Faith Wilding, various articles.
Articles include “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism,” “Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism,” “Monstrous Domesticity,” “Wounded Painting/Painted Wounds,” “Metafertility and Resistant Somatics.”
Donna Haraway’s (1991) concept of partial or situated knowledges has been a major influence on feminist methodological debates within geography. In this paper, I argue that geographers can interrogate the partiality of knowledge by developing research designs that incorporate methods derived from different epistemological traditions. The silences and gaps between data sets can be explored to interrogate the partiality of knowledge produced in different theoretical and methodological contexts. Also, advocates of interpretive methodologies can add substantially to theoretical debates over epistemology by demonstrating how the results from all methods are incomplete and subject to power – and positionality – laden interpretations. Using different methods is one way to highlight this issue and to challenge the hegemony of positivist science within mainstream academic and policy circles. (Author’s abstract)
Feminist and Postmodern: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg, by Alison Caddick (.rtf).
“In summary then, I have proposed that the development of the new reproductive technologies carries through a more: general transformation in the mode of the constitution of subjects. That is, in line with much recent social theory, but hardly applied in the specific case of the reproductive technologies, I take the view that persons are constituted as such in distinctive and variable ways according to the socio-cultural context of their formation. In particular, some theorists of and commentators on postmodernity help us to begin to illuminate the distinctive self of postmodern society, pointing to the contemporary science-technology nexus as crucially implicated in the new subject form. For the purposes of this essay I have drawn on the work of Donna Haraway in this regard.” (Author’s summary)
Frida Kahlo: A Postmodern Icon of the Cyborg, by Daniela Falini
Brief hypertext essay comparing Frida Kahlo to Haraway’s Cyborg.
In this paper I argue that Mary Shelley’s Monster (more widely known as Frankenstein’s Monster) is a proto-cyborg, and, consequently, that the cyborg (Donna Haraway’s cyborg) is the modern version of Shelley’s monster. Although the argumentation might at first seem a “playful work on words and thoughts,” a thing that I myself acknowledge, I believe that the idea that leads this paper, the one according to which, since we are all cyborgs and the cyborg is the modern version of Shelley’s Monster, then we are all monsters, is by no means simple and easy to accept. However, since the Monster is not at all the evil creature the Western culture subsequently struggled to build the image of, it might not be such a bad thing to be one. Moreover, I believe that it is high time for us to question our anity and acknowledge our cyborgosity and monstrosity in a post-human time. (Author’s abstract)
Good Cyberfemme Housekeeping, by Nathalie Muller.
Commentary on cyberfeminism and its male “boyscout” influences. Author’s website includes interviews with Braidotti, Balsalmo, Plant, and other “Cyberfeminists.”
Ever since William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson’s second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson’s second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is not relegated to one choice among many. Rather the specific materiality of individual existence is presented as both desirable and ultimately necessary to a complete existence, even in a posthuman present or future. (Author’s abstract)
Infomaniacs, by Christine Waters.
As electronic communication reaches its awkward adolescence, what are we left with? Is it a place for imaginations to soar without messy, bodily residue–or a place to hole up without human contact? (Author’s introduction)
Compares Haraway’s notion of relationality to William James’ use of radical empiricism and compares Haraway’s use of style with Gertrude Stein’s. The essay focuses mostly on Modest Witness.
Like Haraway, “I am especially interested in a specific sense of time built into Christian figuration,” (ibid., 9) including the ways certain traditions have attempted tohack into this temporal coding for their own Ends. The modest witness appeals to “the love/hate relation with apocalyptic disaster-and-salvation stories maintained by people who have inherited practices of Christian realism.”(Ibid., 43) As a consequence, I begin with Haraway’s premise that, “Technoscience is a millenarian discourse about beginnings and ends, first and last things, suffering and progress, figure and fulfillment.” (Ibid., 10) My paper thus addresses the erotic subtext which connects the breaking of the Seven Seals to the splitting of the atom: both climaxing in a Revelation. Where Haraway insists that, “Salvation history is history,” (ibid.) I maintain that libidinal millenarianism is millenarianism. (Author’s introduction)
Intimate Perceptions, by Nina Czegledy (curator) for the Digitized Bodies/Virtual Spectacles art installation and CD-ROM.
The Intimate Perceptions exhibition, an integral yet independent component of the Digitized Bodies-Virtual Spectacles project, investigates the ways in which the rapidly developing technologies affect our perception of our bodies, our lives, our imaginations, and our very future.
