A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s

Abstract

Discusses the potential appropriation of scientific & technological advances by socialist feminism, with focus on the image of the genderless cyborg. It is argued that the cyborg offers an opportunity to imagine a utopian world without gender & celebrate the modern confusion of boundaries, a confusion that offers the opportunity for more responsible & just recreation of boundaries. The image of the cyborg is increasingly relevant as the distinctions between human & animal, & animal & machine, are continually challenged & reconstructed by technology & science. Although the proliferation of cyborgs could become a mechanism of further domination, it is suggested that cyborgs can by symbolically & physically utilized in a feminist socialist project emphasizing the advantages of partial, fractured, & continually evolving identities. Gender, race, & class consciousness are not the product of inherent identities or traits, but a reaction to histories of oppression & marginalization, & cyborgs could potentially blur these borders & categories that have provided the basis for domination. Following a brief review of the repressive & liberating potential of technology, it is concluded that high-tech rearrangements of race, class, & gender could reinvigorate socialist feminism. T. Sevier