MakeUp1

So I'm taking time now to make up some reading responses that I've missed, which is harsh since I'm away from Brown and trying to suppress all memories of the event. As I was looking back through posts and readings to figure out what I'm missing, I started reading the responses to the Cyborg Manifesto week. I found this week the least compelling, the hardest for me to grasp. Haraway's reading was literally hard to read, but also the ideas she was presenting to me were the furthest from any manner I had previously thought about race. Looking back at both her reading and responses (it feels different having gone through the entire class), I actually might say that her reading is the richest with possibility. Thinking of humans literally as machine animal mixes again has helped me understand the constructions she was discussing and her case for us all being walking cyborgs. I'm not convinced by the argument in terms of technology, but in this post Suzy really articulates her points in terms of our class well. This quote by Haraway also...

This quote to me summarizes the weight in the argument that she is making: "Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism."

This argument is beautiful to me, but the issue I had with it during class, was that this often turned into a future with no categories. A raceless, genderless, classless reality. This is why during class I said that maybe, as someone living in this time, I'm not equipped to imagine a utopia.

Anyway, this post by Suzy was also helpful in my understanding.

Technologies have shown us how mutable identity is, and hence made us realize that categories like race and gender are not natural, so people should be free to identify or not identify themselves as they choose. Saying man is part machine is a good way of describing this because it means we can’t separate our “selves” from the technologies that enhance and define us. We can use labels to our advantage just as we can use contact lenses or hair dye or psychiatric drugs (I choose these technologies because they are really hard to identify as “me” or “not me” once someone uses them). Like technologies, identities are not inherently internal to us but rather are internalized. Seeing human difference as a technology can open the opportunity to internalize or externalize labels at our liberty and not think that somebody “just is” a member of a category.