The Cyborg and Artificial Intelligence: Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto
Haraway, D. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp.149–182
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century was written by Donna Haraway who is both a biologist and a socialist-feminist theorist. Here she employs irony to critique dualist and essentialist classifications, especially the divide of culture-nature in the feminist movement: specifically of radical feminism and socialist feminism. She uses the postmodernist metaphor of the cyborg to do this. She defines the cyborg as a hybrid between machine and organism (Haraway,1991, pg 65). Furthermore, she does not only use the cyborg as a metaphor but also the chimaera; a mythical creature with multiple and disparate animal parts to elucidate her argument.
Haraway uses these metaphors to disagree with the border war that was created by Western individualisation and capitalism. This conflict on the border engenders a dichotomy between oneself and the other, resulting in the exclusion of women who do not conform to the pre-established gender roles of white, upper middle class, and heterosexuality. It is for this reason that she advocates for the necessity to meticulously scrutinise these boundaries. Hence, she calls for the feminist movement to be based on affinity over identity (Haraway,1991, pg73). She opts for affinity due to coalitions being based on kinship and choice, unlike identity, which is solely based on blood and individualisation.
Haraway wrote that the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world, to be precise one as per Western imagination. Due to the Western understanding of women being based on Biblical interpretations, the cyborg is a creature that would not recognize the Garden of Eden. It is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust (Haraway,1991). Here, she calls out the dualism of human and nature; how the constructs of what is natural and what is not is societal. By being a cyborg and returning to the binary construction, as we all are, we can create our own identities and constructions.
Haraway brings the cyborg corpus of women of colour to the forefront due to language politics pervading the struggles of women of colour (Haraway,1991). She highlights the importance of writing for all colonised groups, to be specific cyborg writing. She writes that cyborg writing is about the power to survive and to ‘seize the world of the tools that marked them as Other’ (Ibid). Likewise, she cites the example of Cherrie Moraga and how her chimeric identity subverts colonial narratives. She does this by bringing indigenous women like Malinche, who inspired Chicana feminism. She also cites women like Audre Lorde and Octavia E Butler, who have a chimeric identity, like Moraga.
Despite these women coming from different backgrounds, their chimeric identities as women of colour and lesbians influences their writing. Unlike socialist and radical feminism who call for the ignorance of social and political reality, Haraway cites Chela Sandoval in mentioning that liberation of women of colour comes from the breaking away of ‘false consciousness’ through opposing Western capitalist understandings of division.
She concludes her article by calling for the dualisms between the woman as a physical entity and a woman as a political agent to end. She instead calls for the construction of new and the destruction of old machines, identities, categories, relationship and space stories. Rather than being a goddess, she prefers to be a cyborg. She implies that she favours the assemblage of the techno-human, rather than being one of both human and nature.
This essay was for a module: Approaches to Theory which was convened by Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo from the School of Media, Languages and Culture
