Creating the Ideal Posthuman Body? Cyborg Sex and Gender in the Work of Buzzati, Vacca, and Ammaniti (original) (raw)
The cyborg metaphor in Ibero-American science, technology and gender literature
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway 1991b Haraway, Donna. 1991b. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women, edited by Donna Haraway, 141–181. London: Free Assoc. Books. [Google Scholar] ) has marked a before and after in relationships among feminisms, technologies and bodies (Wajcman 2010 Wajcman, Judy. 2010. “Feminist Theories of Technology.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (1): 143–152. doi: 10.1093/cje/ben057 . [Google Scholar] ). Published in two versions, first in 1985 and later in 1991, the “Manifesto” made an important contribution to feminist thought in the post-industrial age, leading to new understandings of relationships among women, bodies, and technologies. In this literature review, we look at the reception of Haraway’s essay in Spanish language current literature in Science, Technology and Gender Studies (ST and Gender) considering some works from Spain, Argentina and Mexico that summarize the main points of the essay to establish a dialogue with it, though not always in complete agreement.2 2 This review focuses on the following books and articles: Ontología Cyborg; el cuerpo en la nueva sociedad tecnológica [Cyborg Ontology: the Body in the New Technological Society] (Aguilar García 2008 Aguilar García, Teresa. 2008. Ontología cyborg: el cuerpo en la nueva sociedad tecnológica. Barcelona: Gedisa. [Google Scholar] ); Epistemología feminista: la subversión semiótica de la mujer en la ciencia [Feminist Epistemology: the Semiotic Subversion of Women in Science] (Maffía 2007 Maffía, Diana. 2007. “Epistemología feminista: la subversión semiótica de las mujeres en la ciencia.” Revista venezolana de estudios de la mujer 12 (28), http://saber.ucv.ve/ojs/index.php/rev\_vem/article/view/2181 [Google Scholar] ); Feminismos y poscolonialidad: descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina [Feminisms and postcoloniality: decolonizing feminism in and from Latin America] (edited by Bidaseca and Laba 2011 Bidaseca, Karina, and Vanesa Vazquez Laba. 2011. Feminismos y poscolonialidad: descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Ed. Godot. [Google Scholar] ); Cartografías del cuerpo: biopolíticas de la ciencia y la tecnología [Cartographies of the Bodies: Science and Technology by Pérez Sedeño and Ortega Arjonilla 2014 Pérez Sedeño, Eulalia, and Esther Ortega Arjonilla. 2014. Cartografías del cuerpo: biopolíticas de la ciencia y la tecnología. Madrid: Cátedra. [Google Scholar] ); Cyborgs, mujeres y debates. El ciberfeminismo como teoría crítica [Cyborgs, Women and Debates. Feminism as critical theory] (García Manso 2007 García Manso, Almudena. 2007. “Cyborgs, mujeres y debates. El ciberfeminismo como teoría crítica.” Barataria. Revista castellano-manchega de ciencias sociales (8): 13–26. doi: 10.20932/barataria.v0i8.202 . [Google Scholar] ) and Colectivos sociales y cyborgs: hacia una lectura feminista de los drones [Social Collectives and Cyborgs: Towards a Feminist Reading of Drones] (Suárez 2016 Suárez, Marcela. 2016. “Colectivos sociales y ciborgs: hacia una lectura feminista de los drones.” Teknokultura 13 (1): 271–288. doi: 10.5209/rev_TK.2016.v13.n1.51775 . [Google Scholar] ). View all notes These three countries, as well as others from Latin American not included here, have established a fluid dialogue around common STS, gender and feminism problems. This dialogue has been presented in the compilation Science, Technology and Gender in Iberoamerica edited by Norma Blazquez Graf and Javier Flores in 2005 Blazquez Graf, Norma, and Javier Flores. 2005. Ciencia, tecnología y género en Iberoamérica. México: UNAM. [Google Scholar] .3 3 Ciencia, Tecnología y Género en Latinoamérica. View all notes The book constituted a big effort to make this field of research visible in Spanish, given that most of ST and Gender literature is primarily published in English. The purpose of this literature review is to highlight and make these contributions known in order to identify current ways of thinking that have been inspired by the “Manifesto” on cultural production, epistemology, the hybridization of bodies and technologies and collective actions based on feminism and new technologies. However, this review will demonstrate that Haraway’s proposals are read in different ways in Latin America and Spain.
This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, 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. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs -creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics -the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other -the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense -a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection-they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals
The Cyborg, its Manifesto and their relevance today: Some reflections
2015
The mere presence of adoring fans has been insufficient to entice Donna Haraway to visit Australia. Only Helen Verran and postgraduates at Melbourne University’s History and Philosophy of Science department managed to interest her once in the late 1990s. So as the first Australian with a doctorate co-supervised by Haraway at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I have occasionally been called upon to speak when the doyenne of cyborg feminism was, as usual, unavailable down under (Sofoulis 2003). The role of antipodean Haraway always made me uneasy. It is a mistake to project patriarchal (and oedipal) traditions of scholarly filiation onto feminists. In my observation, feminist supervisors rarely seek to turn out clones of themselves and feminist students do not usually aspire to replicate/replace their professors. Like cyborgs, feminist students can be “exceedingly unfaithful to” and quite uninterested in their origins (Haraway, 1991, p.1...
Queering the Posthuman: Representations of Technology, Gender, and Sexuality in 'Her'
Let us imagine how we might begin to react when we live in a world where consciousnesses spring into existence fully formed and greet us with a bounding "Hello, I'm here!" This is the stage of the film Her (2013). More than that, let us imagine a world where totally average and apparently rational adults come to form relationships and romances with the consciousnesses embedded in their electronic devices. This is the drive behind the film Her.
On gendered technologies and cyborg writing
Since Hélène Cixous introduced it in 1975, the notion of a specifically feminine writing -écriture féminine -has been discussed as a provocative and potentially disruptive form of representation that breaks with masculine and authoritarian modes thereof. However, in this paper we will discuss how the notion of écriture féminine may itself be at risk of getting trapped within the gender binary its progenitors tried to break free from. As a commentary on this, we suggest looking at the gendered nature of the research text from the perspective of the technologies with which they are produced, as the writer -when writing/publishing -is always already embedded in the technologies of the publishing machine, turning (academic) writing into something akin to cyborg writing. We further suggest that an understanding of the cyborg nature of writing can introduce a parallel mode of inquiry, which holds the potential to enrich écriture féminine and stand as a critique of too simplistic readings of the same.