” Within private life, I shall discuss the issue of family, which is considered to be a unit, and as regards public life, I shall bring into discussion the issue of education and its impact on people’s lives. According to the traditional pattern, the public realm is exclusively associated with men and the private one with women. Nowadays, significant progress has been made so that women can act their part in the public area and men in their turn in the private one. Thus, we can almost speak of equilibrium. The separation between home and work makes substantial differences to the daily lives of both men and women. This means that there is a clear distinction between work time and leisure time and there is also a much clearer distinction between public and private life.

In Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Jean Bethke Elshtain uncovered and made explicit the public / private divide in Western political thought and analyzed the implications of this division for the relation between gender and politics. Elshtain notes that Plato’s perspective on wives’ prerogatives reflects Plato’s belief, less in the equality of these women than in moving them from being private possessions of men to being a collective possession. The author stated that Plato’s Republic was far from embracing women’s equality by allowing wives to enter the public realm. J. B. Elshtain also made reference to Aristotle and argued that his analysis of the distinction between public and private is both teleological and sexist:

Aristotle absorbs woman completely within the oikos, or household, denies woman any possibility of a public voice or role […] Aristotle constructed this tidy arrangement under the terms of a set of teleological presumptions and an explanatory theory flowing from these presumptions which contain irresistible outcomes of women, men and politics (Elshtain 1993:41).

Women’s exclusion from certain fields of activity was justified by labeling the later unfeminine, stating that the proper realm of women to be not politics, but the private and domestic realm. I highly appreciate Harriet T. Mill’s assertion according to which the proper sphere to all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain:

Let every occupation be open to all, without favor or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of those men and women who are found by experience to be most capable of worthily exercising them. There need be no fear that women will take out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than they. Each individual will prove his / her capacities in the way in which capacities can be proved–by trial the world will have the benefit of the best faculties of all its inhabitants. But, to interfere before-hand by any arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind of an individual of a certain sex or class, these faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only in some few of the many modes in which others are permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the individual and a detriment to society, but is also the most effectual mode of providing that, in the sex or class so fettered, the qualities which are not permitted to be exercised shall not exist (Mill 1970:101).

According to Linda Kerber (1980: 235), the vision of the Republican Mother owed a debt to the Enlightenment and to the Revolution. To the mother’s traditional responsibility, were added the obligations that she be an informed and virtuous citizen. She had to observe the political world with a rational eye, and she was to guide her husband and children in making their way to it. She was to be a teacher as well as a mother. This Republican Mother should be alert and reasonably well acquainted with public affairs. Women were advised on what to read and on what not to read. Men were said to read newspapers and history, women were taught to exercise their weaker intellects on devotional literature. Women quietly persisted in their choice of fiction and religious biography, writing romantic fiction that counseled against the loss of self control, and revising their understanding of housekeeping to make room for their own participation in the world of imagination. The extensive didactic literature critical of women’s interest in fiction served an implicit political purpose. It began with a political ideal of what women ought to be.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29