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103 5 The Cyborg and the Crip Critical Encounters Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. —Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women Controversy came quickly to the cyborg. In 1983, Socialist Review invited several feminist theorists, among them Donna Haraway, “to write about the future of socialist feminism in the context of the early Reagan era.”1 Haraway responded with “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” framing the cyborg as a figure of feminist critique.2 Her cyborg was a radical border-crosser, blurring the boundaries between human and animal, machine and organism, physical and non-physical.3 Such a cyborg, she argued, could “guide us to a more livable place,” an “elsewhere,” in which “people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”4 This potential arose from the cyborg’s hybridity, its transgression of boundaries and categories; because it does not, or cannot, privilege unity or sameness, it offers “a way out of the maze of dualisms” that characterize Western thought.5 Haraway positioned her cyborg as an intervention not only in Western dualism but especially in Western feminism, and her critique was focused along two fronts: first, feminist dismissals of science and technology, and second, feminist reliance on “universal, totalizing theory.”6 She argued that the cyborg’s non-innocence—its origins in a militarized and colonizing technoscience—was precisely what made it a potentially productive tool for feminist analysis. It could lead to “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” or to a feminist politics in which we take pleasure and responsibility in technology; the key is to recognize this risky dual capacity as opening new possibilities for resistance.7 The fragmented cyborg pushes us to see from 104 | The Cyborg and the Crip multiple perspectives at the same time, stressing that every perspective “reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”8 Capable of “holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true,” the cyborg rejects binary logic and embraces contradiction.9 Nowhere is its contradictory stance more apparent than in terms of science and technology. As Haraway describes it in an interview, the manifesto is “neither technophobic , nor technophilic, but about trying to inquire critically” into the assumptions , uses, and implications of technoscience; it urges feminists to engage in and take responsibility for “the social relations of science and technology.”10 Thus, she warns against feminist approaches that serve only to heighten the dualism between science and nature by rejecting technology outright. Her manifesto is an alternative to those feminisms that “have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body.”11 The feminist task, then, is not to plot some escape from technology, or to map our return to a preindustrial Eden, but rather to contest for other meanings of, or other relations with, technoscience. The cyborg serves as a theoretical framework for such contestations. Haraway describes her project as a challenge to “versions of Euro-American feminist humanism” that assume “master narratives deeply indebted to racism and colonialism .”12 The valorization of nature and the desire on the part of some feminists to cast all technology as phallocentric is one such master narrative; another is the development of a universalizing feminist theory dependent on monolithic ideas of “woman,” articulations that prioritize gender over race and class. Haraway’s second intervention, then, was in “some streams of the white women’s movement in the United States” that naturalize “woman.”13 For Haraway, the boundary-crossing cyborg could be a productive intervention in such debates, shifting the terrain of feminist thought and practice from monolithic identities to shifting affinities. Drawing on Chela Sandoval’s work on women of color and “oppositional consciousness,” Haraway pushes for a feminism not “on the basis of natural identification, but . . . on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.”14 Through her cyborg figure, she suggests that “the future of socialist feminism” requires a politics open to the possibility that “[g]ender might not be a global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.”15 Although Haraway explicitly positioned both the cyborg and its manifesto as feminist, not all readers shared that interpretation. Reflecting on the history of the manifesto, Haraway recalls that the Socialist Review’s East Coast Collective found the essay politically unsuitable, antifeminist, and devoid...

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