Related: [[The Cyborg Manifesto]] # ["The Cyborg Manifesto" and Cyberfeminism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe7U-ANhSOE) - Haraway highlights the shortcomings of feminism by reconceptualizing questions of gender and identity in the context of technology. She uses the cyborg, as a metaphor to explore the boundaries between human/machine, nature/culture, physical/nonphysical. - The goal of text, which Harway admits is utopian, is to imagine a world without fixed categories like race and gender. - Haraway's essay is a product of its era. The introduction of personal computers and the internet, was changing how people related with technology. - By the 1980s, feminism was grappling with internal critiques about the need to recognize diversity among women, not just middle and upper class white women. - This led to third wave feminism (beginning in the early 1990s) and intersectionality, which complicated womanhood by considering how race, class, and sexuality intersect with gender. - Haraway's text can be seen as a response to these debates. - The concept of the cyborg comes comes from the field of **cybernetics**, an approach to sociology which views societies and social organizations as complex systems with interconnected parts, which regulate, communicate, and balance each other. - For Haraway, to call someone a cyborg is simply to recognize their positionality and sublimation into a broader system of ideas, technologies, and institutions, which regulate social life. - "positionality": a person's position within various systems, such as cultural, political, technological, and economic systems. No one exists outside these systems. - "sublimation": how individuals are absorbed into and shaped by overarching systems—like governments, corporations, and cultural norms— that govern how we think and act. - Put simply: For Haraway, calling someone a cyborg means recognizing that they are shaped by and part of larger systems of technology, ideas, and rules that structure society. - Haraway defines a cyborg as, "A cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality, as well as a creature of fiction." **Donna Haraway's Cyborg Metaphor** - Definition: A cyborg is a **hybrid**, blending the organic and mechanical. It **blurs boundaries** between human/machine, physical/non-physical, and natural/artificial. - An **identity** that is **fluid, multiple, and constructed**, challenging essentialist views of identity, such as fixed notions of gender and race. - The cyborg **disrupts binary oppositions** and promotes an understanding of identities and relationships as complex and intertwined. - The cyborg symbolizes a **positive and active engagement with technology**, seeing it as integral to our identities and experience. The cyborg emerges at the intersection of the three major social and technological boundary breakdowns of the late 20th century. ![[harway-cyborg_culture-nature-tech-intersection.png]] #### Breakdown: Human and Animal - The line between humans and animals has been crossed by various biotechnologies. - The theory of evolution has blurred the distinction between human and animal. - Animal rights movements are recognition of connection across the "breach" of nature and culture. #### Breakdown: Human and Machine - With the advent of cybernetics and other technologies, living organisms can be seen as information systems or biotic components. - Machines themselves are increasingly taking on life-like qualities. This seems even more evident today with AI and machine learning. #### Breakdown: Physical and Non-Physical - Advancements in digital and information technologies, have significantly blurred this boundary. - We interact in virtual spaces, form communities online, create and experience digital representations of ourselves. - We even work and create online, this was especially apparently during the pandemic when everyone was working from home. Harway's work was also, in part, a reponse to Marx.