In 1985, professor and influential feminist activist Donna Haraway published her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. It was later edited and republished in 1991. With the advent of the third millennium and the development of technoscience- epitomised by the unprecedented intersection between the biological and the digital- feminists revisited concepts like: gender, feminism, biology, capitalist patriarchal hegemony, culture and nature. This elicited reactions both in support of and in opposition to women’s involvement in technology, particularly in regard to biotech issues that are connected to the female body in the context of increased domination and control over women’s bodies. As such, the cyborg metaphor was brought back to the limelight as a new ontology of the technoscientific human, and the manifesto became the point of reference for the debate.
The cyborg for Haraway is not only a metaphor for the amalgamation of biology and technology. Rather, it collates the fractured identities and borders between the material and the semiotic, the real and the imagined, the worldly and the divine. The construct eliminates the division between the human body and other living beings; virtual and real. The cyborg denotes the collapse of borders between the real and the imagined, nature and culture, the embodied and the disembodied in the networks of science. Contrary to exploding, collapsing deposits fragments. For Haraway, the cyborg represents a deposition of the material and cultural meaning intertwined with the pressing demands of feminism.
The cyborg does not describe individuals; rather, it denotes ways of being, and always, a coming together of culture and nature. If the previous emphasis on the female body risked the reinforcement of traditional dichotomies: woman/ body/ nature as opposed to man/ mind/ culture, the cyborg foregoes a forceful manipulation when it underscores the existent relation between technology and women. Technology is not regarded as mere junk and metallic tools, it literally imparts entire ways of being. The cyborg has since influenced all kinds of material culture studies. We can even assert that one of the most significant and likely political effects of the cyborg is its undermining of the traditional exclusion of women’s participation within the fields of science and technology. It seems that Haraway’s notion that the Cyborg exists everywhere has made us all, especially women, implicated and complicit with technology, sabotaging in the process the gender based division of labour which has long denied women from contributing within the fields of scientific innovation and public discourse. This prompts women to overcome the initial technophobia which often accompanies the lack of access to technology.
Dr. Amani Aburahma presents her reading of the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, focusing on its pertinence in the current conditions as experienced by women in general and in the region in particular. We will study the opportunities and potentialities that the cyborg offers as a construct in unmaking the restrictions of the past and its myths.. Setting-off as cyborgs that determine their corporeal position and interrogating the world that classifies them as (other). Cyborg denotes possibilities.
Amani Aburahma is a Palestinian researcher, writer, and translator based in Gaza. She holds a master’s degree in Pharmacy and Biotechnology, and has completed academic courses in Psychology. Her main research interests span Postmodern Studies, Feminism, and Biopolitics. Aburahma is the author and translator of many books, including Cyborg Feminism: Notes on Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto and situated knowledge (2020), Beyond Foucault: Biopolitics in Genome Era (2017) and Man Without Content . Giorgio Agambin. trans. Amani Aburahma, (2018).
Image: Lynn Randolph. Cyborg, 1989.