WOMEN’S STUDIES

2017, VOL. 46, NO. 1, 60–75

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1252569

Representing Posthuman Embodiment: Considering

Disability and the Case of Aimee Mullins
Luna Dolezal
Trinity College, Dublin

Introduction
The term “posthuman” has been a part of academic parlance for some time
and is increasingly used in discussions that engage with how biotechnologies
can affect and modify embodied life, altering our understanding of what
counts as human in the present day. Central to the notion of the posthuman,
and the related posthumanist position1—both empirically and theoretically—
is the decentering of Man as the measure of all things. The posthuman
unsettles the unity and possessive individualism of the subject central to
the doctrine of liberal humanism. It undermines the conception of the
sovereign human as a singular, self-contained consciousness operating with
universal rationality and unquestioned dominion over the world. Instead, the
posthuman subject is conceived as radically relational—with technology, with
the environment and with other species—and, as a result, has fluid and
multiple identities (Braidotti, The Posthuman).
At the core of the posthuman, understood in this way, is a reconception of
the human body, which decenters the dualism prevalent in humanistic
thought. The posthuman body is not a discrete entity under complete control
of a self-governing rational subject. Instead, under the posthuman paradigm,
the body is necessarily relational, fluid, and multiple. Furthermore, central to
many conceptions of the posthuman body is the idea of enhancement and, to
this end, the intrinsic malleability of the body through engagement with
science and technology (Nayar 3). Contemporary representations and instan-
tiations of the posthuman body are often closely aligned to that which Donna
Haraway terms the “cyborg” body. A “hybrid of machine and organism,” the
cyborg is an entity unbound from essentialisms and dualisms, capable of
being re-crafted by biotechnologies (Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs” 65).
As a result, the posthuman entails an expanded notion of embodiment that

CONTACT Luna Dolezal luna.dolezal@tcd.ie Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, College Green,
Dublin 2, Ireland.
1
The terms posthuman and posthumanities are in fact not synonymous. Scholars in the posthumanities are
concerned with a critique of liberal humanism and an interest in animal studies, while the posthuman articulates
a technologically mediated subjectivity that extends the notion of what it means to be human. Although the
aims of the posthumanities may diverge from the posthuman position, both make central a critique the subject
of liberal humanism.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 61

disrupts the predominant binaries of humanism: mind-body, nature-culture,

human-animal, biology-technology, born-made.
The posthuman body is a common motif in our cultural imaginary. It is a
body of possibility and often augmented capability, modified or enhanced by
surgeries, genetics, prosthetics, implants, and technologies that blur the lines
between self and other, human and animal, man and machine. Posthuman
bodies are standard fare in much of mainstream visual culture. As Kim
Toffoletti, author of Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture
and the Posthuman Body, asserts, these bodies “function to destroy coherent
meaning about the human being as an originary form” (31–32). Consider the
human-machine, human-animal hybrids with enhanced physical and mental
capabilities that populate contemporary science fiction and fantasy (e.g., in
films such as Avatar and Star Trek, or represented by characters such as Iron
Man and Wolverine). Far from being limited to the realm of speculative film
and fiction, the posthuman body increasingly proliferates in reality through
the pioneering efforts of scientists, artists, and technological visionaries. As a
site of creativity and playfulness—interrogating the limits of what it means to
be human, the possibilities for the posthuman body are being materially
explored at the fringes of art, medicine, and technology. Increasingly emerging
in the mainstream, the posthuman is moving out of the realm of fiction and
into reality.
In this article, I will consider the figure of Aimee Mullins as a mainstream
exemplar of the posthuman body. Mullins is an American world-record-
breaking athlete, fashion model, inspirational speaker, and actress who was
born missing both her fibula bones, which resulted in her having both of her
legs amputated below the knee when she was a year old. Mullins is an icon of
disability pride and equality and a symbol of posthuman progress where
technology and biology have come together in order to enhance and extend
human capability. She famously owns over a dozen pairs of prosthetic legs that
she can change at will, transforming not only her physical appearance but also
her physical capability. An outspoken advocate of posthuman progress and
experimentation through her use of various prostheses, Mullins effectively
exemplifies the multiplicity and transgression that are purportedly central to
the posthuman project.
In what follows, I will first explore notions of posthuman embodiment and its
inherent malleability, examining the potential posthumanism holds for feminist
and disability politics. I will then turn to consider how Aimee Mullins is exemplary
of a posthuman position. Her playful use of prostheses and incorporation of
technology into her body effectively demonstrate how bio-technologically
mediated bodies are relational, blurring the lines between human-machine and
human-animal. In doing so, Mullins successfully disrupts and puts into question
the traditional category of the disabled Other, using the category of posthumanism
to reconfigure humanistic notions of normativity.
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I will then turn to examine a counter thread of representations of Mullins.

