Not terribly familiar; do you have a link or source for the manifesto ( or should I be un-lazy and see if I can find it myself ;D ) ?
Non-PDF version for those like me who can’t stand PDFs: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto
Good call!
Yeah that one. I’ve been reflecting on a lot of stuff on feminism, gender and leftist militancy in general, and this text is blowing my mind lol
I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I’ve heard about it previously — I’m very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there’d be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.
(I’ve always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)
Yeah, I personally tend to Julia Serano’s understanding of gender (with both innate and social aspects), but the way Haraway talks about it is making me reconsider some stuff.
Oh I have theories about gender, but alas I’m too tired to elaborate much right now. Suffice it to say, I think which gender we identify with (I.e. what people, and only then by extension, sociocultural concepts, our ideal self-image is shaped in dialogue with) is probably innate (and I have a whole etiology for this), but what gendered behaviors and expressions and identities and ways of being we adapt from that identification come from gender as a sociocultural construct, which is largely “arbitrary”, multifaceted, and so on. This does not mean you can arbitrarily change or remove people’s identification with other people, or their desire or lack thereof to express aspects of that concept, however. I think my account of exactly how that cultural construct functions, is identifiable, and what it is, as well as my account of the etiology of gender identification, are probably less rigidly medicalized than Serano’s, however. I’m a poststructuralist through and through, and dislike essentialization, and enjoy using tools such as Wittgenstein’s language games and family resemblances.
I apparently need to upgrade my lexical processor - I couldn’t understand it.
I’m trying to understand what she’s saying (while pretending to work at my corpo job), and much of it seems very 2nd wave feminist. “feminine = exploitable, subservient, vulnerable”, “masculinity = good at fixing things”, and then offers that cyborgs (ie transhumanism?) are an escape from this very narrow view of gender and political identity? Am I completely off the mark?
Like is she saying that because we have, for example, guns (technology superior to our animal flesh) that men and women are more equally capable of defending themselves and thus on more equal ground? Or is it something else entirely?
