Hollywood Utopia

important measure for an eco-textual analysis and the cyborg in particular provides
a focus for such exposition.
For some cultural critics the cyborg effectively represents the conventional
postmodernist expression of a ‘rupturing of identity’ beyond gender, and even
embodies an expression of extreme schizophrenia. Sobchack, however, is much
more positive and productive when she argues that the postmodern science fiction
film does not ‘embrace the alien’ in a ‘celebration of resemblance’ but ‘erases
alienation’ in a ‘celebration of similitude’. The ‘alien’ posited by marginal and
postmodern science fiction texts enables the representation of alienation as
‘human’ and constitutes the ‘reversible and non-hierarchical relations of similitude
into a myth of homogenized heterogeneity’ (cited in Broderick 1995: 114). This
process of transformation and (de)alienation promotes an ecological utopian
project, which would break down opposition between various agents (human and
non-human) in the interests of a greater understanding and acceptance of the total
eco-system. The breakdown of these oppositions also serves to promote radical
reconceptualisations across ecological boundaries.
As communal human beings, we apparently cannot do without ‘foundational
myths’: shared stories which define the possibilities and limits of an oppositional
politics. Haraway’s evocation of the cyborg, in spite of her continual evasion of
foundational myths, in many ways serves such a function. Her cyborg myth(s) in
particular help extend the insights of post-colonial feminism into a ‘fusion of
outsider identities’ (Thornham 1997: 163). 6 Haraway effectively affirms that the
cyborg confounds the boundary between human and machine, subverting the
dualisms of western colonial culture, in particular male/female, mind/body. In
Haraway’s original ‘liberatory myth of the cyborg’, she argued that we (feminist
critics in particular) must abandon the ‘feminist dream of a common language’
because it operated as a ‘totalizing and imperialist’ force, appropriating,
marginalising, or excluding those [black women, lesbian women, ‘third world’
women] whose identities could not be constructed within it (Haraway 1991: 215).
However, Jenny Wolmark remains unsure as to whether postmodernist and
feminist theories can work together. She is convinced, nonetheless, that science
fiction should be regarded as the primary genre for such dialogue and recognises
how the cyborg and the cyberpunk help problematise notions around the central
motif of ‘the human’, which remains at the core of humanism. 7
But many feminist critics stubbornly but understandably remain highly critical of
such inclusive postmodernist theories, perceiving that acceptance of a multiplicity
of discourses and positions serves to displace altogether the primacy of sexual
difference as an organising principle. Some contend that Haraway’s cyborg in fact
denies the realities of women’s material existence as ‘women’. Other critics remain
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 197