Cyborg feminism
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| Part of the series on Feminism |
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Subtypes Topics Waves of American Feminism Lists |
Cyborg feminism is a sub-movement of feminism that uses the notion of a cyborg, a machine-organism hybrid, to explore feminism. It is often used as a metaphor for female identity and feminist thought or as a thought-experiment (eg. to investigate what happens to gender in a dehumanizing body).
In the essay Reading Cyborgs, Writing Feminism (1988), Anne Balsamo uses the cyborg as a metaphor for the female body and identity.
Donna Haraway, in her well-known and often-cited essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century which is part of her book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. Simply put, explore personal affinity not categorical identity. The Cyborg Manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism.
The idea of the cyborg deconstructs binaries of control and lack of control over the body, object and subject, nature and culture, in ways that are useful in postmodern feminist thought. Haraway uses the metaphor of cyborg identity to expose ways that things considered natural, like human bodies, are not, but are constructed by our ideas about them. This has particular relevance to feminism, since women are often discussed or treated in ways that reduce them to bodies. Balsamo and Haraway's ideas are also an important component of critiques of Essentialist Feminism and Essentialism, as they subvert the idea of naturalness and of artificiality; the cyborg is a hybrid being.
An excellent explanation of The Cyborg Manifesto can be found on Stumptuous.com by Krista Scott:
| Haraway feels that the cyborg myth has the potential for radical political action as it frees feminists from a desperate search for similarity with one another, since physical/epistemological boundary breaks can be extrapolated to political boundary crossings. |
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
- A discussion of cyborg feminism at the Purdue University website
[edit] Further reading
- Flanagan, Mary and Austin Booth. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. 2002.
- Sandoval, Chela. "New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed." In The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995.
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