Donna Haraway: Rise of the Cyborgs

Stop Number Three on our tour of voices lifted against patriarchy takes us even deeper into the depths of feminist literature and identity to consider the work of scholar Donna Haraway.  Where bell hooks views resistance to oppression as the building of coalitions between people with broad intersections of identity categories, Haraway resists the idea that categories and intersections have any validity at all - that there is no "being a female" as such.  From Haraway's perspective, the female experience (like all experiences) is constructed on the social, cultural, and scientific level and exists only in our imaginations as a platonic form, rather than an immutable fact.  And that's ok.

A Fusion of Dissimilar Elements

Haraway gained the most renown with the publication of her Cyborg Manifesto in the early eighties, which is an amazing metaphor expressing a very sophisticated idea.  With demagogic flourish, she forcefully makes the following point: there is no single feminism because there is no singular female experience.  There may not even be any aspects of female experience that apply to all people that self-identify as females.  However, Haraway does not see this as a problem for feminists: rather, it is an asset.  In the same way that cyborgs in science fiction transcend the limitations of both their organic and metallic components, feminists can transcend the limitations of their own limited perspectives by amalgamating the diverse body of perspectives that consider themselves feminist.  The goal is no longer assimilation, or even reconciliation; it isn't necessary to hash out a general understanding that creates internal consistency between different advocates against patriarchy.  

“The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” 

That is to say, working to construct the perfect feminism doesn't have to be a prerequisite to toppling patriarchy.  We can accept and move past the fractured nature of resistance (inevitably fractured because none of us can let go of the notion of divisive identity), and instead focus on our shared affinity - abhorrence of oppressive power structures.

Existential Horror

There are many wonderful authors of feminist literature in the world, but I chose Donna Haraway today because I think that her particular advocacy is emblematic in the differences in thinking that can arise when we suspend the demands for structural rationality that grow from the old order of knowing and organizing our knowledge.  At different points this month I've blogged about the ways that our understanding of the world (science, medicine, etc.) has not developed in a neutral, humanistic vacuum.  All of history is tainted by the arc of historical development that has concentrated power and influence in the hands of men, and has enabled these men to frame our social expectation for acceptable argument in ways that make it difficult to uproot the status quo.

Donna Haraway doesn't care about any of that.  Her argument disregards those logical demands (that all feminists should agree on what feminism is); she rejects them on face and calls them what they are - not inherently necessary elements of truth, but rather conditions imposed by the existing social order.  In that sense, Haraway's work is not only a beautifully evocative metaphor, but also a challenge to patriarchal power structures by the virtue of its very construction.