Donna Haraway is an American feminist academic and author. She has written extensively on the meeting of science and the feminist agenda, and multi-speciesism in the context of our ecological crisis.
A Cyborg Manifesto is one of her best-known works, first published in 1985. It is considered to be a seminal text in socialist-feminist theory, presenting arguments for the blurring of traditional binaries of human/animal and human/machine. Its context is that of a pre-internet time, where information technology was still being conceived and its potential theorised about. Science fiction was another field generating similar ideas around posthumanism and what these new technologies could eventuate.
Haraway presents the 'image of the Cyborg' as a means to push our definitions around what is human and what is not (humans/machines, the two genders) further, or more specifically, together. Cyborgs, as a hybrid of these binaries, offer an alternative figure towards which we can understand and build a more inclusive and liberated social reality.
'By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorisied and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism — in short, cyborgs.' (Haraway, 2016/1985, pp. 7)
She also constructs her argument/language in an interesting way, bringing science and religion and myth together. This hybrid of worldviews brings us somewhere into the futurespace, but always with an undercurrent of the primordial.
I keep coming back to this text because it captures the deviance and creative power that she writes about, that I want to find through my methods and design research. I think there's power and an interesting potential in the 'coupling' that she refers to the cyborg as a product of. What else could be coupled to achieve similar ends? Writing this post now, I have already conducted a number of experiments around this text and drawn parallels to the image of the Witch. I hope to carry Haraway's call-to-arms of cyborgs into our time, in the twenty-first century and beyond, and extend these ideas in provocative ways.
Haraway, D., (2016). Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1985)
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