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wow, it seems you’re pretty popular today with this blog post hehe. After reading your blog I saw a lot of connections between ours. I think the connection with Butler is really good. I wrote about this in my blog too if you want to take a look and I also wrote about maybe a connection with Rubin and Althusser. Rubin, obviously because she talks about women and Althusser maybe because he focuses on like a class struggle, similar to that of the struggle that women had to go through for inequality. This may be a little out there haha, but it might fit in. This relates to the quote that you used in your blog from 2280, which I used as well! It seems that you understood this reading pretty well. As for the biology part, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I think your Deleuze and Guattari relation might work here, I wasn’t sure what to write about those two so nice job!

I think you’re on the right track with Haraway and Butler connection in this text. It seems that Haraway is aiming for the same genderless society as Butler was. In fact I don’t think you are wrong for tying in Butler at all. On page 2270 Haraway states,
“It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.”
I think for Haraway it’s hard to imagine the cyborg in existence without being in a post-gender world?!?!

-Marina

My take on page 2269, where Haraway says, “Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices…” is that people are no longer being seen as the sum of all their parts. The medical realm has created artificial limbs, and thus human/machine hybrids. Do we consider these hybrid people/cyborgs any less human, male or female? No.

This leads directly into the next quote you pulled from the text.

Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity. There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women. (2275)

I think you are right to bring up Butler here. Gender, in our society, is based on biological parts, yet Butler says that maleness or femaleness is not a “natural” assumption based on these parts. If some men are born with ovaries and breasts, women with male genetailia, or even women who undergo hysterectomies, all of these provide a gray area within the dichotomy of “men” or “women.” To invert this system of doubt among the categories, the same holds true for women as a collective. Being female, possessing the required parts, does not create unity among the group. As Haraway points out, society, history, difference in race, class, and gender are divisive.

I think the end game is that cyborgs hold the key to possibility in that they breach the boundaries of dualism. The list on page 2296 shows all the ways that cyborgs circumvent the categories. This circumvention can lead to freedom because the categories no longer hold true.

-Kim

To talk about Disneyland, what I got from that part of the article was that we created Disneyland, as well as places like that, in an attempt to reaffirm ourselves that what we have is real. Disney and all other amusement parks are places of fantasy with things that do not exist on the outside, this is meant to prove that our lives are real because they are not like Disneyland. Baudrillard is saying that is not true, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”

With the feigning/simulating thing, I agree that they are more alike than Baudrillard is willing to admit. As a person who has tried the ‘too-sick-to-go-to-school’ thing, I was under the impression that simulation was an essential part of any good feign. I think that the stomache ache is a perfect example, because the more you complain about your stomache ache, the worse it gets.