Devin Glenn - Core Response #5

          In “Terminal Resistance/Cyborg Acceptance,” Scott Bukatman discusses the armored, hypermasculinized body as “a mental projection of the surface of the body” that emerged as a reaction to a new age both in terms of politics and technology (303, 306). As Bukatman explores the rigid, structured shell constructed by this conceptualization of masculinity, he addresses its connection to a “masculine aversion to the soft, the liquid, and the gooey—elements associated with the monstrous feminine” which irrationally positions women and their fluid characterization as threats that “wash away all that is rational” if not kept contained (303). This extreme alienation is depicted in Terminator 2 which pivots the feminine against the masculine through the form of T-1000 as digital entity and that of Terminator as a mechanical body. But interestingly, Bukatman points out that the character of Sarah Connor (although both a woman and a mother) is paradoxically made into a “tough-guy heroine” that also fights alongside Terminator to destroy “the slimy, reproductive alien nemesis” (306).

In more ways than one, Susan Jeffords’ “Terminal Masculinity: Men in the Early 1990s” is a perfect companion piece to Bukatman’s in which she maps out the shift in onscreen depictions of masculinity from the 80s to the 90s from the warrior to the father (143). In describing this change, Jeffords explores why films began to portray hard-bodied violence not as a gloried spectacle (as they predominately had been in the 80s), but as a selfish and self-destructive behavior (145). In addition, Jeffords highlights how this transition argued that “the tough, hard-driving violent, and individualist man of the eighties was not that way by choice,” but that it was the result of larger societal and political pressures (144). However, the highly problematic conditions of this justification, as Jefford emphasizes, is that it never claims personal responsibility and it likewise never faltered in its assumption that the male bodies in question are white (148). Most interestingly to me about Jeffords’ chapter is her reading of the Terminator as a maternal figure that gives birth to the future of the human race instead of attempting to initiate its utter destruction, as was its mission in the first Terminator film (160). Jeffords explains that this reading is promoted by the Terminator traveling back in time to safe John Connor and thereby “give” him life (160).

One additional element I’d like mention in conversation with Jeffords’ reading of the Terminator as a mother is the fact that John (in the future) is the one that sends him back in time to help his younger self. So, while the Terminator acts as a parental figure for young John, his mission and purpose emerge from future John, conversely establishes him as a son of sorts to John—especially if Terminator 2 is read as an allegory of the Christian conceptualization of God The Father who sent His Son (Christ) to earth to save mankind. In this manner, Terminator simultaneously functions as John’s parent and child. This nonlinear, cyclical relationship, though not without its own problematic connotations (like how it relegates Sarah to a lower, more animalistic status of mother), builds upon the binary reading initially offered by Bukatman which Bukatman then complicates by addressing Sarah’s hard-bodied presentation. This, in turn, led me to ponder upon the significance of viewing the cyborg experience as an allegory for transness, which similarly deconstructs binary systems of identity and being (as developed by the Wachowski sisters in The Matrix).