I’m working my way through a response to Sarah’s incisive and provocative posts on Drone Sexuality. But, I realized that I need to get some preliminary arguments on the table before I get into the thick of my response. In particular, I want to focus on what Sarah identifies as the ambivalence at the center of drone/cyborg eroticism; this ambivalence is, as I have argued in this article, deeply racialized. In what follows I’ll first explain my reading of Sarah’s point and then follow that up with the relevant excerpt from the article.

In her second post in the Drone Sexuality series, Sarah argues:

I think something particular is going on when cyborgs are sexualized. Transgression is erotic in itself, often powerfully so, and we tend to construct the blurring of the line between human and non-human as strongly taboo. Like all sexual taboos, we feel ambivalent toward it, experiencing fear and revulsion at the same time as we’re fascinated and deeply attracted by the idea…So cyborgian transgressiveness is exactly why we find it so sexy. A sexualized cyborg is at once submissive and potentially dominant, alluring and threatening, subservient and powerful. (emphasis mine)

Sarah’s claim that cyborgs are sexualized, and that this sexualization manifests as an ambivalence, as a tension between submission and dominance, allure and threat, is, I think, absolutely correct. I’ll give some evidence to support her claim, and my assessment of her claim, in the long passage that follows below. I want to push Sarah’s claim further, and consider how this ambivalence is racialized in terms of a black/white binary. I should clarify that I’m talking about race primarily as a system of social organization and less as a matter of personal identity. “White” and “black” express an individual’s, group’s, or phenomenon’s position in white supremacist society: those whom white supremacy benefits are “white,” those whom it oppresses are “black.” The tl;dr of this passage is that we whiten the beneficial, alluring, submissive and subservient aspects of cyborg sexuality, and we blacken the dominant, threatening, and powerful aspects of cyborg sexuality. In other words, we parse our ambivalence about cyborg sexuality along a racialized virgin-whore dichotomy.

What follows is an excerpt from my article “Robo-Diva R&B” from the Journal of Popular Music Studies. You can read the full thing here (and you should! It’s about Beyonce & Rihanna, too.)

In his reading of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Andreas Huyssen identifies, in the Maria-robot, “the unity of an active and destructive female sexuality and the destructive potential of technology” (77). For Huyssen, the robot expresses early-twentieth-century fears of technology in terms of patriarchy’s fear of female sexuality: both are seen as objects simultaneously desirable and horrifying, as alienating, overwhelming, and, when not strictly disciplined, potentially destructive. “The expressionist fear of a threatening technology which oppresses the workers is displaced and re- constructed as the threat female sexuality poses to men and, ironically, technology” (Huyssen 77). Refusing conventional stereotypes that equate femininity with nature and masculinity with technology, the film thus emphasizes the perceived “common denominator” underlying female sexuality and technology in early twentieth-century Western patriarchy, that is, that they both, when left unchecked, threaten the dominant order. “Woman, nature, machine” function, according to Huyssen, as “a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control” (70).

Now, neither women nor technology are always viewed with hostility; indeed, this “otherness” invests them not only with fear, but with desirability. Huyssen maps capitalist patriarchy’s ambivalence about technology onto the well-known virgin/whore dichotomy—a dichotomy that, as many feminists have demonstrated, is deeply racialized. Thus, I argue that race is an essential element in understanding the sexual–techno politics at work in Metropolis: insofar as white culture hypersexualizes the black female body, and black female sexuality is considered to be a countercivilizing force (witness the Moynihan Report), the robo-woman of Metropolis is most correctly read as a black woman.

Black feminists have long noted that black female sexuality is stereotypically represented as inherently “abnormal” and “excessive.” From Saartje Baartman to Lil’ Kim to Beyonce ́, any number of particular black women have represented, to/for white patriarchy, extreme, disproportionate sexuality. Describing “a sexual hierarchy in operation that holds certain female bodies in higher regard than others” (368), Kimberle ́ Crenshaw explains that

blacks have long been portrayed as more sexual, more earthy, more gratification-oriented; these sexualized images of race intersect with norms of women’s sexuality, norms that are used to distinguish good women from bad, madonnas from whores. Thus, black women are essentially prepackaged as bad women (Crenshaw 1995:369).

Following Crenshaw’s account, virgin/whore dichotomies are racialized such that white women are considered asexual, whereas black women are believed to be excessively sexual. Because they are fundamentally “passive” with respect to their desires (or better yet, have no desires at all), “good” white women are less threatening to the white patriarchy than “bad” black women and their “active” desires. Indeed, insofar as white women are read as, by virtue of their whiteness, more removed from their bodies than black women, the former are less threatening to white patriarchy because their whiteness buffers and tempers their feminine “immediacy” with embodiment, sexu- ality, and nature. Richard Dyer argues that “the white woman . . . was not supposed to have [sexual] drives in the first place . . . The model for white women is the Virgin Mary, a pure vessel for reproduction who is unsullied by the dark drives that reproduction entails” (Dyer 1997:29). Lacking the strength and moral fortitude supposedly contained in whiteness, black women do not possess the capacity to control their otherwise violent desires, and are thus threats to civilized society.

In this light, Huyssen’s discussion of the virgin/whore dichotomy at work in Metropolis involves not only gender, but also the intersection of gender with race. Huyssen’s argument about the relationship between female sexuality and technology rests on the distinction between

two age-old patriarchal images of women which, again, are hooked up with two homologous views of technology . . . The myth of the dualistic nature of woman as either asexual virgin-mother or prostitute-vamp is projected onto technology which appears as either neutral and obedient or as inherently threatening and out of control (73).

The overarching duality, which is applied to both patriarchal perceptions of women and technology, is the “controlled” versus the “uncontrollable.” Huyssen’s analysis of the “homology” between femininity and technology is incomplete insofar as it presents a very abstract notion of “femininity,” one that overlooks the ways in which white privilege and racism have determined which sorts of women are seen as “neutral and obedient” and which sorts are considered “inherently threatening and out of control.”

A better account of gender would recognize its fundamental intersection with race, and would thus expand the “homology” to include white privilege: technology and female sexuality, when in white bodies (individual and social), ensure the progress and development of civilization; technology and female sexuality, when in black bodies (individual and social), corrupt civilization. Thus, if “the machine vamp in Metropolis . . . embodies the unity of an active and destructive female sexuality and the destructive potential of technology” (Huyssen 77), then it is clear that the machine-woman is, for all intents and purposes, black. Even though the machine-woman is based on Maria, who is white, insofar as the machine is Maria’s opposite and represents an “abnormal” (Huyssen 77) sexuality, it is still consistent to read the machine as black, since, historically, stereotypical white femininity and black femininity developed via their opposition; the “good” white girl and the “bad” black girl were defined against one another, as opposites. While omitting the language of race, Huyssen makes this point in different terms: “Rather than keeping the ‘good,’ asexual virgin Maria categorically apart from the ‘evil’ sexual vamp,” he argues “we become aware of the dialectical relationship of these two stereotypes” (79).