The role of technology in cyborg feminism

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7 word format

document in English

social sciences

presentation

published 03/07/2008

review : Completed

level : Advanced

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Summary

Donna Haraway, in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” casts the role of ‘technology’ in two opposing lights: on the one hand, technology is seen as something women should (indeed must) embrace as a motivator for political and social progress; on the other hand, technology is seen as another method of control, a way to dominate women in various “idealized spaces”. Technology functions to mediate “the impact of social relations” within “the Home”, ‘the Market’, “the Paid Work Place”, “the State”, and “the School”. At the center of this contradictory significance of technology as both (1) ‘a catalyst for social and political progress’ and (2) ‘a method of control’ is the image of the cyborg: a being that embraces (as opposed to dissolves) the contradictions necessary to its character. The point is for women to start thinking of themselves as cybernetic in the sense that cybernetic organisms are differentially constructed out of mutually exclusive (i.e. fractured) identities.

The cyborg opposes traditional patriarchal dualisms.
No qualitative difference between human and animal.
Ontological dualism between physical and non-physical is no longer viable.
Haraway's analysis of the relevant conditions of possibility.
Haraway's critical theory.
Haraway's critique of essentialism in socialist and radical feminisms.
1. Socialist feminism.
2. Radical feminism.
Revising social relations in terms of science and technology.