Robots and Scopophilia

Unlike the aliens we explored in subsequent weeks, who are a radical form of Otherness faraway from our own ideas of race, culture, religion, and sexuality, the robot or cyborg is a reflection of our human selves. It is something that we as humans have created in our own image, for our own purposes. In Laura Mulvey’s article, she talks about scopophilia and fetishization in the medium of cinema, and how it satisfies, “a primordial wish for pleasurable looking,” (Mulvey, 201).

Isn’t possible that the creation of a cyborg or robot in our own image also satisfying this primordial wish? Think about how in Robot Stories, in the third story, their is an objectification of both the male and female robot. Of course, the female robot is further objectified because of our patriarchal society, with he male co-workers touching her breast while she works, and eventually even tearing off her clothes when the story reaches is erotic climax. The female robot is fully an object for heterosexual male desire, because it is just a tool for the office, with no perceived feelings, or desires.

In Battlestar Galactica we have a race of robots that look exactly like humans, and the first Cylon we are introduced to “the ultra-gendered body of the blond bombshell,” (Kustritz, 9). As the Cylons destroy the diplomatic space station, she kisses the human diplomat, perhaps an example of the “castration” explained by Mulvey experienced by the male audience when a woman is shown in full view, outside of the male gaze. Again, when we see this Cylon #6 as Gaius Baltar’s girlfriend, she is revealed fully to be the cause of Caprica’s destruction. With her full reveal to the male protagonist, she is no longer just visual eye candy, an object that Baltar doesn’t even respect enough to be faithful to. She is shown in full view as an enemy of humanity, “castrating” the power and male privilege of Baltar, and by extension the audience.

In the final section of Robot Stories, Clay, we are introduced to an elderly man, whose nearing the end of his life, and whose wife, Helen, is now reduced to digital data. The old man is a sculptor, an occupation that is almost entirely about fetishization of the human body and holding the human voyeuristic gaze. The old man, despite the protest of his family, refuses to have his brain copied into a digital computer. His wife Helen, to him, only exist as a hologram, not an actual human. He sees their interactions in the digital world as “not real”. He is an old man, yet she is still represented as relatively young, to him she only exist for his voyeuristic gaze. In her digital form he can only see her as the object, as the form of his sculpture. She is no longer human, so he refuses to join her digitally and dies on his own, naturally in the woods.

Michael Randolph