Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead

The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction

M. Elizabeth Ginway

• Editore: Vanderbilt University Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826501196
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria nella fantascienza

Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects—and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría's "baroque ethos, " which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between "political life" and "bare life." This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.

CHAPTER 1

Gendered Cyborgs

Mechanical, Industrial, and Digital

This chapter traces the technological augmentation, enhancement, and even replacement of the human body in Mexican and Brazilian speculative fiction. In order to simplify the presentation, I employ the word cyborg to denote several types of beings, including altered humans, whose bodies have been implanted with prostheses; cyborgs proper, which combine cybernetic and organic systems to an extreme degree; and robots or androids, which are fully mechanical or artificial beings. Examining the texts from Mexico and Brazil over the past hundred years that feature these kinds of beings, we will see how technologically altered bodies offer insight into personal boundaries and the concept of embodiment, especially as these concepts relate to changing social and political institutions and national identity.

I will examine cyborg texts from three key economic periods.¹ The first covers the primarily export-based economy that extends from 1870 to 1910 and features female proto-cyborgs, that is, automatons that function as fetishes of modernity. The second, which focuses on postwar industrialization from 1945 to 1980, introduces female robots and cyborgs that are industrial products intended for internal consumption and markets. The third period encompasses the neoliberal period, the mid-1980s to the present, focusing on cyborgs and posthumans as compliant bodies and outsourced labor in a globalized world. All of these entities—doll-like automatons, industrial robots, and posthuman cyborgs—capture the dilemmas of gendered labor and social inequities while simultaneously serving as a voice for those who have been silenced in the national collective memory. I believe that the female or ambiguously gendered cyborg offers the most original and resistant iteration of this figure, estranging the body in mechanical, industrial, and digital paradigms of work and modernity, and for this reason I will focus on this type of cyborg throughout the study.

Thematically, the cyborg body may be used as a vehicle for exploring the borders between masculine and feminine, organic and artificial, and traditional and modern. Notably, the cyborgs and other altered human bodies appearing in Mexican and Brazilian speculative fiction are often arbitrary assemblages of disparate parts, with low-tech prostheses and inefficient interfaces that are repurposed for improvised functions. This feature, which reflects the unevenness of technological transfers, can be seen as subverting paradigms of productivity and efficiency. Gendered cyborgs in both Mexico and Brazil are especially effective at capturing the social, racial, and technological contradictions of late development and modernization, adding an extra layer of estrangement to social relations. For this reason, although they can be analyzed in accordance with N. Katherine Hayles’s concepts of three stages of cybernetics,² they also provide an excellent illustration of Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría’s “baroque ethos,” because they resist the methods and products of capitalism while participating in it.

As I explained more fully in the Introduction, Echeverría believes that the subaltern classes of Latin America have developed an “ethos” that can make their lives bearable, even satisfying, in the face of historic injustice and economic difficulty. He defines an ethos as a paradoxical concept that can mean either “shelter,” in the sense of tradition or belonging, or “resistance,” in the sense of challenge, for example to a given restriction assigned by society (“Ethos” 26). As a cultural strategy of the subaltern, the baroque ethos exemplifies an attitude that “acepta las leyes de la circulación mercantil . . . pero lo hace al mismo tiempo que se inconforma con ellas” (“Ethos” 26–27; “accepts the laws of mercantile circulation . . . while simultaneously refusing to conform to them” [Gandler 301]).³ In general, the baroque ethos subverts capitalism’s strict notions of profit, developing attitudes of conservatism and nonconformity in dealings with social reality, in which subalterns appear to conform yet resist or subvert the dictates of the more powerful (Gandler 301–2).⁴

Gazi Islam has examined the continued relevance of the concept of cultural antropofagia, which resembles Echeverría’s codigofagia of cultural absorption. In Brazilian society, Islam notes that such knowledge is embodied and encoded by individuals and social institutions in a way that rejects the separation between mind and body that has been central to modern thought since the Enlightenment (172). Islam illustrates this by citing the example of women’s police stations in Brazil that refuse to publish mission statements because they recognize that theirs are hybrid or in-between institutions based on patriarchal structures but “manned” by women whose feminist principles move them to protect other women from violence. Codigofagia is useful in analyzing female cyborgs who may appear to conform to gender expectations but whose minds resist subordination by others. These characters also illustrate the importance of gender in analyzing structures of modernity in a patriarchal culture, where such adaptations do not fit into conventional feminisms, but rather are highly adapted to a social context and the power structures of race and class.

