Haraway’s cyborg concept made rejecting essentialist womanhood a feminist tenet

Evidence

In 1984, Haraway helped a generation of feminists to definitively reject essentialist notions of what women ‘are’ by arguing that bodies, machines, geographies, genders, and sexualities co-determine one another’s meanings in a dialectical fashion. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time,” she wrote, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 258

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concise definition of Haraway’s famous cyborg thesis as dialectical co-determination of body and machine.
• XREF: connects to: Cyborg theory shifts feminism from knowing to questions of bodily technological existence — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 263; Firestone’s technological utopianism prefigured queer theory and cyborg feminism — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 879; Feminist analysis of digital identity needs stable categories even while rejecting essentialism. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 257 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Cyborg theory shifts feminism from knowing to questions of bodily technological existence #expands (0.85) — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 263
• Feminist analysis of digital identity needs stable categories even while rejecting essentialism. #complicates (0.80) — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 257
• Difference-based feminist critique aims at less dualistic culture, not traditional roles #corroborates (0.78) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 305
• Firestone’s technological utopianism prefigured queer theory and cyborg feminism #corroborates (0.75) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 879
• Rejecting nature-culture dualism improves feminist accounts of reproduction #expands (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 162
• Femininity is an artificial, inculcated product rather than a natural instinct #qualifies (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037