Feminist, Queer, Crip - Alison Kafer - annotations
exported 2025-09-04
5 - The Cyborg and the Crip: Critical Encounters
2025-09-03 09:10 | Page No.: 224
Markedly absent is any kind of critical engagement with disability, any analysis of the material realities of disabled people's interactions with technology. Disabled bodies are simply presented as exemplary, and self-evident, cyborgs, requiring neither analysis nor critique.
2025-09-03 09:11 | Page No.: 224
Its disinterest in and refusal of temporalities ruled by “salvation history,” “oedipal calendars,” and “rebirth without flaw” suggest the possibility of crip futurities, futurities grounded in something other than the compulsory reproduction of able-bodiedness/able-mindedness.
2025-09-03 09:12 | Page No.: 225
This struggle entails not only reimagining the cyborg from a critical crip position but also engaging seriously with existing critiques of the figure. In other words, what might disability studies learn from criticisms of the cyborg by women of color, by antiracist scholars, or by activists working to contest globalization? How can we use the figure of the cyborg not only to imagine disability differently but to imagine a cripped coalition politics?
2025-09-03 09:14 | Page No.: 226
Jennifer Gonzalez argues, however, that cyborgs “function as evidence” of “differences, histories, stories, bodies, [and] places,”30
2025-09-03 09:16 | Page No.: 228
The ability to become cyborg is too often economically determined.34
2025-09-03 09:18 | Page No.: 230
As Swartz and Watermeyer note, doping can also be seen as cyborg technology, but athletes accused of doping are not described in those terms; physical disability and its attendant technologies render one cyborgian in a way nothing else can.40
2025-09-03 09:19 | Page No.: 230
In these news stories, “cyborg” represents the melding of pure body and pure machine; there is an original purity that, thanks to assistive technology, has only now been mixed, hybridized, blurred.
2025-09-03 09:19 | Page No.: 230
The “cyborg” concept thus serves to perpetuate binaries of pure/impure, natural/unnatural, and natural/technological; rather than breaking down boundaries, it buttresses them.
2025-09-03 09:23 | Page No.: 234
It doesn't take long to realize that Haraway is someone who loves words.53 Puns, alliterations, and unexpected pairings appear throughout her writing, and she frequently invents and combines words to illustrate her arguments.
2025-09-03 09:23 | Page No.: 235
This play is integral to her politics: “If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets,” she asserts, and “cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics.”54
2025-09-03 09:25 | Page No.: 236
If Haraway were aware of the usage of “disabled,” why did she deploy “severely handicapped” in the text, and not once but twice? My suspicion is that she needed to evoke in her readers an image of a person completely dependent on technology, an image of a body that could not possibly exist without a technological intervention.
2025-09-03 09:25 | Page No.: 236
Unlike “disabled,” which potentially has more political overtones, or even “differently abled,” which can be seen as a (naïve and unsuccessful) attempt to break down able-bodied/disabled binaries, “handicapped” is thoroughly immersed in individual, medical, and charity models of disability.
2025-09-03 09:27 | Page No.: 238
In other words, although Haraway recognizes the potential insights to be derived from the experience of living with disability technology, casting disability as a challenge to “organic holism,” she presents disability in remarkably monolithic terms, as a single, universal experience.
2025-09-03 09:27 | Page No.: 238
The disabled body, then, is figured within the manifesto as the creature of futuristic fiction or the monstrous past; disabled bodies are, once again, cast as out of time.
2025-09-03 09:27 | Page No.: 239
The Asian factory workers can be called cyborg because of their place in globalized capitalism. It is through their work in the assembly line, and their location in a region where multinational corporations can cut labor and safety costs, that they participate in the global economy. Their “nimble fingers,” a description indebted to colonialist and racist stereotypes, link their bodies to the machines they are building.
