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A Cyborg Manifesto

S C I E N C E , T E C H N O L O G Y ,

A N D S O C I A L I S T - F E M I N I S M

I N T H E L A T E

T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y

Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065. Created from warw on 2017-12-18 03:37:21.

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A N I R O N I C D R E A M O F A

C O M M O N L A N G U A G E F O R W O M E N

I N T H E I N T E G R A T E D C I R C U I T

This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to

feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as

blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identifica-

tion. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things

very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the

secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States poli-

tics, including the politics of socialist-feminism. Blasphemy

protects one from the moral majority within, while still insist-

ing on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy.

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger

wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incom-

patible things together because both or all are necessary and

true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical

strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more

honored within socialist-feminism. At the center of my ironic

faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and

organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fic-

tion. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important

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political construction, a world-changing fiction. The interna-

tional women’s movements have constructed “women’s expe-

rience,” as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collec-

tive object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most

crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of

the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppres-

sion, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and

lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experi-

ence in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and

death, but the boundary between science fiction and social re-

ality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures

simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds am-

biguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of

cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each

conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power

that were not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg “sex”

restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and

invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against hetero-

sexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic repro-

duction. Modem production seems like a dream of cyborg col-

onization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism

seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I,

command-control -communication-intelligence, an $84 bil -

lion item in 1984’s U.S. defense budget. I am making an argu-

ment for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily

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reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very

fruitful couplings. Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid pre-

monition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we

are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine

and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it

gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both

imagination and material reality, the two joined centers struc-

turing any possibility of historical transformation. In the tradi-

tions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist,

male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradi-

tion of the appropriation of nature as resource for the produc-

tions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from

the reflections of the other—the relation between organism

and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border

war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and

imagination. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the con-

fusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construc-

tion. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist cul-

ture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and

in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender,

which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a

world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation

history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempt-

ing to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic

utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoë Sofoulis argues in her

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unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and

nuclear culture, “Lacklein,” the most terrible and perhaps the

most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in

non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression,

which we need to understand for our survival.1

The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck

with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or

other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropri-

ation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense,

the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final”

irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the

“West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an

ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.

An origin story in the “Western,” humanist sense depends on

the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented

by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the

task of individual development and of history, the twin potent

myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and

Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psy-

choanalysis, in their concepts of labor and of individuation and

gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of

which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of

escalating domination of woman/nature.2 The cyborg skips the

step of original unity, of identification with nature in the West-

ern sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to sub-

version of its teleology as Star Wars.

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The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, inti-

macy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and com-

pletely without innocence. No longer structured by the polar-

ity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological

polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos,

the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can

no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by

the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts,

including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are

at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Franken-

stein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it

through a restoration of the garden—that is, through the fabri-

cation of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a fin-

ished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of

community on the model of the organic family, this time with-

out the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the

Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-

turning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs

can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the

manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not rever-

ent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of hol -

ism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel

for united-front politics, but without the vanguard party. The

main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the ille -

gitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not

to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often

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exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all,

are inessential.

I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this

essay, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary break-

downs that make the following political-fictional (political-

scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in

U.S. scientific culture, the boundary between human and ani-

mal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness

have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks: lan-

guage, tool use, social behavior, mental events—nothing really

convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And

many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; in-

deed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of

connection of human and other living creatures. Movements

for animal rights are not irrational denials of human unique-

ness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across

the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evo-

lutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultane-

ously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and

reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace

re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes be-

tween life and social science. Within this framework, teaching

modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of

child abuse.

Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened

up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human ani-

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mality. There is much room for radical political people to con-

test the meanings of the breached boundary.3 The cyborg ap-

pears in myth precisely where the boundary between human

and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of

people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and

pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this

cycle of marriage exchange.

The second leaky distinction is between animal–human

(organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be

haunted; there was always the specter of the ghost in the ma-

chine. This dualism structured the dialogue between material-

ism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called

spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were

not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not

achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an au-

thor to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist repro-

ductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid.

Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have

made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural

and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally

designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to or-

ganisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively,

and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Technological determination is only one ideological space

opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as

coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and

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reading the world.4 “Textualization” of everything in post-

structuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marx-

ists and socialist-feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived

relations of domination that ground the “play” of arbitrary

reading.5 It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like

my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example,

the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In

short, the certainty of what counts as nature—a source of in-

sight and promise of innocence—is undermined, probably fa-

tally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost,

and with it the ontology grounding “Western” epistemology.

But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some

version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological

determinism destroying “man” by the “machine” or “mean-

ingful political action” by the “text.” Who cyborgs will be is a

radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both

chimpanzees and artifacts have politics (de Waal 1982; Winner

1980), so why shouldn’t we?

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary

between physical and nonphysical is very imprecise for us. Pop

physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the

indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equiva-

lent to Harlequin romances6 as a marker of radical change in

American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are

on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially mi-

croelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisi-

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ble. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking

the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a sur-

face for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only

by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores.

Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western

stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has

changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has

turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as

preeminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV

sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV

wristbands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our

best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean

because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves,

a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently

portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit

and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both

material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.

The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs are precisely why

these Sunshine Belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to

see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or

its simulation.7 They are floating signifiers moving in pickup

trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-

weavings of the displaced and so unnatural women of the anti-

nuclear Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, who read the cyborg

webs of power so very well, than by the militant labor of older

masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defense

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jobs. Ultimately the “hardest” science is about the realm of

greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure

spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent se-

crets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers

are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution as-

sociated with the night dream of postindustrial society. The

diseases evoked by these clean machines are “no more” than

the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune

system, “no more” than the experience of stress. The nimble

fingers of “Oriental” women, the old fascination of little An-

glo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced

attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this

world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these

new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg

women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita

Jail8 whose constructed unities will guide effective opposi-

tional strategies.

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent

fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people

might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my

premises is that most American socialists and feminists see

deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine,

idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic for-

mulations, and physical artifacts associated with “high tech-

nology” and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man

(Mar cuse 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant 1980), the

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analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on

the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an

imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of

my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist

worldwide intensification of domination has never been more

acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better

enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of

power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final im-

position of a grid of control on the planet, about the final ab-

straction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the

name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bod-

ies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia 1984). From another per-

spective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily

realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with

animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial iden-

tities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to

see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both

dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other

vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than dou-

ble vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are mon-

strous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances,

we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and

recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group,

as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting

the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the

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tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a

political form that actually manages to hold together witches,

engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists

long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name

of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity: related not by blood

but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for an-

other, avidity.)9

F R A C T U R E D I D E N T I T I E S

It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single ad-

jective—or even to insist in every circumstance on the noun.