How is contemporary technoscience refiguring the dichotomies of nature/artifice, real/virtual, body/embodiment, as well as the current classification of gender? (Excerpt)
Donna Haraway has argued that women’s engagement with the masculine domain of science and modern culture usually occurs at the peripheries and from the depths, not from the platform of the powerful. This paper considers the popular culture fields of science fiction and nature writing, exploring the contributions of two American women writers who both operated at the peripheries of science and landed on the ‘platform of the powerful’: Judith Merril and Rachel Carson. Their domestic Cold War envisioning and conflation of literature and science and their insights into the inherently political nature of science anticipated the foundational feminist discussions on the intersections of feminism, literature, and science that followed in the 1970s and 1980s. Merril’s postwar, literary avant-garde ideas together with the stories of the later American feminist science fiction writers prompted Haraway’s challenging suggestion in her transformative study, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) that we might read natural science as a narrative–potent fictions of science–and listen to scientists as storytellers. Rachel Carson, considered the founder of the modern American environmental movement and the author of the famous polemic Silent Spring (1962), had advocated the idea of natural science as narrative decades earlier. The paper traces how Carson links to Merril indirectly and Haraway to Merril directly. In the Cold War decades, both Merril and Carson struggled successfully from and within the margins of science to reshape literatures dealing with possible futures and alternative presents.
Keyboard Cowboys and Dial Cowgirls, by Kirsten Notten, Soundings 3 (Summer 1996) (.pdf).
A brief reading of Star Trek and Star Wars and a discussion of heroines through the lens of Donna Haraway.
This paper arises from my curiosity about the educational implications of the ways in which our increasing familiarity with virtual terrains may be changing our understandings of ourselves as embodied, located and positioned in relation to those territories, boundaries and borders that we assume to be other than (or more than) virtual. (Author’s introduction)
The Loneliness of Cyborgs, by Michele Loyd (.pdf)
Until recently, I thought of cyborgs as creatures of fantasy, perhaps achievable in fact in another century (if we don’t destroy ourselves before then), but certainly not relevant to my daily life. But then a few sentences in Alice Adams’ Reproducing the Womb radically rearranged my perspective on the subject. I was taking cyborgs too literally, and forgetting their allegorical value. While literal, albeit rudimentary, cyborgs do exist (such as people with pacemakers, or those with the Jarvik-7 artificial heart), the real key to understanding the cyborg is in seeing it as a metaphor for our relationship to technology. (Author’s introduction)
Of Mind, Body and Machine: Cyborg cultural politics in the age of hypertext, by Julie M. Albright.
This paper attempts to examine hypertext/hypermedia as powerful tools to advance cyborg cultural politics, and in doing so attempts to delineate the feminist potential of this new means of communication. Hypertext allows a confusion of boundaries between organism and machine, granting feminists the ability to create and signify their bodies and themselves, and in doing so allows new dimensions of social relations in postmodernity. Hypertext/hypermedia also further the cyborg project by enabling non-hierarchical, non-linear, “fractal” knowledge from which patterns of ideas and identities can emerge. Hypertext shifts knowledge production from monologue or dialogue to what Gergen has called “hyperlogue”, allowing a polyvocal, more inclusive discourse to unfold. Lastly, just as self has been redefined relationally, hypertext enables mind to be envisioned relationally, creating the possibility of a “social mind” or “collective consciousness”, thereby expanding the capacity of the body and mind beyond their previous limitations into the realm of cyborg consciousness. (Author’s abstract)
A Modem of One’s Own: The Subject of Cyberfeminism, by Jodey Castricano, Rhizomes 4 (2002).
In this essay, I will examine how the spatial metaphor of Woolf’s “room”–which has been politically meaningful to the identity politics of early feminists–has also come to signify discursively within feminism what Rosi Braidotti has called the “terminal crisis of classical humanism.” (Author’s introduction)
The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, by Peta S. Cook (.pdf).
