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I\u2019m working my way through a response to Sarah\u2019s incisive and provocative posts<\/a> 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\u2019ll first explain my reading of Sarah\u2019s point and then follow that up with the relevant excerpt from the article.<\/p>\n In her second post<\/a> in the Drone Sexuality series, Sarah argues:<\/p>\n I think something particular is going on when cyborgs are sexualized. Transgression is\u00a0erotic 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<\/em> toward it, experiencing fear and revulsion at the same time as we\u2019re fascinated and deeply attracted by the idea<\/em>…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<\/em>. (emphasis mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sarah\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s claim further, and consider how this ambivalence is racialized in terms of a black\/white binary. I should clarify that I\u2019m talking about race primarily as a system of social organization and less as a matter of personal identity. \u201cWhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d express an individual\u2019s, group\u2019s, or phenomenon\u2019s position in white supremacist society: those whom white supremacy benefits are \u201cwhite,\u201d those whom it oppresses are \u201cblack.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What follows is an excerpt from my article \u201cRobo-Diva R&B\u201d from the Journal of Popular Music Studies. You can read the full thing here<\/a> (and you should! It\u2019s about Beyonce & Rihanna, too.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his reading of Fritz Lang\u2019s Metropolis<\/em>, Andreas Huyssen identifies, in the Maria-robot, \u201cthe unity of an active and destructive female sexuality and the destructive potential of technology\u201d (77<\/a>). For Huyssen, the robot expresses early-twentieth-century fears of technology in terms of patriarchy\u2019s fear of female sexuality: both are seen as objects simultaneously desirable and horrifying, as alienating, overwhelming, and, when not strictly disciplined, potentially destructive. \u201cThe 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\u201d (Huyssen 77). Refusing conventional stereotypes that equate femininity with nature and masculinity with technology, the film thus emphasizes the perceived \u201ccommon denominator\u201d underlying female sexuality and technology in early twentieth-century Western patriarchy, that is, that they both, when left unchecked, threaten the dominant order. \u201cWoman, nature, machine\u201d function, according to Huyssen, as \u201ca mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control\u201d (70).<\/p>\n Now, neither women nor technology are always viewed with hostility; indeed, this \u201cotherness\u201d invests them not only with fear, but with desirability. Huyssen maps capitalist patriarchy\u2019s ambivalence about technology onto the well-known virgin\/whore dichotomy\u2014a dichotomy that, as many feminists have demonstrated, is deeply racialized. Thus, I argue that race is an essential element in understanding the sexual\u2013techno 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.<\/p>\n