Although connections between JacksonJackson's creation of Patchwork Girl and Haraway's theories on Simians, Cyborgs and Women are rather obvious, the hypertext is also relevant to another piece of material in the course -- Bladerunner. At various points in Patchwork Girl does the narrator focus on her own mortality as a cyborg and the concept of the real versus the simulated. The Patchwork Girl, assembled of various odds and ends, falls into the latter of the two categories.
As if she were articulating the sentiments of the cyborg in love with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Shelley, as Patchwork Girl, laments that "like Pinocchio, my most conservative part wanted to be real." In the director's cut of Blade Runner, the fact that the female cyborg is destined to expire, dooms her relationship with the Blade Runner. Only in the original cut of the movie does Patchwork Girl's wish come true for the female cyborg, as it is revealed at the end that she actually will live the duration of a normal human life.
The portion of Patchwork Girl entitled "I am" also airs possible grievances of the cyborgs of Blade Runner. The female involved with the Blade Runner could easily have said "I belong nowhere" in reference to her suspended status between the real and the unreal, and her hesitant commitment to Ford's character could be explained by Patchwork Girl's assertion that for cyborgs, "belonging has generally meant 'belonging to.'" For the replicants of Blade Runner, "belonging to" meant being the property of the Terrell corporation.
There are other writings from Shelley's storyspace web that pertain to the movie. In a window of the web entitled "Birth," Patchwork Girl speaks as if she were one of the replicants running loose through Los Angeles in 2019: "I must leapfrog out of the middle of my several births to the day I parted for the last time with the author of my being, and set out to write my own destiny." This remark could easily have come from the mouths of the cyborgs played by Rutger Hauer or Daryl Hannah as they dispose of their "author", the head of the Terrell corporation, before setting out to destroy Ford's Blade Runner.