These images ostensibly advocate the imaginary of posthuman possibility with
respect to bodily diversity and non-conformity. However, as we shall see, in
effect, efface tangible bodily difference and promote the most narrow of body
ideals. Using the exemplary case of Aimee Mullins, I will ultimately argue that
the use of the posthuman in mainstream visual culture in fact reveals the cultural
anxieties that arise with respect to humanity’s continuing relationship with
technology. Parallel to medicine’s ongoing efforts to “restore the clean and
proper body” (Shildrick 270), the mainstream posthuman imaginary reveals a
certain moral economy about bodies, bodily integrity, and normative values.

The posthuman body: Disability and prosthesis

For some theorists in the 1990s—such as Katherine Hayles, author of How We
Become Posthuman—the posthuman condition entails surpassing the physical
body. The posthuman body transcends the limits of the flesh due to its engage-
ment with cybernetics and technologies that expand and extend consciousness.
As Hayles articulates, “the posthuman appears when computation rather than
possessive individualism is taken as the ground for being, a move that allows the
posthuman to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines” (34). Under
this conception of the posthuman, the normative categories of liberal humanism
—gender, race, disability, class—and the physical limitations of bodily existence
can be superseded to such an extent that the body is left behind, literally
transcended by its engagement with technology: the cyber punk subject lives
as a self-created avatar in a virtual realm.
However, at present, the posthuman condition is not adequately explained
by transcendence through technology (a species of dis-embodiment), but
rather by augmentations and transformations through engagements with
technology. It is not easy to come to an all-encompassing description of
the posthuman body; it is perhaps best understood through concepts that
Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, editors of the collection Posthuman
Bodies, offer, such as multiplicities, assemblages, and becomings. Posthuman
bodies are variable and infused with multiple possibilities. They rupture the
coherent and stable narratives of the liberal humanist subject through playful
experimentation with identity and form made possible through the recent
proliferation and accessibility of biotechnologies. Through plasticity and
body malleability, the posthuman position offers a further unsettling and
reconfiguration of the traditional subject of liberal humanism that was begun
by the theoretical projects of feminist theory, disability theory, critical race
theory, and queer theory.
Haraway, Braidotti, and other feminist thinkers of the 1990s theorized
posthuman figures of hybridity (such as cyborgs) in order to suggest their
transgressive potential for feminist politics—as these posthuman figures
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 63

disrupt the limiting binaries that had traditionally defined women and
femininity.2 In fact, Haraway’s renowned “Cyborg Manifesto” proposes a
reconception of the feminist subject liberated from essentializing binaries
and the traditional limits of the body. There are, as Braidotti writes in her
discussion of Haraway’s posthuman conceptions of the body, “enthralling
promises of possible re-embodiments” (“Posthuman, All Too Human” 204).
She explains: “Multiple, heterogenrous, uncivilized, they show the way to
multiple virtual possibilities … the classical ‘other than’ the human are thus
emancipated from the category of pejorative difference and shown forth in a
more positive light” (“Posthuman, All Too Human” 204). Rather than posi-
tioning technology and the posthuman as patriarchal structures, feminist
thinkers reconceived them as a means to redefine the social role of women.
Hence, there is a palpable sense of possibility, creativity, and plurality when
considering the posthuman malleability of the body. Gender and race, for
instance, are not fixed categories, and the traditionally limiting parameters for
“normal” embodiment are destabilized. Braidotti explains, “Sexualized, racia-
lized and naturalized differences, from being categorical boundary markers
under Humanism, have become unhinged … leading to the elaboration of
alternative modes of transversal subjectivity” (The Posthuman 98). She argues
that these alternative modes of subjectivity “extend not only beyond gender and
race, but also beyond the human” (The Posthuman 98). As a result, the potentials
for diversity and enhanced experience that posthumanism holds are compelling,
and for this reason it has captured the cultural imaginary. Hollywood blockbus-
ters and popular science fiction are replete with posthuman figures. These
figures include a variety of animal, alien, and transsexual hybrids with super-
human physical capacities (Graham). The posthuman body as it is imagined in
fiction and film, and increasingly made manifest in movements such as body
hacking, transhumanism, and posthuman performance art, is about the exciting
and seemingly limitless possibilities of enhanced experience and bodily diversity.
However, what is surprising in theoretical writing about the creative and
political potentials for posthumanism, as Stuart Murray notes in his book
Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Minds and Cultural Futures, is that
Braidotti, Haraway, and many other posthuman theorists fail to theorize the
connection between disability and posthuman subjectivity (Murray). This
lacuna is surprising, Murray argues, as disability is arguably the site where
the posthuman body has the most tangible traction. In fact, it seems obvious
that posthuman bodies already proliferate in the realm of what is categorized
as disability. These are bodies that are often intertwined with prostheses and
technology and demonstrate a wide range of physical and neurological
diversity. Furthermore, discussions about the posthuman center on issues

See for instance Haraway, “When We Have Never Been Human”; Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects; and Haraway, Simians,
2

Cyborgs, and Women.

