Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies without organs, and Westworld: Interrogating academic writing and scholarly identity

Netolicky, Deborah M. (2017) Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies without organs, and Westworld: Interrogating academic writing and scholarly identity. KOME: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PURE COMMUNICATION INQUIRY, 5 (1). pp. 91-103. ISSN 2063-7330

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Abstract

This paper fashions a lens through which to view scholarly identity and the experience of academic writing. The lens of inquiry I apply is the metaphor of Season 1 of sci-fi HBO television show Westworld and its characters, especially its cyborg protagonist Dolores. Thrumming like electric currents through this lens of inquiry are Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg, the fictional worlds of science fiction and Wonderland, my own lived experience, and Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines and bodies without organs. I engage in the cyborgic technology of writing in order to playfully explore what it means to be a cyborg academic operating in intersecting machinic worlds. I ask: Can we listen to our internal voices and write our own stories? Can we burn the world clean with our scholarship and the ways in which we interrogate ingrained and expected practices?

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