Imagining the Cyborg in Náhuatl: Reading the Videos of Pola Weiss

摘要

By 1985, when Donna Harawayu27s essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s," presented the cyborg as a hybrid between organism and machine and an alternative model of feminine subjectivity, the Mexican independent media producer Pola Weiss had been challenging normative female experiences and relations between self and technology through her video work for nearly a decade. In this article, I propose to explore Weissu27s work through the lens of Harawayu27s in order to collaborate with recent efforts to locate Weissu27s practice more meaningfully in the histories of media arts. By placing particular attention on Weissu27s conceptualization of her camera as a hybrid coupling between organism and machine, I use Harawayu27s Manifesto for Cyborgs to suggest a frame in which to understand Weissu27s practice as critique of the dominant intellectual traditions and conventions of representation that have produced and reproduced hierarchies of race, class, sex, and gender difference in exico. In doing so, I also explore how Weissu27s experiments with televisual images challenged normative female experiences and relations between self and technology. Ultimately, in proposing Harawayu27s work as a vehicle through which to understand the work of Weiss, I also seek to find affinities between the two women as they inhabited parallel worlds and shared similar concerns.