Islam also considers the triadic structure of the “language of difference” to be a reappropriation, in an active sense, of resistance, similar to that propounded by the baroque ethos and codigofagia:

The corporalized nature of anthropophagy, finally, contrasts with the identity politics of some postmodern discourse. . . . Different from political correctness, which sees language as a form of domination, anthropophagy recognizes language as a tool of desire, opens up a hybrid liminal or “third space” (Bhabha, 1994) where the dyad “colonizer-colonized” can be unsettled though changing the meanings of colonial language. (173)

What I wish to argue here is that the cyborg body and the baroque ethos articulate this third space, because they conflate human and machine, male and female, colonizer and colonized, traditional and modern. Gendered cyborgs tell stories that allow us to understand the how and why of apparently contradictory behaviors, focusing on people who do not conform to standards of modernity because they do not benefit directly from them, but rather choose to adapt them to their needs in order to survive.

By analyzing cyborgs from three distinct periods, I offer a historical sampling that emphasizes gender and embodied labor, using Echeverría’s concepts to highlight the distinct baroque character of Latin American speculative fiction. As a way of understanding late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cyborgs, I begin by analyzing proto-cyborgs and the baroque ethos in light of Ericka Beckman’s Capital Fictions (2013), a study of the Latin American literature and culture of the export age (1880 to 1920). Beckman bases her analysis on Marx’s concept of commodity “fetishism,” by which a product’s market value gives it an aura of mystical desirability, to illustrate how Latin American elites were seduced by promises of export-based financing for modernization. Beckman shows the repeated failure of export economies to realize the economic elites’ dreams of modernity in Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, and Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Beckman emphasizes the predominant realist ethos and the strength of external markets for elite investors, I focus on the baroque ethos during the same time period, examining internal markets and using cyborgs as allegories of labor. I take my cue from Beckman in also highlighting what “capitalist fictions” try to hide: the complexity of systems of production described in these nineteenth and early twentieth-century techno-fictions.

In the mid-twentieth century, the economies of postwar Latin America provide an interesting scenario for examining the industrial cyborg and the baroque ethos, as they begin to develop their own internal markets through state-sponsored import substitution. N. Katherine Hayles’s cybernetic paradigms, as outlined in How We Became Posthuman (1999), are of use here. She explores different representations of mind and spirit, noting that the mind is consistently privileged over the body in the Western tradition. In her analysis of information science and its portrayal in science fiction texts, Hayles distinguishes three phases in cybernetic theory. The first is the homeostatic cybernetic model of combined living and mechanical systems described in Norbert Wiener’s 1949 book The Human Use of Human Beings. Based on studies of homeostasis (the tendency toward stable equilibrium among interdependent elements), it relies on feedback loops for self-regulation. The second phase of cybernetics, dated during the 1960s and ’70s, is characterized by “reflexivity,” according to which beings “create” their own reality from inside the cybernetic feedback loop based on the internal adjustments within the system, which recognizes humans as part of the system. In the third phase of cybernetic theory, Hayles claims that pattern recognition and randomness produce what she calls “flickering signifiers” of data, which privilege cybernetic, disembodied knowledge and cyberspace over face-to-face contact and other humanistic forms of knowledge (35).

