I Wanna Be a Cyborg (?)

If "the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective self" (205), then I want to be a cyborg. Then again, perhaps if gender is a set of behaviors, I already am a cyborg. Why? At least 50% of my attitudes and actions have male traits; "a cyborg is...a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as of fiction" (191). So, I am creating myself with these male-esque traits (hyper atheticism, lack of maternal instinct, propensity to cuss like a sailor, etc.) as a fictional creature; I can't begin to tell you how many people find it odd I don't want children. I am a fictitious female. Yet I am a "social reality," with my long hair, proclivity to wear tank tops, and the occasional purse usage. I am a collective of learned gender traits and a protest against them, of which some of this can be found online.

This leads to the question: can I be branded? Sadly, I would say yes. We all can be branded. The girls on YouTube are "crafting gender identity through particular performances" (282). Could I not, then, be said to be doing the same with my assimilation of different gender traits? Just because I am not broadcasting everything about who I am all over the internet does not mean branding is not happening. My resistance against the stereotypical female has itself already been co-opted by "the man." And, to my horror, it has been turned into the thing I hate.

The concept of strong women has become "Grrrl Power," and attached to things like little pink tank tops. When I went to Hot Topic when it first came out, black, dark, and what is now called emo was all the "fashion" you could find. Yet now there are hot pink and electric blue fishnets etc. that these neo-goths can wear "ironically." Gag. I always just wore plain black clothes--yet even THAT was "branded" by my mom. I was a "long hair"--the second-generation pre-hippie Beatnik. Even what I still like has a brand: Steampunk. And let's not even get into what has happened in the athletic world with the whole "shrink it and pink it" attitude, which includes "women's specific bikes,"  girly-girl clothing in "fashionable" colors, and stickers that say "(insert sport here) Like a Girl." GAG.

We simply can't avoid the branding. Whatever we try to "become"--be it from a place of protest, uniqueness, or outright oddity--someone will latch onto it and turn it into a fad; sure, it may be a counter-culture fad, but it is a culture--a sub culture; it is a way for us to identify with others. We are social creatures. We really can't avoid it.

And, we can't really escape ourselves. Palfrey and Gasser (P&G) make this clear with their example of the 16 year-old agrarian girl who could move to a new town and start a new life for herself. But we are now "plugged in"--cyborgs, really. Our social lives take place in the real and digital world. The more of a "native" we are, the worse it is--and the more we immerse ourselves in the digital world, the harder it is to "hide" ourselves. Computers leave records the way paper never could. As P&G say, "If the Digital Native has created multiple identities, those identities might be connected to create a much fuller picture of the individual than was possible before, spanning a greater period of time" (35). Google searching can dig up god knows what.

So, here many of the younger people are: branded cyborgs trying to control their identities. The control may or may not be possible; the avoidance of branding very much seems out of our hands. Maybe I don't wanna be a cyborg after all...