The Disembodiment of Digital Subjects and the Disappearance of Women in the Representations of Cyborg, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman

Abstract

With the expected feasibility of smart technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, various techno-philosophical discourses and representations of human digitization have garnered attention. Examples of this include Mind Transfer (Moravec, 1988) and Mind Uploading (Kurzweil, 2005), which describe robots or computers equipped with human intelligence. This study examines the intelligence-driven logic inherent in the above-stated male-led technology-oriented discourse and clarifies that the information-centric approach to digitized humans tends to reduce the human to its mind and to regard the body as unnecessary. This discourse contradicts Hayles’ pioneering posthuman concept, which defines future digitized humans as material-informational entities (1999). After Hayles, Kurzweil’s idea of digitized humans as “non-biological thinking” seems dangerous, as this concept prioritizes cognition and mental faculty over the body and renders the body meaningless in pursuit of the “transcendent reason/mind.” Such a concept of digitized humans could result in the disappearance of a woman’s identity, based on a “plural and fluid” body that affirms their differences and bodily singularity. This article addresses the erasure of sexual and gender differences, and ultimately, the disappearance of women as problems caused by the vision of anthropocentric and Kantian male-led discourses on human digitization. Further, this article attempts to propose an alternative posthuman concept based on feminist (techno-) philosophical discourses led by Hayles, Braidotti, and Haraway.