Document Type
Article
Abstract
The late 20th and early 21st centuries shifted significantly from their Postmodern bearings in their search for new meaning, new ideologies, and new gods. One such shift resides in the contestation of the meaning of the feminine body and its corresponding gender, or more often, the lack thereof. Feminist theories of essentialism and constructivism, after years of battle over the delegation of the sexed flesh, were reinvigorated by Donna J. Haraway's riotous cyborg trope - evidence that the argument had finally left the security of the Ivory Tower and was now up for new, albeit alien, interpretations. [1] Outside of the academic boundaries of feminist theory, this shift in re-thinking the female frame aggressively emerged within the arenas of popular culture. In the early 21st century, the mass appeal of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code became a cultural phenomenon in its radical articulation of the sexual sacred female, sparking debate from the suburban housewife to the Vatican. Yet, pop music had already predicted the emergence of a national gender rebellion at the end of the 20th century; as it saturated the air waves and visually infiltrated mass culture through the venues of MTV and VH1, the politicized female body materialized as anything but unitary.
Repository Citation
Privett, Katharyn. "Sacred Cyborgs and 21st Century Goddesses." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1–28. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss4/8