64 L. DOLEZAL

such as body adaptation, prostheses, physical and neurological difference,

and technologies and societies evolving to incorporate and enable these
bodily and technological diversities—issues that have long been central to
disability and disability politics.
As a result, posthumanism is a potent site for disability politics, which is
centrally concerned with reconceptualizing questions regarding subjectivity,
bodily experience, intersubjectivity, and what counts as properly human
(Wolfe xxix). As a human body of a particular configuration and functionality
has traditionally been cast as normal and natural, the impaired or differently
abled body has often been seen as abnormal, deviant, and deficient.
Consequently, critiques of normalcy and normative bodies have been central
to disability politics and the disability rights movement (Garland-Thomson;
Davis, Enforcing Normalcy). Destabilizing the category of the normal body and
making salient the relational nature of human bodies with technologies, others,
and non-humans, the posthuman position reinforces the work that disability
studies has done to undermine classificatory regimes with respect to bodily
social orders and abilities (Nayar 102–08). Consequently, disability is a fertile
ground for theorizing the posthuman and experimenting with posthuman
possibilities in the realm of technology, enhancement, and re-embodiment.
In fact, the posthuman and disability are already closely aligned in speculative
film and fiction—genres in which an exploration and questioning of conven-
tional ideas of the body, gender, identity, and human limitations are a central
device. Posthuman fictional characters are often disabled figures, augmented
through prostheses, mechanical devices, or even the common accouterments of
disability—such as the wheelchair users in Bryan Singer’s X Men 2 (2003).
Beyond the realm of fiction and film, technology and advances in biomedical
treatment are concretely altering human experience and the human body in the
treatment of bodily dysfunction and disability. Consider Peter Houghton, a
modern day “cyborg” who was alive for several years despite the fact that his
heart had stopped beating (Moore 3–22). In fact, Houghton was kept alive by the
Jarvik 2000 rotary heart pump, a mechanical device powered by external bat-
teries that were housed in a bag he carried outside his body. Despite his limited
mobility and debilitating rheumatism, Peter, for the last years of his life, was a
cyborgian blend of man and machine. His prosthetic heart enabled a technolo-
gically extended life, and was cited frequently by futurists as an example of
posthuman progress (Moore 15).
Prostheses, understood broadly as “mechanical aids to enhance bodily
appearance or functionality” (Shildrick 271), are a potent site for the realiza-
tion of the posthuman imaginary. As Margrit Shildrick observes, the prosthesis
has significant posthuman potential; it is where “the infinite confusion of
boundaries between the human, animal and machine plays itself out most
tellingly” (271). In fact, the trope of the prosthesis has become commonplace in
philosophy, cultural theory, and posthuman discourse, utilized by scholars
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 65

who are concerned with the human body’s porous and malleable nature when
it comes to its interaction with animals, tools, and technology (Smith and
Morra). Surpassing its meaning in a medical context of an artificial limb or
implement that is attached to the body in order to restore or replace a bodily
lack due to illness, defect, accident or disability, prosthesis has come to signify
augmentation, enhancement, and a posthuman fascination with cyborg
bodies. The prosthesis is the blending of human, animal, and the technological
to triumphantly overcome the allegedly natural limitations of the human body.
Consider the well-known case of Oscar Pistorius who was barred in 2008 from
competing for a slot on the South African track and field Olympic team
because his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair advantage over the able bodied
runners. In fact, prosthetic technologies are swiftly becoming more sophisti-
cated and instantiating more than a restoration of the body, but concrete
possibilities for superhuman enhancement. As a result, prostheses are quickly
becoming the site where we see the potent political possibilities for the posthu-
man body to destabilize and transform the very category of disability.

