i. Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto

29

Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay The Cyborg Manifesto talks about

the binaries that dictate the world that were established by and serve to favour only white cis-hetero patriarchy, and presents the Cyborg—

an entity that is simultaneously a hope for the future, and our current existence. 75 She defines the Cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” 76 Her premise for establishing this observation is that the difference between social lived reality and science fiction is “an optical illusion.” 77 The real world inspires fiction and fiction emulates the realities of existence. Therefore, the Cyborg exists amongst both, and within neither at the same time.

Her

Cyborg exists in a world without gender, and therefore, represents no origin story. She calls it the illegitimate offspring of patriarchal capitalism and militarism, expected to reject its origin story, as “illegitimate offsprings are often unfaithful to their origins.” 78 She describes the Cyborg as an entity that blurs the binaries that exist within the world—between humans and non-humans, between organisms and technology, and between the physical and nonphysical. 79 Haraway wrote this essay four years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “Intersectionality” and therefore, it does not appear in this essay. 80 However, much of what Haraway talks about is intrinsic to the discussion about intersectionality. She mentions Chela Sandoval’s concept of “oppositional consciousness” which centers the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Chicana and other womxn of color who are pulled apart by identity politics— excluded in the racial discourse, and in the social construction of “woman” which was fought for by the white Feminist movement. 81 Acknowledgement of the intersectionality of these identities is what Sandoval calls “oppositional consciousness,” which Haraway describes as a “historical consciousness marking systemic breakdown of all signs of Man in ‘Western’ traditions, constructing a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity.” 82

It becomes essential to center as Haraway does, the discourse of intersectionality and oppositional consciousness when discussing the binaries that govern social relations. Haraway discusses the social constructions such as race, gender, class that are established to keep hierarchies that preserve the power for those who already possess it. The blurring of these binaries is not the imagination of a post-racial future, but it is the acknowledgment of the differences created by these historical boundaries and making the conscientious choice to allow for varied identities to exist in validation.

75. Donna, Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149 76. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 149. 77. Ibid, 149. 78. Ibid, 151. 79. Ibid, 151. 80. Crenshaw, 3. 81. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 154. 82. Ibid, 154.