Engaging the Cyborg Manifesto in questions of gender and sexuality
The cyborg is a metaphor, an imaginative resource that provides useful fodder for re-evaluating and reimagining our lived social realities. Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of the cyborg in A Cyborg Manifesto as a part human, part animal, part machine creature is a “rhetorical strategy and a political method” (Haraway, 2016, p.5) for socialist-feminism in technologically mediated societies. Haraway’s political vision of the emancipatory cyborg feminism published decades ago has several implications for gender and sexuality issues of today.
Challenging biological essentialism
The cyborg challenges naturalistic assumptions of corporal ontology. Cyborgs do away with the idea of distinctiveness set in stone by challenging biological determinism. For the cyborg, “there is no clear boundary between what is natural and what is constructed” (Kathleen, 2019, para 61). In other words, the binary of that created naturally and that which is constructed culturally breaks down for the cyborg. The emphasis on lived reality comes to replace natural constituency. Even as Haraway visualises the cyborg in a postgender world (Haraway, 2016, p.8), she contends that gender, among other categories, “require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts” (Haraway, 2016, p.66) that does not believe in a unitary identity. Quite recently popular author J.K Rowling tweeted about the irrefutability of biological determinants of the identity of “being female”, distinct from “being trans”. The tweets received responses from trans activists who called for a departure from the singularity of white feminism that is rooted in “scientific racism and biological essentialism” (John, 2020, para 23). Cyborg feminism can be harnessed here in dismantling totalising definitions of what it means to be female. The image of the cyborg gives “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies” (Haraway, 2016, p.67). Cyborgs consider seriously the “partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment” (Haraway, 2016, p.67).
Subverting wholeness and embodying hybridity
The fusion of human, animal and machine is integral to the cyborg. The cyborg is in that sense an embodiment of differences intertwined with one another. The performative image of the cyborg can be inhabited to connect contestable worlds (Hughes and Lury, 2013, p.795). The cyborg ontology is that of seemingly contradictory, partial and “permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves” (Haraway, 2016, p.21) rather than impermeable wholeness. Radical feminist theorists like Janice Raymond have espoused construction of identities as “whole” with no scope for mutation. Raymond refuses to accept transsexuality and attacks it in her book The Transsexual Empire published in 1979. The counter-discourse to this by transsexual activist-academic Sandy Stone, known as The Empire Strikes Back: A (post)transsexual manifesto, draws from the work of her mentor Haraway. The cyborg shows potential for the work of Stone who posits transsexuals as occupying the position nowhere but “outside the binary oppositions of gendered discourse” (Bettcher, 2014, para 30). Raymond accepts biological sex as a given (Bettcher, 2014, para 21), an immutable ontology that the cyborg challenges through its rejection of puritan myths of origin and of dualisms including that of man and woman. Abby Wilkerson maintains that, while Haraway is not articulate about sexuality in the Cyborg Manifesto (Wilkerson, 1997, p.168) apart from the dismissal of any naturalised sexuality (p.165), her reading of the manifesto as a bisexual feminist led her to see that bisexuality like the cyborg takes pleasure in the confusion of boundaries (p.167). For her, the multiple visions endorsed by the cyborg in place of a single one is akin to the bisexual perspectives that arise “from the experience of occupying several margins at once” (Wilkerson, 1997, p.167).
Replacing a “feminism of sameness”
In conjuring up the idea of the cyborg feminism, Haraway is inspired by accounts on the oppression of women of colour. She recognizes the work of postcolonial feminist Chela Sandoval to note that the category of “woman” in the United States used to negate “all non-white women” (Haraway, 2016, p.18) and how the category of “black” “negated all nonblack people, as well as all black women” (Haraway, 2016, p.18). She also discusses the work of Lesbian Studies and Feminist Theory scholar, Katie King who “criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists…to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole”, marginalizing every other form of feminism (Haraway, 2016, p.19). Reiterating the position of postcolonial feminists, Haraway warns us of the “danger of a feminism of sameness” (Wilkerson, 1997, p. 170). She asserts that fighting against such universalising endeavours which assumes unity through domination is a fight against all similar claims that are put forth from a “natural standpoint” (Haraway, 2016, p.20). Cyborg feminists, according to Haraway, have to argue against any such “natural matrix of unity” and also affirm that “no construction is whole” (Haraway, 2016, p. 21).
Why should we be cyborgs?
Cyborgs push us towards newer forms of collective consciousness that honours hybridity instead of singularity. As McCracken rightly puts it, “Haraway’s use of the cyborg as transformative metaphor is productive” (1997, p.294) because it “engages with the kinds of hybrid identities that are being produced by the new global economy” (1997, p.295). Haraway insists on a cyborg politics that envisages a “profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politics” (Haraway, 2016, p.67). The cyborg’s “post-identity politics of monstrosity” (McCracken, 1997, p.293) empowers us to imagine revolutionary transformations in our social relations and lived experiences.
Citation format: APA 7 released in October 2019
Works cited:
Bettcher, Talia, (Spring 2014 Edition) “Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/feminism-trans/>.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late twentieth century” In Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press.
Hughes, C., & Lury, C. (2013). Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a social to an ecological epistemology. Gender and Education, 25(6), 786-799.
John, T., (2020). Trans Activists Call J.K. Rowling Essay ‘Devastating’. [online] CNN. Available at: <https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/11/uk/jk-rowling-trans-harry-potter-gbr-intl/index.html> [Accessed 15 July 2020].
Lennon, Kathleen, (Fall 2019 Edition). “Feminist Perspectives on the Body”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/feminist-body/>.
McCracken, Scott. (1997). Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism. Socialist Register, 33.
Wilkerson, Abby. (1997). Ending at the skin: Sexuality and race in feminist theorizing. Hypatia, 12(3), 164-173.
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