glossary

                                      
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Technofeminism

A framework defining technology as socially and culturally constructed, rejecting technological determinism and questioning the more utopian sides of cyberfeminism, emphasizing that technologies are gendered tools shaped by power structures.

Critical Posthumanism

A theoretical framework defining the human as relational and entangled with non-human agents, embracing limitation and materiality as conditions of existence common to all, and thus contrasting the transhumanist pursuit of perfection and the human transcendence of the body.

Transhumanism

Often presented as a techno-utopian (but arguably dystopian and techno-capitalist) ideology expanding on humanism and envisioning the enhancement of the body through technology, finding alignment with ideals of optimization as a means to immortality, meaning that its ultimate objective is to completely overcome the body and its limitations.

Transhumanist Aesthetic Ideal

A cultural formation that treats the body as a cage impeding ascendence beyond the human form, envisioning that limitation to be transcended through technological design, pointing to an ideal already operational in beauty culture, particularly in relation to the construction of the digital self.

Cyborg

Inherently refuses definitions.

Gendered Cyborg

A cyborg body through which systems of gender, race, and class are carried into form, function, and appearance, making visible the ideological assumptions embedded in technological design.

Female Cyborg

A cyborg deliberately designed to be perceived as female and moulded to an idealized image of a woman, functioning as the materialization of a disciplinary aesthetic ideal in which fantasies of bodily transcendence converge with historically gendered systems of control.

Embodied Cyborg

A cyborg with a visibly designed body whose physical presence materially enacts the transhumanist aesthetic ideal.

Disembodied Cyborg

A cyborg whose absence of a recognizable body constitutes a different but parallel mode through which the same underlying system of gendered aesthetic control operates across a different mode of materiality.