Considering Aimee Mullins

I will turn now to consider the accomplished model, actress, athlete, and
prostheses user, Aimee Mullins, as exemplary of the potential that the posthu-
man holds for disability and embodiment. Through her use of prosthetic legs,
Mullins is positioned as a human-technology-animal hybrid figure whose
embodiment has had significant consequences in contemporary representations
and conceptions of disability and femininity. I will explore representations of
Mullins in art, film, and advertising to consider the potentials and contradictions
of her posthuman embodiment.
Born missing both her fibula bones—a condition called fibular hemimelia—
Aimee Mullins had both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was
a year old in order to enable mobility through the use of prosthetic limbs. Utilizing
a variety of prostheses, and surpassing the abilities of most of her able-bodied
peers, Mullins has successfully pursued a variety of careers and received many
accolades in the public realm. She has been an Olympian athlete who set world
records in the 1996 Paralympics and was appointed manager of the American
Paralympic team for the London 2012 Olympics. She has appeared on numerous
print and television ads, and has worked as a haute couture fashion model for
designers such as Alexander McQueen. In 1999, Mullins was voted one of People
Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People. She has made multiple appearances as a
motivational speaker at TED events, and, in 2011, she was named the global
ambassador for L’Oréal Paris (an honor shared recently by such mega-celebrities
as Jennifer Lopez and Julianne Moore). According to the L’Oréal website, Mullins
is among the “Most famous American women of the 20th Century” for her
contribution to the world of sport (L’Oréal, “Aimee Mullins”).
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Aimee Mullins’s career as a public figure is the result of her appearance on a

TED Talk in 1998 (“Changing My Legs”). At that time, Mullins was a college
senior at Georgetown University and had just competed in the 1996 Atlanta
Paralympics running on prototype carbon graphite Flex-Foot legs that were
designed by Van Phillips—a leading prosthetics designer. Priced at approxi-
mately $20,000 per leg (Sobchack 31), the Flex-Foot design is revolutionary
because—unlike all previous prosthetics—the legs collect kinetic energy from
the user’s steps, storing it as potential energy, allowing the wearer to jump and
run. Phillips dubbed these prostheses the “Cheetah Foot” because their C-shape
was modeled after the hind legs of a cheetah (Goldswasser 48). As the first para-
athlete to wear the Flex-Foot design—later catapulted into prominence by Oscar
Pistorius—Mullins broke world records in the 100 meter and 200 meter sprints
and the long jump. After her initial TED appearance, Mullins was approached by
I.D.: The International Design Magazine and was featured on its cover in the
cheetah legs. This led to a provocative photo shoot for the fashion magazine
Dazed and Confused, with the headline “Fashion-able?,” which launched her
career as a model and actress.
Mullins is an interesting figure when considering posthuman embodiment.
First, unlike other figures who might be seen to embody the posthuman, such
as Peter Houghton, or avant-garde posthuman performance artists such as
ORLAN or Stelarc who use surgery and biotechnology to change their bodies
as part of their art practice (Gomoli), Mullins is a decidedly mainstream
figure who is prominent in the high-visibility fields of sports, fashion, and
advertising. Second, unlike the painstaking surgeries and bodily interventions
often required to realize posthuman body malleability, Mullins’s body is
immediately malleable, drastically altered simply by varying her use of
prostheses. As a result, Mullins is an important figure when considering
the realization of posthuman embodiment, and she has utilized her non-
normative embodiment to unsettle fixed notions of the human body with
concrete consequences for mainstream conceptions of disability.
Initially, Mullins’s success as a model and actress was largely based on her
bodily difference and the creative possibilities her immediately malleable body
presented to fashion designers, artists, and photographers. Significantly, the
American artist Matthew Barney harnessed the unique creative potential in
Mullins’s embodiment and she figured prominently in the third film of his
highly acclaimed film opus The Cremaster Cycle. The body plays a central
symbolic role in the Cremaster films, named for the male cremaster muscle, the
primary function of which is to raise and lower the testes in order to regulate
temperature. Sexual development, bodily differentiation, biology, and creation
mythology play principal parts in the metaphoric universe and “self-enclosed
aesthetic system” of the films (Spector 25). As a result, the body (and an
engagement with posthuman malleability) is central in symbolizing, as curator
Nancy Spector notes, “the potential of sheer creative force” (Spector 25).
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 67