2025-09-03 09:28 | Page No.: 240
Why is the act of Asian women making chips seen as self-explanatory, while the spiral dance requires definition? Spiral dancing may not be common knowledge, but neither are the reasons why assembling computer chips makes one “cyborg.” Moreover, are there not differences between the kinds of activities and subjectivities Haraway links here—protestor and worker, jail and factory, Asia and the United States—that need exploring?
2025-09-03 09:31 | Page No.: 241
Haraway agrees that her “narrative partly ends up further imperializing, say, the Malaysian factory worker,” noting that if she were to rewrite the manifesto, she would be much more cautious about attributing cyborgism to others. She goes on to speak of the need for a whole range of boundary creatures, in the hopes that expanding the kind of figures in her imaginary would reduce the imperialist effects of the cyborg; “Could there be,” she hopes, “a family of figures who would populate our imagination of these postcolonial, postmodern worlds that would not be quite as imperializing in terms of a single figuration of identity?”70
2025-09-03 09:32 | Page No.: 242
Many feminist theorists have the tools and the training to recognize the imperializing move behind Haraway's description of the cyborged factory workers (or at least have the tools to recognize it once it has been pointed out to them) but lack the familiarity with disability studies to recognize these characterizations of disability as equally problematic, equally contentious.
2025-09-03 09:32 | Page No.: 243
What stands out in Haraway's analysis, then, is its reliance on narrow understandings of disability. She offers disabled people as exemplary hybrids, but without any examination of what such hybridization might feel like or entail. Disability may be an excellent site for witnessing the blurring of human and technology, but not, apparently, for exploring actual experiences of such blurring.
【Annotation】!!!!!
2025-09-03 09:34 | Page No.: 245
Its very unpredictability is precisely what makes it such an important and potentially useful concept; its fluidity and permeability make it difficult to lock it permanently in to any one set of meanings. As Christina Crosby argues, it is “dynamic, mobile, [and] programmable, which makes the cyborg incalculably dangerous in the form of a cruise missile, but also offers opportunities that haven't yet been calculated for forming new alliances, new affinity groups, new coalitions.”77
2025-09-03 09:35 | Page No.: 245
for example, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle chose to include the piece in their Transgender Studies Reader, even though the manifesto never explicitly takes up trans identities, because of its examination of how “marginalized embodied positions” are “politically charged sites of struggle.”79
2025-09-03 09:37 | Page No.: 247
By including these critiques alongside my disability reading, I am aware that I run the risk of presenting the critiques as analogical: disability functions “like race” in cyborg theory, or “just as” women of color have been marginalized within the manifesto, “so too” have disabled people. These kinds of analogical moves are all too common in disability studies (and beyond), and they unfortunately have the result of obfuscating the relationships between disability and race rather than illuminating them.
2025-09-03 09:37 | Page No.: 248
One of my goals in this chapter, then, is to use both the manifesto and its critics to think through how to do cross-movement work within disability studies and, relatedly, how to draw on the critiques of women-of-color theorists without merely analogizing race and disability or universalizing the experiences and categories of race and disability.
2025-09-03 09:38 | Page No.: 248
Decades after its original publication, the manifesto remains a site of provocative, rich, creative feminist scholarship, work that can enrich disability studies in unexpected ways. Using the cyborg in disability studies, then, means not only reading Haraway and the manifesto but delving into the many critiques and retellings of the manifesto, not all of which are faithful to their origins.
2025-09-03 09:38 | Page No.: 248
she positions her manifesto as “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and responsibility in their construction.”
2025-09-03 09:39 | Page No.: 249
In her book-length interview with Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve asks Haraway if the pervasiveness of the cyborg figure disturbs her, if she feels it has been distorted by its many appropriations, gaps, and uses. Haraway responds,
I think the cyborg still has so much potential. Part of how I work is not to walk away when a term gets dirty and is used in all these appropriate and inappropriate ways because of its celebrity. Instead such uses just make me want to push the reality of the cyborg harder…. So instead of giving it up because it has become too famous let's keep pushing it and filling it.84
Following Haraway, then, this section “pushes and fills” the cyborg in order to imagine feminist queer crip futures.
