Cyborg Feminism Expressed in Fashion Design

The recent innovations in technoscience have changed the patterns of everyday lives for women and their politics of identity. Among the various debates on a women`s relationship to technoscience, Donna J. Haraway`s theory of the cyborg has been one of the most influential, as it provides new modes of conceiving subjectivity as well as new notions of women`s shared experiences. For Haraway, the cyborg is an image of a female subject that will lead the future of science and technology as an amalgamation of non-hierarchical differences. This study examines the characteristics and meanings for the distortion, anti-aesthetic body, and clothing in fashion design through the cyborg feminism theory. Characteristics and meanings of the cyborg in fashion designs find their expression through mechanical images, distorted physical transformations, reconstruction of a destructed body, expression of an anatomical and heterogeneous body, and the persona image. Such expressions are not simply an act of distorting and destroying a body image but extending the category of a body, but of going beyond the limit of a real body and create a new body.