In the third film of the Cremaster cycle, Mullins appears as the ultimate
posthuman figure, morphing between animal, monster, cyborg, and fantasy
figures. In Cremaster 3, Mullins’s legs are “wearable sculpture” (Mullins,
“12 Pairs of Legs”), and she appears as a variety of personas with radically non-
normative embodiments, including: the character Oonagh, wife to the Irish giant
Fionn MacCumhail; the Entered Novitiate who morphs into a cheetah divinity;
an unidentified woman cutting potatoes with a device attached to the foot of her
leg that is molded out of earth. At the end of the film she appears as a bleeding,
blindfolded, and noosed Madonna figure astride a chariot tethered to five lambs.
She is wearing transparent legs that end in tentacles, which are in fact made out
of polyurethane, or bowling ball material (Smith 60). A striking image is her role
as the cheetah divinity—a reference to the posthuman athletic potential afforded
by her Cheetah Foot legs. In this role, Mullins appears as a figure that is half-
woman and half-cheetah with a movable tail and articulated paws at the end of
tapered furry cheetah legs. In this semi-human form, Mullins’s bodily malle-
ability makes explicit the cultural imaginary of the posthuman: destabilizing the
category of human, enhancing physical capability, and blurring the line between
human and animal embodiment.
Mullins, herself, is inspired by Barney’s vision in the Cremaster films. In a
TED Talk, she speaks of the importance for creativity, poetry, and “whimsy”
with respect to body malleability and posthuman experimentation. She
muses: “Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm
of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into
something that invites them to look … and maybe even understand”
(Mullins, “12 Pairs of Legs”). Inspired by the dominant cultural imaginary
of posthuman bodies in speculative fiction and film, Mullins is outspoken
about animals and superheroes serving as inspiration to create “super-abled”
bodies that move “away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only
aesthetic ideal” (Mullins, “12 Pairs of Legs”). She is explicit about the
potential creativity has for representations of disability and non-normative
human bodies.
Mullins herself embraces the potential that her use of prosthetics affords
her to play with conventions when it comes to bodily form. In the Portraits of
Aimee Mullins series by the well-known photographer Howard Schatz, we see
highly stylized images of Mullins—reminiscent of a fashion photo shoot—
utilizing her prosthetic legs in athleticized postures not usually available to
double-amputees (Schatz). As Maria Neicu points out in her discussion of
these photographs, “the prosthetic limb does not represent a need to hide or
replace the biological loss with a disguised normality.” On the contrary,
Neicu argues, “by refusing conformation to social expectation, it stands as
a symbol of a power to create whatever it is that the wearer wants to create in
that space” (51). Images such as these demonstrate how utilizing cutting-edge
technologies, under a posthuman paradigm, have the potential to liberate
68 L. DOLEZAL

Mullins’s radically non-normative body from the limiting categories—dis-

abled, Other, crippled—ordinarily assigned to double-amputees.
As Marquard Smith indicates, Mullins embodies “posthuman progress”:
“the ultimate victory of technology over deficiency” (58). In Schatz’s photo-
graphs, Mullins’s status as “disabled” is effectively destabilized. She subverts a
social condition: her “status as an amputee must be acknowledged and dis-
avowed simultaneously” (58). These representations of Mullins’s embodiment
concretely demonstrate the potential that the posthuman, technologically
mediated body has for disrupting limiting and essentializing humanistic cate-
gories, especially with respect to conceptions of “ability” and “disability.”

Aimee Mullins in the mainstream

Mullins is outspoken about the potential for exploring the creative potential
afforded by prostheses and body technologies that defy anthropomorphic
convention, especially for overturning conventional ideas about disability
and femininity. However, what is interesting when considering the case of
Aimee Mullins is the tension between transgression and conformity that is
produced in mainstream representations of her embodiment. While whole-
heartedly embracing the potential of posthuman embodiment in her work,
many representations of Mullins exploit her classical good looks to fetishize a
particular posthuman cyborgian body ideal. This is, of course, evident in
Schatz’s photo series in which Mullins’s athletic and attractive body—ful-
filling the hyper-normal expectations of a fashion spread or celebrity photo
shoot—is juxtaposed against her cyborg-alien-metallic prostheses. A recent
photo shoot for the Italian WIRED Magazine—with the headline “Evolution
in Progress”—further demonstrates this tendency, where we see a highly
sexualized cyborgian Mullins posed beside Hugh Herr (WIRED). Mullins is
in playful collusion with these sorts of representations: “I want to be a Bond
girl. … What if I had weapons in my legs? I could take one off and pull out
an Uzi! Legs Galore—that would be me!” (People 144).
In these images—which mostly appear in popular magazines, fashion spreads,
and advertisements—Mullins is usually sexualized as a hyper-attractive, able-
bodied woman “who just happens to be an amputee” (Smith 58). These highly
stylized and palatable images effectively subsume the posthuman, and its creative,
relational potential into the narrow individualistic and functional logic of main-
stream consumerism—not to mention playing to mainstream culture’s most
patriarchal and normalizing tendencies. Mullins is reduced to some sort of
“Cyborgian sex kitten” (Smith 58) in the service of a banal species of aspirational
advertising: utilizing beautiful women—albeit exoticized and cyborgian—as
vehicles to peddle biotechnologies, products, and services.
The television advertisement made by the British internet company
Freeserve epitomizes this strand of the representation of Mullins. It uses
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 69

