Dangerous Dames. Heather Hundley
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 6, “Transcending Boundaries: Posthumanism and Transhumanism in Caprica and Deus Ex,” continues our examination of cyborgs and women connected with the cognisphere. Women who have chosen transhuman augmentation in the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica and the Deus Ex franchise of video games complicate several Enlightenment binaries: mind/body, self/other, us/them, and human/machine. Altogether, the dangerous dames challenge false dichotomies in ways that reveal the promise of the embodied cyborg and the distributed cognisphere for feminisms in posthuman contexts.
The conclusion, “Envisioning Feminist Futures,” serves as an epilogue to our exploration. It features a succinct summary, connects themes across chapters, discusses the ramifications and implications of our analysis, and delineates our visions for the future. Throughout, we endeavor to illuminate the complex environments these dangerous dames navigate and the important rhetorical functions they perform across media. We identify equipment for living they provide, and we document the constraints they face. By doing so, we hope to advance the ongoing conversation about postfeminist media and perform some of the ongoing feminist work needed to actualize a more just and equitable future.
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Notes
1. This change affected primarily white women; most women of color and low-income women had been working outside the home long before this time.
2. We utilize the wave framework here due to its recognizability while acknowledging critiques of the wave framework leveled by many feminist scholars. Nicholson (2010) argues that the wave framework is reductive, U.S.-centric, and elides the multiplicity and enduring work of feminist activisms not recognized by this framework. Those interested in learning more about some of the feminist activism led by women of color during the 1970s would do well to consult Roth (2004).
3. This is not intended to impose judgment on or assess the value of research conducted at research or teaching institutions. We are merely pointing out that this research is not motivated by external factors relating to our employment positions.
4. The Washington Post obtained and released the tape on October 7, 2016, a month prior to the presidential election.
5. The Women’s March recurred January 20, 2018, with millions of people participating around the globe.
6. Throughout, we refer to characters by first names because several of the texts include numerous characters with the same last name (e.g., the Everdeens), and others have no last name (e.g., the title character from Proud Mary). To avoid differential treatment among the characters, therefore, we refer to all of them by their first names.
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