Disabled Cyborgs

Any animal/machine interdependency is a cyborg.  Donna Haraway writes

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics–the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other – the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination

“The cyborg is our ontology..”  Which is to say, usually we don’t see our cyborgness because the machine aspect is integregrated with the animal aspect into a single awareness.

The disabled cyborg experiences the animal/techno as a duality.  Other cyborgs may experence the disabled cyboorg as in the Uncanny Valley, not because she resembles a robot, but becasue he doesn’t.