Critical Annotated Webliography-Q1 (By Sophie Tam)

What is a cyborg? Not surprisingly, many of us haven’t heard it would wonder

what it is. Seemingly it has become so familiar on the Internet nowadays. Hope

this would bring you the answer.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a

creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived

social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing

fiction.


In fact, the international women's movements have constructed 'women's

experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object.


This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind.

Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative

apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.


So, cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts

as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life

and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an

optical illusion.


In fact, cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with

bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to

organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts

into a higher unity.


Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific

culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is a plenty of room

for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.

Cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and

animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other

living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.

Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.

Another scholar Judy Wajcman has written a piece of journal about gender

relations and identities. As we enter the twenty-first century, it is

satisfying to note that the relationship between gender and technology is now

an established area of inquiry. Indeed, it has been a significant influence on

mainstream social studies of technology which developed during the same

period.

Technology studies have emphasized the way technological
innovations are socially shaped, feminists have demonstrated that gender
relations and identities are a vital aspect of the social. As a result of the
proliferation in recent decades of feminist research and writing on
technology, Now there is a much more complex understanding of gender, of
technology, and of the mutually constitutive relationship between them.
Increasingly, the scientists work from the basis that neither masculinity,
femininity nor technology are fixed, unitary categories but that they contain
multiple possibilities and are constructed in relation to each other.
Some of these possibilities are here brought to life in a fresh and innovative
way. The book first time seeks to explore individual women experiences and
relationships to technology. While the contemporary women movement
emphasized the value of everyday experience as a basis for
knowledge, there have to date been few attempts to draw on this rich source
in technology studies. In an exciting new departure, the authors of this
volume examine their own relationships to technology using an explicitly
autobiographical approach. Technology studies is said to be a
methodology that has been widely used in gender studies and elsewhere in
the social sciences and the humanities. The use of autobiography as a
methodology throws new light on women relationship to technology, bringing
into sharp relief the way our experiences are filtered through differences
such as race/ethnicity, class, sexuality and generation.

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
Modern surgical procedures, particularly those involved in transplanting or
replacing body parts, have redefined the way people conceive the physical
bodies of themselves and others.

For centuries bodies and their parts have been used for knowledge
production (anatomy labs), for symbolic purposes (as in the display of
Lenin's remains), and for commercial purposes (in pharmaceuticals,
sales of relics, and a plethora of other products). In each case, body
materials come to be seen as existing in another state; another
category from the whole person.
Hogle argues that matters change fundamentally with the situation of the
"donor-cyborg" whose very existence forces a range of patients an medical
professionals to think differently about dead bodies. These include research
scientists, "practicing physicians who must balance needs and resources,
health economists seeking alternatives to long-term care, family members of
the dead who need to find a purpose in the loss, and health professionals who
must attend to this patient who now requires a different sort of care.

In fact, the multiplicity and complexity of the cyborg paradigm has attracted
many to it because it leads to a reconception of self in ways they belief both
more accurate and more politically responsible that what they take to be the
traditional Western emphasis on unified being.
According to Donna J. Haraway, the emphasis upon a unified self derives
from, helps produce, or is implicated in a complex of ideas that produce many
forms of oppression:

As for westerners, gender difference is that a person may be turned by
another person into an object and robbed of her or his status as subject.
The proper state for a western person is to have ownership of the self,
to have and hold a core identity as if it were a possession. That
possession may be made from various raw materials over time, that is,
it may be a cultural production, or one may be born with it. Gender
identity is such a possession. Not to have property in the self is not to be
a subject, and so not to have agency.
She therefore argues that "A concept of a coherent inner self, achieved
(cultural) or innate (biological), is a regulatory fiction that is unnecessary –
indeed, inhibitory - for feminist projects of producing and affirming complex
agency and responsibility. A related "regulatory fiction" basic to Western
concepts of gender insists that motherhood is natural and fatherhood is
cultural: mothers make babies naturally, biologically".
Others writing on the subject, arrive at very similar positions from very different
starting points. For example, in his interview with Chris Hables Gray, Major
Jack E. Steele, USAF, a pioneer in proposals for cyborg space exploration,
argues that all human beings embody multiplicity: It said that humans are all
multiple. Yet, we're a little more tightly organized than the multiple personality.
We all have things we've forgotten, areas we don't remember. Different parts
do different things. In different circumstances we're different people.
The term "cyborg," derived by combining the words cybernetic and
organism, was first used by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline 31
years ago in an article they jointly authored called Cyborgs and Space,
in which they theorized that long-distance space travel would require
astronauts to be physically adapted -- wedding flesh and machine -- to
their new environment. It didn't take long for this cool, technologically
luscious concept to be discovered by the science-fiction community,
and cyborgs began their long, gruesome pilgrimage to Star Trek: The
Next Generation, where they became known as "The Borg," a race of
Frankenstein Ian soul-vampires who have lost their identity to
machines.


Although men and women technically speak the same language, some
scholars have concluded that men and women use language and converse
differently. There are socialized conceptions of how women and men should
speak differently as well as how persons of different cultures express
themselves. According to Lakoff (1975), women and men speak English in
several different ways. She suggests that women's language makes more
frequent use of emotionally intensive adverbs such as "so," "terribly," "awfully,"
and "quite." Similarly, Eakins and Eakins (1978) observed that men and
women use different vocabularies. They suggest that women's language is
more punctuated with adjectives and adverbs that "connote triviality or
unimportance" such as "sweet," "dreadful," "precious," and "darling". Soskin
and John (1963), after observing the talks between a couple over a certain
period of time, found that wives produce significantly more expressive
statements such as "Ouch!" or "Darn!", whereas husbands uses more
directive and informative statements.
To sum up, cyborg is somewhat a wholly human or a robot. Although
experiments have been made, it still remains controversial whether cyborg can
replace human being in our everyday life.

Reference:
Haraway, Donna. retrieved on 1st March 2009.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html



Wajcman, Judy. retrieved on 20th Feb 2009.

http://www.rawnervebooks.co.uk/clforeword.html

Landow, George P. Professor of English and Art History, Brown University,

retrieved on 1st March 2009.

http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/body1.html

DEWDNEY, CHRISTOPHER First Mann into cyborgspace, Saturday, December 15, 2001. retrieved on 26th Feb 2009.
http://wearcam.org/cyborg_book_globeandmail.htm

J Michael Jaffe, LeeYoung-Eum, Huang Li-Ning, and Oshagan Hayg
http://research.haifa.ac.il/%7Ejmjaffe/genderpseudocmc/gender.html