Summary: Book 3. The arena of the body: The Cyborg and Feminist Views on Biology
/ Cecilia Asberg (2018)
Elena van Hattum
Donna Haraway iconically spoke of the cyborg. Cyborg= cybernetic organism, hybrid of
body-technology. The cyborg in contemporary popular culture is often depicted as either
ultra feminine sexy robot, or hard-boiled masculine terminator (very gendered). They are or
destructive human machines, or ultra sexualised fighting machines. → Interesting for
feminists: cyborgs are biological AND technological, their bodies exist through a combination
of nature and culture and embody the nature-culture debate.
Origin of the cyborg is in neo-colonial natural science and super-power Cold War militarism
in 1960, the idea that it would greatly improve the US position in the domination of outer
space. The cyborg, in times of colonisation, offered the opportunity to conquest outer space
AND the inner space of the body. Cybernetics, the science of feedback and regulation,
engineered control and communication in living organisms as well as other self-regulating
systems, was applied to the human body AND to society. Cybernetics (Greek: to control) is
concerned with controlling of genetic and computer generated information. The cyborg was
inspired by cybernetics as a body containing controllable integrated artificial feedback
systems: not innocent, initially conceptualised as an instrument of war and imperialism. →
Borders between scientific facts, social fantasies of technology and science fiction unclear.
Nowadays, in their life-prolonging medical and life-threatening military functions, cyborgs
have become a symbol of ambivalences of high modernity: poses a challenge to the ways
we perceive ourselves, our bodies and our humanity. Leading to a radical redefinition of
bodies, identities and the discourse of biology: no longer seen as Gods-given and
unchangeable. → Interesting to feminist: critique of biological determinism. Problematizing
the idea that your position in society is naturally determined by your biology.
The trouble with biology
In the 1970s biology started to be criticised by feminists. In socio-biologist arguments the
solution to aggression, territoriality, racism and male supremacy lied in genetic programming:
these properties of the sexes were biological. Feminist theorists rejected such explanations
for the social positioning of women, distancing themselves from biological determinism and
claiming gender to be a social construct. Sex = biological, gender= social.
They also created knowledge on the ways gendered assumptions give shape to popular and
scientific ideas of the biological body, tackling the problematic differentiation between nature
and culture and sex and gender. In Western scientific thought the opposites of nature and
culture was symbolically linked to the question of the nature of ‘the woman’ and ‘the native’
as opposed and inferior to ‘the civilised man’. The Universal Man was the norm. The role of
biology was to categorise all the physiological, external differences as essential differences
to reinforce societal hierarchy. The institutions producing knowledge about ‘nature’ weren’t
neutral nor objective: natural science was a cultural phenomenon, part of a gender and race
divided society and subject to historical change.
