Donna Haraway Cyborg Manifesto: What Does She Say about Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Women’s stories have started to diversify as stories that not only female viewers but also male viewers want to watch. Instead of thinking about how to identify with whom, the female viewer can watch the types of identification in different stories, with different female characters. However, in the cinema where male domination has been present for centuries, it is not an immediate situation that the female perspective gains momentum as much as the male perspective. At the same time, all the steps necessary for this state to be realized continue to be taken by women. The 2010s were challenging male-dominated cinema narratives. Instead of stereotyped female characters categorized by feminist film theorists, radical female characters breaking these stereotypes are now categorized. Female characters that are promising, strong, able to raise their voices in the public sphere, make their voices heard, and who can talk about realities against the face of society are represented as women replacing the compassionate mother, punished woman, and beautiful, femme-fatale woman. Going out of the beauty judgments of the social order has a very important role in breaking the male-dominant view.
Haraway, who works on feminism and techno-science, contributes to women’s studies, social gender studies, and the field of new media. Saying, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”, Haraway’s thought enables philosophy to open its doors to the readers who follow her.
Haraway starts her work with the title of “An Ironic World of Creating a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit”. She mentions that she wrote the text on the way to an ironic political myth that believes in feminism, socialism, and materialism. Saying that irony has a relationship with humor and serious play, Haraway states that the cyborg image lies at the root of her ironic belief. Haraway defines the cyborg as: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Cyborgs are defined as those who prevent sexuality, heterosexism and do not reproduce as a result of organic reproduction. Saying that we are all chimeras, Haraway states that based on the combination of machine and organism, humans are made-up hybrids and emphasizes that our ontology is cyborgs. The cyborg is stated as the creature of the post-gender world. In a postmodernist, non-naturalistic fashion, Haraway imagines a world without gender, without birth, and the end of the world. An ultimate self, freed from all addictions is important to her. The cyborg is firmly attached to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversion. Therefore, the cyborg is oppositional and has nothing to do with innocence. The dream of establishing a family based on the organic family model is not found in the cyborg. They also present the possibility that humans may have close matches with other living beings in a way that is both disturbing and pleasurable. The boundary between the physical and the non-physical becomes blurred based on cyborgs and in questioning the boundaries between the human and animal. “They are like ether,” Haraway says of cyborgs. Ether is a colorless, volatile liquid with a distinctive odor. Therefore, cyborgs are not ubiquitous and they have invisible qualities. Cyborgs, who are related to consciousness or its simulation, are beings with the ability to read the power network well. Referring to Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964) and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980), Haraway states that these works emphasize the domination brought by the technique mandatorily and indicates that there is an effort to return to an imaginary organic body that will integrate people’s resistance. The cyborg world is about situations where people are afraid of being related to animals and machines and do not hesitate to have fragmented identities.
Sexual objectification is seen as the result of gender/social gender structure. At this point, it is the woman who becomes the sexual object. Likewise, Haraway underlines that the dualities within some concepts are ideologically problematic. Like mind/body, animal/human, organism/machine, public/private, nature/culture, man/woman, primitive/civilized… They are the ones that create a structure of the things that are imagined about personal and social possibilities in gender, sexuality, reproduction, and high-tech myth systems. Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig are also thinkers who write about the body and question eroticism, cosmology, and politics based on images of embodiment, fragmentation, and reconstitution of bodies. Cyborgs in feminist science fiction make problematic the status of the human being, whether male or female, as a member of a race, as a singular being, or as a body.
Stating that the cyborg body is not innocent and has adopted irony from the beginning, Haraway underlines that people are now becoming machines. She adds that the people responsible for the machines cannot be dominated or threatened by the machines. While it is pointed out that gender is not a global identity, it is thought that cyborg gender may be a local possibility that attempts to take revenge on a global scale. The regrowing limb may come out as a freak, or it may be a copy of the old one. For this reason, Haraway, who believes in rebirth, argues that this possibility includes a utopian dream such as the hope of a monstrous world that does not recognize social gender. The cyborg’s imagination, bodies, and tools can show people the way out of the labyrinth of dualities that is explained by them. This state is seen by Haraway as a heteroglossia. This imagination means both constructing and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, and stories of space. Therefore, Haraway emphasizes that she prefers to be a cyborg rather than a goddess (Haraway, 2006).