Cyborgs and Women

Haraway’s social-political article about cyborgs examines how biotechnology constructs our bodies in a male bias with innocence being violated.  Thus, Haraway creates a stir in many women who can be referred to as cyber feminists who seek alliance between machinery, new technology, and women.  She emphasizes that there is an optical illusion between science fiction and social reality.  People opposed to cyborgs, Haraway describes, aren’t as adaptable; cyborgs are at the purest form.  She continues that cyborgs are as difficult to sense materially as they are politically.  Haraway, who is a professor of the history of consciousness, says this invisibility is deadly cyborgs are about simulation.  The connection between human modern day realities and technology is so intimate that it is difficult to determine where we end as humans and begin as machines.

Cyborgs are oftentimes associated with fantasy, science fiction.  Yet, they have been around for about fifty years plus.  The first cyborg was a lab rat with a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals implanted into its body.  Currently, we are very prone to cyborgs.  My own father can be considered a cyborg with having two replaced knees.  Haraway considers cyborgs to be, “information machines.”

“Wired: You are Cyborg”, an article by Hari Kunzro, breaks down Haraway’s scholarly language into applicable terms.  Kunzro even admits that Haraway’s concepts are indeed complicated.  Everyday there are interactions between humans and machines.  I’m doing it now as I type on my laptop; watch a movie on the flat screen TV; and at my side, my iPhone which is constantly informing me about e-mail, texts, and social media.  I will even count the light in the room as a technology, because it is.  Inside our bodies are networks with man-made materials like pharmaceutical drugs or products from agribusiness.

Haraway describes the world of feminism as complex.  She is not a feminist who seeks to be in unity with Mother Nature.  Instead, she searches a different kind of world filled with technological advances.  A cyborg, a hybrid of animal and machine, throws away many beliefs about nature and culture.  That belief is that if something is natural, it is unable to be changed.  For women, we are supposed to be naturally the weaker sex.  The notion of cyborgs is in opposition to what is natural.  Instead, we are constructed beings.  Haraway notes that is it politically wrong to label recent movements that women have in politics as ‘radical feminism’, “Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.” 

What are Haraway’s main concerns with technology and feminism?  She believes that they are encoded in technology, but not in a rhetorical sense.  There is cohabitation between many forms of sciences and cultures as well as organisms and machines.  Haraway, although aware of the complexity of the matter at hand, believes this concept is anything but abstract.  Haraway concludes,

It 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.

                Though we are complicated organisms, we are not bound by this ‘natural’ identity of sex.  We are constructed to be any identity we choose.

Questions to Consider:

1.       What is your take on Haraway’s essay about having a fractured identity as a female cyborg?  Are cyborgs really created through a male bias?  Defend your stance.

2.       Haraway mentions many aspects: culture, politics, and gender. How do they interweave in technology?

3.       Give your own example of a cyborg and state your opinion on how Haraway’s notion of feminism is righted or wronged.