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and Joan Vinge, many of who used the SF form to consider questions
of gender and identity. (By comparison there were comparatively few
female contributors to the SF genre known as Cyberpunk, which
emerged in the mid-'
s, the notable exception being Pat Cadigan.
This is perhaps not surprising, given Cyberpunk's fascination with
hardware and the film noir form, with its solitary male hero.)
Feminist science fiction, like that described above, was one of the
inspirations for philosopher of science Donna Haraway's polemical
paper 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs',
45
first published in
80
, which
intended to present positive ways for feminism to engage with tech-
nology. It is an attempt to present a socialist-feminist analysis
of 'women's situation in the advanced technological conditions of
postmodern life in the First World'.
46
Haraway finds the standard
tools for such an analysis, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism as
it was then constituted, problematic; each relies on structures that
are limiting and unhelpful, such as labour as the source of subjec-
tivity, the centrality of the family or the idea of woman as an essen-
tial, trans-historical category. Instead, Haraway finds an alternative
model for women's identity in the figure of the cyborg, or cybernetic
organism. This term, originally coined by engineer Manfred Clynes
in
1985
to denote the imbrication of man and machines, was derived
from the work in Cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and others after the
War. By acknowledging such an imbrication and its blurring of the
distinction between human and machine, the notion of the cyborg
not only gets away from questions of individuality and individual
wholeness, but from the essentialist humanist concepts of women
as childbearer and raiser, which are consonant with the heterosexual
marriage and the nuclear family. It complicates the binary opposi-
tions, which have been 'systemic to the logics and practices of
domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals'.
47
As Mark Dery also points out, the manifesto is short on practi-
cal suggestions for living in an increasingly technological world,
especially for women who are exploited by high-tech industries.
48
1960
