Cyborgs

A cyborg manifesto Donna Haraway

What is a cyborg?

‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ – Donna Haraway A Cyborg Manifesto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urVXWUD8Q3Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQiwRrR-LeE&feature=PlayList&p=C925E7278B12CA06&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=7

DominationHaraway labels the postmodern technological configuration the ‘informatics of

domination’ • Representation Simulation• Bourgeois novel, realism Science fiction,postmodernism• Organism Biotic Component • Depth, integrity Surface, boundary• Heat Noise• Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription • Physiology Communications Engineering• Small group Subsystem• Perfection Optimization• Eugenics Population Control• Sex Genetic engineering • Labour Robotics• Mind Artificial intelligence• Second World War Star Wars• White Capitalis Patriarchy Informatics of Domination

Breaking down binaries

• Human/nonhuman

• Culture/nature

• Male/female

• Technology/biology

• Divine /man made

• Reality/ representation

• Subject/ object

Vs.

Cyborgs, sex and gender

• Cyborgs challenge gender binaries and support the idea that gender is socially acquired.

• "There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices"-Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto" (155).

• Gender as language, codes and signs. • Halberstam states ‘ gender is also not innate or

essential, but learned imitative behaviour that can be progammed’ and ‘feminity and masculinity are always mechanical and artificial’

• The cyborg transgresses gender sterotypes and is a liminal being with it its own subjectivity.

Cyborgs and Feminism

• Donna Haraway- Influential in feminist discourse• Ecofeminists versus technofeminists• Ecofeminists critique technology• Technofeminists argue technology is

empowering• Cyber-feminism • ‘The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and

reassembled, postodern collective and personal self. This is a self feminists must code.’ ( Haraway 163)

Cyborg- Online identities

• Heightened connection to machine• Online identities - Multi identity, partiality• The internet allows for the deconstruction of

binary genders• “The new identity is formed from the relationship

between the original identity and the internet. It is a cyborg identity, part machine, part human

-Ted Kaiser• The user as a cyborg

Bibliography

• Sofoulis, Zoe (2002) ‘Cyberquake: Haraway’s manifesto’ in Tofts, Darren, Annemarie Jonson and Allesio Cavallaro (2002) Prefiguring cyberculture: an intellectual history, Sydney: Power Publications, pp 84-103.

• Haraway, Donna (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Haraway, Donna J (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women. Reinvention of nature, New York: Routledge, pp 149-181.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto• http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/advant.html• http://www.egs.edu/faculty/haraway.html