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fawei's picture

clarity?

I have a bit of trouble with the cyborg's 'need for community' too. I think Haraway uses the example of 'women of color' because of the double pressures of gender and race on them. We saw in the Dull/West/Banales articles that these are social factors on an individual that actually makes communities less easily constructed/cohesive than groups of white women or men. I'm guessing it is a modern concrete example Haraway was using to illustrate cyborgs in 'reality,' maybe difficult to compare to the fictional 'Frankenstein.' Women of color are not completely immune to social pressures when they construct their communities, so how is it different from Frankenstein's monster's desire to have his companion? It's assumed he wanted a female companion to establish the 'model of the organic family,' but the the reproductive possibilities only seems to come (explicitly) from the head of his creator.

I also have trouble with the definition of what a 'full' cyborg might be. There might be an issue of time (on 151 Haraway places her tools, both technological and ideological, in 'the late twentieth century long after 'Frankenstein' was written) or place ('optimization' for conditions over universal 'perfection' on 161). And with the monster/women comparison, is the type of community desired the chief defining feature of a modern cyborg? If the physical aspect has any say, the monster might be at least a partial example rather than a counterexample...

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