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Essay Relationship of Women and Technology in Cyborg Manifesto

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Abstract: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto discusses the relationship of women and technology.

Summary Critique of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’

Donna Haraway’s essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is an analysis of women and advanced technology in a postmodern world. Haraway uses various illustrations to focus on women’s relation to the technologically scientific world, she uses the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists and engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. She also uses the idea of the cyborg to offer a political strategy for the dissimilar interests of socialism and feminism. In her manifesto, Haraway describes a cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism or a cybernetic organism, created by the advances in
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Technology is used for the formation of tools and machines that significantly increase the rate of productivity and/or quality plus society, is continually becoming more dependent on machinery. The growth of technology is rapid with inventors developing new ways to get a job done, quicker, faster and better. The rapid growth has caused society to become increasingly dependent on technology, it is a way for people to keep in touch with constant communication like mobile cell phones. If we had lived over 100 years ago and talked about a phone that could be used anywhere in the world without wires, people may have had a tendency to avoid us for fear of catching whatever was ailing us. A recent example of advances in technology included the use of the computer and Internet to find long lost classmates to help plan a 20th year high school reunion.
In her essay Haraway discusses several examples, not just technology, of how each theory relates to a particular field. According to her Manifesto, "There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices".
The Cyborg theory was created in order to criticize traditional notions of feminism -- particularly its strong emphasis on identity, rather than similarity. In her argument, Haraway
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