First, let me say WTF!

I am most interested in the imagery of monsters that runs throughout the manifesto. I think I understand portions of this, but I’m not altogether clear as to the purpose of certain others.

In the beginning of this piece Haraway speaks of Frankenstein’s monster (293). It is to this that the cyborg is first compared. The cyborg, like Frankenstein’s monster, is connected to a world of relationships in which wholes are constructed from pieces or parts. The cyborg, unlike the monster, has no need of being made complete, of finding that other part that will complete itself. The cyborg, in as much as it would not recognize the Garden of Eden, is also “completely without innocence.” The cyborg does not have an origin story—no myth of its first creation. Like Frankenstein’s monster the cyborg is a creation absent of human reproduction.

Though Haraway makes the comparison with the monsters, we certainly are not led to believe that the cyborg is itself a monster—at least I don’t think this is the case. The comparison provides Haraway a mechanism that allows her to construct a metaphor for feminism in a “postmodernist, non-naturalist” mode in which the world is imagined without gender, without genesis, and possibly a world without end (292).

Is this part of the metaphor of the monster then—to test the limits of our society, of what we can accept? Does this move us past the limitations of our society by allowing us to invest in the monster or cyborg those aspects of ourselves that we cannot admit to ourselves? Or is this a statement of what we do or not do with monsters, and by extension with cyborgs as well? Perhaps, and I offer this only as a possibility, this provides a partial answer to Nate’s issue of “political gridlock due to the fact that the sum of our identities (race, gender, sexuality, ability, education, class, etc.) make it so that nobody can completely understand anybody else’s struggles.” Perhaps the metaphor of the cyborg without human limits or constraints, created not in the future, but present with us now, can help us to understand our struggles and those of others.