The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto or,
A Frankenstein of One’s Own: How I Stopped Hunting for Cyborgs and Created the Slightly Irregular Definition of Cyborgean Forms of Storytelling
“Narrative transmography is the animation of the structural engine that drives the story in not only new media works of art, but across artistic narrative texts of all kinds.”
— Jilly Dreadful, The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology, #3 Feminist Science Fiction
The Shelley Jackson Hallway
Excerpt from The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto:
There’s a trope called, “Women in Refrigerators,” (WiR) which was made famous when Gail Simone called attention to Green Lantern #54, when the hero comes home to find his murdered girlfriend stuffed into the refrigerator. The WiR Syndrome employs the death (or injury) of a female comic book character as a plot device, usually in male driven titles. The trope has been used to highlight the elimination (or incapacitation) of women in comic books and other media.
By co-opting the WiR trope of sensationalized female character deaths inside The Spectral Dollhouse, the project (re)appropriates the gaze in order to challenge the lines between gender, materiality, and violence in a new media format. I purposely staged the scenes so that there are no bodies of women, only the eerie aftermath of violence that has been left in the wake of their passing. I then photographed the rooms in such a way that readers hopefully “forget” that they’re looking at a simple dollhouse.
The basement is the only room that features a body. Under the stairs in the entryway is a secret door to the basement. If you venture down below, you will encounter a cyborg being assembled in a secret laboratory. I thought it only fitting to have the foundation “house” the symbol that started it all.
Ada is a peer reviewed academic journal, and Donna Haraway has an article included in the issue which is basically a dream come true for me (publishing in the same issue as my scholarly hero).