ABSTRACT
While the posthuman cyborg has often been promoted as embodying a seamless articulation of human and machine, biological flesh and technological augmentations, cyborgs can still struggle with the integration of technology into their organizational systems. Into this tension among posthuman cyborgs and issues of agency, we can insert RoboCop, one of the preeminent hypermasculinzed cyborgs of the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk era. When police officer Alex Murphy is resurrected as a cyborg in films and comic books, his power resides not in his Kevlar-laminated titanium skin or his Auto 9 machine pistol, but in his advanced multimedia optical sensors; in other words, the power of the cyborg is asserted not just through physical force but also through the cyborg gaze—i.e., technology's ability to find and control the image of others. What emerges in diverse RoboCop franchises and the cyborg gaze is a series of subjective shots into the social mechanisms of cyborg posthumanism, including loss of identity, loss of humanity, and loss of control. At the same time, while the machine can take control over one's humanity, RoboCop's cyberpunk future(s) also show the human subject using the tools of the technology itself to take control of the machine and achieve a cybernetic symbiosis that doesn't lose sight of the human amidst the cybernetics.
