Saturday, March 27, 2010

A Cyborg Manifesto


Drawing by Elizabeth Bronwyn Wells 2002

Donna Haraway’s essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ is an analysis of women and advanced technology in a postmodern world. Haraway uses various illustrations to focus on women’s relation to the technologically scientific world, she uses the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists and engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. She also uses the idea of the cyborg to offer a political strategy for the dissimilar interests of socialism and feminism. In her manifesto, Haraway describes a cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism or a cybernetic organism, created by the advances in technology. She discusses science and the creation of cyborgs, for example, biology teaches us that a Cyborg is the combination of human and machine, many examples of this can be found in the medical field by the use of prosthetic limbs.

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