Sexless and Genderless Cyborgs

We've been considering in this class the ways in which race can be considered a technology; one offshoot from a question such as this is whether gender (which is another inborn physical characteristic that brings with it very distinct social effects) can be considered a technology by a similar route. The Cyborg Manifesto does, to some extent, convince me that gender can at least be considered within the same frame which we've been using for race: not so much as a straightforward technology, unto itself, as an essence. It's somewhat convenient to consider the contemporaneity of the evolution of the civil rights movement after WWII with the first inklings of the movement for women's rights – both are movements of reimagining the role that the particular structuring force (race or gender) play in society and concurrently in the psyche of the individual.

Haraway states: “It's not just that 'god' is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints.”

This speaks of a (constructive) destruction of notions of femininity through the milieu of the technological, through the C³I, through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, a de-mystification of the feminine. Cyborgs are post-gender, Haraway says, which makes them precisely the potent tools for analyzing gender that they are in her estimation – by asserting the irrelevance and superficiality of gender (here, opposed to sex) through their own lack of gender, they able to prove an entirely modern point. “The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is 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.”