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities

seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won

recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender,

race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential”

unity. There is nothing about being “female” that naturally

binds women. There is not even such a state as “being” female,

itself a highly complex category constructed in contested

sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender,

race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by

the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social

realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who

counts as “us” in my own rhetoric? Which identities are avail-

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able to ground such a potent political myth called “us,” and what

could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful frag -

mentation among feminists (not to mention among women)

along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman

elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of

each other. For me—and for many who share a similar historical

location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical,

North American, mid-adult bodies—the sources of a crisis in

political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the

U.S. left and U.S. feminism has been a response to this kind of

crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity.

But there has also been a growing recognition of another re-

sponse through coalition—affinity, not identity.10

Chela Sandoval (n.d.; 1984), from a consideration of specific

historical moments in the formation of the new political voice

called women of color, has theorized a hopeful model of political

identity called “oppositional consciousness,” born of the skills

for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership

in the social categories of race, sex, or class. Women of color, a

name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorpo-

rate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic

breakdown of all the signs of Man in “Western” traditions, con-

structs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, dif-

ference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully

political, whatever might be said about other possible postmod-

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ernisms. Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness is about con-

tradictory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about

relativisms and pluralisms.

Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for

identifying who is a woman of color. She notes that the defini-

tion of the group has been by conscious appropriation of nega-

tion. For example, a Chicana or U.S. black woman has not been

able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano.

Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identi-

ties, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial cate-

gories called “women and blacks,” who claimed to make the

important revolutions. The category “woman” negated all non-

white women; “black” negated all nonblack people, as well as all

black women. But there was also no “she,” no singularity, but a

sea of differences among U.S. women who have affirmed their

historical identity as U.S. women of color. This identity marks

out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the

capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on

the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.11

Unlike the “woman” of some streams of the white women’s

movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the

matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely avail-

able through the power of oppositional consciousness.

Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent for mu -

lation for feminists out of the worldwide development of an -

ticolonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the

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“West” and its highest product—the one who is not animal,

barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called

history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semi -

otically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including

those of feminists.12 Sandoval argues that “women of color”

have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate

the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous

Marx isms and feminisms, which had not faced the conse-

quences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolo-

nization.

Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and

the political/poetic mechanics of identification built into read-

ing “the poem,” that generative core of cultural feminism. King

criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary femi-

nists from different “moments” or “conversations” in feminist

practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s

own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole.

These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it ap-

pears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types per-

sisting over time, especially those typical units called radical,

liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms

are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building

an explicit ontology and epistemology.13 Taxonomies of femi-

nism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official

women’s experience. And of course, “women’s culture,” like

women of color, is consciously created by mechanisms induc-

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ing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of

academic practice have been preeminent. The politics of race

and culture in the U.S. women’s movements are intimately in-

terwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is

learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on

a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identi-

fication.

The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-

through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironi-

cally undermines not only the justifications for patriarchy,

colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism,

and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or

natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-

feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemo -

logical strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in

imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all

“epistemologies” as Western political people have known them

fail us in the task to build effective affinities.

It is important to note that the effort to construct revolu -

tionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people

committed to changing the world, has been part of the process

showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmod-

ernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological dis-

course about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic al-

lies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We

are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a histor-

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ically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our

origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics

lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence. But

what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look

like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory,

permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective

selves and still be faithful, effective—and, ironically, socialist-

feminist?

I do not know of any other time in history when there was

greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dom-

inations of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and “class.” I also do

not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might

help build could have been possible. None of “us” has any

longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape

of reality to any of “them.” Or at least “we” cannot claim inno-

cence from practicing such dominations. White women, in-

cluding socialist-feminists, discovered (that is, were forced

kicking and screaming to notice) the noninnocence of the cate-

gory “woman.” That consciousness changes the geography of

all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a

fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that “we” do not

want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction

is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood

as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the

constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth-

century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in

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the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility

opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the

day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation

history.

Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms

have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category

“woman” and consciousness of the social lives of “women.”

Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of

moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labor

that reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage rela-

tionship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated

from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowl-

edge, domination rules in practice. Labor is the preeminently

privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion

and find that point of view that is necessary for changing the

world. Labor is the humanizing activity that makes man; labor

is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a sub-

ject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.

In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying

itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main

achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists

was to expand the category of labor to accommodate what

(some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordi-

nated to a more comprehensive view of labor under capitalist

patriarchy. In particular, women’s labor in the household and

women’s activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in

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the socialist-feminist sense) entered theory on the authority of

analogy to the Marxian concept of labor. The unity of women

here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological struc-

ture of “labor.” Marxist/socialist-feminism does not “natural-

ize” unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible

standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is

in the ontological structure of labor or of its analogue, women’s

activity.14 The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-

eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribu-

tion from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily

responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to nat-

uralize them.

Catharine MacKinnon’s (1982, 1987) version of radical fem-

inism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating,

totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding

action.15 It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of

the diverse “moments” or “conversations” in recent women’s

politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon’s version. But

the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology

and ontology—including their negations—erase or police dif-

ference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the

rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical

feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of ex-

perience, of women’s identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for

all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into

this tale of radical feminism achieves its end—the unity of

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women—by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radi-

cal nonbeing. As for the Marxist/socialist-feminist, conscious-

ness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon’s

theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist

revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.

MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a dif-

ferent analytical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the

structure of class but at the structure of sex/gender and its

generative relationship, men’s constitution and appropriation

of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon’s “ontology” con-

structs a nonsubject, a nonbeing. Another’s desire, not the self’s

labor, is the origin of “woman.” She therefore develops a theory

of consciousness that enforces what can count as “women’s”

experience—anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex

itself as far as “women” can be concerned. Feminist practice is

the construction of this form of consciousness—that is, the

self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.

Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the

epistemological status of labor; that is to say, the point from

which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must

flow. But sexual objectification, not alienation, is the conse-

quence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowl-

edge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and ab -

straction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her

product but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even

potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to

sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is

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not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of

the laborer from his product.

MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the

extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the au-

thority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a

totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never

succeeded in doing—feminists’ consciousness of the nonexis-

tence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think

MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of iden-

tity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the prob-

lem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject

for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian

doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marx-

ian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unas-

similable, radical difference made visible in anticolonial dis-

course and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all

difference through the device of the “essential” nonexistence of

women is not reassuring.

In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a rein-

scription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the

activities of women named by socialist-feminists as forms of

labor only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Repro-

duction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies,

one rooted in labor, one in sex, both calling the consequences of

domination and ignorance of social and personal reality “false

consciousness.”

Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the ar-

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gument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist

points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial ex-

planation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. West-

ern explanation has demanded as much; how else could the

“Western” author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex

other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories

through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed si-

lence about race among white radical and socialist-feminists

was one major, devastating political consequence. History and

polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to es-

tablish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or

for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of

the category woman and social group women as a unified or to-

talizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this:

socialist-feminism—structure of class // wage labor //

alienation

labor, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition

race

radical feminism—structure of gender // sexual appro-

priation // objectification

sex, by analogy labor, by extension reproduction, by addition

race

In another context, the French theorist Julia Kristeva claimed

that women appeared as a historical group after the Second

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World War, along with groups like youth.16 Her dates are doubt-

ful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects

of knowledge and as historical actors “race” did not always ex-

ist, “class” has a historical genesis, and “homosexuals” are

quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the

family of man—and so the essence of woman—breaks up at the

same moment that networks of connection among people on

the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and com-

plex. “Advanced capitalism” is inadequate to convey the struc-

ture of this historical moment. In the “Western” sense, the end

of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates

into women in our time. Perhaps socialist-feminists were not

substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that sup-

pressed women’s particularity and contradictory interests. I

think we have been, at least through unreflective participation

in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and

through searching for a single ground of domination to secure

our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the

consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless

difference and giving up on the confusing task of making par-

tial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are

poles of world historical systems of domination. “Epistemol-

ogy” is about knowing the difference.

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T H E I N F O R M A T I C S O F D O M I N A T I O N

In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I

would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture in-

debted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame

for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrange-

ments in worldwide social relations tied to science and technol-

ogy. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental

changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging

system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that

created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a move-

ment from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, in-

formation system—from all work to all play, a deadly game. Si-

multaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be

expressed in the following chart of transitions from the com-

fortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks

I have called the informatics of domination:

Organics of Domination Informatics of Domination

representation > simulation

bourgeois novel, realism > science fiction,

postmodernism

organism > biotic component

depth, integrity > surface, boundary

heat > noise

biology as clinical practice > biology as inscription

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physiology > communications engineering

small group > subsystem

perfection > optimization

eugenics > population control

decadence, Magic Mountain > obsolescence, Future Shock

hygiene > stress management

microbiology, tuberculosis > immunology, AIDS

organic division of labor > ergonomics, cybernetics of

labor

functional specialization > modular construction

reproduction > replication

organic sex role specialization > optimal genetic strategies

biological determinism > evolutionary inertia,

constraints

community ecology > ecosystem

racial chain of being > neoimperialism, United

Nations humanism

scientific management in > global factory/electronic

home/factory cottage industry

family/market/factory > women in the integrated

circuit

family wage > comparable worth

public/private > cyborg citizenship

nature/culture > fields of difference

cooperation > communications

enhancement

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Freud > Lacan

sex > genetic engineering

labor > robotics

mind > artificial intelligence

World War II > Star Wars

white capitalist patriarchy > informatics of domination

Transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the

scary new networks of informatics of domination.

This list suggests several interesting things.17 First, the ob-

jects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as “natural,” a re-

alization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side

as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not

just that “god” is dead; so is the “goddess.” Or both are revivi-

fied in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechno-

logical politics. In relation to objects like biotic components,

one must think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms

of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics,

costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind

of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits

as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual

reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex

and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms

and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and

ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and antiporn

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radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly un-

masking the irrationalism.

Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to

be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood

groups or intelligence scores. It is “irrational” to invoke con-

cepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the

search for integrated social systems gives way to a new prac-

tice called “experimental ethnography” in which an organic ob-

ject dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of

ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into lan-

guages of development and underdevelopment, rates and con-

straints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be rea-

sonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no

“natural” architectures constrain system design. The financial

districts in all the world’s cities, as well as the export-process-

ing and free trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of “late

capitalism.” The entire universe of objects that can be known

scientifically must be formulated as problems in communica-

tions engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for

those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies.

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on

boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across

boundaries—and not on the integrity of natural objects. “In-

tegrity” or “sincerity” of the Western self gives way to decision

procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies

applied to women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings

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will be developed in the languages of population control and

maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-

makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates,

costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like

any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a sys-

tem architecture whose basic modes of operation are proba-

bilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in

themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other

if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed

for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this

world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist

markets that Marx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology

affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress—

communications breakdown (Hogness 1983). The cyborg is not

subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics,

a much more potent field of operations.

This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of

knowledge that have appeared historically since the Second

World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies

in feminist analysis that has proceeded as if the organic, hierar-

chical dualisms ordering discourse in “the West” since Aristotle

still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoë Sofia (1984)

might put it, they have been “techno-digested.” The dicho -

tomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism

and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and

women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.

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The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation

into a world system of production/reproduction and communi-

cation called the informatics of domination. The home, work-

place, market, public arena, the body itself—all can be dispersed

and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with

large consequences for women and others—consequences that

themselves are very different for different people and that make

potent oppositional international movements difficult to imag-

ine and essential for survival. One important route for recon-

structing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and prac-

tice addressed to the social relations of science and technology,

including crucially the systems of myth and meanings struc-

turing our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled

and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This

is the self feminists must code.

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the

crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and en-

force new social relations for women worldwide. Technologies

and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formal-

izations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions

constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instru-

ments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable be-

tween tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical sys-

tems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible

bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool

mutually constitute each other.

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Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biolo-

gies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the

world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language

in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and

all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly,

investment, and exchange.

In communications sciences, the translation of the world

into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cyber-

netic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to tele-

phone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or

database construction and maintenance. In each case, solution

to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control;

the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and prob-

abilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is

subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to informa-

tion. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit,

basis of unity) that allows universal translation, and so unhin-

dered instrumental power (called effective communication).

The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communi-

cation. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fun-

damentals of this technology can be condensed into the meta -

phor C3I, command-control- communication-intelligence, the

military’s symbol for its operations theory.

In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a prob-

lem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology,

sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The

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organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding

and readout. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs re-

search broadly.18 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as

objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e.,

special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous

moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and

utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and as-

sociated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of

coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as con-

structions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryp-

tography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity.

Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its communica-

tion processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference be-

tween self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke

national ethical perplexity—for animal rights activists at least

as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the United

States gay men and intravenous drug users are the “privileged”

victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (in-

scribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollu-

tion (Treichler 1987).

But these excursions into communications sciences and bi-

ology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely

economic reality to support my claim that these sciences

and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the

structure of the world for us. Communications technologies de-

pend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations,

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military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems,

political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labor-con-

trol systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial

pornography, the international division of labor, and religious

evangelism depend intimately on electronics. Microelectronics

is the technical basis of simulacra—that is, of copies without

originals.

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into ro-

botics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and

reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence

and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern

more than human reproduction. Biology as a powerful engi-

neering science for redesigning materials and processes has

revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious

today in areas of fermentation, agriculture, and energy. Com-

munications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-

technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between

machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and

tool are on very intimate terms. The “multinational” material

organization of the production and reproduction of daily life

and the symbolic organization of the production and repro -

duction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated.