Industrial cyborgs tend to fall within the first two paradigms of cybernetic homeostasis and reflexivity. Armed with these tools, I analyze how mid-century gendered cyborgs in Mexico and Brazil work within the informational and industrial feedback loops, both as products of consumption and as agents of resistance. I note that, as domestic space becomes a metaphorical factory for production and consumption, gendered cyborgs initiate sexual couplings that promote, but most often interfere with, the smooth functioning of the capitalist feedback loop, disrupting normative concepts of modernity.

No study of gendered cyborgs would be complete without a consideration of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), which conceptualizes the cyborg as a feminist possibility, a self-created, self-engendered female, free from the demands of capitalism and the Freudian neuroses caused by traditional family life (150). We find, however, that despite their rebellious nature, neither Brazilian nor Mexican female cyborgs fulfill this feminist vision for independence, as they all yearn for traditional ties and emotional acceptance through romantic partnerships or family structures, as part of the baroque ethos.⁵ These gendered cyborgs also have much in common with what Hayles characterizes as “reflexivity,” as described above.

Several previous studies have explored the gendered cyborg in Mexico. In his 2000 Science, Technology and Latin American Narrative, Jerry Hoeg identifies Carmen Boullosa’s novel Duerme (1994) as the inspiration for his term “cybermestizaje,” characterizing the work’s protagonist as a “hybrid fusion” (99). Boullosa further develops the female cyborg in her novel Cielos en la tierra (1997), but, as J. Andrew Brown notes, in this story the cyborg yearns to recapture a human identity and escape the dehumanizing effects of technology (54). Thus, Cielos en la tierra negates Haraway’s liberating idea of a posthuman feminism, since by the end of the novel, the cyborg rejects her society as a technological nightmare, in which “posthuman bodies merely reconstitute an oppressive social order rather than subvert it” (Brown 56).

As we shall see, these gendered cyborgs are not monsters of capitalism but rather human/machine hybrids that allow us to see the new iterations of the human in the posthuman that resist and occasionally disrupt the system, at times conveying an implicit utopian possibility of social redefinition and renewal.

Female Fetish Cyborgs in the Long Nineteenth Century

I begin with a story by Brazilian master Machado de Assis, whose work has been insightfully analyzed by Roberto Schwarz, who first set forth his concept of “ideias fora do lugar” (misplaced ideas) in his study on Machado, Ao vencedor as batatas (1977; To the winner go the potatoes). He notes that, in their efforts to match European civilization and culture, nineteenth-century Brazilian elites adopted liberal ideas that ignored the reality of their slave-based coffee economy in order to embrace ideals of industrialized economies and free labor (14–15), principles that actually formed the political basis for Brazil’s 1824 Constitution. Many of Machado’s characters skillfully navigate this contradiction, while others exhibit a metaphorical blindness and deny slave-based reality altogether, and a few, such as Rubião in Quincas Borba (1890), eventually succumb to insanity and death.

Students of Brazilian science fiction will be interested to know that Machado penned one of Brazil’s first proto-cyborg stories in “O capitão Mendonça” (1870; Captain Mendonça), although it eventually turns out, as in many of Machado’s stories of the fantastic, that the events were part of a dream. Loosely based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Sandman,”⁶ Machado’s “O capitão Mendonça” is the story of a young man named Amaral who becomes obsessed with Captain Mendonça, an inventor, and his invention, a female automaton. The story is framed by Amaral’s evening at a theatrical performance, after which he decides to accept an invitation to dine at Mendonça’s home. The house, with its dark rooms, taxidermied animals, and labs for alchemy experiments and other sinister operations, is reminiscent of a gothic horror setting. Amaral describes the house as having a “purgatorial” character (187), thus casting Mendonça as a Faustian figure whose faraway look, bushy eyebrows, and eccentric manner recall that of a mad scientist. Soon Amaral meets Augusta, a beautiful green-eyed female automaton whom Mendonça introduces as his daughter. When Amaral notes that her green eyes are the same color of those of a stuffed owl, Capitão Mendonça asks if Amaral would like to examine them, removing the eyes of his “daughter” for Amaral to inspect. Her face then appears skull-like to Amaral, who remarks that she looks like “uma caveira viva, falando, sorrindo, fitando em mim os dois buracos vazios” (188; a living skull, talking, smiling, fixing her two empty sockets on me). He also comments on how the eyes are still looking at him in Mendonça’s hands, as if in a conscious way: “Daquele modo, as duas mãos do velho olhavam para mim como se foram um rosto” (188; That way, the two hands of the older man looked at me as if they were a face), suggesting a strange seduction and manipulation. Yet despite these uncanny, deathly images, Amaral returns repeatedly to the house, and after Mendonça gives him a diamond, Amaral proposes to take Augusta as his wife. Mendonça approves the union under the proviso that Amaral undergo a brain operation to match his intelligence to that of his future wife. As he is immobilized by Augusta for the procedure and Mendonça prepares to perforate his scalp, Amaral suddenly awakens to find that he has fallen asleep in the Teatro São Pedro, where he realizes that he has dreamed the entire episode.

