Cyborg Theory

For Kafer, she believes that how one understands disability, is the way we are going to imagine disability in the future. In this book Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Throughout her book she challenged the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been positioned in the service of compulsory of either able-bodiedness or able-mindedness. However, Kafer rejects the idea of disability seen as a “pre-determined” limit. She uses a lot of different theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability to better support her envisions that there is a new future for the crip. Kafer’s book goes against normalization and

One of the theorists is Donna Haraway and she focuses on the cyborg theory. “The cyborg theory rejects the notions of essentialism, proposing instead a chimeric, monstrous world of fusions between animal and machine.” In Feminist, Queer, Crip chapter 5 analyzes how disability figures into the feminist imagination of the cyborg theory, as described by Haraway, as “guid[ing] us to a more liveable place” ( Kafer 103). This chapter also brings disability studies to focus on feminist cyborg theory by engaging disability studies scholars and activists. Kafer asserts that “although feminist and critical race theories have taken Haraway and other early feminist cyborg theorists to task for how women of colour and people living in the global south are used to illustrate cyborg theory while racism and colonialism remain unexamined, such critical interventions have neglected to consider the implications for how disability is deployed in renderings of cyborgs.” This is considered a theoretical gap and Chapter 3 cross-examines the ways that “disability and disabled people are decontextualized, removed from the realm of the political, and presumed to play no active role in the category breakdowns that animate both the cyborg and the manifesto” (Kafer

The social action theory basically means taking steps to change the things that are wrong in our society and introducing new ideas and processes for doing things better in the future. This relates to Kafer’s book because Talcott helps explain why society labels disabled people as “sick” and in need of a cure. Now looking at it through a functionalist perspective, they categorize impairment and disability as the sick role. A lot of controversy and discrimination is brought along when disability is viewed as something that has to be fixed. However, Kafer states that the only way we can justify that problem of disability seen as something that has to be fixed; is by getting rid of the medical/individual model. The say get rid of this model because that’s where it all starts. The social model of disability says that disability is caused by the way society is organized, rather than by a person's impairment or difference. It looks at ways of removing barriers that restrict life choices for disabled