A Cybog Manifest: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century — Donna Haraway
Some quotes..:
Haraway says in the first paragraph that she thinks blasphemy is the perfect stance to take to explain her political myth, because blasphemy is not apostasy and such allows her to remain within the boundarys she is critiquing.
At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.
Illegitimate ofspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, afer all, are inessential.
Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.
Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics (de Waal 1982; Winner 1980), so why shouldn’t we?
There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as “being” female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientifc discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.
[Chela] Sandoval argues that “women of color” have a chance to build an efective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marx isms and feminisms, which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization
The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.
Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.
Women in the Integrated Circuit
However, there is no “place” for women in these networks, only geometries of diference and contradiction crucial to women’s cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of “identifcation,” of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.