While the cyborg is popularly understood as a being made of symbiotic human and cybernetic parts, its evocation in feminist analyses, STS, and Sport Studies flags a more complex set of relations. In “A cyborg mani-
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festo: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the twenty-first cen- tury,” Haraway (1991) argues that technosocial relations, cultural politics, and capitalist formations shape contemporary conditions in ways that are best understood as fragmented and transgressive. Reflecting critically on distinctions drawn between animal/human/machine, she argues that cyborgs transgress such dualisms, elaborating, “the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred” (Haraway 1991, p. 165).
Cyborgs are not fictions of the future; they characterize our present.
Subscriptions to settled identities and notions of natural bodies are there- fore romanticized notions—desires that, she contends, feminists must reconsider. Haraway refutes liberatory projects that make totalizing claims around appeals to a universal “women’s experience” (as they evoke tacit beliefs about “woman” as an essential identity) and explains how their orientation does not capture the struggles of Women of Color (a category she frames as a productive fusion that reflects an enduring affin- ity among and with outsiders). These insights, taken together, support her point that our contemporary politics are cyborg politics, meaning that alliances can only be temporary. Thus, while the cyborg reflects the embodiment of technosocial relations, its analytical focus captures more than features of bodies.
This brief summary does not capture the nuances of Haraway’s many claims about cyborg politics or the various interpretations and adapta- tions that have followed her initial publication (e.g., Prins 1995; Wilson 2009). Instead, it points to key features, not all of which have been taken up in sport scholarship. According to Tara Magdalinski (2008), cyborg bodies emerge from tensions that are emblematic of the “paradox” of modern elite sport (p. 1): that is, the quest for incredible human perfor- mances requires technological advancement and integration, generating various cyborg bodies that can challenge presumed distinctions between the organic (attributed to humans) and inorganic (attributed to technol- ogy). Elite sport, a domain known for pushing the boundaries of physical human achievement, therefore offers a site in which the notion of an innate “humanness” can be called into question. As such, many studies focus on how the cyborg problematizes the presumed binary division between human and machine, enabling further scrutiny of how “what is commonly assumed to be the ‘natural’ body is indeed a complex amalga-
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mation of science, technology, and flesh” in the context of sport (Norman and Moola 2011, p. 1268). Specific applications range in topic, from issues related to athletes and disability (Howe 2011; Norman and Moola 2011), bodily enhancement (Miah 2003; Magdalinski 2008; Swartz and Watermeyer 2008), environment (Butryn and Masucci 2009), narratives of identity (Butryn and Masucci 2003; Rail and Lefebvre 2003), and sex/
gender (Cole 1993). Although distinct, they collectively demonstrate the variety of ways in which athletes, as cyborgs, elicit pleasure—for example, their reverence and celebration in high-level competitions—and provoke anxiety—for example, the disdain for athletes who do not seem “natural,”
such as those who are suspected of doping (see Henne 2015; also Magdalinski 2008).
To explain how cyborg bodies prompt responses that exceed presumed binaries between pleasure and anxiety, consider Ted Butryn and Matthew Masucci’s (2003) discussion of narratives around former Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong (i.e., prior to findings of organized and pre- meditated doping). Rather than approach his story as evidence of a supe- rior natural athlete, they trace shifts in his subjectivity—as an elite cyclist, cancer patient and survivor, and parent—as a “process of cyborgification”
in which technologies become “infused in his self-narrative and the ways that Armstrong himself relates to his own physiological identity through technological means” (Butryn and Masucci 2003, p. 125). His narration exemplifies Haraway’s proposition that the embodied self is not stable or whole. Butryn and Masucci also convey how Armstrong, as an embodied figure, is hybridized in ways that are etched and shaped by technosocial engagements. Thus, Armstrong—even before the findings of his doping- related violations—was “irreversibly ‘polluted’ through various degrees and methods of technologization” (Butryn and Masucci 2003, p. 126).
In short, his identity was never singular, pure, or fully human, even though he was celebrated for his corporeal achievements.
