PUBLIC LECTURE: Terminal Masculinities

Ideas of technology, subjectivity and the body have always had points of intersection, but these connections have become increasingly widespread and visible across the last few decades. Feminist scholar Donna Haraway famously argued that the figure of the cyborg could embrace and enact a feminist politics by destabilising the coherence of the 'subject' and blur the line between person and machine. In Hollywood cinema, however, Arnold Schwarzenegger's cybernetic terminator initially appears singularly inappropriate to act as a feminist icon! In this lecture Tama Leaver will engage with ideas of cyberculture using the figure of the terminator to consider shifting ideas of masculinity in both cinematic and other digital forms.

Tama Leaver's recently submitted doctoral thesis is entitled 'Artificialities: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Culture - Subjectivity, Embodiment and Technology in Contemporary Speculative Texts'. He is currently a lecturer at the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at UWA.

This lecture is part of the public program for the exhibition 'CRASH (and other worldly pleasures)' at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery from 12 February to 29 March.