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Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' at 30

It is 30 years since Donna Haraway published the first version of her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’. It still makes for extraordinary reading. It anticipates many of the concerns of our own time, from the link between technology and militarized surveillance to the rise of precarious labor, which Haraway called the 'homework economy.’ And certainly, in the popular imagination of science fiction, the cyborg figure has not gone away, even if most popular narratives are less then enabling. Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) is an honorable exception. Better to think through the 'ironic political myth’ that Haraway constructed. In Molecular Red (forthcoming from Verso) I make the case that Haraway is not only an enduring feminist and science studies thinker, but also a Marxist one. Below is a sample from a later version of the 'Manifesto for Cyborgs’. Here is a link to the rest

“Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs — creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex’ restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.”

By Ken Wark

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This is my new favorite book ever on gender studies. They're not exaggerating with the framing of it being groundbreaking/next wave shit. Quite accessible too, reading level-wise anyway. It is foundationally and fully outside identity politics framework fyi.

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(via "It's just what they accuse us of.")

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ON THE NOTION OF AFFINITY  Avital Ronell, Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler  

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‘Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.’

What’s striking here is not Solanas’s revolutionary extremism per se, but the flippancy with which she justifies it. Life under male supremacy isn’t oppressive, exploitative, or unjust: it’s just fucking boring. For Solanas, an aspiring playwright, politics begins with an aesthetic judgment. This is because male and female are essentially styles for her, rival aesthetic schools distinguishable by their respective adjectival palettes. Men are timid, guilty, dependent, mindless, passive, animalistic, insecure, cowardly, envious, vain, frivolous, and weak. Women are strong, dynamic, decisive, assertive, cerebral, independent, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, freewheeling, thrill-seeking, and arrogant. Above all, women are cool and groovy.“

-ANDREA LONG CHU, On Liking Women

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We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Framed

LGBTQI+ Refugees Welcome and activist-artist researchers Moshoula Capous-Desyllas and Milia Akkouris invite you to We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Framed, an art exhibit that explores the visions and voices of LGBTQI+ Refugees living in Athens, Greece. This arts-based research project places the power of representation in the hands of refugees who use photography to explore concepts of identity, home, needs, hopes, dreams, and the refugee crisis from the perspectives of 13 displaced people who identify as LGBTQI+. We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Framed features the photos taken by the artist-participants. These artists hope you will attend and leave having gained a deeper understanding of their challenges, aspirations, and ways in which we can all support their community. EVENT DETAILS: Who: LGBTQI+ Refugees living in Athens, Greece What: Through the Lens of LGBTQI+ Refugees: a photovoice art exhibit When: Sunday, March 17 & 18, 2018 from 19:00 to 23:00 Where: AMOQA – Athens Museum of Queer Arts – Erigonis 3, 2nd Floor, 118 54 Athens, Greece Why: To engage with organizations and the broader community in exploring the perspectives of LGBTQI+ Refugees living in Athens,

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If we reimagine ‘queer’ as a set of possibilities produced out of temporal and historical difference, or see the manipulation of time as a way to produce both bodies and relationalities (or even nonrelationality), we encounter a more productively porous queer studies, one shaped by and reshaping not only various disciplines but also the studies of race, nation, migration, and postcolony. Indeed, this queer studies meets critical race theory and postcolonial studies in its understanding that what has not entered the historical records, and what is not yet culturally legible, is often encountered in embodied, nonrational forms: as ghosts, scars, gods.

Elizabeth Freeman (via coocoolah)

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Queerness here is the modality through which “freedom from norms” becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. Arguing that “more reflection on queer attachments might allow us to avoid positing assimilation or transgression as choices,” Sara Ahmed notes, “The idealization of a movement, or transformation of a movement into fetish, depends on the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way.” Individual freedom becomes the barometer of choice in the evaluation, and ultimately, regulation, or queerness.

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages P. 22 (via temporarilyeuropean)

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ΔΕΝ ΕΙΜΑΣΤΕ ΣΤΡΕΙΤ ΑΝΑΓΚΑΣΤΙΚΑ ΓΟΥΣΤΑΡΟΥΜΕ ΓΚΕΙ ΚΑΙ ΛΕΣΒΙΑΚΑ ΦΙΛΙΑ

Ένα βράδυ του Ιούλη, δύο male presenting φιλενάδια κάθισαν δίπλα στη λίμνη του Άλσους Φιλαδέλφειας για μία μπύρα, χουζούρεμα και catching up. Απ’ ό,τι φάνηκε, η εμφανής τρυφερότητα ανάμεσά τους αποτελούσε πρόσκληση για έναν μάτσο και wannabe μελλοντικό οικογενειάρχη, να τους πλησιάσει και να τους απειλήσει ότι θα τους σπάσει τα πόδια αν τυχόν τους ξαναδεί να φιλιούνται εκεί ή οπουδήποτε αλλού. Με τη δικαιολογία ότι κυκλοφορούν παιδάκια στα πάρκα – στις 2.00 το βράδυ – έκανε επίκληση στο δικαίωμα των παιδιών να επιλέγουν τη σεξουαλικότητά τους, χωρίς να τους θολώνουν οι gays την κρίση με την δημόσια προβολή της ομο-διαστροφής. Ταυτόχρονα όμως, τους ξεκαθάρισε πως δεν έχει κανένα πρόβλημα με τη φάση τους, όσο παραμένει στα πλαίσια του ιδιωτικού χώρου. Εξάλλου, αυτός ήταν και ο λόγος που ήρθε ειρηνικά να τους ενημερώσει για τις προθέσεις του να τους σπάσει στο ξύλο. Λόγω αριθμητικής υπεροχής των άλλων και μηδενικής όρεξης για σύγκρουση σ’ ένα κατά τ’ άλλα ήρεμο βράδυ, τα παιδιά αποχώρησαν από τη λίμνη.

Τέτοιες καθημερινές πράξεις βίας δεν αποτελούν ειδικές περιπτώσεις, αλλά τον κανόνα σε μία διαδικασία συμμόρφωσης των κουήρ σωμάτων στις επιταγές του δημόσιου χώρου. Τέτοιες πράξεις βίας υπενθυμίζουν πως το αίτημα για ασφαλέστερους χώρους δεν αποτελεί παρωχημένη τάση για αυτοπεριθωριοποίηση, αλλά πολύ υπαρκτή ανάγκη για την ενδυνάμωση των κουήρ σωμάτων στο ελληνικό συγκείμενο. Και το κυριότερο, τέτοιες πράξεις βίας δεν μας φιμώνουν, αλλά προκαλούν πολύ μεγαλύτερη επιθυμία για διεκδίκηση της δημόσιας έκφρασης της ανωμαλίας μας.

Οπότε, για ακόμα μία φορά βρισκόμαστε στους δρόμους να υπενθυμίζουμε πως δεν είμαστε το αφηρημένο «άλλο», αλλά τα παιδιά που η δική τους και η κάθε οικογένεια μεγάλωσε.

                   RPLK