her status as a hybrid, posthuman figure—technology-human-animal—to

disrupt conventional ideas about disability, while simultaneously exploiting
her status as an elite fashion model and athlete as a vector for aspirational
advertising. In this advertisement, screened in April 2000, Mullins appears as
a runway model who is preparing for an exclusive fashion show (“Catwalk”).
A young girl’s voice opens the ad, asking, “What do I like about Aimee?”—
immediately setting up a relationship of desirability with respect to Mullins
and her embodiment. A fast montage of shots of a fashion shoot, a catwalk,
and Mullins in elaborate costume and makeup sets up an atmosphere of
dynamic creativity and exoticism. Mullins appears on the catwalk in a variety
of legs, including the Cheetah Foot running legs—her real-life achievements,
modeling, and running, are made explicit. As such, it is not just Mullins’s
unique posthuman embodiment that serves as currency in the ad, but also
her real-life achievements.
The climax of the ad inter-splices images of a cheetah with images of
Mullins running down a fashion catwalk to a cheering and exuberant crowd
with her voice addressing the audience in disjointed phrases: “The cheetah
just stared, just stared …”; “You gotta run with the cheetahs and the ante-
lopes …”; “It’s a feeling of total accomplishment …” (“Catwalk”). The crux of
the ad is the implicit suggestion that Mullins’s posthuman embodiment,
animal, technology, and human intertwined, is highly desirable. Implicitly,
it puts forth the perhaps shocking suggestion that the little girl would want to
be Aimee, legless and all (Karpin and Mykitiuk 425). The ad also suggests
that the freedom to radically transform the body, using costume, makeup,
prostheses, technology and fashion, brings the feeling, as she says, of “total
accomplishment.” The implied freedom of her legs and the freedom of
Mullins’s speed in the ad, all set within the highly desirable and exclusive
world of couture fashion, fade to the closing words “Be Free,” which become
“Be Freeserve” on the screen (Kuppers).
Freedom is a common trope when considering justifications for mainstream
body malleability achieved through cosmetic surgeries, fashion, and cosmetics in
the present day. The dominant cultural logic that is infused with the ideologies of
neoliberalism—freedom, private property, capital, commodification—dictates
that women are “free” to express themselves through their bodies and consumer
“choices.” The logic reads something like: one has the freedom to modify the
body—commodified as one’s private property—in order to augment one’s social
or body capital. Considering how radically non-normative Mullins’s embodi-
ment is, and, further, how outspoken she is about the posthuman possibilities for
defying limiting body ideals and anthropomorphic conventions, it is dissonant
to see representations of Mullins utilized to promote this sort of discourse.
Wearing what she calls her “pretty legs” (Goldswasser 49), Mullins’s bodily
difference becomes imperceptible. Speaking of her pretty legs, she says,
“They’re absolutely gorgeous. Very long, delicate, slim legs. Like a Barbie’s.
70 L. DOLEZAL

Literally, that’s exactly how it is” (Goldswasser 49). She says: “I love that I can
go anywhere and pick out what I want—the shoes I want, the skirts I
want. … It’s like a Barbie foot under this. … It’s just stuck in this position,
so I have to wear a two-inch heel. There’re [sic] veins on the feet, and then
my heel is pink, and my Achilles’ tendon—that moves a little bit” (Mullins,
“Changing My Legs”). These legs make her 5’8’’ and require that she wear
two-inch heels. She has five pairs of lifelike “pretty legs”—all built with
different heel heights complete with hair follicles and freckles (O’Brien).
Prosthetist Bob Watts, who designed and fabricated these legs, comments:
“These are sort of my fantasy legs … when you’re making two legs … there’s
twice as much freedom, because there’s also no reason why you can’t make
them absolutely identical and ideal. Aimee offered me an opportunity to
make the perfect female leg” (Goldswasser 49).
The objectifying and normalizing implications of Mullins’s “pretty legs”
are apparent. Although Mullins has appeared in many fashion shoots that
subvert the imperatives of mainstream normalized bodily ideals, it is sug-
gested that her “true” identity is expressed most fully when she wears her
Barbie-esque pretty legs. In an interview about her recent appointment as
Global Ambassador for L’Oréal Paris we read, “[Aimee Mullins’s] ambition
has been to shed the disabled tag. ‘And now it has happened,’ she says. ‘With
L’Oréal, I get to be Aimee Mullins, model. No qualifier. And that means
everything to me” (O’Brien). Notably, in the promotional material for
L’Oréal, Mullins appears in her pretty legs and her status as a double
amputee is imperceptible. It is arguable that Mullins effectively shed the
“disabled” tag in the avant-garde and cyborg-esque images discussed above
and through her real-life accomplishments in the realms of sports and
fashion. In fact, she is indubitably more physically capable and accomplished
than the majority of her “able” bodied peers. However, it seems that Mullins
finds some liberatory potential in effacing her bodily difference through the
use of her “pretty legs”: she asserts, “the doll ideal is liberating rather than
limiting” (Goldswasser 49).
It is no coincidence that Mullins feels most “herself” in the legs that afford
her the most mainstream cultural currency. Here we see the common phe-
nomenon of women’s “creative” choices about individual bodily expression
falling into the narrow normalized ideals that they perceive will best augment
their “body capital” (Bourdieu 204). For instance, in the image used in People
magazine’s feature of Mullins in 1999 as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People of
that year, her use of prosthetics is undetectable. In this image, she wears her
pretty legs and poses in a chiffon party dress, seated and reaching over her legs
in a gesture which, as Petra Kuppers notes, is “kinesthetically familiar to a
person with flesh legs” (Kuppers). This seemingly “natural” gesture of holding
or stroking her legs is depicted repeatedly in images and videos of Mullins
where her physical difference is effaced and a normalized embodied ideal is
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 71