The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure,

public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more

feeble.

I have used Rachel Grossman’s (1980) image of women in the

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integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so

intimately restructured through the social relations of science

and technology.19 I used the odd circumlocution the social rela-

tions of science and technology to indicate that we are not deal-

ing with a technological determinism, but with a historical sys-

tem depending on structured relations among people. But the

phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide

fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis

and political action (Latour 1984). Some of the rearrangements

of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech–facilitated social re-

lations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective

progressive politics.

T H E H O M E W O R K E C O N O M Y

‘ ‘ O U T S I D E T H E H O M E ’ ’

The “New Industrial Revolution” is producing a new worldwide

working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The

extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international di-

vision of labor are intertwined with the emergence of new col-

lectivities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These de-

velopments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in

advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to

permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the

job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in

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Third World countries are the preferred labor force for the sci-

ence-based multinationals in the export -processing sectors,

particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and

involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and

production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women’s

lives have been structured around employment in electronics-

dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial het-

erosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from ex-

tended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high

likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as

they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon

Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in cul-

ture, family, religion, education, and language.

Richard Gordon has called this new situation the “homework

economy.”20 Although he includes the phenomenon of literal

homework emerging in connection with electronics assembly,

Gordon intends homework economy to name a restructuring of

work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to

female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being re-

defined as both literally female and feminized, whether per-

formed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made

extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled,

exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as

servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job

that make a mockery of a limited workday; leading an existence

that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and re-

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ducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to

formerly privileged workers. However, the homework econ-

omy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it

deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women

and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather,

the concept indicates that factory, home, and market are inte-

grated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial—

and need to be analyzed for differences among women and for

meanings for relations between men and women in various sit-

uations.

The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational

structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technolo-

gies. The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly

white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new com-

munications technologies to integrate and control labor despite

extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences

of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the

family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privi-

lege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming

capital-intensive—for example, office work and nursing.

The new economic and technological arrangements are also

related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensifi-

cation of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves

as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of

poverty—generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the

homework economy where stable jobs become the exception,

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and sustained by the expectation that women’s wages will not

be matched by a male income for the support of children—has

become an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed

households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their

increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on

many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a

function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the

kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively

war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for exam-

ple, on U.S. black women, who have achieved an escape from

(barely) paid domestic service and who now hold clerical and

similar jobs in large numbers, has large implications for contin-

ued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women

in industrializing areas of the Third World increasingly find

themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their

families, while access to land is ever more problematic. These

developments must have major consequences in the psychody-

namics and politics of gender and race.

Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism

(commercial/early industrial, monopoly, multinational)—tied

to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related

to Jameson’s three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, mod-

ernism, and postmodernism—I would argue that specific forms

of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its

political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problemat-

ically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be

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schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by

the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied

by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nine-

teenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the

modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and

institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist

heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions repre-

sented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3)

the “family” of the homework economy with its oxymoronic

structure of women-headed households and its explosion of

feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of

gender itself.

This is the context in which the projections for worldwide

structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies

are part of the picture of the homework economy. As robotics

and related technologies put men out of work in “developed”

countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third

World “development,” and as the automated office becomes the

rule even in labor-surplus countries, the feminization of work

intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known

what it looks like to face the structural underemployment

(“fem inization”) of black men, as well as their own highly vul-

nerable position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret

that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are in-

terwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways that

have also differentiated the situations of white and black

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women. Many more women and men will contend with similar

situations, which will make cross-gender and race alliances on

issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not

just nice.

The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger

and on food production for subsistence worldwide. Rae Lessor

Blumberg (1981) estimates that women produce about 50 per-

cent of the world’s subsistence food.21 Women are excluded

generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech com-

modification of food and energy crops, their days are made

more arduous because their responsibilities to provide food do

not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more

complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other

high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisions of la-

bor and differential gender migration patterns.

The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of

“privatization” that Rosalind Petchesky (1981) has analyzed, in

which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies,

and intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as

private synergistically interact.22 The new communications

technologies are fundamental to the eradication of “public life”

for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent

high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic

expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies

like video games and highly miniaturized televisions seem cru-

cial to production of modern forms of “private life.” The culture

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of video games is heavily oriented to individual competition

and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations

are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruc-

tion of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences.

More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other reali-

ties of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are

the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect ex-

change—and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice

of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world’s

largest single industries.

The new technologies affect the social relations of both sex-

uality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways.

The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the

body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing

machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories

that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic

of domination of male and female gender roles.23 These so -

ciobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body

as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system.

Among the many transformations of reproductive situations

is the medical one, where women’s bodies have boundaries

newly permeable to both “visualization” and “intervention.”

Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries

in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. The specu-

lum served as an icon of women’s claiming their bodies in the

1970s; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed

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body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cy-

borg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of

visualization recall the important cultural practice of hunting

with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photo-

graphic consciousness.24 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are

central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imag-

inations of personal and social possibility.

Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new

technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture,

work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical

workforce. A major social and political danger is the forma-

tion of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of

women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of

color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several

varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled

by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertain-

ment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist -

feminist politics should address women in the privileged oc -

cupational categories, and particularly in the production of

science and technology that constructs scientific-technical

discourses, processes, and objects.25

This issue is only one aspect of inquiry into the possibility of

a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of consti -

tutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and

practice can new groups doing science have? How can these

groups be allied with progressive social and political move-

ments? What kind of political accountability can be con-

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structed to tie women together across the scientific-technical

hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing

feminist science/technology politics in alliance with antimili-

tary science facility conversion action groups? Many scientific

and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys

included, do not want to work on military science.26 Can these

personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into

progressive politics among this professional middle class in

which women, including women of color, are coming to be fairly

numerous?

W O M E N I N T H E I N T E G R A T E D C I R C U I T

Let me summarize the picture of women’s historical locations in

advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been re-

structured partly through the social relations of science and

technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize

women’s lives by the distinction of public and private do-

mains—suggested by images of the division of working-class

life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and

home, and of gender existence into personal and political

realms—it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show

how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in

practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image,

suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the per-

meability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body

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politic. “Networking” is both a feminist practice and a multina-

tional corporate strategy—weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.

So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of

domination and trace one vision of women’s “place” in the in-

tegrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social locations

seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist so-

cieties: Home, Market, Paid Workplace, State, School, Clinic-

Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically

and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous

to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the

social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies

in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work.

However, there is no “place” for women in these networks, only

geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women’s

cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power

and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions.

There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of

“identification,” of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The

task is to survive in the diaspora.

Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy,

flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic

work, paid homework, reemergence of home sweatshops,

home-based businesses and telecommuting, electronic cot-

tage industry, urban homelessness, migration, module ar-

chitecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense

domestic violence.

