Representations of the Grotesque and Cyborg Bodies in Art and Popular Cultural Genres

Critically discuss representations of the grotesque and/or cyborg bodies in art and/or popular cultural genres in terms of what they tell us about social/cultural ideas about the body and its boundaries.

"Man has made his match...now it's his problem", read the tagline from Ridley Scott's iconoclastic film, Blade Runner¹. A nightmarish vision of the future where man created machines are a marauding super race, more powerful than man and uncontrolled by the rights and the wrongs of their modern society. This subjective anxiety over man's future counterparts - or indeed mans prosthetics - has captured the imagination of many. The 1980's saw an explosion of films relating to human existence and either its harmony with machine or utter contempt for it. Films like Terminator² saw machine assisting man its survival whilst films like Robocop³ considered the fragility of the human body and its ultimate reawakening as part man, part machine. The word 'cyborg' as Balsamo notes⁴, is an amalgamation of 'cybernetic organism'. A mixture of both flesh and non-organic material which, as Balsamo states:

"Serves not only as the focal figure of the mass mediated popular culture of American techno-science, but also as the figuration of posthuman identity"⁵.