blade runner and jurassic park

Of Androids and Fossils: (Re)Producing Sexual Identity in Blade Runner and Jurassic Park With the shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism, our culture has become increasingly concerned with the problem of how to represent subjects in a technologized world. Traditionally, dominant conceptions of the subject have relied on Western metaphysics; naturalized monolithic categories arranged in hierarchic binary oppositions: male/female, human/machine, subject/object, etc. In this system, the discourse of science maintains an …

…postindustrial world; how, then, are we to re-imagine our relations within it? While neither Blade Runner nor Jurassic Park offers answers to this question, I caution against dismissing them as merely ambivalent embodiments of “postmodern angst.” Instead, we must acknowledge them as genuine efforts to speak the complexity of cybernetic existence, and, as cyborgs ourselves, use them as a starting point from which to read -- and perhaps reweave -- the cultural webs of power.