Response to Haraway

Article Response to Donna Harway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto

One of the most important things that Donna Haraway relates in “A Cyborg Manifesto” is that we cannot totalize “woman” as so many radical feminists do, equating sex with gender. Haraway writes that “Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth” (315). Similarly, Hayles in How We Became Posthuman asks us to consider that functionalities might be universally present but that they rest as “potentials rather than actualities” (242). I’m curious as to what people think about universalizing such constructs of woman…I’m assuming that my using “constructs” might cause people to retort. It’s hard to move past universalizing and equating sex with gender as Radfems do. Cat and I, when we were designing our discussion for Wednesday, began to discuss how perhaps one can totalize what woman may be if we look at it solely socially.

I could also see a connection between Hayles and Haraway in how the machine and human inform one another. Hayles writes that “In the AL paradigm, the machine becomes the model for understanding the human. Thus the human is transfigured into the posthuman” (239). Haraway writes that “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse…and in daily practice…, we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (313). Both women certainly buy into the fact that the machine and human inform each other’s understanding, though Hayles is sure that the human is transfigured into the posthuman through the machine.

One thing that I thought was interesting that Haraway discussed was how real-life cyborgs “are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies” (313). This echoed what I remember of anorectics in the first chapter of Hayles where the question of what the body meant to the mind or whether it even mattered was posited to the reader. Perhaps another view might be that the posthuman, in “real-life” as Haraway calls it, uses their body as a tool. Hayles discusses the women laboring in Asia, putting their body at risk. Haraway discusses the anorectics using her body as a tool to gain back control or, in my opinion, to make visible the mind.

When Harway writes about how cyborg politics rests in a struggle against perfect communication it makes me think about Hayles and her discussion of how information, depending on how it is embodied, can mean something entirely different. Context matters. I’m glad we read both of these pieces against one another because the connections were plentiful. Hayles was a beast, but the Haraway actually helped me to process her book.