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Market: Women’s continuing consumption work, newly

targeted to buy the profusion of new production from the

new technologies (especially as the competitive race among

industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous

mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new

markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal

buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the nu-

merous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass

markets; growing importance of informal markets in labor

and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market

structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds

transfer; intensified market abstraction (commodification)

of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent

cynical theories of community; extreme mobility (abstrac-

tion) of marketing/financing systems; interpenetration of

sexual and labor markets; intensified sexualization of ab-

stracted and alienated consumption.

Paid Workplace: Continued intense sexual and racial di-

vision of labor, but considerable growth of membership in

priv ileged occupational categories for many white women

and people of color; impact of new technologies on women’s

work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles),

agri culture, electronics; international restructuring of the

working classes; development of new time arrangements to

facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time, over

time, no time); homework and out work; increased pres-

sures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of

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people in cash-dependent populations worldwide with no

experience or no further hope of stable employment; most

labor “marginal” or “feminized.”

State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentral-

izations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship

by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in

the form of information-rich/information-poor differen -

tiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly op-

posed by many social groups; reduction of civil service

jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of of-

fice work, with implications for occupational mobility for

women of color; growing privatization of material and ideo-

logical life and culture; close integration of privatization and

militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist

personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups

to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief

in abstract enemies.

School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs

and public education at all levels, differentiated by race,

class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educa-

tional reform and funding at the cost of remaining progres-

sive educational democratic structures for children and

teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in

technocratic and militarized culture; growing anti-science

mystery cults in dissenting and radical political movements;

continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women

and people of color; growing industrial direction of educa-

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tion (especially higher education) by science-based multina-

tionals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-de-

pendent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a

progressively bimodal society.

Clinic-Hospital: Intensified machine–body relations; re -

negotiations of public metaphors that channel personal expe -

rience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction,

immune system functions, and “stress” phenomena; intensi-

fication of reproductive politics in response to world historical

implications of women’s unrealized, potential control of their

relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically spe-

cific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of health in

en vironments pervaded by high-technology products and

pro cesses; continuing feminization of health work; intensi-

fied struggle over state responsibility for health; continued

ideological role of popular health movements as a major form

of American politics.

Church: Electronic fundamentalist “super-saver” preach-

ers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated

fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting

the militarized state; central struggle over women’s meanings

and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality,

intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle.

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as

a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverish-

ment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most

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vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the so-

cial relations of science and technology, the urgency of a social-

ist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is

plain. There is much now being done, and the grounds for po-

litical work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms

of collective struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU’s Dis-

trict 925,27 should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts

are profoundly tied to technical restructuring of labor pro -

cesses and reformations of working classes. These efforts also

are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of

labor organization, involving community, sexuality, and family

issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial

unions.

The structural rearrangements related to the social relations

of science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is

not necessary to be ultimately depressed by the implications

of late-twentieth-century women’s relation to all aspects of

work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and repro-

duction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination

best and have trouble understanding what can only look like

false consciousness and people’s complicity in their own dom-

ination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is

lost, perhaps especially from women’s points of view, is often

virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the

face of current violation. Ambivalence toward the disrupted

unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting con-

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sciousness into categories of “clear-sighted critique grounding

a solid political epistemology” versus “manipulated false con-

sciousness,” but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures,

experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the

rules of the game.

There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new

kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elemen-

tary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer pro-

tean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced

worldwide in connection with the social relations of science

and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is

not transparently clear, and we lack sufficiently subtle connec-

tions for collectively building effective theories of experience.

Present efforts—Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropo-

logical—to clarify even “our” experience are rudimentary.

I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my his-

torical position—a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was

made possible by Sputnik’s impact on U.S. national science-

education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed

by the post–Second World War arms race and Cold War as by

the women’s movements. There are more grounds for hope in

focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to

produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large

numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats.

The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has con-

sequences for our expectations of forms of political organiza-

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tion and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work

well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams

for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of ex-

perience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, di-

alectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradic-

tion. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with

animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of

Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these

potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social rela-

tions of science and technology, there might indeed be a femi-

nist science.

C Y B O R G S : A M Y T H O F

P O L I T I C A L I D E N T I T Y

I want to conclude with a myth about identity and boundaries

that might inform late-twentieth-century political imagina-

tions. I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ,

Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree Jr., Octavia Butler,

Monique Wittig, and Vonda Mclntyre.28 These are our story-

tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech

worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring conceptions

of bodily boundaries and social order, the anthropologist Mary

Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to con-

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sciousness about how fundamental body imagery is to world-

view, and so to political language.

French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for

all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave

eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodi-

ment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation

and reconstitution of bodies.29 American radical feminists like

Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly

affected our political imaginations—and perhaps restricted too

much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.30

They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But

their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofemi-

nism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only

be understood in Sandoval’s terms as oppositional ideologies

fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder

anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness

of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg

world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explic-

itly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of

clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar

distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity

of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and

opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from per-

sonal and political “technological” pollution? I look briefly at

two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the

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construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: construc-

tions of women of color and monstrous selves in feminist sci-

ence fiction.

Earlier I suggested that “women of color” might be under-

stood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized

from fusions of “outsider” identities, sedimented in the com-

plex political-historical layerings of Audre Lorde’s “biomy -

thography,” Zami (Lorde 1982; King 1987a, 1987b). There are

material and cultural grids mapping this potential. Lorde (1984)

captures the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my polit-

ical myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom U.S.

workers, female and feminized, are supposed to regard as the

enemy preventing their solidarity, threatening their security.

Onshore, inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Out-

sider is a potential amid the races and ethnic identities of

women manipulated for division, competition, and exploita-

tion in the same industries. “Women of color” are the preferred

labor force for the science-based industries, the real women

for whom the worldwide sexual market, labor market, and pol-

itics of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean

women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are

recruited from high schools, educated for the integrated circuit.

Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the “cheap” fe-

male labor so attractive to the multinationals.

Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the “oral primitive,”

literacy is a special mark of women of color, acquired by U.S.

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black women as well as men through a history of risking death

to learn and to teach reading and writing. Writing has a special

significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial

to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written

cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently

to the erosion of that distinction in “postmodernist” theories

attacking the phallogocentrism of the West, with its worship of

the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the

unique and perfect name.31 Contests for the meanings of writ-

ing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releas-

ing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories

of U.S. women of color are repeatedly about writing, about ac-

cess to the power to signify; but this time that power must be

neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about

the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness be-

fore language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is

about the power to survive, not on the basis of original inno-

cence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that

marked them as other.

The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that re-

verse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized

identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the

central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been

colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfill-

ment in apocalypse. The phallogocentric origin stories most

crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technolo-

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gies—technologies that write the world, biotechnology and mi-

croelectronics—that have recently textualized our bodies as

code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have

the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert

command and control.

Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the

struggles of women of color; and stories about language have a

special power in the rich contemporary writing by U.S. women

of color. For example, retellings of the story of the indigenous

woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo “bastard” race of the

new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry

special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherríe

Moraga in Loving in the War Years (1983) explores the themes of

identity when one never possessed the original language, never

told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legiti-

mate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot

base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to nat-

ural names, mother’s or father’s.32 Moraga’s writing, her superb

literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation

as Malinche’s mastery of the conqueror’s language—a viola-

tion, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga’s

language is not “whole”; it is self-consciously spliced, a chi -

mera of English and Spanish, both conquerors’ languages. But

it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original lan-

guage before violation, that crafts the erotic, competent, potent

identities of women of color. Sister Outsider hints at the possi-

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bility of world survival not because of her innocence but be-

cause of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without

the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable

apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has

imagined to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at

the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son. Writ-

ing marks Moraga’s body, affirms it as the body of a woman of

color, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked cat-

egory of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of “origi-

nal illiteracy” of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother

here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms

Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing

needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man.

Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched

surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics are the

struggle for language and the struggle against perfect commu-

nication, against the one code that translates all meaning per-

fectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cy-

borg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in

the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the

couplings that make Man and Woman so problematic, subvert-

ing the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate lan-

guage and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of

reproduction of “Western” identity, of nature and culture, of

mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. “We” did not

originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal

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politics and epistemology that imagine the reproduction of in-

dividuals before the wider replications of “texts.”

From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground

politics in “our” privileged position of the oppression that in-

corporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely

violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see pow-

erful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground

on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolu-

tionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppres-

sions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence,

and greater closeness to nature. With no available original

dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising

protection from hostile “masculine” separation, but written

into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or

salvation history, to recognize “oneself” as fully implicated in

the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification,

vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity,

the “bastard” race teaches about the power of the margins and

the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of color have

transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into

the originally literate mother who teaches survival.

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transfor-

mation. Every story that begins with original innocence and

privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to

be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of

autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation—that is, war, tem-

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pered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These

plots are ruled by a reproductive politics—rebirth without flaw,

perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either

better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker

individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in

masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at

stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through

Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It

passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate

cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological re-

sources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs

are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how

many times a “Western” commentator remarks on the sad pass-

ing of another primitive, another organic group done in by

“Western” technology, by writing.33 These real-life cyborgs (for

example, the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japa -

nese and U.S. electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are ac-

tively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies.34 Sur-

vival is at stake in this play of readings.

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in

Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics

and practices of domination of women, people of color, na-

ture, workers, animals—in short, domination of all consti-

tuted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among

these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/

nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance,

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whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive,

right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is

the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of

the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows

that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the

autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be pow-

erful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be in-

volved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other

is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial.

One is too few, but two are too many.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing

ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation

between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and

what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In-

sofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for exam-

ple, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework

economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cy-

borgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have

become biotic systems, communications devices like others.

There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal

knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands

as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.

One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools

is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer

users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural

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jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped

people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experi-

ences of complex hybridization with other communications

devices.35 Anne McCaffrey’s prefeminist The Ship Who Sang

(1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl’s

brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a se-

verely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment,

skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies

end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by

skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be

animated—given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or

to account for their orderly development and mental capacities.

Or organisms could be mechanized—reduced to body under-

stood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relation-

ships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in

other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate

components, friendly selves. We don’t need organic holism to

give impermeable wholeness, the total woman and her feminist

variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial

reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group

of texts, feminist science fiction.

The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very

problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artifact,

member of a race, individual entity, or body. Katie King clarifies

how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on

identification. Students facing Joanna Russ for the first time,

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students who have learned to take modernist writers like James

Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to

make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where char-

acters refuse the reader’s search for innocent wholeness while

granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and

serious politics. The Female Man is the story of four versions of

one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not

make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or

remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fic-

tion of Samuel R. Delany, especially Tales of Nevèrÿon, mocks

stories of origin by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying

the founding moves of Western civilization to subvert their

plausibility. James Tiptree Jr., an author whose fiction was re-

garded as particularly manly until her “true” gender was re-

vealed, tells tales of reproduction based on nonmammalian

technologies like alternation of generations of male brood

pouches and male nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme

cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddess-

planet-trickster-old woman-technological-device on whose

surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are

spawned. Octavia Butler writes of an African sorceress pitting

her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations

of her rival (Wild Seed), of time warps that bring a modern U.S.

black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her

white master–ancestor determine the possibility of her own

birth (Kindred), and of the illegitimate insights into identity and

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community of an adopted cross-species child who came to

know the enemy as self (Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first in-

stallment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the story of

Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam’s first and re-

pudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the

widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the United States.

A black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith medi-

ates the transformation of humanity through genetic exchange

with extraterrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engi-

neers, who re-form Earth’s habitats after the nuclear holocaust

and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with them. It

is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear

politics in a mythic field structured by late-twentieth-century

race and gender.

Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions,

Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal can close this truncated cata-

logue of promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine

the pleasures and politics of embodiment and feminist writing.

In a fiction where no character is “simply” human, human sta-

tus is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can

speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but

she longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic im-

plants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans.

Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying a new

developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants of mi-

croelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means.

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Laenea becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host

of other alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds ex-

ceeding that of light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused

plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time sense

that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole

species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the

dream of communicating experience; and the necessity of lim-

itation, partiality, and intimacy even in this world of protean

transformation and connection. Superluminal stands also for

the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense;

it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and

colonial discourse in the science fiction I have alluded to in this

essay. This is a conjunction with a long history that many “First

World” feminists have tried to repress, including myself in

my readings of Superluminal before being called to account by

Zoë Sofoulis (n.d.), whose different location in the world sys-

tem’s informatics of domination made her acutely alert to the

imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including

women’s science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitiv-

ity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre’s role as writer

of the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV’s Star Trek

series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal.

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in

Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient

Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek

male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pol-

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lutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated

twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material

in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natu-

ral and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—

all crucial to establishing modern identity.36 In the evolution-

ary and behavioral sciences, monkeys and apes have marked

the multiple boundaries of late-twentieth- century industrial

identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define

quite different political possibilities and limits from those pro-

posed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the im-

agery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, our-

selves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no

exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a

garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antag-

onistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes

irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility.

Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an

aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated,

worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes,

an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for ma-

chines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible

for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), fe-

male embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and

female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its

metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we

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take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that

this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cy-

borgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, some-

times aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not

be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical

breadth and depth.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily

activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cy-

borg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are

given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain

daily life and so have a privileged epistemological position po-

tentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that

makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the

ground of life.

But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of

women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill?

