Bellocq’s Cyborgs

What is a cyborg?

Donna Harraway writes:“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and

perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence”.

“Imagine her a moment—afterthe flash, blinded—stepping outof the frame, wide-eyed, into her life”.(Tretheway 48)

Marxist Feminism• “Marxists are opposed to any social or political action that perpetuates the

enslavement and oppression of members of the work force”.

• “Prostitution is a form of labor and therefore has been specifically noted as falling under the designation of a corruption of wage labor”.

• “Prostitution, therefore, can be seen as standing as a symbol of all that is wrong with world policies in society. Prostitutes may feel that they are free, but looking at the larger economic picture in Marxist terms, they are in reality oppressed workers

reinforcing and perpetuating an exploitative capitalistic scheme”.

“I’m not so foolish

that I don’t know this photgraph we make

will bear the stamp of his name, not mine”. (Tretheway 39)

Socialist Feminism• “…the socialist feminist sees the oppression as having psychological and social

roots.32 on people, not profits”.

• “To the socialist feminist, the prostitute is a victim of the corruption of a society which accompanies class distinctions”.

• “The oppression of class in a materialistic society degrades people by categorizing them in a particular class and objectifying them so that they are merely parts of a

mechanism that can be replaced by other parts of the same description”.

“My mama was a whore

and now I’m one too.”

Question: Have prostitutes turned themselves into cyborgs to meet the needs of their

customers and therefore increase their profit from the trade they work in; or have we, as a society, made prostitutes cyborgs because it is easier to

assume these women are somewhat less than human and therefore more easily forgiven for their wantonness' behaviors? Is it easier to assume these

women are simply made differently than the average woman then to assume that it is the psychological damage endured from living in a patriarchal

capitalist society that has created an oppressive sex industry?