A Cyborg Manifesto

What a great essay! As with most of the reading assigned (or not) for this class, I didn't know what to expect when I read Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". I was astounded! I'm willing to bet that most guys might not be able to fully appreciate this, but it's rather empowering as a female to read feminist theory from a brilliant scholar and feminist like Donna Haraway. In titling her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" Haraway calls to attention parallel theories originating with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and "The Communist Manifesto" with socialist-feminism and the feminist identity in a patriarchal world. It is a call to action.

The "cyborg" represents a metaphor for the breach of boundaries between science, technology and the socialist-feminist; a breach between animal and machine where biology and technology are so entwined you cannot tell one from the other. Haraway's metaphor of the cyborg is "an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender..."(pg 2)

It is presupposed that women/females inherently or biologically have an instant connections to each other; that our identities have common ground. However, as Haraway points out, "There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices." (pg 6) The cyborg, being neither animal or machine, is a metaphor for the hi-tech cultural restructuring of society from an organic and biological society to one of a "polymorphous information system". To illustrate her point, she charts this transition from old "Western" dualism of ideologies to the new technological networks and calls it the "informatics of domination". I would love to reproduce that list in this entry but it's pretty long and needs to be separated into two columns to make the correlations between the two.

Cyborgs are the embodiment of our disembodied females selves; disassembled and reassembled animal and machine.

"The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth."

Social-feminism is the dichotomy of politics and feminism. It is the embodiment of the labor of women and the roles we assume in a male-dominated or patriarchal world. We must make ourselves like cyborgs. A hybrid of animal and machine; genderless, sexless, raceless beings staking claims and calling to action our political foundations. Haraway concludes that cyborg imagery "is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

http://wmst490.drkissling.com/spring2009/files/cyborg_manifesto.pdf