The companion cyborg

technics and domestication

Ronald Bogue

pp. 163-179

in: Jon Roffe, Hannah Stark (eds), Deleuze and the non/human, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", first published in the Socialist Review in 1985, is by far her best-known work.¹ Her proposal to displace the feminist myth of the goddess with that of the cyborg, "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (1991: 149), signaled her commitment to a socialist-feminism that is neither technophilic nor technophobic but fully engaged with the problematics of the interpenetration of nature and culture in such diverse realms as biology, ecology, cybernetics, economics, politics and ethics. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), which included a revised version of "A Cyborg Manifesto", and in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997), Haraway continued her exploration of these issues in rhetorical terms largely consonant with those of the "Cyborg Manifesto". In 2003, however, she adopted a new master trope and discursive idiom in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, upon which she expanded in her 2008 study, When Species Meet. In these last two books, her focus is not on cyborgs but on dogs, and specifically her passionate participation in "the doghuman sport called agility" (2008: 26).

Cited authors

Haraway Donna