In "A Cyborg Manifesto," first published in 1985, Donna Haraway* shows how contemporary biology and technoscience can be used to deconstruct the Cartesian binaries of human/animal, organism/machine, and physical/non-physical. Her goal is to problematize dualism and open up the possibility of multiple, unstable, and necessarily incomplete identities, thus refiguring ideas of gender. The object-to-think-with she uses to accomplish this is the cyborg:
The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead, cyborgs are about specific historical machines and people in interaction that often turns out to be painfully counterintuitive for the analyst of technoscience. (Modest_Witness 51)
Using this model, techno-science rejects closure, and instead becomes all about that which "is contestable and contested" (Haraway, "Postscript" 23)
The slipperiness of distinctions between biology and physics (cellular nuclei do mechanical work; computers "think") suggests that the body constructs and is constructed by technology, that all bodies are technological, and the techno-body, the cyborg, stands as a boundary object belonging to both organic/natural and technological/cultural realms.
When Haraway originally conceived of the cyborg, she imagined it as ungendered, capable of reproducing itself like an amoeba or a fern. In later discussions, she argued for it as a site of feminist practice, a location "in the belly of the monster, in a technostrategic discourse" (Penley and Ross 6). Locating this discourse in a matrix or web formed by strands of nature and culture further feminizes the space sematically.
The fluidity of both the matrix and the construction of the cyborg suggest multiple possibilities for the performance of the ambiguously gendered technological body. Judith Butler would approve.
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