What about men’s access to daily competence, to knowing how

to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other

embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a

global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg

theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to pro-

duce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of bound-

aries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth

system waiting to become a political language to ground one

way of looking at science and technology and challenging the

informatics of domination—in order to act potently.

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One last image: organisms and organismic, holistic politics

depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the re-

sources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have

more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the repro-

ductive matrix and of most birthing. For salamanders, regener-

ation after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth

of structure and restoration of function with the constant pos-

sibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at

the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous,

duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We re-

quire regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our re-

constitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a mon-

strous world without gender.

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in

this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is

a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always,

but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the so-

cial relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-

science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so

means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the bound-

aries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in commu-

nication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and tech-

nology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well

as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can sug-

gest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have ex-

plained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not

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of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.

It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike

fear into the circuits of the super savers of the new right. It

means both building and destroying machines, identities, cat-

egories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in

the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

N O T E S

1. See Zoe Sofoulis (n.d.).

2. See Hilary Klein 1989.

3. Useful references to left and/or feminist radical science movements

and theory and to biological/biotechnical issues include Bleier 1984,

1986; Harding 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Gould 1981; Hubbard et al.

1979; Keller 1985; Lewontin et al. 1984. See also Radical Science Journal

(which became Science as Culture in 1987): 26 Freegrove Road, London N7

9RQ; and Science for the People, 897 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachu-

setts 02139.

4. Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology

and politics include Cowan 1983, 1986; Rothschild 1983; Traweek 1988;

Young and Levidow 1981, 1985; Weisenbaum 1976; Winner 1977, 1986;

Zimmerman 1983; Athanasiou 1987; Cohn 1987a, 1987b; Winograd and

Flores 1986; Edwards 1985. Global Electronics Newsletter, 867 West Dana

Street, #204, Mountain View, California 94041; P rocessed World, 55 Sut-

ter Street, San Francisco, California 94104; ISIS, Women’s International

Information and Communication Service, P.O. Box 50 (Cornavin), 1211

Geneva 2, Switzerland; and Via Santa Maria Dell’Anima 30, 00186 Rome,

Italy. Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that do

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not continue the liberal mystification that all started with Thomas Kuhn

include Knorr-Cetina 1981; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and

Woolgar 1979; Young 1979. The 1984 Directory of the Network for the

Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organization lists a wide

range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis, available

from NESSTO, P.O. Box 11442, Stanford, California 94305.

5. A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and the-

ories of “postmodernism” is made by Fredric Jameson (1984), who argues

that postmodernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural

dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from within; there

is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting

fiction of critical distance. Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be

for or against postmodernism, an essentially moralist move. My position

is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinvention, most

modernist critique, and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have

a chance. The old dominations of white capitalist patriarchy seem nos-

talgically innocent now: they normalized heterogeneity, into man and

woman, white and black, for example. “Advanced Capitalism” and post-

modernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened,

without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drown-

ing depths. It is time to write The Death of the Clinic. The clinic’s methods

required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations

don’t work by medicalization and normalization anymore; they work by

networking, communications redesign, stress management. Normaliza-

tion gives way to automation, utter redundancy. Michel Foucault’s Birth of

the Clinic (1963), History of Sexuality (1976), and Discipline and Punish

(1975) name a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse

of biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language of the spliced sub-

stantive; no noun is left whole by the multinationals. These are their

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names, listed from one issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Al-

lergen, Hybritech, Compupro, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics

Corp., Syntro, Codon, Repligen, Micro/Angelo from Scion Corp., Per-

com Data, Inter Systems, Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., Intertec. If we are

imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires

language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cy-

borg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics. For cyborg po-

etry see Perloff 1984; Fraser 1984. For feminist modernist/postmodernist

cyborg writing, see HOW(ever), 971 Corbett Avenue, San Francisco, Cal-

ifornia 94131.

6. The U.S. equivalent of Mills and Boon.

7. Baudrillard 1983 and Jameson 1984 (page 66) point out that Plato’s

definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original, i.e.,

the world of advanced capitalism, of pure exchange. See Discourse 9

(Spring/Summer 1987) for a special issue on technology (cybernetics,

ecology, and the postmodern imagination).

8. A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guards and

arrested antinuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County Jail in Califor-

nia in the early 1980s.

9. For ethnographic accounts and political evaluations, see Epstein

1993; Sturgeon 1986. Without explicit irony, adopting the spaceship

earth/whole earth logo of the planet photographed from space, set off by

the slogan “Love Your Mother,” the May 1987 Mothers and Others Day ac-

tion at the nuclear weapons testing facility in Nevada nonetheless took

account of the tragic contradictions of views of the earth. Demonstrators

applied for official permits to be on the land from officers of the Western

Shoshone tribe, whose territory was invaded by the U.S. government

when it built the nuclear weapons test ground in the 1950s. Arrested for

trespassing, the demonstrators argued that the police and weapons facil-

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ity personnel, without authorization from the proper officials, were the

trespassers. One affinity group at the women’s action called themselves

the Surrogate Others; and in solidarity with the creatures forced to tunnel

in the same ground with the bomb, they enacted a cyborgian emergence

from the constructed body of a large, nonheterosexual desert worm. I was

a member of that affinity group.

10. Powerful developments of coalition politics emerge from “Third

World” speakers, speaking from nowhere, the displaced center of the uni-

verse, earth: “We live on the third planet from the sun”—Sun Poem by Ja-

maican writer Edward Kamau Braithwaite, review by Mackey 1984. Con-

tributors to Smith 1983 ironically subvert naturalized identities precisely

while constructing a place from which to speak called home. See espe-

cially Reagon (in Smith 1983, 356–68); Trinh T. Minh-ha 1986–87a, b.

11. See hooks 1981, 1984; Hull et al. 1982. Toni Cade Bambara (1981)

wrote an extraordinary novel in which the women of color theater group

the Seven Sisters explores a form of unity. See analysis by Butler-Evans

1987.

12. On orientalism in feminist works and elsewhere, see Lowe 1986;

Said 1978; Mohanty 1984; Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Per-

spectives (1984).

13. Katie King (1986, 1987a) has developed a theoretically sensitive

treatment of the workings of feminist taxonomies as genealogies of

power in feminist idealogy and polemic. King examines Jaggar’s (1983)

problematic example of taxonomizing feminisms to make a little machine

producing the desired final position. My caricature here of socialist and

radical feminism is also an example.

14. The central role of object relations versions of psychoanalysis and

related strong universalizing moves in discussing reproduction, caring

work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline their

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authors’ resistance to what I am calling postmodernism. For me, both the

universalizing moves and these versions of psychoanalysis make analysis

of “women’s place in the integrated circuit” difficult and lead to system-

atic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major aspects of the con-

struction of gender and gendered social life. The feminist standpoint ar-

gument has been developed by Flax 1983; Harding 1986; Harding and

Hintikka 1983; Hartsock 1983a, 1983b; O’Brien 1981; H. Rose 1983; Smith

1974, 1979. For rethinking theories of feminist materialism and feminist

standpoints in response to criticism, see Harding 1986, 163–96; Hartsock

1987; and S. Rose 1986.