2025-09-03 14:37 | Page No.: 250
If, as Haraway and others argue, technoculture is pervasive, then disabled people are not alone in the cyborgian realm. Cyborg theory could then turn itself to interrogations, for example, of why the very same technology is alternately described as “assistive” or “time-saving” depending on whether a disabled or nondisabled person is using it.85
2025-09-03 14:46 | Page No.: 253
Cripping the cyborg, developing a non-ableist cyborg politics, requires understanding disabled people as cyborgs not because of our bodies (e.g., our use of prosthetics, ventilators, or attendants), but because of our political practices.
2025-09-03 14:47 | Page No.: 254
As anthropologist Steven Kurzman explains,
I see cyborg more as a subject position than an identity, and believe it is more descriptive of my position vis-à-vis the relationships of production, delivery, and use surrounding my prosthesis than my actual physical interface with it. In other words, if I am to be interpellated as a cyborg, it is because my leg cost $11,000 and my HMO paid
2025-09-03 14:47 | Page No.: 255
for it; because I had to get a job to get the health insurance; because I stand and walk with the irony that the materials and design of my leg are based in the same military technology which has blown the limbs off so many other young men; because the shock absorber in my foot was manufactured by a company which makes shock absorbers for bicycles and motorcycles, and can be read as a product of the post–Cold War explosion of increasingly engineered sports equipment and prostheses; and because the man who built my leg struggles to hold onto his small business in a field rapidly becoming vertically integrated and corporatized. I am not a cyborg simply because I wear an artificial limb.94
2025-09-03 14:48 | Page No.: 256
The same technology that enables a paraplegic to walk allows a soldier to kill more efficiently and ergonomically; cyborg ironies, indeed.96
2025-09-03 14:55 | Page No.: 260
As Haraway made clear in the manifesto, simple technophilia or technophobia is untenable; what we need to do is to take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology.102
2025-09-03 14:56 | Page No.: 261
Bradley Lewis draws on Haraway's cyborg theory for precisely these reasons, arguing that the cyborg can help us better understand Prozac and the domination of psychopharmacology.
2025-09-03 14:56 | Page No.: 262
Prozac, he argues, “is not clearly oppressive or liberatory. It is a contradictory mixture of both—sometimes one more than another, but always both. This makes the problem not Prozac itself but the politics of representation surrounding the production and circulation of Prozac discourse.”106
2025-09-03 14:57 | Page No.: 262
O'Brien positions her use of prescription medications as a practice demanding contextualization within a wider political economy.107 She traces the manufacturer of each medication, discusses where she obtains the syringes she needs for injections (leading to a brief rumination on HIV/AIDS, the war on drugs, and needle-exchange programs in Philadelphia), and describes the politics of health care that lead her to purchase these medications out of pocket, online, and away from a “proper” provider.
2025-09-03 14:58 | Page No.: 262
Inspired by Haraway's manifesto, she describes her position within biomedicine as contradictory, ironic, subversive. She may be interfacing with corporate medicine, but she does so “improperly.”109
2025-09-03 14:58 | Page No.: 262
The cyborg, O'Brien argues, offers a way to approach the medical industrial complex that does not privilege “isolation, purity, or refusal” but recognizes the potential to interact unfaithfully with the medical system. As she puts it, “If your survival depends on substantially
2025-09-03 14:58 | Page No.: 263
accessing global pharmaceutical industries, a politics of purity and non-participation just doesn't get you that far.”110
2025-09-03 14:59 | Page No.: 263
and because I believe that GID is still being misused by some mental health practitioners as a basis for involuntary psychiatric treatment for gender transgressive people.”112
2025-09-03 15:02 | Page No.: 267
Kline wrote a mass-market paperback titled From Sad to Glad; first published in 1974, the 1989 edition featured the tagline, “Depression: You can conquer it without analysis.” Kline's faith in drugs is evident in the article he coauthored with Clynes, “Cyborgs and Space,” in which their imagined osmotic pumps deliver medicine that cures everything from radiation sickness to fatigue to psychosis.
