Bound in a Spiral Dance. The Dance of Cyborg and Goddess as Diffraction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2019.49Keywords:
Cyborg, Spirituality, Feminist Critique, Ecofeminism, New MaterialismAbstract
With the words „[I would] rather be a cyborg than a goddess" Donna Haraway closes her relevant Manifesto for Cyborgs in 1984 (Haraway 1991, 180). Thus the cyborg was introduced as a figure of technical-human hybridity and feminist counter-model to a 'technophobic' goddess. The latter was regarded as the central metaphor of spiritual, ecofeminist thinking of the 1970s and 1980s and, according to Haraway's criticism, was strongly linked to nostalgic narratives of the reconquest of a matriarchal, pre-historical period of time. The cyborg, however, embodied the promise to break out of the dualisms that dominate industrial societies (culture/nature, woman/man, etc.). What do these boundary-figures of the cyborg and goddess (still) stand for in feminist contexts? Can the cyborg-goddess, who is in an area of tension, be thought to be productive for a contemporary feminist dialogue? Based on these questions, the essay focuses on a diffractive reading of the two boundary-figures, with the aim of complicating the current feminist debate and thus opening up new spaces for resignations and reinterpretations.
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