Donna Haraway

A Cyborg Manifesto

Cyberfeminism

A Fusion of Machine and Organism

Intersections
Nature Culture Gender Science Technology

Social Construction

A New Frontier: Haraway calls for responsible bridges between humans and machines (technology)

Sociotechnical factors along with human interactions affect human associations and the direction that endeavors in knowledge making take.

How do individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality? Social constructionism argues that social phenomena are created, institutionalized, known and made into convention through human habit. Social phenomena include social organization, knowledge, technologies, artifacts, and the characteristic materiality of cultures.

Cyborgs
Haraway conceives of cyborgs as realities. Cyborgs are socially constructed hybrids of

machines and organisms.

Cyborgs live in borderlands or productive space

intended for knowledge building.

Haraway uses the image and myth (or story) of the

cyborg to argue for the construction of ones consciousness or responsibility, particularly with respect to newer technologies.

Haraway & Core Concepts

Borderlands Caring Connections or Isolation Worldliness Boundaries Cyborgs

The Borderlands
Productive places where negotiations of

knowledge building take place

What does one care about? Ones concerns open up borderlands. Haraway raises the questions:
What matters personally in biographical terms,

political terms, and emotionally?

In other words, What does one care about and

what does that tell me?

Borderlands: Caring and Connections

Haraway points out that:
Opening borderlands is essential to being open to

possibilities and worldly.

Connections arise out of the relationship with what

one feels is important and personal.

Worldliness and Isolation

Everything that one cares about makes one more

worldly.
Worldly relates to what one cares about or connects

to and this connection leads to a multiplicity of other connections and their development.
If what one cares about, isolates them, the question

becomes: Is this good for one and, if so, how does one deal with that isolation?

Boundaries
Relates to connections

Everything in the world is linked

It is crucial to view entities within

their network of connections in an open, fluid, and indistinct semiotic flow

Alexander McQueens Cyborg

Three Critical Breakdowns

Transgression in the boundary between human and

animal

Affirmation of connection between human & other living creatures

Ambiguity in distinctions among animal-human-machine

Uncertainty of what one accepts as nature

Boundary between physical and non-physical is

imprecise

Machines and microelectric devices are everywhere and invisible.

Cyborg: A Conceptual Hybrid

Creatures simultaneously animal and machine who

live in ambiguous, crafted Foucaults biopolitics.

worlds.

Cyborgs map social and body reality like

The social and body reality is an imaginative resource, an open field an open text

Cyborgs are ones ontology: A postmodern,

socially constructed sense of being

Partiality and Cyborgs

Argues for situated, localized knowledge not

universality provides the conditions for responsible knowledge claims.

Represents the interdependence of people Machines are aspects of our embodiment as such

Haraway emphasizes the need for responsible relations with machines.

The cyborg represents a way out of the labyrinth of

Western, patriarchal views and its dualism

Floating Signifiers
The Cyborg myth is about boundaries, fusions and

risky possibilities in borderlands.

It is everything about caring and taking

responsibility for the relationships such concern creates.

Cyborgs are transformative they encourage the

construction of identity in a partial, fragmented and contradictory world.

The Situated Cyborg

Social relations of new technologies are

reformulations of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical work-force.
Danger lack of control for high-tech repressive

apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance culture of video games and sci-fi escape.
Speaks to a critical need for privileged women to

address scientific-technical discourses and processes in a conscious and responsible way.