ABSTRACT
In 1974, the Six Million Dollar Man premiered on network television. Air Force
Colonel Steve Austin was almost killed in a plane crash, but as the episode opens,
the viewer hears the narrator, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. . . .
Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster” (Bennett, 1974-1978). Colonel
Austin receives a series of bionic parts-an arm, both legs, and one eye; thus, he
becomes one of the first cyborgs-an amalgamation of body and machine-born
in U.S. popular culture. Haraway’s (1991) cyborg was initially conceived to
critique traditional representations of the feminine, but it is now more widely used
as a mechanism to theoretically discuss the relationships between people and
machine. For this chapter, “the cyborg reflects the dynamic synergy of indi-
vidual, technologies, and the contexts they share, a flexible and simultaneous
emphasis that previous names for ages, eras, and periods could not provide”
(Inman, 2004, p. 14).
