This paper demonstrates how Indian female para-athletes stand beyond the imaginary identifications and frames of mirrored wholeness and antagonism. In the postcolonial scenario, both the biological and the technological female bodies are categorised as the Other. Consequently, the female cyborg in Haraway and Braidotti’s sense is considered a cultural and technological transgressor whose politics is not viewed as a simple mind/body opposition. The aim here is to trace the noticeable shift in the cyborg ontology and map out how the female para-athletes assume the cyborg’s role. Having examined the theory of supercrip, Cartesian mind-body split and Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, this paper argues that the cyborg athletes strive to transcend the embodiment constraints and proceed to their individualism and free will. This is not just liberation of the feminine against the clutches of the patriarchy, but also that of the cyber-identities against the capitalist society as a whole. For the Indian female para-athletes, the oppression works in multiple levels: they are treated as the Other by the Western tradition of thought, by the patriarchy in India and by every other non-disabled person. Using feminist posthumanism as a framework, this paper explores how Indian female para-athletes interrogate the historical exceptionalism given to human “man” and critiques the unequal social stratifications privileging few human and non-human bodies, modes of being and knowledge over others.
In general, the statistics paint a fearful picture of the representation of Indian female athletes, to add disability as another marker, filters a very small number of para-athletes. Indian female para-athletes designate the future prototype of a human: part human, part technology. They combine natural and artificial instead of juxtaposing these notions, and by doing so, they highlight a new body image for women and new adaptation patterns for disabled people. Armed with one of her prostheses, the para-badminton player Manasi Joshi became both an incarnation of monstrous femininity and a superhero- a cultural cyborg overcoming biological deficiencies. She challenges people’s perceptions of limiting disabilities and the impact of this on social status by redesigning possibilities for the body. As an amputee, she has been able to turn her bodily constraint on its head. A prosthetic leg allowed her to redesign the assemblage of her body. Shalini Saraswathi, a quadruple amputee, is known as the Blade Runner because of the prosthetic blades she uses for walking and running. She has trained extensively and struggled because of the heavy prosthetics but continued till she ran a 10k marathon for two consecutive years and is now an accomplished para-athlete. Another Blade Runner is Kiran Kanojia, who put on a prosthetic leg after her leg was amputated. Since 2014 she has been running marathons in India and abroad. Deliberately exploring the issue of modern identity, combining technology and avant-garde, Shalini and Kiran changed emancipatory disability narration from clichéd Helen Keller stories and moved it closer to feminist posthumanism. Additionally, there is also the reclaiming of their own bodies, taking control of it. These para-athletes highlight the significance of reflecting one’s personality through an altered body image. Their prostheses wield superpower, but their connotations with new identity and individuality are more important, encouraging people to stand up for themselves.
It could be argued that in these female para-athletes, we see ‘techno-bodies’: bodies transcending the biological limitations of human bodies. Techno-bodies are portrayed as cyborgs since they are enhanced using prosthetics for achieving ‘corporeal reimaginings.’ The cyborg identity becomes subjected to the gaze and often these athletes are marked as the exotic Other. They do not conform to the social and cultural ideas and refuses to be defined by the pre-determined racist and sexist social roles. The cyborg, a chimera in Haraway’s terms, resists all the categorisation put forth by Humanism. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” introduced the cyborg as a figure of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (71). Haraway envisioned the cyborg to initiate “joint kinship with animals and machines” and possess a partial identity (72). Cyborgs unsettle the traditional Humanist order by creating new modes of assemblage which undermine the existing hierarchies and binaries. The hybridised identity of the cyborg is referred to as ‘posthuman’ by Hayles:
The posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. (Hayles 3)
The para-athletes as cyborgs concede control of the vital entities of their professions to the machines and systems. The posthuman emerges not as the “obsolescence of the human” but as a form of resistance against the long-established binaries of self and nonself, order and non-equilibrium, normativity and non-normativity (Halberstam 10). Humanism has always considered the human to be a male subject at the centre of this world who manipulates his way through the world with his intelligence and an independent agent whose thought and action produce history. The posthumans deconstruct this liberal humanist subject by releasing the body from its restraints and challenging its corporeality. Posthumanism often deconstructs the ontological foundations of the Enlightenment subject. Going against the Cartesian concept of the liberal subject, the cyborg para-athletes become subjects who embody multiplicity, “in part by releasing the body from the constraints placed on it not only by nature but also by Humanist ideology, and allowing it to roam free and ‘join’ with other beings, animate and inanimate” (Seaman 248). The unconstrained posthuman embodiment is thus, composed of many subjects in relations to power, technology, virtuality and reality. The supercrips with enhanced capabilities and hyper-individualities transcends space and time. The collapse of the internal and the external belies the Humanist exceptionalism and furthers the concept of ‘companion species’ which blurs the distinctions between natural/mechanical and human/non-human. Once the situatedness in the Humanist tradition ceases to be a compulsion, these posthumans reconceptualises the body limits and individual freedom.
