Participation Literacy

I am a human, I am a man. Donna Haraway’s cyborg is “a creature in a post-gender world”(1991). I cannot see that world yet. The world I live in is absurdly gendered. Women have been oppressed for thousands of years, at least, and I am afraid they are always going to be that as long as the world is gendered. In a post-gender world we will still have men and woman. Haraway’s cyborg is a woman, while most other cyborg figurations are men. I am a man by sex but I do not appreciate the gender category. The very existence of the category gender might very well be the cause of the oppression. The oppression has been carried by language through time and space and spread like a plague or a computer virus.

I am not only a man. I am born in the western tradition. I doubt I could be a cyborg in Haraway’s sense. I do not consider myself as oppressed and her cyborg belongs to the oppressed.

My physical body is of course one of the nodes in the Native Web Cyborg I call Me. Another node is the technological machinery behind Cyberspace and yet another one is Cyberspace itself. My physical body includes the somewhat abstract feature often called mind. A true cyborg does not think of body and mind as two different entities.