Haraway writes:
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. (149)
First Contact does not escape duality. Picard’s liberal hu/manism, is countered by its opposite - a radical Borgian feminism. The film pits two superpowers against each other: the humans versus the Borg, the great Captain versus the Queen, hu/man against post-hu/man. First Contact is a film in which two opposing hegemonies battle for ultimate power. The characters are either/or; they are with Picard or against him. All identity is connected to the preeminent masculinity of Picard, or the subversive post-hu/manism of the Borg Queen. There is no middle ground; there are no partial identities.
Female Character Profiles /Male Character Profiles
Surely women’s experience cannot be understood through Picard, nor can it be explained through the Borg Queen. If the Queen represents any branch of feminism, it is the radical form of feminism that Haraway criticizes. The Borg Queen’s viewpoint is too collective, too totalizing, too extreme. First Contact presents two extremes that are binary opposites, which do not accurately account for human diversity. Cyborg imagery, if constructed differently, could " suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181). For Haraway, First Contact does not take us out of the maze, but takes us deeper inside present dominant ideologies.
Return to Science Fiction as Metaphor
