Disabling the Race to Perfection
Emerging biotechnologies continually raise the bar of how we define normal through innovations to correct the body’s “flaws,” leading to increased pressure to perfect ourselves. This pressure becomes particularly severe for people with disabilities who are often rhetorically called upon to represent what’s good about this trend, deemed by able-bodied techno-enthusiasts as the forerunner cyborgs or post-humans for having technologically intertwined bodies. Though some technologies have offered great benefits, disabled communities are not unanimously embracing this “post-human” label nor the corresponding technologies, as the disability rights movement proposes resisting technological innovations meant to “cure” or erase disabilities. Beitiks’ presentation seeks to explore how the disabled body has become a site of contestation over biotech “progress.” I begin by briefly exploring how the disabled body fused with technology is gaining iconic weight in popular culture when famous people with disabilities, such as Stephen Hawking, have claimed to be “cyborgs.” I then pair this with examples of people with disabilities conceptualizing interdependency with machines in more humanized terms than the “cyborg” rhetoric allows. This conversation will illustrate the need for a deeper look into the lived experiences of techno-embodiment in order to complicate the increasingly popular image of “forerunner cyborgs” and bring to light the transhumanist agenda that it serves.