The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway

Abstract

Donna Haraway’s (1991) vision of a post-gender cyborg has (re)sparked feminist interest in reclaiming patriarchal technological tools as a source of liberation from gender oppression. These utopian, cyborgian dreams of the dissolution of body and gender dualisms however, are flawed. This failing is founded on Haraway’s underestimation of the gender-influenced relationship between: the historical legacies of the cyborg; linguistic metaphors and symbols; and the lived subjective technological experiences of embodied materiality. Consequently, despite Haraway’s fantastical claims of the cyborg being able to transgress traditional hierarchical bodily-based binaries, this cyborg vision is distinctly modern in a nostalgic, linear, and utopian construction. As a result, these idealistic cyborg visions can be linked paradoxically to patriarchal discourses; the Cartesian philosophies of Christian religion; and the posthuman prophetical desires of the Extropian transhuman collective (Extropy Institute, 2003a, 2003b; More, 2003), such as featured in the works of Hans Moravec (1988) and Kevin Warwick (2002).