represented in its place, such as the opening image of Mullins used for the
L’Oréal television advertisement “Find Your True Match with Aimee Mullins.”
This advertisement, which is ostensibly about diversity—it features a range
of skin tones and stars a “disabled” model—demonstrates the potential for
the pernicious appropriation of posthuman body malleability to promote
normalized body ideals. While Mullins “passes” as able-bodied in the open-
ing image of the advertisement, there is a fleeting reference to her status as a
double amputee: a brief montage of Mullins running on the metallic spring-
like prosthetic legs she uses for sports. This reference to Mullins’s posthuman
potential serves two purposes: first, to reassure us that L’Oréal’s concern for
women’s bodies extends beyond the superficial dictates of beauty and cos-
metics; and, second, to remind us of Mullins’s career as an athlete, implicitly
invoking discourses of overcoming adversity, empowerment, and freedom.
The advertisement can be read as a sinister parody of passing, which as
Sander Gilman notes is a type of “silent validation” where one endeavors to
be “accepted without comment” (Gilman 26, emphasis in original). In this
advertisement, Mullins “passes” as able-bodied, and the skin tone of her
prosthetic legs “passes” as real. At the same time, the thirty-three tones in
the True Match range, suggesting a variety of racial skin colors, reference the
plight of raced bodies using cosmetics to try and pass as white. Implicitly
connecting racial difference with disability, the advertisement promotes
bodily diversity, while simultaneously expunging its material traces.
Mullins’s function in the L’Oréal promotion—beyond bringing socially con-
scious kudos to a multinational cosmetics company—seems to be to promote
the idea that body malleability is useful in that it can be a means to efface
bodily difference and help one triumphantly achieve normalized body ideals.
The ostensible diversity that L’Oréal and the True Match advertisement
invoke is in fact very limited. The images of Mullins seem to tell us that being
differently embodied can be celebrated, just as long as you can do all things
that normal—read: white, young, beautiful, athletic—bodies can do, or in
fact, as in the case of Mullins, do them even better. Illustrating what Robert
McRuer’s terms the “compulsory able-bodiness” (McRuer 2) of contempor-
ary neoliberalism, the representation of Mullins in this advertisement
occludes the more mundane realities and prejudices that people struggling
with limb-loss actually face. Diversity, in this advertisement, is not about real
bodily differences, but is, as Lennard Davis asserts in his critique of the
contemporary “discourse of diversity,” “equated with sameness” (Davis,
“Why Is Disability Missing”). As Davis notes, the abnormal and the extre-
mely marginal are excluded from diversity, and only those bodily differences
that can be realized or modified through consumer choices are palatable in
the discourse on diversity.
Hence, as the case of Aimee Mullins demonstrates, the potential for true
transgressive bodily diversity that the posthuman body holds is being
72 L. DOLEZAL

appropriated by mainstream consumer culture to promote the plastic body—

one that is enhanced or modified by expensive biotechnologies—as the new
normalized ideal. Mullins effectively embodies these tensions that arise in
posthumanism when it is subsumed into the dominant ideology, namely the
neoliberal capitalist system—the very system where posthuman fantasies can
materialize. As Braidotti comments:
Not surprisingly, this non-profit, experimental approach to different practices of
subjectivity is not exactly the spirit of contemporary capitalism. Under the cover of
individualism, fuelled by a quantitative range of consumer choices, that system
effectively promotes uniformity and conformism to the dominant ideology. The
perversity of advanced capitalism, and its undeniable success, consists in reattaching
this potential for experimentation with new subject formations back to an overinflated
notion of possessive individualism tied to the profit principle. (The Posthuman 61)

Images of Mullins as a posthuman hybrid figure are palatable in the main-

stream because she already conforms to the uniformity of the dominant
ideology: she is beautiful and successful; she is an athlete and a model. In
the case of Aimee Mullins, we see the tendency to use the posthuman body
not as a means to overcome limiting and essentializing bodily categories, but
instead to promote heightened levels of normalized body ideals—a set of
ideals that can only be achieved through biotechnological interventions.

