IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 39

propaganda" concerning beliefs about war [11]. Similarly, Veloso and Bateman focus "on the multimodal meaning construction within Marvel's Civil War comics
series," as a discursive strategy that helped to legitimize
the U.S. Patriot Act in the frenzied response to 9/11 [19].
Mirrlees [20] argues that the Iron Man franchise promotes U.S. imperialism as an aspect of a globalized Hollywood. Many have addressed how fictional cyborg and
robotic characters manipulate cultural beliefs about real
technology [14], [21]-[23].

Exoskeleton Defined
The first exoskeleton to be popularized was the "Hardi-man," a joint venture of the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy,
and the General Electric Company [24]. Popular
Mechanics first mentioned it in August 1966 in a section called "News from the military" and playfully preceded the passage with the quip, "Holy Muscles!" [24].
The author, William R. Kreh writes, "The Navy is developing a unique exoskeleton suit called "Hardi-man"
which can be worn like an outer garment to augment a
man's ability to lift and move heavy objects" [24] (see
Figure 2).
We define an exoskeleton as a body-worn human
enhancement technology that takes the form of a suit,
made to heighten, surpass, or add physical and cognitive
abilities. An exoskeleton is usually a rigid external covering that encases the legs, arms, and torso. Mounted with
microprocessors, digital sensors, hydraulics, and other
components, it has the potential to augment the entire
body in terms of physical strength, added muscular
capabilities, speed (e.g., run faster, fly), or the heightened ability to communicate across digital connections
from within the suit. Other terms pertinent to exoskeletons are "wearable robotics," "soft robotics," or "exosuits," all of which describe technology that sheaths the
human body with materials of varying degrees of flexibility. Here, all of these inventions will be referred to as
"exoskeleton." As discussed later in this article, DARPAfunded university researchers and spin-off companies innovate various kinds of body-worn technologies to give
soldiers the advantage in combat [25]. Supersoldier posturing is very much a theme that runs across all of
the discourses.

Transhumanism
Transhumanism is most often discussed in relation to
Posthumanism. In philosophical and ethical studies,
transhumanism signifies a semantic middle ground
between the categorical species named human and the
scientifically or technologically evolved category known
as posthuman, a category that may include nonhumans.
Posthumansim as envisaged by N. Katherine Hayles in
her seminal 1999 work How We Became Posthuman
march 2017

∕

Figure 1. "Iron Man Tech" An Iron Man Exoskeleton from
the Marvel Movie Franchise (creative commons photo credit:
Harshlight on Flickr.com).

[6], concentrated on bodily materiality and its loss. She
saw posthumanism as promoting "fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality" [6], claiming
that human beings would ultimately forego their bodily
limitations without consideration of the consequences.
The complaint rested upon the privileging of information, code, and disembodied messages instead of an
embodied, contextualized, human subject. In later
writing, Hayles also critiqued "versions of transhumanism . . . [that] perform decontextualizing moves
that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new
millennium some of the most questionable aspects of
capitalist ideology" [7]. She later rounded out her ethics
of transhumanism by drawing on the work of many
media theorists including Marshall McLuhan and Bernard Stiegler naming the process of "Technogenesis,"
"the idea that humans and technics have co-evolved
together" [8], thereby minimizing the problematic scenario of treating the "human" as a privileged liberal
humanist category in the discussion of transhumanism.
Transhumanism has been defined by Hansell
and Grassie [4] who summarize it through a profile of

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017