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Donna Haraway's seminal text A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, published for the first
time in 1984, and republished and translated in numerous anthologies*
is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Donna Haraway, the socialist feminist Professor at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, U.S.A, who was renamed a 'cyborg
feminist', reinvented the paradigm of the cyborg for possible new articulations
of new media technology potentials and for the emancipatory political, social
and aesthetic actions of women at the end of the previous century. The cyborg
discusses new media technologies as means for women's emancipation from
patriarchal constraints, but also from one-dimensional technology's adorations,
that serve only and solely to improve big corporations' profit. In the age that
Steve Mann defined as the 'Age of Wearable Computers' where technological
prosthesis and implements become constituent parts of the body, it is of
crucial importance to ask how much and in which way new technology opens up
space for the political and social emancipation of different class-, race- and
gender- constituted people. Haraway also proposed in her manifesto an important
re-conceptualisation of reproduction processes, social positions and political
views. She argued that for women it is crucially important to liberate
themselves from traditional patriarchies and from the constraints of being no
more than laboratories for reproduction. Moreover, she pressed us to see
technology, gender and politics as artificial processes; for their definition
and implementation we have therefore to constantly construct new political and
social interpretations.
"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic
replication", Haraway argues. In this way she urged a constant
political re-articulation of all that is considered to be simply naturally
embedded in the globalised world: procreation, sex, gender, technology,
democracy, and emancipation. The mediation of the cyborg manifesto between the
human and the non-human, discourse and materiality, gave an important boost to
questions of who the new material-semiotic actors' or actants' or agents' in
the world are. Haraway's cyborg-theory, inspired by Bruno Latour's actor
network-theory, and further in the 1990's rebuilt with Trinh T. Minh-ha's
paradigm of the inappropriate/ed other, re-articulates significantly the
problematic of material-semiotic actors, such as literature, language, context,
gender, politics, etc. The results are new directions and alternatives within
feminism and how to connect them with new media technology that radically and
differently determines action, theory, politics and subjectivity in this time
of global capitalism.
Haraway argued, "The cyborg is a creature in a
post-gender world" (1984), meaning that not only gender, but theory
and technology, even cyberspace is just another actor in the constantly
re-constructed physiognomy of the world. Therefore, no one and nothing can be
dismissed as unimportant, but everything also has to be once again
re-articulated: history, the world, outer space, technology, and the political,
along with, agents, subjects, objects, abjects, and the relations between
First, Second and Third Worlds.
The paradigm of the cyborg opened up a huge field of
cyborg-discourses: from theory to practice, from media,
computer-mediated-information technology to cyberpunk (William Gibson coined
the literary term 'cyberspace' in his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer
to describe immersive data spaces and virtual reality), and it fostered the
practice and theory of cyberfeminism (the ISEA 2004 meeting in Helsinki has
just celebrated the first 10 years of Cyberfeminist Theory).
If feminism has at its base a way to organise the social
(and I will add political) world(s) by/with/out gender, and therefore
differs not only according to different theories (Marxist, Liberal, Lesbian,
Postmodern, etc.), but also according to different topics and practices (such
as race and social location, women's rights, gender roles, or political
issues), then cyberfeminism is also one of its branches. What is important is
that this fragmentation of feminism is not to be seen as a kind of new
democratic women's attitude, but it is a situated, problematic, contested
reality that is constantly open to new hegemonic and political processes of
interpretations and power inscriptions.**
Marina Grzinic
*Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-81),
translation by Valerija Vendramin and Tina Potrato; introduction by Marina
Gržinic (Ljubljana: ŠOU Koda, 1999, 241-93).
** The Spectralization of Technology: From
Elsewhere to Cyberfeminism and Back. Institutional Models of the
Cyberworld, edited by Marina Gržinic in collaboration with Adele
Eisenstein, English/Slovene, published by MKC, Maribor 1999.