Looking at these para-athletes from the feminist posthumanist approach, makes each of them a unique individual with unique set of bodies, spaces, materialities, and subjectivities. By decentering the normative image of athletes, feminist posthumanism aims to be ethically responsible to human and non-human entanglements, and multispecies urgencies. Posthuman thinking is characterised by what Braidotti refers to as transversal, that is, multidirectional, rather than linear, movements. Humanist thinking valorises linear, chronological time, and forward-moving progress narratives, but feminist posthumanism moves away from more traditional social science notions of human actors set in dialectical relationships with social structures. Braidotti charts new ways of thinking and moving beyond the rational humanist man to confront new conditions of the anthropocene via “nomadic thinking.” Her affirmative politics suggests how people search to explore positive life forces generated through posthuman practices, creating new modes of posthuman embodiment and life. The challenge we face according to Braidotti, is both how to find alternative representations for the kind of subjects we are in the process of becoming that avoid either/or dualisms, and how to articulate and activate these representations in theoretical terms. When the politics of location, creativity, intensity, and passion are introduced, they play a major role in the process of building oppositional consciousness, making criticism and creativity to be ways of resistance. In other words, or to put it in Braidottian terms, here is the point where the figuration of the nomadic subject emerges in order to redefine desire not as the site of lack and otherness, but instead as the meeting point of interconnectedness and affirmation.
The feminist interrogation of gender since Simone de Beauvoir has revealed how women are assigned a cluster of ascriptions, like Aristotle’s concept of the Other. Female, disabled, and dark bodies are supposed to be dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent bodies, since femininity and race are performances of disability. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that because women and persons with disabilities are cultural signifiers for the body, their actual bodies have been subjected relentlessly to what Michel Foucault calls “discipline.” The medical commitment to healing, when coupled with modernity’s faith in technology and interventions that control outcomes, has increasingly shifted toward an aggressive intent to fix, regulate, or eradicate ostensibly deviant bodies. The disabled body becomes a body whose variations or transformations have rendered it out of sync with its environment, both the physical and the attitudinal environments. In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer talks about the “cripped cyborg politics,” inviting feminists to reconsider their common use of disability as a depoliticised metaphor for hybridity and entreating disability activists to include the critiques of class and Western privilege offered by socialist and transnational feminists. Kafer suggests that as discussions of the cyborg are one of the rare places disability continually appears within feminist texts, disability scholars need to attend to cyborg theory. She highlights the ableism often apparent in these texts: with disabled people separated as an essential state of cyborg, non-disabled people will never achieve. Indian female para-athletes are subjected to the gaze for being the Other in many aspects: nonnormativity, belonging to a third-world country and for being female athletes who are already heavily marginalised. People using prosthetic devices are stared at by strangers which further contributes to their psycho-emotional disablism (Reeve 97). Therefore, viewing the impaired body as a contemporary cyborg also reinforces the discourses of normal/abnormal because of the way technology tends to recreate the ‘normal’ body.
