In 1985, Donna Haraway published a seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. While it was greatly intended to discuss like a metaphorical disclosure, many futurists and feminists were inspired by its more technoprogressive and literal interpretation of her message. This essay became a major influence on the society’s conception of postgenderist theory, and inspired many other articles like “Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary” and “Overcoming Gender” and "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary" (sentientdevelopments, 2010).
In her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Haraway issued feminists a challenge to start engaging in politics beyond essentialism and naturalism. Haraway implemented the concept of this cyborg to offer political strategy for disparate interests of socialism and feminism, as she wrote we all are theorized, chimeras and fabricated hybrids of organism and machine; to simplifying this means we are cyborgs. “A Cyborg Manifesto” might also be seen from an alternate angle and might be interpreted as an ecofeminism critique. She attempted to break away from Christian origin myths such as Genesis and Oedipal narratives in this essay, as she wrote
Cyborgs do not dream about community model of having an organic family, here without oedipal project. A Cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden as they are not made from mud and they can’t dream of turning to dust. She also argued about the issue of eroding boundary between humans and machines, particularly integrating machines and women that liberation can be found from the patriarchal dualism of past.
Section I: The idea is that humans are cyborgs and we have mutations in technology, media and social organizations. We all become cyborgs as it is offered and developed like “an ironic political myth” urgent due to power other effecting myths. This ironic faith is her blasphemy “the image of the cyborg” (Haraway, 149). This myth developed around the boundary between social reality and s/f- where these two fade into each other and there is distinction between these two which appears as “optical illusion”. Also she has mentioned that Cyborgs are resolutely committed to irony, perversity, intimacy and partiality.
Section II: In the programmatic rejection about human heroic myths of End and Origin. Haraway provides a general schema about the heroic masculine narrative as it passes through
separation, original innocence, the tragedy of autonomy, individuation, alienation, war, the birth of the self and falling into writing and tempering of imaginary respite. She states on the plot that women have weaker individualities, less selfhood, more fusion to the mother, to oral much less at stake than their masculine counterparts.
Section III: This section discusses the three distinctions and there breakdown: Physical/Non-physical: Here the essay states that our best machines clean and light and are made of sunlight as they nothing more than signals.
Human/Animal: Here the essay states the animal rights movements are recognition of connections between culture and nature.
Human-Animal/Machine: Here the essay states in the late 20th century machines have made the difference between mind and body, natural and artificial and externally designed and self-developing thoroughly ambiguous.
Section IV: Breaking down of these distinctions made the traditional conceptions of identity unsustainable. Example: woman cannot be generalized, named, totalized around set of features as she is differentially fractured (White/ colored; Western/non-Western; Lesbian/ straight/bi-sexual/transsexual; rich/ poor; ). This cannot be wished away as feminists should give up their dream of naivety, originality, purity and innocence.
Section V: The domination informatics has developed to point to a completely new social set of practices. This system can be seen as part of the dystopic control regime and can be also seen as utopian and liberating. In case the self becomes a cyborg, I/it can practice new sort of politics where cyborg is a resembled and disassembled, postmodern personal and collective self.
Coding is required for controlling the cybernetics system as biology and communication sciences are constructed with a common move by translating the world into form of coding, searching for common language for which resistance of instrumental control vanishes and the heterogeneity can be submitted for disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange.
Section VI: Work gets restructured as ‘home work’ in which all society places gets changed and these social development means that feminists need to give up their political metaphysical grounding in aspects of female identities such as mothering.
Section VII: These Cyborg myths has in itself to take us beyond dualism which has been explained about what is human and what is non-human in the Western Tradition
Conclusion
After almost 3 decades of its emergence, “A Cyborg Manifesto” is seen as the inspiration behind emergence of 'cyberfeminism' and 'cyborgology', subdisciplines which is made from the culture critics who used postmodernist questions and cyborg metaphor. Haraway in her essay explored the woman-machine interface. She also mentioned that it also brought the transhumanists into discussion, by integrating and re-interpreting ideas of Haraway, which resulted in emergence of postgenderist theory- suggesting that both males and females need to get liberated from constraints of gender with the advanced technology applications.
Works Cited
Haraway, D. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. Print.
Dvorsky, G. “25 years later: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"”. http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2010/10/25-years-later-donna-haraways-cyborg.html. Sentientdevelopments.com. Oct 17 2010. Web. 7 Jan 2014
