The stable identity of the self has become essentially fluid in the contemporary condition. Appearing and not being characterize this situation. Sensation supplants emotion; in many of her incarnations Max's image is one of a cruel inhuman "robot". "Masculinity", as an attribute has become visually and technologically reproducible. Max's masculine violent image is incorporated as an equal image in the multitude of images that have lost their fixed meaning and value, other than their inter-referentiality.

The incessant transformation, the illusive identity is a strategy of mimesis advocated by Luce Irigaray (see her 1977 essay "Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un"). In a mimetic process, Irigaray tries to strip the powerful meanings culture has attached to woman. The strategy requires woman to deliberately assume a mimetic role. This effectively means for woman going back to all images/words/definitions of "Woman" and then processing and (re)-appropriating them. Max succeeds in playing this mimetic game without risking repetition of men's image of violent action heroine. By eroding any conventional notions of woman from both inside and outside she strips away all meaning and is able to free herself from them. She no longer always coincides with the image she projects. Orchestrating and directing images of femininity creates a distance between reality and representation for the female image. In the space these created images interplay in a posthuman vacuum of reality.

In repeating and then fragmenting any representation of woman this tactic "decolonizes" the structured identities. Femininity is stripped of its deceptive naturalness and exposed for its artificiality. In the posthumanist era fixed identity disappears. The loss of identity puts the immutable relationship between sex and gender in motion. In posthuman visual culture, gender identity is shaken loose and gender is portrayed as a visual spectacle. This alows for an ambiguous representations of gender. After revealing the artificial nature of femininity, Max can adopt "masculinity" just as naturally as femininity. After all both representations are just as inauthentic. Max creates a space in which the feminine can adopt new amalgamated representations of gender. Together this fractures the one-dimensional image of identity. Max can simulate images of both "femme fatale", machine and man. This condition enables the female to appear to be "more" woman--and man--than ever before.

What are the feminist political implications of the convergence of these discourses at the site of the female body? In one respect, Max's monstrosity unites science and nature and structures the relational science that Haraway advocates. In another respect, however, it structures a hermeneutic relationship within the feminine that positions the female "Cyborg" as confronting a feminized monstrosity located ultimately within her own body. In this way, Dark Angel constructs the feminine as ultimately in search of itself, never able to fully discover or accommodate its position within scientific and cultural institutions. What would be the consequence if Max were able to reconcile her divergent components of scientific monstrosity and feminized cyborg? What happens, in other words, if distinct, even antagonistic forms of feminized power materialize at specific moments to struggle against historically masculine forms of knowledge/power? Can such microconcentrations of feminized power be amalgamated for individual/personal and social change?

Selected Bibliography

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject In Post-Modern Science Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.

Butler, Judith, and Scott, Joan W. (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

Drey, Mark. (ed.). Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.

Featherstone, Mike & Burrows, Roger. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. New York: Sage, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. Alan Sheridan (trans.). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Gray, Chris Hables (ed.). The Cyborg Handbook London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Haraway,Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N Katherine. How WE Became Post-Human. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Irigaray, Luce. Gillian C. Gill (trans.). Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985.

Irigaray, Luce. "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?" Cultural Critique 1: 73-88. 1985.

Langton, Christopher G. (ed). Artificial Life. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Post-industrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Richard Howard (trans). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre Cleveland. Press of Case Western Reserve Univ. 1973.