Haraway's Cyborg Research Articles

Revisiting Haraway's Cyborg Myth: A Case Study of Female Cyborg Characters in Marvel Comics

Revisiting Haraway's Cyborg Myth: A Case Study of Female Cyborg Characters in Marvel Comics

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway

The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway

Cyborg Liberation: Donna Haraway's Cyborg Feminism as an Emancipatory Model of Identity


 
 
 Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg is a radical archetype for emancipatory self-construction that models conscious reshaping of socially imposed identities. The cyborg represents the plasticity of our socially constructed identities: our ability to transcend the limits of prefabricated identities and overwrite oppressive, socially imposed roles. Understanding social construction through this lens gives social workers and clients the conceptual tools to deconstruct rigid identities—particularly those of gender identity—imposed by society. These identities are the subject of active political contestation; they are the product of economic, social, and cultural relations and institutions. The concept of the cyborg provides an emancipatory model that denaturalizes and destabilizes rigid essentialist binaries and instead recognizes the chimeric multiplicity of the individual.
 Keywords: cyborg, social construction, identity, gender, feminism
 
 

Do Androids Dream of Care Labor? Rosa Montero's Bruna Husky Trilogy and its Lessons for Cyborg Feminism

Bruna Husky, the android protagonist of Spanish author Rosa Montero's Science Fiction trilogy, is often celebrated for her seeming alignment with Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism. While Montero's trilogy and Haraway's Manifesto are both deserving of celebration, in this essay, I explore Bruna's 'failures' rather than her 'successes' as a cyborg subject, as these offer valuable insight to feminist thought. Specifically, Bruna refuses to perform the sort of coalition-building political care labor that Haraway emphasizes as the key for resisting domination, and in doing so, invites us to reconsider models of feminist thought that place the burden of creating a better world on the shoulders of marginalized individuals.

The rise of the biocyborg: synthetic biology, artificial chimerism and human enhancement

Applying technologies into the human body makes a hybrid human/machine: a cyborg. We identified four types of cyborgs in the literature: the original cyborg, enhanced temporarily for space exploration, the science-fiction cyborg, the “Haraway cyborg” used to critic the dualisms and the “everyday cyborg” who became one by necessity, and learns to live with the implanted technologies. We propose in this article a fifth version: the biocyborg. Such a cyborg presents a new kind of hybridity that we named artificial chimerism, it leads to a multi-scale non-Darwinian evolution and the willingness to become a biocyborg is not only driven by necessity but also by the desire to be enhanced and to push the physiological boundaries of the human body. Becoming a biocyborg comes with new vulnerabilities as any embodied technologies but the associated risk is multi-level and also concerns the human species.

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review).

Reviewed by: Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton Jethro Hernández Berrones (bio) Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico By David S. Dalton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 248. In Mestizo Modernity, David S. Dalton examines the role of technology in the construction of the national Mexican identity after the Mexican Revolution and throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing theater plays, murals, films, and novels, the author exposes the contradictions of the project of post-revolutionary governments to create a mix-raced, mestizo, population that adopted and adapted technology in order to become part of a modern nation and a modern world. Theoretically sophisticated yet with deeply engaging examples, the analysis explains that writers, painters, and filmmakers viewed the incorporation of Western science and technology as a tool that redeemed Mexicans through mestizaje. The author uses the concept of technological hybridity to expand the work on the intersections of science and culture in Latin America that other culture studies scholars such as Pilar Blanco, Joanna Page, Ruben Gallo, and Andrew Brown have developed in the last two decades. Technological hybridity equates the entities and characters represented in Mexican literary and visual productions with Donna Haraway's cyborgs—entities defined by human-machine interactions, and the resulting mestizo modernity with a post-human society. Through this lens, the author shows that post-revolutionary discourses on mestizaje embraced ideas about human-machine identities half a century before scholars theorized about them. If Haraway's cyborg promised to denaturalize—and therefore escape from—the issues of human identity, Mestizo Modernity shows the limits and complexities of this liberatory promise. Cyborgs and post-humanist perspectives in the post-revolutionary culture represented an internal imperialistic project to colonize the indigenous at the same time that the resulting mestizos resisted external imperialistic forces. The key element of this analysis is that mestizo cyborgs and post-humanism reframed indigenous Mexicans in oppressive ways that still offered spaces for resistance through the technologically-mediated selective preservation of traditional indigenous values against some colonial forms of oppression centered around class, race, and gender. The four chapters trace instances of technological hybridity chronologically, from the elitist cultural space of literate government officials to more popular, visual forms of art that could reach illiterate, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. José Vasconcelos' theater play Prometeo Vencedor describes the transformation of an indigenous proto-humanity into a celestial/cosmic [End Page 1268] post-human race through technological and racial hybridity. José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera embraced Vasconcelos' view in contrasting ways. While Orozco's Cortés y la malinche and La conquista de México aligned technology with the Catholic Church, European influences, and male domination to transform and subjugate the indigenous population, Rivera's Panamerican Unity and Mecanización de la tierra emphasized the role of indigenous spirituality and women to balance technologies' potential harms. Emilio Fernández's films María Candelaria, Río Escondido, and The Torch centered social progress on a technologically hybrid body. In them, immunized cyborg and mestizo virgins mediated between traditional racial, gender, socioeconomic structures and modern ones. These women, for instance, raise their voices publicly to challenge local strongmen while still performing the domestic roles of housewives and teachers. El Santo films epitomize the official government discourse of mestizo modernity. Carlos Olvera's novel Perdidos en el espacio criticized nationalist state discourses of the 1950s and 60s. Displacing colonizing efforts from the Earth to other planets allows Perdidos to equate global with national imperialistic efforts. Controlling Martians with devices that speak multiple languages, Central mexicans become one, post-human society with the Martians, where Martians can only talk to themselves, and the state can only listen to them when mediated by technology. Dalton's elegant analysis demonstrates the power of cyborg and post-humanism theories to explain the key role technology had in framing the bodies of twentieth-century Mexico's national identity. This analysis will fascinate scholars and graduate students. Undergrads interested in Mexican culture will enjoy the interpretation of visual art and performances through this lens. The book's theoretical framework will help historians, sociologists, and visual and literary...

