This present

1. Donna Haraway
A Cyborg Manifesto

2. Cyberfeminism
A Fusion of Machine and Organism

3. Intersections
 Nature
 Culture
 Gender
 Science
 Technology

4. Social Construction
 A New Frontier: Haraway calls for responsible bridges
between humans and machines (technology)
 Sociotechnical factors along with human interactions affect
human associations and the direction that endeavors in
knowledge making take.
 How do individuals and groups participate in the
construction of their perceived social reality?
 Social constructionism argues that social phenomena are
created, institutionalized, known and made into convention
through human habit.
 Social phenomena include social organization, knowledge,
technologies, artifacts, and the characteristic materiality of
cultures.

5. Cyborgs
 Haraway conceives of cyborgs as realities.
 Cyborgs are socially constructed hybrids of
machines and organisms.
 Cyborgs live in borderlands – or productive space
intended for knowledge building.
 Haraway uses the image and myth (or story)of the
cyborg to argue for the construction of one’s
consciousness or responsibility, particularly with
respect to newer technologies.

6. Haraway& Core Concepts
 Borderlands
 Caring
 Connections or Isolation
 Worldliness
 Boundaries
 Cyborgs

7. The Borderlands
 Productive places where negotiations of
knowledge building take place
 What does one care about?
 Ones concerns open up borderlands.
 Haraway raises the questions:
 What matters personally in biographical terms,
political terms, and emotionally?
 In other words, What does onecare about and
what does that tell me?

8. Borderlands: Caring and
Connections
 Haraway points out that:
 Opening borderlands is essential to being open to
possibilities and worldly.
 Connections arise out of the relationship with what
one feels is important and personal.

9. Worldliness and Isolation
 Everything that one cares about makes one more
worldly.
 Worldly relates to what one cares about or connects
to and this connection leads to a multiplicity of other
connections and their development.
 If what one cares about, isolates them, the question
becomes: Is this good for one and, if so, how does
one deal with that isolation?

10. Boundaries
 Relates to connections
 Everything in the world is linked
 It is crucial to view entities within
their network of connections – in
an open, fluid, and indistinct
semiotic flow
Alexander McQueen’s
Cyborg

11. Three Critical Breakdowns
 Transgression in the boundary between human and
animal
 Affirmation of connection between human & other living
creatures
 Ambiguity in distinctions among animal-human-machine
 Uncertainty of what one accepts as nature
 Boundary between physical and non-physical is
imprecise
 Machines and microelectric devices are everywhere and
invisible.

12. Cyborg: A Conceptual Hybrid
 Creatures simultaneously animal and machine who
live in ambiguous, crafted worlds.
 Cyborgs map social and body reality – like
Foucault’s biopolitics.
 The social and body reality is an imaginative
resource, an open field – an open text
 Cyborg’s are one’s ontology: A postmodern,
socially constructed sense of being

13. Partiality and Cyborgs
 Argues for situated, localized knowledge – not
universality – provides the conditions for
responsible knowledge claims.
 Represents the interdependence of people
 Machines are aspects of our embodiment – as such
Haraway emphasizes the need for responsible
relations with machines.
 The cyborg represents a way out of the labyrinth of
Western, patriarchal views and its dualism

14. Floating Signifiers
 The Cyborg myth is about boundaries, fusions and
risky possibilities in borderlands.
 It is everything about caring and taking
responsibility for the relationships such concern
creates.
 Cyborgs are transformative – they encourage the
construction of identity in a partial, fragmented and
contradictory world.

15. The Situated Cyborg
 Social relations of new technologies are
reformulations of expectations, culture, work, and
reproduction for the large scientific and technical
work-force.
 Danger – lack of control for high-tech repressive
apparatuses ranging from entertainment to
surveillance – culture of video games and sci-fi
escape.
 Speaks to a critical need for privileged women to
address scientific-technical discourses and
processes in a conscious and responsible way.