| Sumario: | This article takes up the ontology and politics of Donna Haraway's cyborg figuration, arguing that the cyborg as political strategy and feminist method forecloses, in part, a feminist technopolitics that meaningfully grapples with the relationship between humanity, race, and the machine. It triangulates a reading of Haraway's manifesto with a close reading of the narratives and surrounding cultural reception of two cyborg films: Alex Garland's Ex Machina and Rupert Sanders's Hollywood remake of the Japanese cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell. Through these intersecting analyses, I make three critiques of the cyborg's racial limits. First, I argue that despite Haraway's suspicion of Western origin stories, both Ex Machina and Ghost in the Shell return to liberal humanist narratives of autonomy and self-actualization. Second, I argue that the cyborg reinscribes racial power relations through the very act of representation, even when this representation is meant to be a form of critique. Third, I argue that race inherently limits the cyborg's ironic potential. I use Anne Anlin Cheng's theorization of the "yellow woman" as both retrograde human subject and ornament to show that the irony of the cyborg project is unachievable for those who have always already been objects. Despite this, I also show how Chinese diaspora and Asian American scholars are following Michelle N. Huang's reverse reading practice to reinterpret the cyborg not as a liberatory figuration for feminist politics but as a generative site for understanding how race and gender shape Asiatic womanhood.
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