Matt Klein approximately 150 words
INTD 105-19: Science Writing
“The Cyborg Manifesto” Response
By Matt Klein
In the late twentieth century, many boundaries in society were beginning to break down. In “The Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway analyzes these boundaries in the context of technology and socialist-feminism. In her main points, she discusses the division between humans and animals, organisms and machines, and the organic and inorganic. Haraway demonstrates how these divisions have begun to disappear, and she hybridizes these pairs into the image of the cyborg. The cyborg represents the transgression of each of these boundaries, leading to a more unified society. In her words, “The cyborg is a creature of a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (292). Haraway thus illustrates how our world is transitioning from individualism to the inclusion and wholeness of our entire society.
This relates to my mini-essay on the arboretum in the sense that the arboretum, like the cyborg, is a hybrid of humans and nature.