15. I make an argumentative category error in “modifying” MacKin-

non’s positions with the qualifier “radical,” thereby generating my own

reductive critique of extremely hetergeneous writing, which does explic-

itly use that label, by my taxonomically interested argument about writ-

ing, which does not use the modifier and which brooks no limits and

thereby adds to the various dreams of a common, in the sense of univocal,

language for feminism. My category error was occasioned by an assign-

ment to write from a particular taxonomic position that itself has a het-

erogeneous history, socialist-feminism, for Socialist Review, published in

SR as “The Cyborg Manifesto.” A critique indebted to MacKinnon, but

without the reductionism and with an elegant feminist account of Fou-

cault’s paradoxical conservatism on sexual violence (rape), is de Lauretis

1985 (see also 1986, 1–19). A theoretically elegant feminist social-histor-

ical examination of family violence, which insists on women’s, men’s, and

children’s complex agency without losing sight of the material structures

of male domination, race, and class, is Gordon 1988.

16. See Kristeva 1984.

17. This chart was published in 1985 in the “Cyborg Manifesto.” My

previous efforts to understand biology as a cybernetic command-control

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discourse and organisms as “natural-technical objects of knowledge”

were Haraway 1979, 1983, 1984. A later version, with a shifted argument,

appears in Haraway 1989.

18. For progressive analyses and action on the biotechnology debates,

see GeneWatch, a Bulletin of the Committee for Responsible Genetics, 5

Doane St., 4th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02109; Genetic Screening

Study Group (formerly the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the

People), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wright 1982, 1986; Yoxen 1983.

19. Starting references for “women in the integrated circuit”: D’Ono -

frio-Flores and Pfafflin 1982; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Fuentes and Ehren-

reich 1983; Grossman 1980; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; A. Ong 1987;

Science Policy Research Unit 1982.

20. For the “homework economy outside the home” and related argu-

ments, see Gordon 1983; Gordon and Kimball 1985; Stacey 1987; Reskin

and Hartmann 1986; Women and Poverty 1984; S. Rose 1986; Collins

1982; Burr 1982; Gregory and Nussbaum 1982; Piven and Coward 1982;

Microelectronics Group 1980; Stallard et al. 1983, which includes a useful

organization and resource list.

21. The conjunction of the Green Revolution’s social relations with

biotechnologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on

land in the Third World increasingly intense. The U.S. Agency for Inter-

national Development’s estimates used at the 1984 World Food Day are

that in Africa women produce about 90 percent of rural food supplies,

about 60–80 percent in Asia, and provide 40 percent of agricultural labor

in the Near East and Latin America (New York Times 1984). Blumberg

charges that world organizations’ agricultural politics, as well as those of

multinationals and national governments in the Third World, generally

ignore fundamental issues in the sexual division of labor. The present

tragedy of famine in Africa might owe as much to male supremacy as to

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capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More accurately, capitalism

and racism are usually structurally male dominant. See also Blumberg

1981; Hacker 1984; Hacker and Bovit 1981; Busch and Lacy 1983; Wilfred

1982; Sachs 1983; International Fund for Agricultural Development 1985;

Bird 1984.

22. See also Enloe 1983a, 1983b.

23. For a feminist version of this logic, see Hrdy 1981. For an analysis

of scientific women’s storytelling practices, especially in relation to so-

ciobiology in evolutionary debates around child abuse and infanticide,

see Haraway 1989.

24. For the moment of transition of hunting with guns to hunting with

cameras in the construction of popular meanings of nature for an Amer-

ican urban immigrant public, see Haraway 1984–85, 1989; Nash 1979;

Sontag 1977; Preston 1984.

25. For guidance for thinking about the political/cultural/racial impli-

cations of the history of women doing science in the United States, see

Haas and Perucci 1984; Hacker 1981; Keller 1983; National Science Foun-

dation 1988; Rossiter 1982; Schiebinger 1987; Haraway 1989.

26. See Markoff and Siegel 1983. High Technology Professionals for

Peace and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility are promising

organizations.

27. The Service Employees International Union’s office workers’ or-

ganization in the United States.

28. See King 1984. An abbreviated list of feminist science fiction un-

derlying themes of this essay: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My

Mind, Kindred, Survivor; Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines; Samuel R.

Delany, the Nevèrÿon series; Anne McCaffery, The Ship Who Sang, Dino -

saur Planet; Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake; Joanna Russ,

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Adventures of Alix, The Female Man; James Tiptree Jr., Star Songs of an Old

P rimate, Up the Walls of the World; John Varley, Titan, Wizard, Demon.

29. French feminisms contribute to cyborg heteroglossia: Burke 1981;

Irigaray 1977, 1979; Marks and de Courtivron 1980; Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society 1981 (Autumn); Wittig 1973; Duchen 1986.

For English translation of some currents of Francophone feminism, see

Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory (1980).

30. But all these poets are very complex, not least in their treatment of

themes of lying and erotic, decentered collective and personal identities:

Griffin 1978; Lorde 1984; Rich 1978.

31. See Derrida 1976 (especially part II); Lévi-Strauss 1973 (especially

“The Writing Lesson”); Gates 1985; Kahn and Neumaier 1985; Ong 1982;

Kramarae and Treichler 1985.

32. The sharp relation of women of color to writing as theme and pol-

itics can be approached through the program for “The Black Woman and

the Diaspora: Hidden Connections and Extended Acknowledgments,” An

International Literary Conference, Michigan State University, October

1985; Evans 1984; Christian 1985; Carby 1987; Fisher 1980; Frontiers

1980, 1983; Kingston 1976; Lerner 1973; Giddings 1985; Moraga and An-

zaldúa 1981; Morgan 1984. Anglophone European and Euro-American

women have also crafted special relations to their writing as a potent sign:

Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Russ 1983.

33. The convention of ideologically taming militarized high technol-

ogy by publicizing its applications to speech and motion problems of the

disabled/differently abled takes on a special irony in monotheistic, patri-

archal, and frequently anti-Semitic culture when computer-generated

speech allows a boy with no voice to chant the Haftorah at his bar mitzvah.

See Sussman 1986. Making the always context-relative social definitions

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of “ableness” particularly clear, military high-tech has a way of making

human beings disabled by definition, a perverse aspect of much auto-

mated battlefield and Star Wars research and development. See Wilford

1986.

34. See A. Ong 1987.

35. James Clifford (1985, 1988) argues persuasively for recognition

of continuous reinvention, the stubborn nondisappearance of those

“marked” by Western imperializing practices.

36. See DuBois 1982; Daston and Mark n.d.; Park and Daston 1981. The

noun monster shares its root with the verb to demonstrate.

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