Donna Haraway’s (1991) vision of a post-gender cyborg has (re)sparked feminist interest in reclaiming patriarchal technological tools as a source of liberation from gender oppression. These utopian, cyborgian dreams of the dissolution of body and gender dualisms however, are flawed. This failing is founded on Haraway’s underestimation of the gender-influenced relationship between: the historical legacies of the cyborg; linguistic metaphors and symbols; and the lived subjective technological experiences of embodied materiality. Consequently, despite Haraway’s fantastical claims of the cyborg being able to transgress traditional hierarchical bodily-based binaries, this cyborg vision is distinctly modern in a nostalgic, linear, and utopian construction. As a result, these idealistic cyborg visions can be linked paradoxically to patriarchal discourses; the Cartesian philosophies of Christian religion; and the posthuman prophetical desires of the Extropian transhuman collective (Extropy Institute, 2003a, 2003b; More, 2003), such as featured in the works of Hans Moravec (1988) and Kevin Warwick (2002). (Author’s introduction)
Multiple Objectivity: An Anti-relativist Approach to Situated Knowledges, by Ron Eglash (.pdf).
Much of the advocacy for relativismis based, either consciously or unconsciously, on the assumption thatobjective methods are necessarily singular in their outcomes. This essayexamines the possibilities for multiple objectivity: frameworks thatare objective, and yet avoid the reduction to a single right answer.It examines two mechanisms by which this epistemic diversity can begenerated – nominalism and process indeterminism – and discussestheir role in two potential theories of multiple objectivity: Pickering’smangle Haraway’s diffraction. The essay concludes with a discussionof the relations between multiple objectivity and ethics. (Author’s abstract)
Objectivity in Feminist Philosophy of Science, by Laura Aline Ward (master’s thesis) (.pdf)
Feminist philosophy of science has long been considered a fringe element of philosophy of science as a whole. A careful consideration of the treatment of the key concept of objectivity by such philosophical heavyweights as Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, followed by an analysis of the concept of objectivity with the work of such feminist philosophers of science as Donna Haraway, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Sandra Harding, reveals that feminist philosophers of science are not members of some fringe movement of philosophy of science, but rather are doing philosophical work which is both crucial and connected to the work of other, “mainstream” philosophers of science. (Author’s abstract)
Parallels between Frankenstein and the Cyborg, by Adrienne Renee Gelardi.
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a phenomenon introduced to the world in thebook Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in 1818. In 1818 the word “cyborg” did not even exist. Even if it had existed it would be incomprehensible to the people of that time due to their lack of technology. Despite the absence of the term cyborg, Frankenstein’s monster upholds many parallels between it’s own nature and that of Donna Haraway’s interpretation of a cyborg in her essay ACyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the LateTwentieth Century. Although referred to as a male at times, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster also exhibits a certain sort of gender ambiguity, which the monster has in common with Donna Haraway’s cyborg. Another similarity between the monster and a cyborg is that they have both been created and therefore do not identify with nature. (Author’s introduction)
“My thoughts on the relationship between high performance computing (as found on the internet) and gender performativity, a la Judith Butler.” (Author’s website)
The Politics and Aesthetics in the Cyborg Era, by Aylin Kalem (.pdf).
The technological age in which we are living marks a turning point in the evolution of mankind. The human kind undergoes a mutational period, a process of transformation towards the “posthuman.” This transformation is determined by the high techne that expands into every layer of culture. High techne is different from the modernist understanding, which defines technology in its mere instrumentality. This aspect stands as the marker of the cyborg era. Thus, this essay will try to lay out the cyborg politics and aesthetics under the notion of high techne by referring to fields of theory and performance. (Author’s introduction)
Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: A Hypertext Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, by Joseph Christopher Schaub.
Since Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” there has been a great deal of debate concerning the liberatory potential of cyborg subjectivity. Of particular interest has been the effects that the cyborg, which dissolves the boundary between human and machine, will have upon the equally contested boundaries which comprise distinctions of gender in the late twentieth century. In this paper I will examine a cyborg construction which appears in the early twentieth century films of the Soviet theorist and filmmaker, Dziga Vertov. The Kino-eye (or camera-eye) is a cyborg combination of the mechanical movie camera, and the human eye. It is most fully explored in Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929), the magnum opus of his cinematic theories. (Author’s abstract)
Science, Ideology, and Donna Haraway, by Robert M. Young.
I’ll only sketch the other movements which have undermined the science/ideology dichotomy. I have stressed various aspects of the history of ideas, because it is easy to think of that discipline as passé, rather than realising how subversive it was, long before anyone set out – as an avowedly political project to push against the distinction between science and ideology. The history of ideas provided the essential basis for joining forces with social and cultural studies. …. All of which brings me to Donna Haraway, to whose work I shall devote the rest of this essay. In particular, I want to celebrate her masterpiece, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, which is among the dozen best books I have ever read. (Excerpt)
Science of the Lambs, by Timothy Druckery.
