All source material for this enabled text is culled from Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times by Jasbir K. Puar.
"the recasting of the cyborg as that optic—and the operative technology—in the production, disciplining, and maintenance of populations drives the analyses in this gestural text” (xiii).
Cyborgnationalism as a concept gestures toward a compulsory prostheticization of non-normative bodies. While people with disabilities have received increased representation in cultural productions (see Peter Dinklage, playing a successful children's author, and :19 in the Gatorade "Lock It Up!" commercial below), the overwhemingly-positivist ideology of cyborg theory frames people with disabilities who use prostheses (or "prosthetic appliances") as exceptions whose bodies function as sites for the formation of new modes of normativity.
"these fleeting invitations into nationalism indicate that the U.S. nation-state formations, historically reliant on ableist ideologies, are now accompanied by...dismodern ideologies, ideologies that replicate...somatic national ideals” (xxv).
“further, this brand of cyborgnationalism operates on a regulatory script not only of normative disability...but also of the...national norms that reinforce these embodied subjects” (2).
Cyborgnationalism posits the extension of bodily capability, and the de facto advocacy of prosthetic use reinforces normative standards of bodily ability and capacity, even as prosthetics suggest a surplus of ability, an exceptional productivity that will become a future normative standand. (For an example of prosthesis as surplus, consider Oscar Pistorius, a South African sprinter who is also a double-, lower-extremity amputee. Fast enough to be within range of Olympic qualification, Pistorius's participation in non-adaptive track and field contests was challenged leading up to the Beijing games in 2008 on the grounds that he gained unfair advantage due to his prosthetic "blades.")
"The cyborg-exception is the excellence that exceeds the parameters of proper subjecthood and, by doing so, redefines these parameters to then normativize and render invisible (yet transparent) its own excellence or singularity" (9).
Pistorius is both a limit-case of adaptive sport and a paradigm of progress, a cyborg-exception figured as transcendant even as his ability establishes new expectations for the human body.
“Cyborgnormativity can be read as a formation complicit with and invited into the biopolitical valorization, of life in its inhabitation and reproduction of heteronormative norms” (9).
Within cyborgnationalism, people with disabilities become responsible for the appropriate uses of prostheses, a 21st-century biopower in which care of the self relies upon the supplementation of the somatic. As such, people with disabilities practicing cyborgnationalism establish a normative model for the hybridity of body and machine that can be transported, appropriated, by the normatively bodied. Animatronic canaries in the digital coalmine.
“Furthermore, cyborg-exceptionalisms rely on the erasure of these very modalities in order to function; these elisions are, in effect, the ammunition with which the exception, necessary to guard the properties of life, becomes the norm, and the exceptional, the subjects upon whom this task is bestowed, becomes the normal” (11).
Imagined as a harmony, a frictionless re-figuring, the cyborg occupies the culturally clean space of pure potential. The cyborg posits limit as mere referent, erasing the material body as it supplements and extends it. As Tobin Siebers argues, the figure of the cyborg is always more than human, never mistaken for the subhuman as are many people with disabilities under the ideology of ability. By hastening the transformation to cyborg, by making people with disabilities the vanguard in posthuman cyborgnationalism, disabled bodies without prosthesis risks even greater abjection as the able-normative ideal encompasses greater and great competencies through mechanization.