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.