a cyborg manifesto response..

My idea of a manifesto is a call to action. I feel as though it is a verbal slap in the face, an effort to use language to make things happen. This essay does such, I feel as though it is a response to those feminists who sought, throughout the 70s and 80s, to define what woman truly is. It embodies the principle ideas of opposition to the considered “norms” of science and the Western cultural ideals. The "ironic political myth" of the cyborg--the proposition that we are all hybrids--offers a way to give up the effort to define the "real nature of women" or of any person, animal or thing.

Haraway creates this “ironic political myth” which combines the idea of postmodernism with a kind of socialist feminist critique. As she says, “I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (p.150). The division between nature and culture has been a very treasured one in the U.S. and practically ingrained in every secular progress. I found this text to be very difficult, as well as hard to understand, but I found central themes discussed in class still prevalent within this piece. (I hope I took away the main ideas, because it was very taxing to sort through :-(  guess i'll find out in class...)