Moss Norman and Fiona Moola’s analysis of double-leg amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius, a former Olympian and Paralympian, also illus- trates how cyborg bodies can be both captivating and unnerving, particu- larly to onlookers who occupy a world built on the presumption of able-bodiness. Acknowledging debates regarding whether or not his pros- theses unfairly enhanced his running ability, they contend that Pistorius,
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as a cyborg, transgressed the culturally construed “boundary between the included (i.e., ability, natural, and the normal) and the excluded (i.e., disability, the cyborg, and the abnormal),” revealing that the binary divide between them “is tenuous and unstable” (Norman and Moola 2011, p. 1273). While Olympic values uphold the ideal athletic body as natural and able-bodied, Pistorius and his quest to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London demonstrates how modern sport actually enables the contestation of these beliefs in practice, thereby pointing to the porous nature of the presumed boundary between those who are included and excluded.
These examples attest that the cyborg exceeds the traditional focus of many feminist analyses of sport, that is, women and/or gender. In fact, Haraway (1991, p. 150) wrote of the cyborg as “a creature in the post- gender world.” Explicitly feminist readings of cyborgs in sport are often attentive to gender but do not limit their analysis to this concern. For instance, with regard to the policing of women athletes’ biological traits under the guise of “fair play,” Rayvon Fouché (2012) emphasizes that Haraway’s cyborg allegory can help us find “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to our- selves” (Haraway 1991, p. 181, as cited in Fouché 2012, p. 291).
Specifically, he argues, the cyborg aids in thinking through the multiplic- ity of bodies, including their various physiological attributes and abilities, beyond the confines of sex/gender alone.
Adopting a different line of feminist inquiry, Sarah Rebolloso McCullough (2010) employs the cyborg to examine how technologies operate to shore up what we think of as “the natural” in sport. By asking how they do the work of naturalization, her analysis aligns with long- standing feminist efforts to understand and unveil how claims of natural or inherent difference have served to normalize inequality and justify dif- ferential treatment. Speedo’s LZR Racer suit, which was worn by 38 of the 42 world record setters in swimming at the 2008 Olympic Games, serves as one such case. It, she argues, “creates an image of technological equity that ignores the unequal access to resources” (McCullough 2010, p. 18). Magdalinski (2008) extends this point in her reflection on the Fastskin technology used in other high-performance swimwear, explain- ing that this suit is perceived differently than other performance enhanc-
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ers for two key reasons: (1) because it appears external to the body (whereas drugs are internal), and (2) because it is marketed as improving a specific function rather than wider bodily enhancement. The suit, as a technology, directs attention away from the myths sustained by the pur- suit of continual improvements in performance—that is, that gains emerge from “progress and superior fitness of some bodies over others”
and by “natural athletic bodies” (McCullough 2010, p. 19). The visibility of swimwear as an artificial enhancement operates almost paradoxically by both revealing and veiling the cyborg athlete. Moreover, by contribut- ing to the sustenance of myths about athlete bodies, the suit is part of a wider network of relationships that undermine the scrutiny of broader inequalities that implicate sports and the bodies who participate and compete in them.
Sport-specific analyses retain core elements of Haraway’s cyborg prop- ositions in that they focus explicitly on the interconnections of organic and mechanical components, even though gender may seem to take a backseat to other concerns. One of their possible shortcomings, though, is the tendency to focus on athletes’ bodies and their “body cultures,”
which reflects Susan Brownell’s contention that “the horizons of an ath- lete’s world can never stray far beyond her body” in part because their identity is intimately connected to corporeal action (1995, p. 10).
Haraway, however, cautions against this narrow focus: she reminds us it is important to not simply acknowledge and describe cyborgs, but also to interrogate what they reveal about sociality and politics. For her, their existence illuminates the permeance of technosocialities as well as blurred boundaries that dislocate binary categories used to articulate difference about various bodies and actors. Cyborgs are evidence of wider ruptures and disruptions, enabling a rejection of claims based on inherent attri- butes. The metaphor is meant to advance a politics of affinity, not iden- tity, and to aid in understanding and confronting conditions that have emerged as part of the influential and male-dominated nexus between militarism and capitalism (Haraway 1991). This observation suggests that it would be a mistake to think of the utility of the cyborg allegory—
or other feminist technoscientific interventions—as simply destabilizing beliefs about bodies in movement. While analyses of cyborgs in sport are compelling in terms of their rethinking of embodied actors, there remains
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a notable gap in terms of making the broader connections that Haraway prescribes.
The next section considers two distinct analytics that feminists and other critical scholars have used to study technosocial relations that include, but are not limited to, sport: agential realism and assemblage.
Recognizing that studies of cyborgs in sport retain a relatively narrow focus, it considers a wider array of STS-informed applications, with the aim of illustrating possibilities for studies of sport more generally and feminist studies of sport in particular.