This week I'm taking a little different approach to posting my blog for the article. I am actually posting this as I read the article and so far I'm a paragraph into this thing and am having a difficult time with her use of rhetoric. Exactly how is she using the term blasphemy? I just don't get what the hell she's doing here. "Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy?" I keep running this over in my mind and I'm coming up with this: blasphemy means to see yourself as as good as God, having God type qualities, or even better than God right? And apostasy is a separation from your religion or cause. So I'm trying to put this together. Seeing myself as equal to God isn't a separation or departure from my own religion or cause. Hmm. I guess it is just interesting to me trying to understand her use of language. Yes, i get it that she is talking about the humor and irony in politics and that she feels the need for that approach in socialist-feminism, and this leads her into talking about the cyborg. She wants to create a political myth that is faithful to both feminism and to materialism.....Blasphemous and ironic. But I'm just thrown off by this introduction.
Okay, maybe this isn't how I'm gonna do this. It might take forever. I'll read this overwhelming 'article' and come back because I probably don't need to pick it apart phrase by phrase. Bad idea mixed with too much ritalin.
So it sounds like Haraway is saying that we are all cyborgs, hybrids of machine and organism in today's world and that the cyborg will change what counts as 'women's experience' in these times (this article being a little old but still just as relevant). Cyborgs are not a thing of the future, but instead a commonality in modern medicine, reproductive technology, manufacturing, etc... so whether we know it or not - we are all cyborgs. And her socialist and feminist views do not agree with separating mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism into dualisms. She sees cyborgs as being mixtures of biological human beings and mechanical/electrical components so intertwined that they can no longer be separated.
The point she tries to make about the classification of women being a socially constructed category rather than biological is quite interesting. When thinking about the cyborg and even the other stuff we've talked about in class like creating a virtual identity in cyberspace, it becomes clear how not only gender, but race, sexuality, and class can be socially constructed. So, disregarding the biological aspect of gender, we must take a different view on feminism altogether and throw out the binaries of either male or female. We are human cyborgs. ? ?
Okay, I just can't do this anymore. It's really hard to read into these metaphors upon larger metaphors.....I'll have to come back to this article. I don't know if it's just me or what but it is killing me. It's a tough read.
I guess I am going to come back and read the rest of the article another time because just reading the first few pages has taken some time. And trying to relate that to some of the issues raised in class is challenging. I didn't even realize the different waves of feminism and influences and stuff.....But I can make some comments on relative ideas that come to mind. It seems like we can certainly throw in the issue of feminism to the discussions we've had on race in cyberspace. Power is given to women by allowing a sort of equal voice and the ability to invent either true or fictional identity. But have you guys ever heard of second life? I haven't messed with it at all but have just recently heard of it. A 3D social networking site where you actually create an avatar and interact with other avatars virtually or whatever. It sounds like there are all kinds of uses for this site - psychiatrists interacting with patients who won't actually come into an office, characters giving on-line performances like singing or speeches or whatever...... I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess just that when you think of this kind of thing on-line it puts a whole new perspective on race and gender and stuff being anonymous on-line. Your avatar is actually doing on-line things that you do in life. How crazy is that? Interesting to me I guess.
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3 comments:
I'm inspired that you even attempt posting while reading. I would have been sitting at my computer for at least 5 days straight trying to formulate my thoughts AND read that beast of a piece at the same time. I can't even count how many times I restarted. I agree completely with the section where you discuss women and how cyborgs are not things of the future but often found in many modern-day medicines, reproductive technology, etc. It's hard to realize technology has grasped us so quickly and we don't even really recognize it until some women writes a really long manifesto about it. Even though the read was pretty excruciating at least it open our eyes to a world that is quickly turning to technology to exist. Yikes.
Hey gotta give it to you...Trying to analyze the article while reading seemed like a good idea. but I just sat down and tackled the article and jotted some stuff down and was adding ideas of what i thought but that turned out to be harder than I thought....due to the crazyness of Haraway and how she wrote this as a way to get a womens perspective on the matter. To anyone who reads the manifesto sit and take it all in slooowwwly!
I think you were right on when you summarized what Haraway is getting at in your 3rd paragraph. In the class discussions we were able to further your line of thought. It seems that Haraway sees this intertwining of machine and human as an inevitability and her hope is to help steer the course of this merger in a more utopic direction.
I also find the point about gender being a social construction rather than a purely biological issue. I suppose I'm going to far to say gender as she specifies this construction to be limited to "woman" and what that term often conjures in the mind.
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