On Fri, 25 Apr 1997, Lorie G Sauble-otto wrote:
> This is a problem I am currently working on, and I'd like some feedback.
> Can we necessarily take Haraway's cyborg literally--all of the time? I'm
> beginning to read it more as an identity, the postmodern identity and the
> metaphore (a word which Haraway herself employs to describe her cyborg).
> I think it's time to rethink exactly what she means by cyborg. We're
> talking about two different things, the literal cyborg and the cyborg
> identity which is far-reaching and shifting, border-blurring..... Is
> Elisabeth Vonarburg's Elisa, in The Silent City, a cyborg? The body as
> machine blurrs the distinctions between the actual cyborg creation and the
> cyborg identity. What do you think?
>
> lorie
>
> Dear lorie, No, I don't think we can take Haraway literally all the
time. I'm not quite sure that she can be taken literally at all.It
seemed to me that Haraway worked off images of the literal cyborg AS a
metaphor for boundary blurring po. mo identities. Most
critics hail the cyborg motif as emanicapatory in an unqualified sense,
and I think that that is a mistake- one interesting exception applies
haraway to AIDS- I can't remember
the name of the article but it is in Linda Hutcheons edition of
collected essays on post modernism.
H. certainly does intend to map out
a post-modern identity- she identifies Cherie Moraga and Audre Lorde as
occupying such a discursive
position (it is by no means clear to me that they do, but that is another
story- there is a blistering attack by a chicana feminist- called Lara or
Lora Romero? on this). What I
find interesting through is that in our culture now the
cyborg figure is used to reinforce sexual steretotypes, and so the utopian
parts of Haraway's equation are being subsumned, and the dystopian aspects
( which H talks about in the "women on the intergrated
circut" part of the essay) are not. I see Haraway's
essay as an early attempt to intervene in the intergration of technology
and the human, to layout previously unthought possibilities.
> >
I too am working on Haraway. But I really should be working on
cross-dressing in Elizabethian drama- there could be a connection! I
have got private replies from 2 other
people who working on H as well. Anyone out there thinking about a
collection of essays???? > >
> >
> >Tanya.
>
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