About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
Constructing an Integration
The ports lining Neo's spine, back, and neck. These are the Matrix's lasting effects on his body.
This awakening, a metaphor for (re)birth, signals the inhabiting of Neo’s body, now effectively queered, by the very nature that it lies outside the previous systems and constructions of “reality.” His realization and subsequent elimination from the Matrix sets him apart, and definitively against, the structures of control maintained by the machines. This moment launches Neo on a journey of self-discovery, as well as introduces him to an underground (both metaphorically and literally) community that quickly becomes his family. Neo’s severance from the machines and his identification with the other members of the resistance physically manifests by way of the ports that still litter his body.
The (re)inhabitation of Neo into his corporeal form is depicted through montage. This is the moment that Neo’s mind rejoins with his body. As Morpheus and Trinity stimulate his muscles while prepping their operating equipment Neo awakes:
Neo: What are you doing?
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Morpheus: Your muscles have atrophied. We’re rebuilding them.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You’ve never used them before.
Neo is operated on and meets the rest of the crew.
In his article, “What Can Queer Theory Do For Intersex?” Iain Morland expands on his theorizations of queer touch by looking at the normalizing surgeries performed on intersex individuals.
I am not arguing that Neo, nor any of the other members of the resistance, are intersex. I wish to adapt specific parts of Morland’s writing in order to think about surgery and queer bodies. Morland’s piece focuses on how intersex bodies are frequently operated on in order to make the physical appearance of sexual organs match male/female binary appearances. This “corrective” surgery places appearance over functionality and feeling. He argues that the “experience of surgery is lived by the body as a whole,
Refreshing a body for machine integration
The construction of Neo’s body represents an act by which we can assume that the majority of other red-pillers’ bodies were created. When he is ejected from the Matrix, Neo awakes in his pod, submerged in the viscous fluid that previously fed him nutrients. Upon pulling a feeding tube out of his mouth, he looks down at the rest of the ports that line his body. His hands gingerly touch the heavy cable attached to the port at the base of his neck. The machines, realizing that he has awoken, unscrew the cable from his neck, forcing the rest of the cables to rapidly disconnect from the ports on his body. Neo is then, for lack of a better word, flushed from his pod and subsequently rescued by the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus’ ship. Neo is welcomed to the real world, the “desert of the real,” weak, dazed, and painfully helpless.
I am not attempting to define Neo’s queerness solely by the physical. There are other members of the Nebuchadnezzar that are “100% pure old-fashioned homegrown humans.” Any human not under the machine’s control is queer simply by the fact that they live on the fringes, outside of the absolute control of the Matrix. Because of this they are constantly redefining what it means to live outside of the machine, as well as creating new spaces and communities amongst themselves.
As the scene fades out and then back in, Morpheus is operating on Neo’s ports. The scene ends with a full-body shot of Neo lying prostrate on the table. He has weeks worth of hair growth showing that time has passed. His ports stand out in stark contrast to the paleness of his skin.
The persistence of the ports on Neo’s body are important for three reasons.
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They are direct evidence of his ability to physically integrate with machines.
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They set Neo and the other members of the resistance apart.
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The ports prompt questions about queerness and surgery.
During the operation on Neo’s body, no attempt was made to rid Neo of the ports that line his arm and chest. They remain, differentiating him and the other members of the resistance as having escaped and found freedom outside of the oppressive regime of the Matrix program. While there are people who are born naturally in Zion (and therefore do not have any ports), there is no apparent hierarchy or difference of treatment between the people born in Zion or the humans freed from the Matrix. While in the context of freed humans versus humans in the Matrix, I assert that bodies of the freed humans, regardless if they have ports or are “100% pure old-fashioned homegrown humans” are queer, by the very nature that the exist outside and in contradiction to the hegemonic structure of the Matrix.
Normalizing surgeries refer to surgeries that make the genitalia of intersex individuals match society’s perception of what genitalia should look like. The patients are often underage and unable to give informed consent. The surgery is also often at the expense of sensation, which is what leads Morland to theorize different ways of conceiving of desire in the intersex body.
even if the body is cut in only a small area” (Morland 446). The surgeries Morland critiques in his piece are used to homogenize bodies to align with a normative standard. Surgery in The Matrix is used solely to ensure the continued survival and functionality of the body. It also ensures the continued ability to integrate with the “mainframe” (the process by which the resistance moves in and out of the Matrix). Morland’s scene depicts a possible loss of feeling and the chance of being cast outside of the queer theoretical lens because of the normalizing effect of surgery. In contrast, Neo’s surgery actively constructs him as something other, a deviance. It sets him apart from the other inhabitants still residing within the Matrix. It also ensures that he is able to survive, and feel, in both realms. However, this deviance is what allows him to survive outside of the Matrix, as well as meet and form relationships with the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar.
The Persistence of the Ports
In leaving the ports on Neo’s person, Neo aligns with and is claimed by the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar. In not only allowing the ports to remain, but consistently utilizing them to gain access to the Matrix, Neo’s body represents a site of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities…” (Haraway 154). He is able to inhabit the Matrix and the real world as he pleases, with no loss in his bodily functions. The ports act as physical evidence of Neo’s ability to transgress the boundaries of human/machine and physical/virtual. The ports set him apart as no longer fully existing in either of these binaries. He consistently flows between the two.
While not the focus of my offshoot concerning the Matrix, this consistent “flow” is especially evident in the third film in the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions (2003). In the final scene between Neo and Agent Smith, Neo most notably transgresses the boundaries between the real world and the Matrix. He is able to expend all his energy, thus completely eradicating all traces of Agent Smith from the Matrix and appeasing the machines on Earth.
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