Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto

Donna J. Haraway’s "A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway’s provocative proposal of envisioning the cyborg as a myth of political identity embodies the search for a code of displacement of "the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities" (CM, 175), and thus for the breakdown of the logic of phallogocentrism and of the unity of the Western idealized self.

Haraway defines the cyborg as "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (CM, 149). Her argument is introduced as "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism" (CM, 149). She claims blasphemy and irony as her vantage tools. Blasphemy invokes the seriousness of the stance she adopts, as well as her distancing from the moral majority without breaking with the idea of community and connectivity, and "irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true […]. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method" (CM, 149). Thus, she posits the embracing of difference and partiality as a different perspective on identity, while the "Manifesto" of the title evokes notions of political commitment and avant-garde activism, alongside with historical reverberations of Futurists’ acclamations to the new machine-age.

Haraway’s cyborg is a blending of both materiality and imagination, pleasure and responsibility, reality and the utopian dream of a world without gender and, maybe, without end. We are all hybrids of machine and organism. The cyborg is our ontology, a creature in a post-gender world with "no origin story in the...

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...and involvement of the female writers into the questioning and subversion of objective transparency. Finally, the prominence of the visuality and corporeality of/inside the Literary Annual openly challenges the masculine illusion of modesty.

Abbreviations

CM: "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century".

MW: Modest_Witness@Second Millennium.

Works cited

Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991.

---. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997

Hunt, Leigh. "Pocket-books and Keepsakes". The Keepsake. Ed. William Harrison Ainsworth. London: Hurst, Chance & Co., & Robert Jennings, 1828.