Cynthia J. Fuchs "Death is Irrelevant" In The Cyborg Handbook; edited by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor; New York: Routledge, 1995 (pp. 281-300) In this article, Cynthia J. Fuchs analyzes contemporary cyborg imagery in its various cinematic representations, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Eve of Destruction, Hardware, Terminator, and Robocop. While her analysis encompasses a broad array of cyborg representations, she discusses the cyborg as a contradictory composition of phallic masculinity, body permeability, paternity, and maternity. She constructs a tentative tripartite distinction between the 'machocyborg,' the 'androgynous cyborg,' and the 'human forced to function as cyborg.' Drawing arguments from Judith Butler's concept of performativity, Fuchs suggests that the cyborg is defined by its own 'indeterminate self-identity': "nothing in a cyborg body is essential." According to Fuchs, the cyborg further challenges the heterosexual reproductive narratives of humanism by presenting a body that is 'self-reproducing' but not reproductive, and threatening biological reproduction with mechanical reproduction. In these analyses, therefore, Fuchs highlights the inconsistencies and slippages apparent in the hypermasculine cyborgs like Terminator and Robocop. In Fuchs'understanding, the filmic desires for self-sufficiency, hypermasculinity, violence, history, representation, heterosexuality, reproduction, and maternity may be rewritten as social anxieties over the bodily dissolution, instability, dismemberment, penetration, and impotence. In other words, the cinematic inscriptions of gender boundaries may be reexamined and understood as panicked articulations of normativity in the threat of gender instability. In her conclusion, she suggests that the cyborg is a promising site of liminal transformation precisely because it represents a male hysteria over body limits, reproduction, and identities. L.E. Fazen