Cyborgs, cripples and icrip
reflections on the contribution of Haraway to disability studies
pp. 91-111
in: Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, Lennard Davis (eds), Disability and social theory, Berlin, Springer, 2012Abstract
Although Haraway's cyborg has been widely used in feminist science studies and other fields, "disabled cyborgs' are largely absent (see Moser, 2000, 2005 for conspicuous exceptions). Ironically, while the cyborg is supposedly about "transgressed boundaries' and "potent fusions', the starting point in any cyborg discussion is inevitably a "fully functioning human and a fully functioning machine' (Quinlan and Bates, 2009: 51), an assumption which remains invisible and unquestioned. One of the reasons why there has been little utilisation of the transgressive cyborg figure within disability studies to date is because of a well-documented history of how technology was problematically associated with normalisation, rehabilitation and cure (Goodley, 2011).