A Cyborg Manifesto

"Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert." (518)
This quote scares me.

I found the Donna Haraway reading, "A Cyborg Manifesto," originally retchingly depressing and then unflinchingly practical. "The main trouble with cyborgs," (which I see as possibly being the ambiguous hope for them as well, "is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins" (517). Haraway suggests that the identity of "woman of color" is a cyborg identity. The term is a catch-all term for shades and shades of otherness. The liberation movements of the 1960's and 1970's were only made for those with one layer of "otherness:" black people and women, or rather, black men and white women. The women of color's identities were made of cast-off bits of negations: not a black man, not a white woman. However, if one is a woman of color with a pen, one is able to celebrate the strengths of this cyborg identity. "Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other . . . Women of colour have transformed [Malinche, consort to Cortés and mother to the new "race" of the "New" World] from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival" (531-532). This is the part of the reading that I connected to the most because I found it the most hopeful and it was where I wanted to see the world going, not into Haraway's dispersed world of the Homework Economy.