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 Editorial | Mythical Bodies I | Mythical Bodies II | Monstrous Bodies | Unruly Bodies | Doll-Bodies |
| Postsexual Bodies | Transgenic Bodies | Collective Bodies | Extensive Bodies |
false Maria»—behind her remarkably beautiful exterior, which betrays nothing of her monstrosity, there lies the machine: a construction with nothing human about it. On the side of the male creatures, on the other hand, there is Frankenstein's monster, whose physical dimensions overshadow those of ‹real men.› As a dim-witted dummy, however, he embodies everything else except ‹true maleness›: he treats girls as if they were flowers, and he expresses at best clumsy desire towards the wife of his creator.
These creatures are not ‹natural daughters› or ‹real› men—and this becomes strikingly evident at the ‹interface gender›: A monster may be granted a mechanical or an animal sexuality. However, for its part it is characterized as monstrous, i.e. threatening and pathological. In other words: According to the core narrations, the creator's creatures represent counterpoles to the ‹real/right› human/man embodied by their creators.
And little has changed in recent years. Rather under the sign of digital and genetic (re)productive technologies, continuities and reversions can be identified that in their deviations from exemplarymodels at best mark the intensification of monstrosity—typically when the issue is the ‹threatened› boundary between ‹artificialness› and ‹naturalness,› between ‹femaleness› and ‹maleness.› The role of the monster turns out to be as plain as the transgression of this boundary/these boundaries appears to be a threat: The norm, to which the power relation between creator and creature ultimately belongs, is confirmed and lastingly stabilized by this. Ripley's ‹uncanny› upgrade in «Alien IV,» which—quite in the spirit of the transgression of boundaries Haraway describes as being characteristic for the new technological order—inscribes male and animal qualities onto her female body, was performed «over her dead body.»
As ‹males,› cyborg heroes such as «Robocop» [44] or the «Terminator I» embodied by Schwarzenegger may struggle for the preservation of jeopardized ‹ideals› such as the nuclear family, which no doubt is supposed to allow them to appear to be ‹human.› [45] In the film «Terminator II» for instance, on the side of the good mother the latter battles against a ‹dehumanized› new technology embodied by the genderless «T1000,» and