2025-09-03 15:03 | Page No.: 267
Clynes and Kline suggest that astronauts are unlikely to recognize when they have had a psychotic break (explaining that delusion and denial are common symptoms of psychosis) and will need to be involuntarily medicated by remote control. I do not know enough about the mental or emotional effects of space travel to evaluate their concern, but I cannot read their recommendation without being reminded of the two scientists' location in a state mental institution, one where many, if not most, of the patients were placed indefinitely and heavily medicated. Moreover, some of them likely served as research subjects for Kline's drug trials, trials that appear to have been grueling for the patients.
2025-09-03 15:08 | Page No.: 269
As Hiram Perez argues, part of the work of the critic is to explore the effects texts and images have on people's lives.122The blurring of boundaries, the permeability of bodies, the porousness of skin—all take on different meanings depending on whether they are viewed through the prism of institutionalization or as part of a strategy of feminist analysis.
2025-09-03 15:09 | Page No.: 270
If, as Haraway claims, “cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue,” then the cyborg may very well be a perfect figure for refusing the erasure of disability from our presents and futures.125 But in the spirit, if not the practice, of Haraway's manifesto, I argue for responsibility in making such claims.
Notes
2025-09-03 09:14 | Page No.: 421
- See, for example, Cherney, “Deaf Culture and the Cochlear Implant Debate”; Johnson Cheu, “De-gene-erates, Replicants, and Other Aliens: (Re)Defining Disability in Futuristic Film,” in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (New York: Continuum, 2002), 199–212; and Meekosha, “Superchicks, Clones, Cyborgs, and Cripples.”
2025-09-03 09:14 | Page No.: 421
- Jennifer Gonzalez, “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden (London: Routledge, 2000), 64.
2025-09-03 09:18 | Page No.: 422
- Swartz and Watermeyer, “Cyborg Anxiety,” 188. Hari Kunzru takes the description still further, arguing that elite athletes' high-performance clothing and scientifically tested diet and exercise regimens qualify them for cyborg status. Hari Kunzru, “You Are Cyborg,” Wired 5, no. 2 (1997), accessed September 22, 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html.
2025-09-03 09:24 | Page No.: 424
- Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 245n4.
2025-09-03 09:29 | Page No.: 425
- Later in the essay, Haraway gets slightly more specific, but more in terms of the production line than the women working it. She offers as one example of “real-life cyborgs” “the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and US electronics firms.” Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 177.
2025-09-03 09:30 | Page No.: 425
- Schueller, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory,” 81.
2025-09-03 09:31 | Page No.: 425
- Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Cyborgs at Large: An Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 12–13. Even in the manifesto, Haraway raises concerns about naming. “[W]ho counts as ‘us’ in my own rhetoric?” she queries. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 155.
2025-09-03 09:35 | Page No.: 427
- The quotation comes from the editors' blurb introducing Haraway's essay. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 103.
【Annotation】!!!
2025-09-03 14:57 | Page No.: 430
- Bradley Lewis, Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 133, emphasis in original.
- Lewis, Moving Beyond Prozac, 142. Elizabeth A. Wilson's analysis of Prozac suggests another way the cyborg can facilitate an understanding of psychopharmacology. She explains that, as a manufactured psychopharmaceutical, Prozac illustrates the difficulty of definitively distinguishing between nature and culture, between one's body and one's culture. Where does the body stop and the drug begin? Although Wilson does not take up the figure of the cyborg, her framing of the drug makes possible a reading of the drug through the lens of cyborgian boundary blurring. Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals, and the Embodiment of Depression,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 373–99.
2025-09-03 14:58 | Page No.: 430
- Michelle O'Brien, “Tracing This Body: Transsexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism,” deadletters: scattered notes toward the remembering of a misplaced present (Summer 2003): 1–14, accessed June 22, 2010, http://www.deadletters.biz/body.html (site discontinued).