Most of the literature about digital influencers, such as the self identifying queer robot, Lil Miquela, remains confined to journalistic sources that do not necessarily connect her to a broader scholarly dialogue about aritificial intelligence, queer identity, and crafted cyborg personas. However, since the earliest days of science fiction, scholars have analyzed the robot as a conduit for exploring the intersection between humans and machines and the fictional narratives that shape identity. In this literature review, I will examine three sources that bring their own understandings of digital queerness, artificial life, and the gap between fiction and reality. Scholars like Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles attempt to understand artificial life as a central idea of post-humanism, using the cyborg and narratives of artificial life to remagine concepts of self and agency, altering the lense through which scholars should examine feminist and queer theory. Other scholars, like Bonnie Ruberg, explore the natural intersection between queerness and technology, providing a backdrop for post-humanism that focuses on queering the presentation of stories and ideas online. By centering research on cyborgs and artificial life, these scholars create links between personhood and technology that have the potential to reframe conversations about identity and queerness as well as how these conversations take place.
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto is one of the most comprehensive and well known work exploring the intersections of feminist theory, queer theory, and posthumanism. Published in 1985 in the Socialist Review, the essay uses the cyborg as a central metaphor for breaking down rigid boundaries. In particular, Haraway examines the boundaries between human and animal, human and machine, and the physical and the non-physical. Learning to think in the space between these distinctions, she argues, helps reshape our ideas about personhood and identity, which then leads to a new, queerer, understanding of feminism. If we understand gender as something constructed rather than a natural predisposition for certain traits, then we can also think of gender as something that can be reconstructed. Haraway thinks of people as nodes in an interconnected web of people and technology. Even if we are not science-fiction creations of part metal, part flesh, we are still technological beings, manufactured to perform a certain way by the world around us. This concept extends past queerness. By thinking of everything in our lives as constructions rather than immovable nature, we are then free to question and reshape everything from our relationship to the natural environment, to the oppressive structures of our societies. This kind of techno-feminist thinking remains crucial to our current world as we face the social and natural threat of climate change. As Hari Kunzru wrote in his profile of Haraway, “Maybe humans are biologically destined to fight wars and trash the environment. Maybe we’re not.”
After establishing the binaries she intends to break down, Haraway talks about problems with Western concepts of humanity and identity, which she claims are deeply rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. She wants to combat “essentialism,” which is the idea that a certain set of characteristics define an identity or a subject and critiques western feminism’s tendency to center identity politics. When Haraway talks about the cyborg, she acknowledges it as both a metaphor and an actual piece of technology, with the understanding that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Although this long predates the problem of a digital influncer inhabiting a queer identity and writing her own identity narrative, it captures the complicated implications of Lil Miquela’s existence. She poses herself as a self-aware robot with a physical form and sexual agency, but in reality this is just a fiction created by CGI animators and a team of writers. Haraway looks at the physical and non-physical as intertwined, understanding fictional narrative as something that both reacts to and affects reality. This piece of literature helps broaden our understanding of Lil Miquela. Rather than thinking of her as either a being with agency or a problematic fictional character appropriating identities for profit.
Haraway used the cyborg to revolutionize feminist conversation, centering queerness and elevating the (new at the time) idea that gender is something maleable and fluid. Her scholarship is a widely cited cornerstone of feminst, post-humanist, queer, and socialist scholarship, but it’s also over thirty years old, written long before anyone had dreamed up the concept of a queer robot social media influencer. Haraway paved the road for other cyborg scholars to respond to and challenge her work, aware that the advent of new technologies would change the way we thought about human identities. Since writing the manifesto, she has stayed active in the field, focusing her recent scholarship on the immediate issue of climate change and the relationship between humans and animals. She has always taken a collective approach to research and writing, making sure to cite the expertise of others and invite new voices into the conversation.
A Cyborg Manifesto gave a name to a generation of feminists who view Haraway’s work as central to their understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality. The term Cyberfeminism, which Haraway herself has never used, emerged in the early 1990s and refers to a group of feminists who believed in a utopian future in which the rise of the internet would bridge sex and gender divisions, centering marginalized voices. The movement was characterized by bold, explosive language and art that delivered non-linear and unconventional narratives, captured well by the 1991 A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. This includes memorable, zine-like quotes such as, “We are the virus of the new world disorder” and “The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” which formed a narrative of radical hope that the internet might be an equalizing force, amplifying the voices of the marginalized and revolutionizing the way we think about the self. The rapid rise of the internet around the turn of the century saw this movement dwindle, or perhaps outgrow itself and adapt into something else. Rather than bringing about a utopian era of equality or elevating feminist thought, the internet brought about its own problems — programs built to suppress the marginalized, threats of harassment on unprecedented scales, and a digital world controlled by the powerful.
