Abstract
In the 21st century, under the influence of the explosive development of science and technology, human thinking mode and aesthetic criteria have also begun to change in science fiction film aesthetics in the post-human context. As an inter-disciplinary approach between interfacing science, literature, and the humanities, the scientific imaginary in visual culture is expanding. Based on the Cyborg Manifesto, created by Donna Haraway, the Cyborg is assumed to be a gender-fluid post-human figure, which is more inclined to the feminine pronoun. After the third wave of feminist movement, in the western fiction films of the Alpha generation period (2013-2024), the images of Cyborg characters have gradually become the images that cannot be ignored, because it plays an important role in the expression of human-machine relations, gender issues, and social order. First, it is the change of the body structure and the organisms of the Cyborg images that change and subvert the original appearance of human beings’ physical body, breaking the bound between human and machine. Second, the Cyborg characters blur the boundary between femininity and masculinity due to the change of body structure and organisms in these sci-fi films. Cyborgs enable a productive blurring of the binaries, such as male and female, self and other, culture and nature, that have sustained Western cultural hierarchies. Third, compared with the powerful Cyborg images, the masculine characteristics of the male Cyborg images become less dominant in science fiction movies where female cyborgs are the major characters. The male castration anxiety in this kind of film is still obvious, which also reflects that the female Cyborg images still cannot completely escape the fate of being male-gazed, voyeurized, and imprisoned. Therefore, the main research question of this thesis is how the Cyborg female image in the western science fiction film realizes the gender and human-machine fluid, breaks the dualistic system and the traditional social order, as well as the influence and imprisonment from the patriarchal social consciousness that still exists. This paper will argue that the fluidity between human and machine of the Cyborg contributes significantly to the post-human gender and social new order.
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