Cyborg Stories: Week 10

Reading for the week: Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), “The Cyborg Manifesto”

Since all human beings are essentially story-tellers, we’ve been telling different stories at different times in history. What we chose to deliver, or memorialize, or fight back against with our stories is representative of what we think is reality, or what it is supposed to be. However, after reading Harraway one is forced to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, online and offline presence, animal and human, even man and machine.  She uses the figure of the Cyborg to illustrate all these boundary concealing interactions, opening up a domain of new possibilities and new hybrids we can use to actually understand the world better. The cyborgs were a figure of ‘super human’ abilities in mainstream media, partly superior to man because of the qualities it possessed, partly inferior because it was created by man. But why only the man?

Donna Harraway decided to tell her own story, one less heard in 1985.  She used the figure of cyborg to elucidate ideas such as intersectionality and affinities. A cyborg is an assemblage of selves, or partial identities. Humans are a lot like that, instead of having and living by strict identity markers we are pretty much in flux and change and evolve with time and age. We see this a lot nowadays with gender identities, sexual preferences, religious and spiritual beliefs and even our consumption habits. All our interactions shape us in weird ways we cannot always trace back, but to acknowledge that instead of trying to fit in a box is, according to Harraway a greater deed.

For feminism, Harraway used these ideas to make points like nothing about simply being a woman binds all the females in the world. We should learn to accept our different contexts and different struggles and only then can we advocate for what is needed. Intersectionality, in her mind was the way to go forward because just like the white man does not speak for world peace the white woman cannot, and is not able to understand the story of non-white women, or white women from a different class background…and so on. We should be cautious of whom we are excluding in such conversations. One may think that this practice would only make things more complicated and making new terminologies, or creating new ‘boxes’ is counterproductive to a movement, because then the masses don’t take it seriously. For example in the case of gender identities or sexualities. It is so hard to break down the rigidities propagated by modernity! However, one day this will become the normal again, the story we are fighting for now will become the story which is chosen to be memorialized.