Rhetoric and Technology – ENC 6421

Haraway, Donna J. (2004). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. In The Haraway Reader  (1-45). New York: Routledge.

In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism 1980s,” Donna Haraway argues that the emergence of cyborgs in human culture has merged the differences between man/woman God/man, mind/body and forced both people in general and scholars to reconsider what we mean by gender. Indeed, Cyborgs have forced us to reconsider what gender is. Her writing style is very abstract and poetic and juxtaposes various metaphors together, just as she claims humans have been combined with computers. Her claim is not that the 20th and 21st centuries have begun the tradition of the cyborg, but that it has taken on new importance with the emergence of new technology.

She writes that “by the late twentieth century. . . we are all chimeras” (8), and this shift means that humans behave in different ways.  These differences force us to reconsider male heterosexual dominance in two different ways: first, cyborgs are by definition “unnatural” and therefore the terminology we use to discuss them forces us to consider that our conceptions of humanity are arbitrary – or at least culturally constructed (20-21). By seeing how gender constructions are just that . . . constructions, we can provide a new viewpoint on gender and sexuality. Second, they force us to reconsider feminism, itself, Feminism should not try to replace one all-encompassing philosophy about humanity with another, but instead feminists should avoid an “essentialist” theory, even in opposition to more dominant ideologies. One should use cyborgs as a way of articulating resistence against the idea of compartmentalization itself. Cyborgs make us reconsider both individualism and social determinism. Instead, the concept of the monsterous – much as in the medieval period and before – can be used as a lens to talk about what is on the “borderlands” (10, 38). Cyborgs break down and resist the conceptions of the individual. Haraway ends her article by summarizing her two main positions, that the “production of a universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake” and that cyborg imagery can undermine the dualisms that Haraway feels are damaging to our society (and possibly even “child abuse”). Instead, we should use cyborg imagery to create different conceptions of what humanity is all about.