As I have discussed elsewhere, the recurrent colors of gold and green of Brazil’s royal coat of arms in the story associate the character Capitão Mendonça with Dom Pedro II in the role of the emperor’s shadow side (Ginway, “Machado’s Tales” 214–15). The captain’s recent arrival from Rio Grande do Sul would associate him with both the War of Oribe and Rosas (1851–1852) and the Paraguayan War (1865–1870), reminding readers of the importance of the wars fought in the River Plate area in establishing Brazil’s hegemony in the region, consolidating the reign of Dom Pedro II and the idea of Brazil as nation. Portrayed as a peace-loving monarch whose erudition and love of science were well known, his associations with slavery, war, and violence have generally been suppressed in Brazil’s collective memory. Through the figure of Capitão Mendonça, Machado de Assis may be suggesting that the reign of Pedro II may not be as peaceful and stable as it appears. Readers have hints of this in the sinister image of Augusta whose head becomes a talking eyeless skull, an image of death—perhaps of repressed historical memory—which Mendonça himself quickly displaces with the marvels of science and a product of commodity extractivism, namely, diamonds.

In order to induce Amaral to marry his daughter, Mendonça initiates a scientific procedure that produces a diamond from coal as if by magic. Notably, the diamond is a perfect example of a commodity fetish, since it has no use value but high market value, and its sparkling perfection distracts from the labor behind its fabrication. The gift of the diamond persuades Amaral to marry Mendonça’s mechanical daughter, dazzling him with the promise of wealth and the marvels of “science.” Significantly, the words diamond and coal appear over twelve times each in the story, reinforcing an obsession with mineral commodities that formed the slave-based export economy of Brazil during the eighteenth century in the mining state of Minas Gerais, where a first independence movement, A Inconfidência Mineira, took place in 1789. As a rebellion begun by intellectuals outraged by the colonial system of the Portuguese Crown, the revolt recalls the underlying ideals of liberal democracy that were later undermined once Brazil gained independence in 1822; both Dom Pedro I and his son Dom Pedro II retained an absolutist hold on power, a theme hinted at by Mendonça’s persuasive manner and need to impose his will.

In Machado’s story, Amaral must resist two forms of temptation or commodity fetishes: first, diamonds, an extractive product of slave labor, and second, Augusta, a product of modernity and science.⁷ However, in the end Amaral is able to draw on the baroque ethos and snap himself out of what Beckman would call an “export reverie” and awaken to resist temptation. As a proto-cyborg associated with diamonds and commodity fetishism, Augusta’s cyborg body reveals two sides of Brazilian society; her skull-like head functions as a reminder of death and those bodies sacrificed to war and slave labor, while her graciousness sparkles like a diamond, recalling the “civilized” manners of the upper classes who use polite subterfuge to disguise their iron will backed by the power wielded by the monarchy. The fact that Augusta merrily continues t...