A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway.
What I found really confounding about Haraway's piece was the provision of a different strategy to navigate feminist discourse with cyborg as germane metaphor in a posthumanist argument for the way of overcoming the dissidence and plurality within the feminist cause.
A cyborg is a "cybernetic organism", a 'hybrid of a machine' that is part of 'social reality' and fictionalised encryption (the sci-fi imagination). Adapting it from the military and apocalyptic matrix where it is the masculine illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism Haraway instead identifies three ‘leaks’ which provide grounding for her envisioning of cyborg as metaphor:
i) the hybrid of animal and machine, stretching back to evolutionary origins where our descent was mapped back to primates. It also draws on a swelling animal rights movement and argument for sentience of animals ii) organism and machine; the machine looks so animated and lively whilst we are inert and stationery, iii) the physical and non-physical. Technology is akin to burst of sunshine - material, yes, but it also possesses electromagnetic powers. Physical and non-physical have blurred, the non-physical can still harness an energy. Cyborgs are invisible and therefore harder to conceptualise.
The cyborg is an embodiment of a unique coupling of intimacy and power that posited 'outside of the history of sexuality'. Take the cyborg in the Garden of Eden, where woman is seen as a naked body, instead; "it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” There no genesis story, gender or end to the world. A Post-Modern, the cyborg is in a constant state of disassembling and reassembling; it has a collective and a personal self. Haraway describes this as something that feminists 'need to code' and take forward in their practice.
The cyborg is then de-centred being, either possessing none of the corporeal traits (age, race, ability), that have come to mire the feminist agenda; or mimicking them in a type of theatre. With "the international women's movement having constructed a 'women's experience'", the cyborg can instead be a free agent and can create its own conditions for existence; it is mythic.
For the complications of organic reproduction are uncoupled from the XX/XY chromosome configuration, eschewing 'heteromate constructs', the hormones, menstruation, and other viscera associated with the reproductive female. This also includes others that are non-binary, gender fluid and those that cannot procreate or choose not to. Furthermore it calls into question what even constitutes your body. Injury or defect can mean replacing part of your body with a prosthesis, however is it still your body? The salamander which can regenerate after injury is parsed as an anthropormorphic example of this.
As not everything is a binary there is instead overlap and intersection, the cyborg can confidently skip any identification of nature in the western sense; it can self-repair, and assume a final composition within a grid controlled, hyper-tech reality.
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