The Cyborg Manifesto

901 Words4 Pages
The Cyborg Manifesto How does Haraway’s image of the cyborg relate to traditional notions of binaries such as male/female and nature/culture? Reference at least one other theorist in your answer. Introduction First published in the socialist review in 1985 Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century is one of, if not the, seminal text of post-modern feminism and has also been very influential in terms of literary theory. In an introduction to The Haraway Reader (2004) she describes the manifesto as a desperate effort in the early Reagan years to “hold together impossible things that all seemed true and necessary simultaneously”. The manifesto is both a call to action that demonstrates political intent and a critique of essentialist feminisms and identity theory. Haraway has a great hope in the transformative power of language and myth and describes her image of the cyborg as both a rhetorical strategy and a political, in opposition to both the traditional white male patriarchy and what she terms the new “Informatics of Domination”. The former being characterised by long established dualities such as male/female, human /animal and human/machine. Haraway’s manifesto is over 14,000 words excluding notes, therefore in the interest of brevity, the essay will primarily be referring to sections one, two, three, and six of her manifesto. Paragraph 1 – Irony and Blasphemy In the first section of the her manifesto entitled “An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit”, Haraway sets out her goal to create her self described ironic and blasphemous myth of the cyborg. She hopes her myth will be both faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism but also blasphemous. She notes ‘blasphemy is not apostasy’, as at times it can be more faithful than unthinking worship. Irony, she
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