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Guiding Questions for Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs

A few questions-

• Haraway discusses the essentializing and totalizing role of ideologically driven movements such as Marxism, Socialism, Socialist Feminism and Radical feminism.

What would a cyborg political framework look like? How would it avoid the pitfalls of appropriating or additive politics? Haraway also states that this essay exists within the socialist-feminist culture and theory - how does this essay function within and outside the imbedded ideologies of socialism and socialist feminism?

• How is cyborg identity constructed? What is the cyborg's relationship to history, culture and tradition?
• What are the biopolitics of the cyborg? How are cyborg bodies constructed and how does the embodiment of cyborgs relate and can be resistant to the politics of domination?
• What are the implications of naming women of color identity a cyborg identity?
• Donna Haraway discusses the socio-economic issues surrounding "women in the integrated circuit" and the role of technologies in both exacerbating oppressive frameworks as well as a potential medium for change and resistance. Is this a masters tools construct or a completely different contextualization of "networking"? Does it matter that the same language is used for both?
• Can the mechanics and language around science be used to describe the human experience? Can or should it be used to describe complex social/political issues and bodies? Is a feminist science possible and if so how would science have to be constructed in order to be feminist?

Terms

Ironic political myth

Common language

Feminist Socialism and Socialism

Materialism

Cyborg and cyborg identity

Gender and cyborg gender

Affinity

Deadly Games

Informatics of Domination

Women of Color

Integrated Circuit

Selected Passages

"This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history" (67).

"Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle or language and the struggle against the one code tha translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on nouse and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine" (95).

"Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only be being out of place could we take intense pleasures in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gneder might not be global identity after all" (99)

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