Creating the Ideal Posthuman Body? Cyborg Sex and Gender in the Work of Buzzati, Vacca, and Ammaniti

Abstract

In recent years much critical attention has been focused on the figure of the cyborg or cybernetic organism: a hybrid being that evolves where the boundaries between human and machine are open to transgression.1 Yet despite its implicit promise of an “enhanced” physique and superior reasoning abilities, to what extent can (or should) we consider this figure as radical, subversive and innovative? In an Italian context, researchers such as Antonio Caronia have theorized posthuman or cyborg phenomena for an Italophone readership, chronicling their development across the centuries and mapping their multifaceted morphologies as central figures of science fiction. However, as is the case with another recent Italian publication on this topic (Vincenzo Tagliasco's Dizionario degli esseri umani fantastici e artificiali) Caronia's attention is directed beyond Italy, to Anglophone—and in particular North American—cultural production. Consequently, both texts markedly privilege Anglophone literature, film and criticism to the exclusion of Italian discourses and cultural artefacts.2 The work of Giuseppe O. Longo (Il nuovo Golem and Homo technologicus) also offers a theoretical engagement with the relationship between humans and technology, but the only Italian literary texts to which significant reference is made are Longo's own. In contrast, this article endeavors to redirect critical attention onto other Italian sources, in an initial attempt to identify and analyse aspects of Italian engagements with the cyborg and bring them into dialogue with Anglophone theoretical work.From the anxieties about mechanised men and women in Massimo Bontempelli's Minnie la candida (1927), to Primo Levi's probing of the golem myth in “Il servo,” twentieth-century Italian literature offers a Rich, if underexplored, array of cyborg characters which both echo those to be found in Anglophone texts and can be been seen to embody and exemplify concerns emanating from a specifically Italian cultural context. Focusing on cyborg figures in three texts—Dino Buzzati's Il grande ritratto (1960), Roberto Vacca's Il robot e il computer (1963), and Niccolò Ammaniti's short story “Ferro” (1996)—this article identifies and analyses approaches to a series of sex/gender issues and attempts to trace the positions assumed by the authors in question back to earlier influential works. More specifically, I question the degree to which these works can be read as encouraging progressive rather than normative attitudes. I argue that despite purporting to convey futuristic innovation that challenges conventional notions of gender roles and identity, these narratives show the influence of problematic ideologies proposed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures such as the Futurists and the criminologist Cesare Lombroso—writers whose work provides a sometimes disturbingly relevant point of reference for this article. Thus the texts analysed allow us to trace the shadows of key Italian thinkers in works that might more readily be seen as linked to Anglophone traditions of science fiction.This article investigates a number of interrelated issues: the ways in which cyborg narratives portray sexual dynamics between cyborgs and “non-enhanced” humans; the erotic charge of fusion with technology; how such narratives engage with mind/body dualism; the ways in which dominant understandings of gender roles and sexed bodies are insistently replicated through fictional accounts of cyborg bodies; representations of male desire for creative power. I have chosen the texts under consideration because they allow me to compare diachronically a series of male perspectives on the sexing, gendering, and eroticization of both male and female cyborgs, sexual interaction with cyborg figures and narrative dramatisations of both the mind/body split and fusion with technology. The reference to “cyborg sex” in my title is meant to indicate both sexed bodies and sex with cyborgs. Unlike “cyber sex”