The Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway

The genre of the manifesto
Questions about rhetoric: "blasphemy" vs. "irony"
We are cyborgs.
The etymology of the word "monster"
Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden.
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism
No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.
Representation vs. Simulation list
The translation of the world into a problem of coding
copies without originals
logic of surveillance
Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the 'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself. (526)
The feminization of work intensifies
What is she saying about disease and hunger?
Networking is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy
decentralization with increased surveillance and control
I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women's movements
distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities.
James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly undl her 'true' gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing.
Who is Octavia Butler?
We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.
(Think about the Wesch video on "The Machine is Us/ing Us")
t means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

How does the Internet both liberate and surveil?

What does that have to do with forming identities online?