Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

By Donna Haraway

  • Takes on the ironic stance that advocates for the existence of the cyborg, backed up by claims of feminism

  • Foils!!!

  • The cyborg is both a concept of fiction and lived experiences, and the author claims that it changes what counts as women’s experience in the late 20th c.

  • Contemporary science is filled with cyborgs

  • Cyborgs are like plants and invertebrate as their creation has no gender

  • This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for the responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to a socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in a utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, and possibly a world without end

  • The cyborg exists beyond an oedipal world (post-oedipal). A post-gender world

  • Historically we have been constantly raised with myths of man and women, the separation of mother that leads to man finding woman to seek fullness (also played as foils)

  • Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labor 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

  • It is “without innocence” unlike the woman who is screamed at to remain chaste or else her worth will go down. With the cyborg, it is already tainted by the hands of creation from humankind.

  • The cyborg has no need for a male counterpart to fulfill or fix it, it is complete as it is

  • “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust”

    • The author is also possibly suggesting not only a leap from an oedipal world, but a mortal one into an immortal one.

  • Cyborgs are not one to feel holistic but that doesn’t mean that they don’t seek connection; they can be attracted to politics but don’t feel the need to rely on a party

  • Although its an issue that cyborgs are the offspring of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, and state socialism, that doesn’t matter as they see no need to bear allegiance towards their fathers “fathers”

  • 3 crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional/scientific analysis possible

    • 1. the boundary between human and animal is breached (ex: feminist acknowledging the pleasure between the connection of humans & other creatures, movements for animal rights)

    • 2. animal-human (organism) and machine (Because they have become autonomous as humans are and act have grown similar to humans as time has progressed)

    • 3. The boundary between physical and non-physical (a subset of the second) (Machines are growing smaller and smaller as they become more advanced, blending in further with reality. Ex: The bulk of the T.V. in history, the microchip.)

  • Cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work

  • There is politics over monkeys and artifacts, so why not have politics over humans?

  • The political struggle": We must recognize that there are possible revolutionary benefits to this (cyborgs) along with potentials for domination

  • LAG (Livermore Action Group)

FRACTURED IDENTITIES

  • “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” (155)

  • For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called ‘woman and blacks’ “ (156)

  • “This identity marks out of a self-conciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (156)

  • “King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different ‘movements’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be telos of the whole” (156)

  • “The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification” (157)

  • “I think that radical v.s. socialist/marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all ‘epistemologies” as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities” (157)

  • “What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective—and, ironically, socialist-feminist? (157)

  • Cyborg feminist have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth-century people a pause as well” (157-158)

  • “In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of marxism (158)

The Informatics of domination

  • Translating biological natural words into versions that cannot be coded as natural

The ‘Homework Economy’ outside ‘the home’

Women in the Integrated circuit

  • “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves”…”It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories”