Mailee Hung | California College of the Arts (original) (raw)
Mailee Hung is a freelance writer and critic based in San Francisco, CA. She holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a BA in Studio Art from University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on prosthetics, biotechnology, posthumanism, and interrogating the boundaries between nature and culture.
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Drafts by Mailee Hung
Technofetishistic depictions of the prosthetic body, the configuration of human bodies and prosth... more Technofetishistic depictions of the prosthetic body, the configuration of human bodies and prosthetic devices, are emerging throughout contemporary Western visual culture. Some theorists read this emergence as a reiteration of the cyborg and its suggestion of total technological integration. I argue that the prosthetic body is emblematic of a potential rejection of technological hybridization, which some theories of the posthuman assume in the hopes for a utopian ontology. Rather than the cyborg, the prosthetic body has instead come to map out the specific, material intersections of technology, trauma, and desire in the formation of embodied subjectivity. Using disability aesthetics and cyborg theory to look at contemporary amputee film figures, I find that the relationships suggested by prosthesis between the discursive body and technology are fundamentally contingent, traumatic, and clearly demarcated. This project works to untangle how these prosthetic fantasies have come to shape a new ontology that frames the contemporary possibilities and limitations of the technologized body.
Technofetishistic depictions of the prosthetic body, the configuration of human bodies and prosth... more Technofetishistic depictions of the prosthetic body, the configuration of human bodies and prosthetic devices, are emerging throughout contemporary Western visual culture. Some theorists read this emergence as a reiteration of the cyborg and its suggestion of total technological integration. I argue that the prosthetic body is emblematic of a potential rejection of technological hybridization, which some theories of the posthuman assume in the hopes for a utopian ontology. Rather than the cyborg, the prosthetic body has instead come to map out the specific, material intersections of technology, trauma, and desire in the formation of embodied subjectivity. Using disability aesthetics and cyborg theory to look at contemporary amputee film figures, I find that the relationships suggested by prosthesis between the discursive body and technology are fundamentally contingent, traumatic, and clearly demarcated. This project works to untangle how these prosthetic fantasies have come to shape a new ontology that frames the contemporary possibilities and limitations of the technologized body.