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Critical Analysis Of Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto?

969 Words4 Pages
Donna Haraway, in her article, "Cyborg Manifesto", proposes the positive potential of technology in its capacity to transgress boundaries and anticipates the heralding of a utopic unfolding of space that is inhabited by a population of posthuman nature- artificial and genderless. In her attempt to locate the acts of transgression (with respect to both bodies and spaces) as a political strategy, Haraway attributes to technology the ability to conjure new meanings and identities that can challenge inherited categories, in the likes of 'self ' and 'gender '. "Cyborg Manifesto" is a site of nebulous undertakings for it anticipates than proclaims while simultaneously rejecting any totalitarian views that limit and maim one 's view of these hybrid bodies. Focusing on the intersection between human and machine, she writes "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (581). For her, totalizing theories like that of feminism which propound the myth of "original unity" (582) and a "once-upon-a-time wholeness before language" (582) sound reductive and crippling in a postmodern age. The literary piece, instead of pleading for an acceptance of hierarchies, argues for an acknowledgement and simultaneous embrace of "partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves" (588). She revels in its multiplicity and sees the image of the cyborg as part of the "utopian tradition of imagining a
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