Clean Slates, Marked Bodies: Dollhouse, the [Re-]Programming of the Mind, and the Gendered Labor of a Cyborg

The idea of mind-upload, which equates a human being to consciousness and treats the body as a separate—and separable—appendage, has long been critiqued by feminist scholars. Joss Whedon's short-lived TV series Dollhouse (2009-2010) remains a rare representation of a science fiction text that focuses on the laboring bodies left behind instead of the uploaded minds. This essay uses a Marxist-feminist approach to media studies and science and technology studies to analyze how Dollhouse represents cyborgs as gendered and racialized workers in a techno-capitalist, neoliberal system, expected to perform primarily immaterial and reproductive labor. By closely examining the show's protagonists, the essay considers how the markers of difference, such as race, gender, and ability, affect the expectations put on the working bodies under neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, it considers Dollhouse's representation of a cyborg within the broader cultural context, comparing it to such influential science fiction works as Rossum's Universal Robots and The Stepford Wives, as well as within the Marxist and feminist scholarship on science and technology, such as Donna Haraway's cyborg and Mark Fisher's post-Fordist labor. The essay argues that Dollhouse allows for a feminist reading due to its overarching narrative in which feminized, disenfranchised laborers fight for control over their bodies and minds and for collective liberation.

African Cyborgs

African feminist writers argue black female bodies should be understood as interactions between materiality and the symbolic constructions of the body embedded within a given culture. They caution that an overemphasis on corporeality and embodiment denies subjectivity to black women. Responding to such concerns, contemporary African cultural and creative practitioners offer alternatives to continuing objectification and bodily stereotyping. In this essay I am particularly interested in the alternative visions of black female bodies presented in African speculative and science fiction film – visions which, I argue, engage colonial histories and local traditions in order to imagine a future inclusive of empowered female protagonists. I explore how the fictional configurations and cyborg imaginations of African sci-fi deconstruct and subvert the fixity, corporeality, fragility and captivity of the black female body. Drawing on African feminism and feminist science fiction in particular, I attempt to construct a theoretical framework through which to approach the representation of female bodies in sci-fi film from Africa. In the work of filmmakers such as Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes, 2005 and Naked Reality, 2016), Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo (Afronauts, 2014), Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, 2009) and South African filmmakers Michael Matthew (Sweetheart, 2010) and Amy van Houten (Elf, 2015), we find female-centred fantastical narratives that recast African women as futuristic cyborgs. Reminiscent of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism of the late twentieth century, these filmmakers adapt the genres of fantasy and sci-fi to speculate about alternative African pasts and futures.

‘The machine is nothing without the woman’

This article analyses how gender and humanity are negotiated in relation to the figure of the cyborg woman in the television series The Bionic Woman and its remake, or re-imagination, Bionic Woman. It examines these cyborg women within a post-humanist framework, inspired by Donna Haraway's cyborg. It claims that both Bionic Woman series highlight the often-contradictory norms concerning gender and humanity and raise questions of control in human-non-human relations. The two series are also examined in the context of certain Western Euro-American understandings of humanity.

Haraway's Cyborg Feminism from the Perspective of Practice Theory : On the Concept of Material-Semiotic Practices

Haraway's Cyborg Feminism from the Perspective of Practice Theory : On the Concept of Material-Semiotic Practices

The Somatope: from Bakhtin's Chronotope to Haraway's Cyborg via James Cameron's Dark Angel and Avatar

The Somatope: from Bakhtin's Chronotope to Haraway's Cyborg via James Cameron's <i>Dark Angel</i> and <i>Avatar</i>

Mind Over Matter: Mental Evolution and Physical Devolution in The Incredible Shrinking Man

Using the background of cold war politics and the growing toxic environmental concerns of the 1950s, this article reevaluates the film The Incredible Shrinking Man in the context of Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto. The hero of the film undergoes a transformation into a reflection of Haraway's cyborgs.

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.

