“I provide a brief exploration of the seduction of the cyborg discourse and the expanding integration of living organism and machine found in a variety of settings. The question I ask about cyborgs is, “What tension lies in a discourse that envisions machines as facilitators of pleasure?” The cyborg discourse, seen in relation to the concept of pleasure, is one example of a contradiction that is constructed during inquiry into the “meaning” of social reality.” (Author’s abstract)
Critical Theories of of Science: From Hegemony to Cyborg Critique, by Alex Cohen (.pdf).
Compares the projects of Haraway’s Simiens, Cyborgs and Women and Alan G. Gross’s The Rhetoric of Science.
This personal story has three layers: experience of nature, what I brought with me into the doctor’s office, with my own ideas laden with feeling; scientific thinking about nature-this is what the doctor contributed to my experience; and thinking about thinking about nature-which is philosophy of nature. (Author’s introduction)
Cultural Cybernetics: The Mutual Construction of People and Machines, by Ron Eglash.
“Cybernetics was coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener to describe the comparison of information flows in artificial, natural, and social systems. These flows include communication, computation, and control. Social constructionists have approached this powerful framework with a critical eye, finding it complicit with corporate and military interests and thus focusing on the ways in which society constructs cybernetics. Computational modelers have approached this powerful framework with an optimistic embrace, pointing to information networks as anti-authoritarian exchange media, and thus focusing on the ways in which cybernetics constructs society. Cultural cybernetics provides a methodology for the syncretic fusion of these two positions.” (Author’s abstract)
Cyberfeminism with a Difference, by Rosi Braidotti.
“In this article, I will first of all situate the question of cyber-bodies in the framework of postmodernity, stressing the paradoxes of embodiment. I will subsequently play a number of variations on the theme of cyber-feminism, highlighting the issue of sexual difference throughout….. In the rest of this paper, I would like to suggest that first and foremost among these iconoclastic readers of the contemporary crisis are feminist cultural and media activists such as the riot girls and other ‘cyber feminists’ who are devoted to the politics of parody or parodic repetition.” (Author’s introduction)
Cyber-Jouissance: A Sketch For A Politics Of Pleasure, by Irina Aristarkhova (.pdf).
An attempt to outline a cyberfeminist politics of pleasure based on Foucaut’s “ethics of the self” and Irigaray’s “ethics of sexual difference”. Cyberspace can be experienced as a new “source of pleasure for and among women, as a means to share female geneaology based on embodied subjectivity”. Since cyberspace, as other spaces, is built over a net of power relations, it is necessary to invent new forms of politicization in order “to create a space for a positive encounter between women as women not by nature, but by our own decision to face and think through sexual difference” (Author’s abstract)