The Postmodern Ironic Political Myth Presented in the Article A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway Essay

In the article, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Haraway tries to create "an ironic political myth"(p.65) which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. "Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's experience."(p.71) As a result, theories and systems lose their utility for collective political action. Haraway critiques the organic self which is sometimes used as a basis for identity, suggesting feminists cannot use an imagined organic ontology as a point of politics or engage in uninformed technophobia because there simply isn't such a natural self. "A Cyborg Manifesto" tries to reveal the ambiguity and irrelevance of nature-culture binarisms in the cyborg age, charting the differences between "comfortable old hierarchical dominations" (p.67) which have the appearance of naturalness because they are so embedded in Western cultural consciousness. The central element is the cyborg, which is "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction."(p.65) The cyborg according to Haraway, is both a metaphor for the postmodernist and political play of identity as well as a lived reality of new technology. "I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings."(p.66) The cyborg resists what has gone before, it is more than the sum of its parts. The cyborg "is a creature in a post-gender world it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity." (p.66) The cyborg does not exist as nature or culture, but is rather a hybrid of both and more, it is not limited by traditional binarisms and dualist paradigms. The cyborg exists as an unfettered self. According to Haraway, there are three major boundary breakdowns in the formation of the cyborg. The first is between human and...

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