The posthumanist theorists reject the traditional Humanist view that humans are separated from the technological world, but rather they believe that “technology is embodied humanity” (Pepperell 36). Little work has been done on the cyborg figure within disability studies, primarily because historically, technology was always associated with normativity, rehabilitation and cure. Paraplegics and other severely handicapped people have the most intense experiences of complex hybridisation with technology. In the recent past, the Indian female para-athletes have formed an intimate relationship with technology, in the form of using prosthetics and implants or assistive devices such as wheelchairs. However, at the same time, disabled people are amongst the poorest group in society, and particularly the female para-athletes from India belong to the lowest economic strata. So, the access to adequate prosthetics or technology so that they can participate in society as an “active citizen” is seriously curtailed. Therefore, enhancements in technology do not always relate to improvements in the quality of life of disabled people. Technology is a capitalist social entity which in Indian culture is shaped and informed by market forces and the requirements of powerful vested interests. Further, the cyborg has always been closely entangled with capitalism. After Norbert Weiner invented the term ‘cybernetic’ to refer to the self-correcting weapons systems, he had been developing during and after World War II, there has been a prominent shift in the ontology of the cyborg- from the mechanical to the biological- from a fabricated entity to a synthetic organic creature. Nevertheless, throughout that shift, capitalism is inherently entangled with the figure of the cyborg.
In paralympic sports, the cyborg athletes are seen as ‘supercrips.’ Ronald Berger mentions that supercrips “are those individuals whose inspirational stories of courage, dedication, and hard work prove that it can be done, that one can defy the odds and accomplish the impossible” (648). As in the cases of Manasi, Shalini and Kiran, they also gain a relatively high-profile media exposure. Para-athletes with cybernetic sporting bodies when appear on the athletics tracks instantly draw much attention and are considered to be the most successful. The use of the prosthetic technologies has led to a litany of supercrip stories which often leave the observer with a sense of impossible achievement. However, those para-athletes who do not receive recognition in mainstream media are not labelled as supercrips and are often marginalised. At the same time, there is also the possibility that the label of supercrip can be negatively bestowed upon impaired individuals who manage to live “an ordinary life” (Kama 452). Often persons with disabilities receive patronising super-status just by living a normal life and thus, the tag of the supercrip becomes a double-edged sword. It becomes a matter of concern when the success stories of the supercrips foster unrealistic expectations about what people with locomotor disabilities can achieve and what they should be able to achieve.
Heidegger’s conception of the ‘subject’ as Dasein is a dynamic ‘way of being,’ an ongoing movement which is in tandem with its own being, and to the world. He argues that selfhood is evolving in keeping with past experiences, present context and future projects. The posthumanist consciousness “is thus precisely to warrant this kind of fulfilment and to provide the self with a bionic prosthesis utilisable to redefine its selfness without surrendering to the machine completely” (Pordzik 152). The cyborg athletes are able to possess an individual personality, identity and embodiment. The self, subject, and subjectivity becomes entangled. Their embodied subjectivities represent the ‘grotesque’ configurations of the feminine and defies the stereotypical notions of beauty, and ideal goddess like figure. The cybernetic enhancements enable them to reclaim their bodies. This is suggestive of the liberation claims, which are close to both feminist studies and posthumanist studies. To critically engage with the fact that with their techno-bodies, the female para-athletes become cyborgs, it becomes important to reflect an understanding on the embodiments of the posthuman subjects. A feminist posthuman approach to this goes beyond just raising the concerns about the inclusion of women in sports, but demands agentic relations between humans, disability, technology and non-normativity. In fact, they become agents who “profoundly restructure the processes of sexualisation, racialisation and naturalisation as pillars of the bio-political governmentality” (Braidotti 98). This paper demonstrates that a posthuman future which decentres the human and acknowledges the political agency of female Indian para-athletes more adequately captures the entangled nature of oppressions and resistances.
Works Cited
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