Claudia Spinger "The Pleasure of the Interface" In Cybersexualities; edited by Jenny Wolmark; Edinburgh University Press, 1999 (pp. 34-54) Claudia Springer examines the highly contradictory representations of technology, focusing in particular on the dual desire to escape the body and eroticize technology. She displays how this 'simultaneous revulsion and fascination' with the human body runs through a wide array of texts, from academic research, to science fiction narratives, cyberpunk, comics, and films. Although she discusses Metropolis as an archetype, Springer is also careful to distinguish between robot and cyborg narratives. While the former establishes a clear dichotomy between human/machine, the cyborg narratives mesh the organic with the inorganic and offer a more problematic deconstruction of human body boundaries: "When humans interface with computer technology in popular culture texts… It involves transforming the self into something entirely new, combining technological with human identity. Although human subjectivity is not lost in the process, it is significantly altered." (p. 37) The 'pleasure of the interface' represents popular culture's fusion of desire and fear of the womb (a crossing between mater and matrix) in a logic similar to Freud's death wish and pleasure principle. Here Springer takes up Janet Bergstrom's argument that in a world beyond our recognition and our norms, gender is often retained as a primary marker of difference. She also discusses Virtual Reality not as an escape, but rather, to borrow John Perry Barlow's phrase, as a 'Disneyland for epistemologists' in which "'being' somewhere does not require physical presence and 'doing' something does not result in any changes in the physical world." (p. 45) Springer further examines how gender categories and sexuality are not only exagerated ("giant pumped up pectoral muscles on the males and enormous breasts on the females" p. 41) but violently reinforced in many cyberpunk and SF films. In this analysis, she compares the representations of Terminator and Robocop to the psyhcological states of male fascist soldiers, claiming that cyborg body armour and mechanic bodies become ideal tools for the maintenance of the ego. Moreover, Springer highlights the paradoxical stature of these cyborg representations, in which the crisis of male subjectivity and the fragility of human gender boudnaries is ironically assuaged by replacing the body with more stable tehnological materials: "Ironically, the attempt to preserve the masculine subject as a cyborg requires destroying the coherence of the male body and replacing it with electronic partss; either physically, -- using hardware, or psychologically - using software." L.E. Fazen