Donna Haraway’s ironic, binary busting cyborg has deeply influenced the study of the relationship between the human and the technological since she published A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985. Providing a template for her cyborg was the 1961 paper by Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes (K&C) Drugs, Space and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.
K&C’s purpose was to find a path to a space-exploring society unencumbered by the technologically unmediated bodies of “man” poorly evolved to living in a vacuum.
Haraway repurposed this to theorize the path to a feminist-liberatory society unencumbered by technologically unmediated female bodies poorly evolved to living in the patriarchy. She redefined “cyborg” as a hybrid made to live not in outer space but in the space of social reality. Continue reading “Disabled Cyborgs In Space”