Cyborgs on the World Stage: Hillary Clinton and the Rhetorical Performances of Iron Ladies

In this article, the writer argues that the nickname of "iron lady" for women leaders provides an accurate and complicated instantiation of Donna Haraway's cyborg ontology, providing women a place from which to be responsible for their machinery, while also positioning them (potentially) as complicit agents in the hegemonic traditions of national manhood. Therefore, iron ladies—these women who are heads of state—present embodied and real-world examples of the debate over the potentials and pitfalls of cyborg ontology in women's studies and feminist research. This article uses historical examples of Margaret Thatcher, Eugenia Charles, and Indira Ghandi to establish the rhetorical trope of iron ladies; then it complicates this tradition with contemporary leaders' performance of iron lady, examining the political personas of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Benazir Bhutto, Ségolène Royal, and Hillary Clinton. To conclude, the writer analyzes the current U.S. political climate for the emergence of an iron lady president. Based on Clinton's campaign in 2008, it seems that the iron lady rhetorical performance had become visible to the same patriarchal systems that cyborgs attempt to subvert, thus requiring female politicians to reconsider the potentials of this technologized rhetorical performance.

Cyborg geographies: towards hybrid epistemologies

As a mode of critique, the cyborg is often separated from its role as a figuration. This article reviews Donna Haraway's cyborg theory to restate the importance of the cyborg as a figuration in critical methodology. Figuration is about opening knowledge-making practices to interrogation. I argue that the cyborg enables this inquiry through epistemological hybridization. To do so, cyborg figurations not only adopt a language of being or becoming, but narrate this language in the production of knowledges, to know hybridly. The epistemological hybridization of the cyborg includes four strategies: witnessing, situating, diffracting and acquiring. These are modes of knowing in cyborg geographies. To underline the importance of this use of cyborg theory, I review selected geographic literatures in naturecultures and technosciences, to demonstrate how geographers cite the cyborg. My analysis suggests these literatures emphasize an ontological hybridity that leaves underconsidered the epistemological hybridization at work in cyborg figuration. To take up the cyborg in this way is to place at risk our narrations, to re-make these geographies as hybrid, political work.

Becoming-Animate: On the Performed Limits of "Human"

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck's essay develops the theoretical concept of "becoming-animate," a triangulation among concepts of human, animal, and technology, which has the potential to draw attention to possible affiliations among the three terms. Developing Haraway's cyborg, Parker-Starbuck's own cyborg theatre, and Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-animal" through moments of pause and hiatus inspired by Giorgio Agamben's idea of the "anthropological machine," the "becoming-animate" emerges as a provocative site for new alliances, especially ones that re-situate contemporary issues of animality. Cathy Weis's multimedia piece "Painting and Stripping" provides a theatrical example of work that blurs the questions of the boundaries among the three elements to foreground the ethical space of performance as the necessary staging ground of this questioning.

I'd Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg

Upon which Christian theological metaphors and models is Donna Haraway's understanding of `cyborg' ontologically dependent, and how and why might it matter? This article explores the possibility that Haraway's cyborg is a saviour-figure, made partially in the image of a transcendent God. It suggests that cyborgs do have an origin story, and that their story is inseparably linked to the theological development of Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, which is itself linked, arguably, to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution. Taking Haraway at her word, or at least her Christian theological words, reveals a disturbingly indifferent cyborg-God, one perfectly at ease with apocalyptic imagery and feats, but one who does not comprehend that apocalyptic rhetoric was never meant to be taken literally.

Prozac and the Post-human Politics of Cyborgs

Working through the lens of Donna Haraway's cyborg theory and directed at the example of Prozac, I address the dramatic rise of new technoscience in medicine and psychiatry. Haraway's cyborg theory insists on a conceptualization and a politics of technoscience that does not rely on universal “Truths” or universal “Goods” and does not attempt to return to the “pure” or the “natural.” Instead, Haraway helps us mix politics, ethics, and aesthetics with science and scientific recommendations, and she helps us understand that (without recourse to universal truth or universal good) questions of legitimacy in science come down to local questions of effect and inclusion. What, in the case of my example, are the effects of Prozac? And for whom? Who is included and empowered to create legitimate psychiatric knowledge? Who is excluded and why? And, what political strategies will increase the democratic health of psychiatric science and practice?

Speaking Cyborg: Technoculture and Technonature

Two ways of self‐interpretation merged in Western thought: the Hebrew and the Greek. What is unique, if anything, about the human species? The reinterpretation of this problem has been a constant process; here I am referring to Philip Hefner and the term created co‐creator, and particularly to Donna Haraway and the term cyborg. Simultaneously, humans have been fascinated by the thought of transgressing the boundaries that seem to separate them from the rest of nature. Any culture reflects the ways it relates to nature. Our nature is technonature, and our culture is technoculture. Our reality can be best approached by the metaphor and symbol cyborg. Donna Haraway's cyborg is not just an interesting figure of speech, it is also a description—of ourselves and our culture. Also, contemporary fiction reflects the return of ontological questions: What is a world? What is the self? The cyborg acknowledges our mode of existence and destabilizes the traditional procedures of identity construction.