I am most drawn to Haraway's statements of self-creation and coalition through affinity over identity--the "conscious appropriation of negation" (5), of oppositional and contradictory identity, that attempts to build unity and political kinship rather than naturalize identities.
This is illustrated in her discussion of "Sister Outsider" as not simply an otherized identity, but one that is outside of identification altogether, one that prefers boundaries, liminality, and partiality over the stability of wholeness. Rather than bolster the melancholic paradigm of the oppressed Other holding the dominant Self in place (and vice versa), the Sister Outsider/cyborg radically transgresses these dualisms and reveals the concept of self to be an illusion. The cyborg claims multiplicity, a site without clear, static meanings, as an escape from the history of binary identification.
Moreover, the cyborg's ability to threaten the distance between the real and imagainary and destabilize origin stories, connects to the threat of fusion and contamination posed by racial mixing. Much like cyborgs, racially mixed individuals reside on the margins, and their very identities subvert Western dreams of racial purity, authenticity, and stable self-hood. Much like America's cultural anxieities about visibility and singular identity are projected on to racial mixing and mixed people, the cyborg also embodies these anxieties and fantasies of undermining the social order.
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