A Re-cap: Manifesto for Cyborgs

I have come to the end of my theory class and have found myself most intrigued with my readings from Haraway’s excerpt in A Manfesto for Cyborgs (NATC). So I have decided to give a more thorough description of what I found.

“A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism” by Donna Haraway illustrates a new way of thinking towards how individuals and society interact with machines. She represents the idea that we have all become cyborgs, a crossbreed of a human and a machine. It moves from the human condition to a critique in politics and power relations. It lets feminists into the world of hybridization and the idea of crossing boundaries. She argues that people strive for an ordered world and in doing so; they unwillingly destroy the ordered principles. The traditional binary oppositions such as human/animal, organism/machine, man/woman, body/mind, hetero/homo, natural/unnatural, and so forth become blurred. She illustrates how humans are becoming more and more like cyborgs, because of pacemakers, cloning, or modified by genetic engineering. The dependency between living things and machines is constantly increasing.

 She states, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (2190). She then continues to discuss cyborg politics and the idea that when individuals realize their identities are culturally constructed, they can reconstruct them in a more proper way. As soon as they acknowledge that their identity has become fragmented, they no longer will be able to dominate others or become dominated themselves. The cyborg does not exist as nature or culture; it is a combination of both and even more. She breaks it down into three major boundaries, human/animal, organism/machine, and lastly, organic/inorganic. It makes way for new and visionary connections. Many films have been created in which the human/machine concept is depicted. These films show that both of these binaries can work together if they transgress boundaries and open the door for a new change.

Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial Theory
•Said, excerpt from Orientalism (NATC, 1986-2012)
•Spivak, excerpt from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (NATC, 2193-2208)
•Deleuze and Guattari, excerpt from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (NATC, 1598-1601)

Benedict Anderson writes in a section of Imagined Communities about Latin. How it was once used, became something for the elite, and is now a language to be read, not spoken, and is reserved for the educationally privileged. He says that “for the older Latin was not arcane
because of its subject matter or style, but simply because it was written at all, I.e. because of its status as text” (1918). What is culture supposed to mean anymore anyways? If culture is meant to evolve, what good does it do to simply trickle out the elite from the mainstream? Anderson also notes Martin Luther saying “where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal
religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century. In this titanic ‘battle for men’s minds’, Protestantism was always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin” (1918).

There is a defensiveness that comes with any progress, this is proven true. In summarization, change is not always welcome. In fact change is typically met with resistance (I assume you know
what’s coming next). There is a specific implication that culture, in fact, is dead. All that is left is recycling of ideas and the idea of something ‘new’ is dead. Culture is recycled. There will be nothing new. Possibly one of the most accessible pieces of evidence for this is fashion. Fashion is never anything new, it is recycled and marketed as something new. Of course there is 80’s revival, 90’s grunge revival, etc. Most recently, there was a 90’s rave culture and bohemian 70’s revival. And of course, these initial fashion statements were based off of something else, and so on. Fashion is proof there is no new culture, only regurgitation of what once was new.

An afterthought that should be noted:

"A single, definitive definition of postcolonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticized it as a concept embedded in identity politics. Postcolonial Theory - as epistemology, ethics, and politics - addresses matters of identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity, of how a colonized people's knowledge was used against them in service of the colonizer's interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, circulated repetitively and finally legitimated in service to certain imperial interests. At the same time, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonist's creative resistance to the colonizer and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects, which utilized a range of strategies, including anti-conquest narratives, to legitimize their dominance."

Ethnicity and Critical Race Theory

Ethnicityand Critical Race Theory

•DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (NATC, 977-87)
•Gates, “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times” (NATC, 2421-2432)

According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs:

“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT
identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

Within “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, Langston Hughes said of the racial struggle for black people that “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America- this urge within the race toward white-ness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” (1192). He identifies the struggle to succeed as being rooted as the struggle of being different. This implies that it is common thinking that the big hurdle is being different. He offers this anecdote: “One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once. “I want to be a poet- not a Negro poet”, meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” and I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself” (1192).

Of course being racially different from the majority of mainstream or successful poets will cause some anxiety, but I don’t agree with Hughes that saying that the racial mountain lies in this example. This exchange is rumored to be between Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, a poet
closely tied with the Harlem Renaissance. I feel that in the sentence “I want to be a poet- not a Negro poet” Cullen meant that he wanted to be defined by his work and not by his race. I will be the first to admit that Langston Hughes is a brilliant gifted writer and was blessed with a mind, I feel that the drive for Cullen was to be remembered for his poetry. For his words to transcend his
family, his hometown, and the blood that pumps through his veins. Cullen died young, living from 1903-1946 but is remembered for his work.

Building on Feminism: Gender Theory/Queer Theory

Buildingon Feminism: Gender Theory/Queer Theory
•Butler, excerpt from Gender Trouble (NATC, 2485-2502)
•Sedgwick, excerpts from Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet (NATC, 2432-45)

•Haraway, excerpt from A Manfesto for Cyborgs (NATC, 2266-99)

Can I get a quick definition?

“Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and Women's studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself. Heavily influenced by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into "natural" and "unnatural" behaviour with respect to homosexual behaviour, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories.”

So let's apply it to La Femme!

Femme and butch lesbian identities date back to the early 20th century in the US, but it wasn’t until the 1940s and the rise of lesbian bar culture that butch-femme culture grew far more visible. By the 1950’s, the butch-femme model was so influential that lesbians felt compelled to identify as either femme or butch in order to participate in mainstream lesbian culture (Levitt et al. 99). Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, butch-femme dynamics remained prominent in lesbian communities and came to define popular understandings of lesbian identities and relationships in the U.S. Thus, for the majority of this time, femme-ininity was defined almost solely in relation to its counterpart and supposed opposite, butch. Femme was (and for some, still is) considered to be a feminine lesbian identity and gender presentation marked by docility. According to Elizabeth Galewski in “Figuring the Feminist Femme,” “Where the butch came to be lauded as the ‘visible,’ ‘public,’ and hence ‘political’ face of same-sex desire, the femme was implicitly conflated with weakness, passivity, and even complicity in the face of oppression” (186). Thus, not only were femmes perceived to be butches’ weaker, less visible counterparts; they were seen as less queer, less of a threat to heteronormativity and patriarchy in the public sphere.

Femme identities, cultures, and politics are critical to understandings of queerness in historical and contemporary US contexts, and yet they are too often rendered invisible in queer communities and discourses on queerness. When queer femme-ininity and femmes are acknowledged or represented, many are marginalized, dismissed, and/or deemed less queer (or not queer at all) because of their seemingly “straight” gender presentations. Other representations of queer femmes are overly simplistic and ignore the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, and other aspects of identity impact our unique constructions of femme-ininity. Nevertheless, femme remains a powerful and meaningful identity category, gender presentation, politic, and community for many queer and transgendered people today.