Conclusion
In this article, I have traced representations of Mullins’s posthuman embodi-
ment from the avant-garde fringe to the mainstream high-profile worlds of
fashion, sports, and advertising. By examining representations of Mullins, it is
evident that there has been a tangible shift in how disability and people with
disabilities are represented through the use of the posthuman imaginary. In fact,
until very recently, representations of disabled individuals played on limiting
and negative stereotypes (Nayar 105). This is made manifest in fictional figures
where the in-complete human body—the “cripple” or prostheses user—is cast as
morally or socially deficient. Nayar, in his discussion of the objectification of
disability in popular culture, lists several examples of disabled villains with
prostheses who are featured in films such as Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon
(1973), James Bond films such as Goldfinger (1964), and the Harrison Ford
film The Fugitive (1993). This type-casting of the disabled malefactor suggests
that “the individual’s predilection for evil acts is somehow connected to his
deformity or disability” (Nayar 104). Ideas connecting disability to deficiency,
personal inadequacy, or moral failing are reinforced by such representations.
What the posthuman offers disability politics is a tangible shift in the
representation, materialization, and, hence, conception of disability and non-
normative modes of human embodiment. As Schatz’s photographs of
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 73

Mullins demonstrate, figures such as Aimee Mullins have real potential to

dismantle entrenched cultural prejudices about disability, impairment, and
the non-normative Other. As a mainstream figure who blurs the line between
fantasy and real life, Mullins feeds the cultural imaginary of the posthuman
cyborg body, while at the same time, completely transforming the landscape
of mainstream representations of disability. Through her imaginative and
skillful use of prostheses, Mullins demonstrates the enabling and empowering
potential for body malleability and prostheses in terms of disability politics. A
far cry from the malignant villain figures in the films and fiction cited by
Nayar, Mullins is a classic all-American girl who embodies health, wholeness,
success, and goodwill.
However, tracing and interrogating the trajectory of representations of
Mullins’s posthuman embodiment from the avant-garde to the mainstream
draws out, on one level, “the implicit desires, anxieties and interests” with
respect to humanity’s “relationship with its tools and technologies” (Graham
1). The palpable sense of possibility that technology holds in terms of
enhancing human embodied experience is made manifest in images of
Mullins where we see the triumphant use of technology to augment her
capabilities. However, this sense of possibility driving the cultural imaginary
of the posthuman is underpinned by deeper anxieties and desires regarding
the human body. This is the long-standing cultural imperative to “restore the
clean and proper body” (Shildrick 270) that underscores developments in
science, medicine, and technology. While the posthuman body demonstrates
the potential for disability to destabilize the categories usually assigned to it,
at the same time we see the possibility of diversity becoming effaced alto-
gether. Despite the fact that “nonpathological marginal identities are more
visible and even at times spectacular” in the present day, what we find is that,
as McRuer argues, able-bodiness “still largely masquerades as a nonidentity,
as the natural order of things” (2, 1). As a result, under this “natural order,”
the posthuman eschews its potential to advance disability politics and
becomes another means to peddle and promote the normal body or, in
fact, the hyper-normal body: an enhanced body that can perform even better
than its “normal” counterparts.
Hence, in the trajectory of representations of Mullins’s posthuman embo-
diment, we see the common phenomenon of the mainstream cultural
mechanism generating fringe activities—which often serve as a form of social
critique—and then absorbing and appropriating those activities into the
dominant social order. The playful posthuman images of Mullins early in
her career, which undermined and put into question the notion of the
normal body, have more recently become a means to promote an even
more heightened sense of the normal: one that is only achieved through
plastic intervention. The figure of the cheetah, repeatedly invoked in repre-
sentations of Mullins, embodies this contradiction. On the one hand, the
74 L. DOLEZAL

cheetah represents the posthuman and the potentials for a relational, multiple
subjectivity. On the other hand, the cheetah is symbolic of the possessive and
triumphant individualism of the humanist subject: she is a lone figure who is
ruthless, efficient, fast, and solitary.
As a consideration of the various representations of Aimee Mullins
demonstrates, the transgressive potential of the posthuman is diffused as it is
appropriated into the mainstream. Mullins’s malleable posthuman body becomes
just another means to promote the body malleability enabled by fashion,
cosmetics, and aesthetic surgeries as her use of prostheses is figured as some
sort of fashion choice. As a result, the malleable body is not a site liberatory
posthuman potential, as imagined by the transgressive feminist politics of the
1990s or disability politics of the present day, but instead becomes merely another
means to promote the possessive individualism of the humanist subject and the
most banal patriarchal tendencies of mainstream consumerism.

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