Haraway’s scholarship opened the dialogue that led to Cyberfeminism, but her work also continued to attract the attention and responses of other post-humanist and feminist writers of the nineties. N. Katherine Hayles, a postmodern literary critic, heavily cites Haraway in her 1999 essay, The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman, which is included as a book chapter in Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark. The entire book relies heavily on Haraway’s initial claims about humans as cyborgs and the breakdown of rigid categories in a digital world. Hayles piece, in particular, brings her understanding of literature and narrative into the field of post-human feminist thought. Like Haraway, she isn’t yet thinking of the possibility of real cyborgs, half metal, but instead using the term more abstractly to refer to the ways in which the body and the self are a machine. Understanding human identity as part machinery, she argues, is key to programming a world with fewer essentialist distinctions. She also talks about the cyborg figure through a literary lense, examining the half-human half-machine created lifeforms that have for centuries been a fictional tool for interrogating the constructions of life. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein famously asks questions about what it means to be created and what happens when someone is made rather than born. Hayles recognizes that a recurring problem of the fictional cyborg is that it challenges the stages of life that characterize someone who is born and experiences linear growth. Rather than framing human and machine as opposing categories, she attempts to analyze what these natural life cycle stages look like for the cyborg, using three main stages (adolescence, sexual maturity, and reproductive phase) to illustrate her point. She pairs these phases with corresponding “disassembly zones” that challenge the constructs and limitations of linear human growth. For example, in the adolescent phase, the body becomes the object of the subject’s attention, causing us to fixate on physical awareness. To disassemble this idea, Hayles talks about “unmaking” the body at a micro-level: thinking about where joints connect to bones and the intricate details of how people are made. Without a grounding real-world example of these cyborg deconstructions, Hayles uses 20th century fiction such as Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo to illustrate the concept of adolescence for a post-human life.
Modern responses to Haraway’s scholarship expand upon her ideas in a world where the digital is an even more relevant part of our lives and the challenges of the internet world have opened cyborg possibilities that no one could have predicted in 1985. British activist and scholar Sophie Lewis is a modern pioneer of family abolitionism, an emerging philosophical, socialist, and feminist perspective that thinks dissovling the nuclear family will lead to a more just, anti-capitalist world in which care is universal rather than personal. Her book Full Surrogacy Now makes the case for bringing care outside of the contained family unit and treating each other as nodes in a human network, similar to Haraway’s concept of interconnectedness. In fact, Lewis considers Haraway to be her academic and feminist hero, and sites A Cyborg Manifesto in her 2018 essay Cyborg Uterine Geography: Complicating ‘Care’ and Social Reproduction. This essay builds upon Hayles attempt to break down reproduction and birth as defining characteristics of humanity and uses this deconstruction to argue against social constructions of capitalism, violence, and land disputes.
She uses the term “uterine geography” to describe more than just childbirth. It refers to the uterus as a “site of doing and undoing,” which doesn’t exclusively take place in a mother’s body but also in pseudo-familial relationships, creations of narratives, and conceptions of the self. According to Lewis’s ideas, Lil Miquela, although she was never born and lacks a physical body, was still virtually born as part technology, part fictional narrative. Her existence is entirely digital, but dwells on the idea of the physical — she’s always seen on her social media hanging out with real celebrities and discussing the ways in which her robot “body” affects her interactions with the world. In this sense, perhaps Miquela isn’t an “other” kind of life form, nor is she entirely artificial. Like any modern human, she has built a narrative of identity in the digital world that doesn’t match up to her reality.
Works Cited:
Evans, Claire L. “’We Are the Future Cunt’: CyberFeminism in the 90s.” Vice, 20 Nov. 2014.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, pp. 117–158., doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “THE LIFE CYCLE OF CYBORGS: WRITING THE POSTHUMAN.” Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 157–173.
Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg.” Wired, Conde Nast, 15 Dec. 2017.
Lewis, Sophie. “Cyborg Uterine Geography.” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018, pp. 300–316.
Solis, Marie. “We Can’t Have A Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family.” Vice, 21 Feb. 2020.
