So I decided to look up Cyborg on Wikipedia. I found a general description, and some historical and cultural chronology- these were followed by a list of sub categorizations. I focused on section
7.6: Body Modifiction. After reading through it, wanted to make a thoughtful contribution to enhance the content. So I signed into my account, with my username HGuthman, and played around in my sandbox for about 20 minutes or so.
Recently, I read through the article by Don Ihde, "Aging, I Don't Want to Be a Cyborg". He has a pretty lengthy discussion about anxiousness, and their specific relationship to feelings of otherness upon technohuman integration. In other words, he introduces a notion of Cyborg Anxiety, and argues that it is quite prevalent among affected/ cyborged humans. I immediately applied this concept to my original question about identity, and wrote a brief statement about the plausible anxiety that men or women may feel once their bodies have been modified.
I'm curious to see if any other additions or comments are made about my post, because I know that not everyone may share the same view.
After posting, I found myself wondering if a techno-integration (as it can cause feelings of otherness) could also disrupt the categorization of identity. Meaning, could Cyborg be understood as a gender itself, in addition to current ones that have been socially constructed? And if it is, then I guess that body modification not only affects the external body, but internal emotions, feelings and notions of self-understanding as well.
Ihde, Don (2008) “Aging – I don’t want to be a cyborg” Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science 8: 397- 404
You pose a nice set of research questions in the beginning of this blog entry, which you expand with the Ihde work on anxiety. You might want to take one more pass to make the prose of your contribution sound a little less speculative, so it isn't mistaken for original research and targeted for deletion. It's challenging to tackle such a large and well-developed article, but weeks later your main points are still represented in the entry.
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