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Cyborg
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 Modest-Witness,
Second-Millennium : Femaleman Meets Oncomouse : Feminism and Technoscience
by Donna J.
Haraway, Lynn M. Randolph (Illustrator).
The book's
title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and
her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung
than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no
innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author
figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory
rodent, OncoMouse. 35 illustrations....
"Haraway's "modest witness" is a
fascinating figure...in a contribution that is by itself worth the price
of the book, Haraway produces a wonderfully thoughtful and complex
account of...the interpenetration of biology and capitalism, two central
players on the stage of politics...Haraway has produced a volume that
richly rewards the hard work and generous literacy it demands of its
reader. It is challenging, powerful, and unsettling to comfortable
notions worth distressing." -- Laura Briggs, Sojourner
Donna Haraway is without question America's most
gifted postmodern cultural critic. In this book, Haraway considers the
realms of "technoscience," focusing mostly on genetic
research, to consider how this emerging science constructs race, gender,
and human relations. Haraway is an extremely witty writer and a true
humanitarian, dedicated to questioning those cultural assumptions which
hurt so many social groups. Well written, well organized, well
illustrated (by Lynn Randolph)... a great book. -- Anonymous Review
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The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for
Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs
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Excerpt related to topics on biology,
computers Other excerpts:
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"A Cyborg Manifesto" is a socialist-feminist
analysis of "women's situation in the advanced technological conditions of postmodern
life in the First World" (Penley, interview cited below). The "elementary units
of socialist-feminist analysis," race, gender, and class are in the process of
transformation. The tools for analysis: Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological
are problematic as they are currently articulated...
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By Steven Mentor, Department of English, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. By what writing technologies are technologies
represented? And what are the politics of those writing technologies? These must be
important questions for techno-historians; no one genre of representation determines the
reception of technologies like electricity or automobiles, and below any essay on
technology lie buried assumptions of what might constitute adequate and inadequate,
normative and abnormal structures of representation. |
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Cyborgs
explained...
This site includes
pages on:
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Excerpts related to topics on immunology,
militarism, and post-industrial capitalism.
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By Michael Joyce. Explorations of feminist and other
visionary texts about body, mind, machine, resistance, contradiction,
virtuality, the
breakdown of dualisms and the demise of hierarchies. (List of texts for a Class with
excerpts)
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Here are some sites concerned with the effects of computer
mediated communication on human thought and human bodies. Includes a link to some
excellent e-texts about cyborgs.
Including:
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By Billy Grassie. This article is a close reading of
two essays by Donna Haraway on feminist philosophy, the biophysical sciences, and
critical social theory. Haraway's strong social constructionist approach to science is
criticized by colleague Sandra Harding, resulting in an epistemological
reconceptualization of objectivity by Haraway. Haraway's notion of "Situated
Knowledges" provides a workable epistemology for all social and biophysical
sciences, while inviting the reintegration of religions as critical conversation partners
in an emancipatory hermeneutics of nature, culture, and technology.
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Brown University's Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory
Web
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Haraway
on the Cyborg: A cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived
social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The
international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as
uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and
fact of the most crucial, political kind. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Such
blurring boundaries between man and machine provides Donna Haraway, who has taught an
entire generation of theorists to think in terms of the cyborg paradigm, to found a
theorical approach that can counter the destructive dualisms that she believes inform the
western tradition... |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Like
Bakhtin's multivocality and Derrida's decentering, Haraway's cyborg , attacks and opens up
false, imposed unities that form as univocality. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. According
to Donna J. Haraway, There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery
of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and
identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a
garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without
end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. According
to Donna J. Haraway, cyborg imagery can "help express" what she takes to be the
crucial point that the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major
mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second,
taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an
anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful
task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. |
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By Robert M. Young. This began life as a talk given at
Nottingham Polytechnic, in which I attempted to re-think the concept of ideology in the
light of social constructivism, especially the astonishing achievement of Donna Haraway in
Primate Visions. Much revised, it appeared in Science as Culture (no. 15) 3:165-207,1992
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List of links to sites about cyborgs, cyber
thought, and
cyberpunks.
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Donna Haraway, whose intriguing "Cyborg
Manifesto" has been cited extensively in literature on the future of gender
construction, also focuses on technologies that provide for the physical recreation of the
body rather than the virtual creation that text-based CMC technology addresses.
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Links relating to cyber thought and postindustrial art.
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Extensive list of e-texts and site links.
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