Technological and/as Sexual Hybridity

I’m interested in examining Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” in conjunction with the readings we’ve done regarding Asian American double eyelid surgery and hybridity.

We’ve frequently touched on the subject of reproduction and surgery as opposing strategies of contending with racial difference. Must all Asian American mothers pass down a desire to maintain, visibly in place of genetically, double eyelids? How do technology and sexuality trump each other? When we watched Imitation of Life there was the question of Sarah Jane’s children—what would happen if they exposed her passing?

Then we read Palumbu-Liu’s “Written on the Face: Race, Nation, Migrancy, and Sex” in which he writes,

“Intermarriage can now be a spectator sport. The actual physicality of the ‘event’ is held at spatial and temporal distance, cleansed of its material messiness, the asymmetry of the political economy of race, gender, and class in America.” (110)

Does the spectacle of hybridity foreshadows the noisy surface-world of Haraway’s cyborgs, or is it opposed to it, as the symptom of what Haraway calls “the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness.”

How do the technological hybrid and the sexual hybrid trump each other—or how are the reconciled in light of Haraway’s cyborg?

I love Haraway’s description of cyborg ‘sex’ restoring “some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such organic prophylactics against heterosexism).” It’s strange but I always associate ferns and invertebrates with antique lithographs made for 19^th century biologists and scientists—they’re always accompanied by anatomical lithographs. It seems that the unisexuality of ferns and flatworms goes hand in hand with the body-less limb or organ, and perhaps then also with the transplanted eyelid or the disinherited body. (Do surgery and reproduction already open up a space for thinking of a ‘baroque’ inheritance?)