ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which female cyborgs, or gynoids, introduce ambiguity into the concept of the female, as well as challenging the integrity of the human subject, by analysing Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the subsequent film adaptation Blade Runner. Using the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the chapter examines the ways in which the female robots or “replicants” in the two narratives challenge traditional “assemblages.” For Deleuze, “assemblages” describe social, political and physical institutions and/or concepts including, for example, normative mother-child or man-woman relationships or the overarching apparatus of heteronormativity. The gynoids in the novel Androids and the film Blade Runner disrupt traditional gendered assemblages by calling the hierarchy of human and machine into question. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work, Bodies that Matter, which argues that gender foregrounds our notion of the human, we can see that the seemingly emotionless female robots of the novel and the film call our traditional conceptualisations of the human into question by challenging the validity of the maternal and the assumed nurturing and caregiving capacities of women.
