You Jung Kim: Imagining the Ideal through the Pregnant Male Cyborg

“In contrast to a beer belly, a pregnant belly stands out and shows itself out of pride and joy. I tried to design men’s clothing with functional elements from maternity clothing.”

Originally from Seoul, Kim studied at the Berlin University of the Arts where she started asking herself the questions that became the basis of her final collection: “What form and function should a cyborg have? Is there absolute body beauty?” The cyborg that Kim invented took the form of a human male, but she also created other characteristics for the three-dimensional character. Her fictional creation is a pansexual cyborg called Vinci who works as a banker and enjoys mountaineering, photography and space travel. “I came to the conclusion that the ideal cyborg image we need is a man that is pregnant,” the designer explains. “In contrast to a beer belly, a pregnant belly stands out and shows itself out of pride and joy. I tried to design men’s clothing with functional elements from maternity clothing.”

“We have come to realise how our bodies are dominated by technological advances and culture.”

Kim was influenced by ‘TechnoFeminism’, a book by sociologist Judy Wajcman which looks at the role that gender plays in technology. “Wajcman’s view that male-centred thinking was deeply embedded in our lives through science and technology aroused my interest and I started to ask why,” Kim explains. “The book deals with the relationship between technology and gender and the effects of science and technology on gender relations.” Another book that inspired the collection was ‘Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women’ by Anne Marie Balsamo. The book explores how the body in high-tech is as gendered as ever. Technology and the human body might at first appear to be opposites but, Kim says, “we have come to realise how our bodies are dominated by technological advances and culture.”

However, Kim did not only look to the potential future, but also took influences from the past, specifically the collage method adopted by Dadaism in the early 1920s. “Using the collage method, the Dadaists were able to mix people and machines or women and men in a way that could not be realised in reality. I wanted to create a new image of a cyborg using this montage method.”

Viewing design as a tool for problem solving is at the core of Kim’s approach. “After learning the concept of TechnoFeminism, I became aware of the problems in everyday life,” she says. “At that time, I also saw the movie ‘Ghost in the Shell’. The female and male characters in it had a distinctly unified, idealised body shape. It was a unified image of the body from a heterosexual perspective.”

The designer’s graduate collection subverted the notion of the unisex cyborg, making the cyborg highly gendered but in an unexpected way. Instead of a uniformly unsexed body, the pregnant man’s body takes centre stage, turning notions of sex and femininity upside down. Overall, the collection raises a lot of issues to do with gender and technology in today’s world, but Kim thinks the main goal it has achieved is that of “gently expressing dissatisfaction with the unbalanced gender role as a woman.” By positioning her male model in traditionally masculine situations – reading the newspaper, taking work calls, sweating after a workout – and adding a pregnancy bump, it highlights the incongruity that still exists between certain gender roles.

“We need to ask what kind of cyborgs are reflected in the current media? What kind of bodies do we really need?”

We have to keep examining the repercussions of these fixed gender roles and how they manifest in modern technology. The world of AI gives us the opportunity to create new ways of living that do not rely so heavily on preconceived ideas, and we are already seeing how patriarchal structures are being reimagined via technology. “Humans can no longer live in a technology-less ecosystem,” Kim explains. “We need to ask what kind of cyborgs are reflected in the current media? What kind of bodies do we really need? There are many social issues embedded within these questions, such as body beauty, gender discrimination, and gender identity.” Kim’s collection raises even more questions about how we interact with gender and technology today, but it’s this curiosity that inspires her to keep designing, creating and imagining.