Architecture+Gender: Feminist Design Power-Tools

Georges Teyssot raises the question of where the bounds between human and machine are set in a future where we increasingly incorporate machine parts into our bodies. So I set the question further, to my oldest son of 14 years. "How many percent mashine/human can one be to still be a human?" My son answer was - "as long as others consider you to be human - you are in fact human and not machine.". My interpretation of his answer is then this: Our knowledge and perception of a person is more important to us than any objective "truth" of biological limitations. There is no reason to try to establish a lowest common denominator of what constitutes "natural" because the border is and will be continually changing. It means that our common acceptance and interpretation will change as well. As long as your peers accepts you, you are in fact human.

In the debate of genetically and technologically modified bodies, there is notion of technological inventions as a imperative force that pushes us to take a stand in ethical questions that we are not prepared to answer or not even fit to consider at all. But the fact that we can imagine these science projects in the first plays is to me an indication of our willingness and even eagerness to reconsider the concept of human!

The debate is actually older than we care to admit. When we look back we see that the normative landscapes where the idea of humanity grew is in part landscapes of separation and compartmentalisation so that some are more human than others. Like in the racist logic of colonization or in the medialised picture of the poor where poverty seems to have drained people of their emotional life and therefore is not quite like "us", not quite human. So what to what social class would a cyborg belong? Is it a poor third world woman or a white middleclass male?

So if appearance and the social agreement (or the skin and what it represents)is at the heart of the matter then what would be really interesting to look at is in what contexts these negotiations take place. The answer to the question above would be less interesting and why and how the quuestion is asked of greater interest.

The dichotomy between brain and body (culture/nature) is as well as the dichotomy between human/machine a tale of what we perceive as threats or what we secretly desire. If we could free the body from our brain, we could shamelessly indulge in extreme violence and sex and if we could free the brain from the body and still survive, we could liberate ourselves from binding social agreements that comes from the need to physically survive. I any case - liberate ourselves from the pressure of social life.