Terminator is a science fiction media franchise that began with the 1984 film "The Terminator" and centers around a war between humans and a malicious artificial intelligence names Skynet that uses an arsenal of cyborgs, called Terminators, to mimic humans and infiltrate human resistance to Skynet.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

In "Feminist, Queer, Crip" Alison Kafer reflects on the history of the cyborg as both framed as a figure of futurist feminist critique by scholars like Donna Haraway, but also as a space of militarization, colonization and institutionalization. While Haraway frames the cyborg as an example how breaking down binaristic categories between human and animal, and human an machine may lead us to a more livable future, Kafer discusses how Harawary's analysis can be read as devoid of looking at how cyborgs, in the science-fiction imaginary and in actuality have been used as tools of militarization, colonization and institutionalization through the imagination of cyborgs as figures like Robocop and Terminator, the presentation of cyborgification as a cure for disability, and how the rhetoric of cyborgs was used in the mid-20th century in discussion around the involuntary psychiatric drugging of institutionalized patients.

Example of Queer Futurity Reinscribing Harm - Cyborgs

RoboCop is a media franchise that began in 1987 and focuses on the the story of Alex Murphy, a fictionalized police officer in Detriot Michigan who after being murdered whilst serving as a police is resurrected by the corporation Omni Consumer Products as a powerful cyborg named RoboCop. Whilst certain parts of the franchise discuss Omni Consumer Products as a corrupt company, RoboCop has been taken up in the cultural imagination as a image of a police robot.

RoboCop

Terminator

In the 1960s Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline  posed cyborgs as a way of imagining human flourishing in space. Kline and Clynes posited that implanting humans with osmotic pumps that would allow the continuous injection of chemicals would allow for the administration of medication to astronauts to prevent illness during space travel. One of the illnesses that were planed on being prevented was the belief at the time that space travel could lead to astronauts experiencing psychotic episodes. It is believed that Clynes and Kline performed trials on this pump, and the anti-psychotic drugs that would be used in it, on the patients at Rockland State Hospital in New York where Clynes and Kline worked as researchers.

History of Cyborgs and Coercive Pharmaceuticals

Price discusses that because Crip Futurity, like Queer Futurity, can reinscribe harm, in discussing time was must recogonize harm as a core aspect of time and be accountable to that harm in how we discuss time.

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