Brief English hypertext essay in German zine called Telepolis that discusses Haraway, eugenics and the clone sheep, Dolly.
Technonative Visions, by Anne Kull (.pdf).
Textual rereadings and translations are familiar practicies in literary studies, philosophy, and theology. Textual rereadings may or may not result in culturally specific interventions in nature as well as culture. The point is to get at how the lived worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the processes; to reconfigure what counts as knowledge, ’a good life’. Technoscience is a term that tries to name the mutations in chances of life and death for all organisms on the planet. Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour are my guides to technoscientific world, where not all translators are human, where not all machines are ’dead’, where an autonomous liberal subject is an extinct species, where distributed cognition is rather a rule than an exception. And where communicatio idiomatum is a daily practice, not an obscure technical term from the history of theology. (Author’s abstract)
Telematic Life Forms, by J. van Brakel, in Philosophy and Technology 4:3 (1999).
This essay borrows from Haraway’s Modest Witness to talk about current academic discourse about virtual reality and “telematics.” The author writes that while the combination of computer and telecommunications technologies indeed changes the life forms of human beings, the newness of some changes is exaggerated, and more importantly there tends to be an overemphasis on the effects of the (fragmented) individual at the expense of effects on human life forms in general. He concludes by arguing that “it might be a good thing to worry less about “the very identity of the human personality” — a rather parochial concept. The social ramifications for a lifeworld that is both increasingly virtual and also real is more important than indulging in the exoticism of virtual realities.”
Feminist productions in the fields of literary, cultural and social studies are almost exclusively – though for good reasons – informed by a radical constructivism. Drawing on discourse analysis and semiotics, such work relies predominantly on gender as a category of analysis in order to examine the social, cultural and psychic construction of subjectivity, while neglecting questions of biological sex. The general refusal of scholars from those disciplines to engage with the materiality of bodies, with their physiological, biochemical or microbiological details, forms and formations, is indicative of an anti-essentialist stance which is very understandable from a historico-political perspective: When politicians and scientists have for centuries recurred to “natural” (because biological) differences to explain and legitimate social discrimination, oppression and inequality between the sexes and between human beings of different classes and ethnicities, it was more than necessary to counter, if not downright deny, biologistic argumentations. Meanwhile, however, the hostile attitude towards the natural sciences and empirical research has “naturalised” itself and the socio-cultural framing of bodies and gender has simply become the counterpart of the ideology known as biological reductionism, insofar as influences of the environment and society as well as individual technologies of the self count as the determining factors now that, in their turn, can be acted upon by the feminist subject. (Author’s introduction)
Of Tools and Toys: Donna Haraway’s Cyborgs and the Power of Serious Play, by Jenny Cool.
Though explicitly addressed to envisioning a possible politics for socialist-feminism, Haraway’s ironic dream captures the attention and imagination of academics in disparate fields because, as with all dreams, the operation of signifying condensation is fundemantal to it. Through condensation, dreams achieve a radical economy of signification, making them richly polysemic and overdetermined, without reduction. (Freud) This essay sets out to unpack some of the most potent elements of Haraway’s cyborg dream and to show how they speak both: to some central tensions within feminism (among feminisms?); and to deep anxieties within the broader field of contemporary criticism. I undertake this unpacking by way of accounting for the Manifesto’s popularity, but wish, subsequently (and simultaneously) to present my own reading of Haraway’s test as an invocation to reform our view of theory and take up, through model-making, the generative power of as if. (Author’s introduction)
Was That Last Turn a Right Turn: The Semiotic Turn, by Timothy Lenoir, Configurations 2 (1994).
In what follows I survey and assess some of the latest efforts to conceptualize science studies as cultural studies. Within this general movement I will limit my concern to the interesting, provocative, and sometimes mystifying “semiotic turn” in some of the most recent science studies. Specifically, I have in mind the papers of Bruno Latour and Madaleine Akrich presenting what they call a “semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies”; Donna Haraway’s papers on what she calls “material-semiotic actors,” notably her “Promises of Monsters,” “Situated Knowledges,” and “Cyborg Manifesto”; and N. Katherine Hayles’s proposal for enrolling these hybrids in a semiotically inspired program of “constrained constructivism.” By tracing the versions of semiotics presented in these papers to their source, I seek an answer to this question: was that last turn the right turn? (Author’s Introduction)
You are Cyborg, by Hari Kunzru, Wired Magazine, Feb 1997.
Wired magazine article on Donna Haraway, Cyborgs, and cyberfeminism.