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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMythical Bodies II
 
 
 
 
 

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interaction when the ‹skin› has been slipped on and filled with ‹life,› or is perceived as an ‹artificial living thing› and integrated into courses of action.

In fact, as Randi Gunzenhäuser notes with regard to the making a fetish of the ‹female› body of artificial figures such as «Lara Croft,» such a constellation can «[…] definitely lead to exciting models of resistance, within which there is a place for the self-reflexive games with identities and desire. […] Then as a fetish, posing becomes a strategic game, identification with the position of the technological fetish becomes a subversive counter-narration. […] In case of doubt it depends on who is assimilating the text. [57] And, it might be added, who ‹brings it up› performatively under which premises. Correspondingly, the playful identification with an artificial gender body as well as its functionalization may indeed be accompanied by the knowledge that in a dual sense gender is a ‹masquerade›—whose functioning is based on the fact that the ‹mask› is not the copy of an original, but the clone of a stereotypical construction. This process may not necessarily exclude an analysis or criticism of the model the construction is based on—but it does

 

not inevitably include such criticism, nor is it assumed as a matter of course.

‹Making sex›

From the observations made thus far, with regard to the imagination space of digital creation and the question concerning the (re)production of genders for the images of artificial humans, which we primarily encounter in this setting, in summary the following can be inferred: The producers of ‹artificial humans› may like to put forward that they created them according to models from nature—and not only do they lay claim to the status of ‹artificial life› for their creatures, they frequently even cite an ‹improved nature.› However, when in the course of this body gender, gender identity and gender role—and thus gender differences on the whole—are formulated hypertrophically, this has the consequence that ‹artificial humans› ultimately embody a monstrous gender. And this is the case regardless of whether they use gender as a weapon—i.e. whether they are armed phallically as male or female fighting machines or function as a ‹femme fatale› of disarming sexuality with devastating

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