I don’t know how we got back to WAP discourse but here we are. I’m shocked, though, in all of this that no one is pointing out the obvious reference to Donna Haraway’s seminal text for our brave new world, Cyborg Manifesto, in all the chatter about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s Grammy performance. I loved that performance, by the way—camp that is slightly stale is my favorite kind of camp.
Anyways, I don’t have time to write that essay in the traditional sense so thought I would try it through GIFs and Haraway quotes. Making GIFs is an art I am too old to do well. But here we are.
This post would be nothing without the GOAT, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, who made the connection to Haraway and femme pop stars of color in her own foundational essay from 2014 on Beyonce…
Here’s the section that inspired this post…
Is Beyoncé a feminist? Is she a womanist? I don't know. To me she is a cyborg. "Cyborg writing," Donna Haraway tells us, "is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." What I appreciate about Beyoncé is that I understand and recognize the tools seized. This is not to say that these aspects in Beyoncé align neatly — they are indeed confusing — but they demand a right that is so often denied black women: the right to be a human, a character with many identities, many aspects, attitudes, vulnerabilities, joys, heartbreaks and realities…Twenty years ago, Donna Haraway wrote in her "Cyborg Manifesto" that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. She also wrote that "women of colour might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities.".. Women like Beyoncé , Tina Turner and Josephine Baker show us the necessity of constantly remastering how you are seen by others, how you are understood, and, in the choreography of that dance of dominance and submission, they show us that the performance of a lifetime is one that you must do in the world, in practice and not just in theory, with all eyes on you.
What follows are Haraway’s quotes and the parts of the performance that, to me, are most evocative of them. But really, I would suggest reading all of Haraway’s text while watching the performance in full for a delightful experience, like dunking cookies in milk….
Donna Haraway: The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
Donna Haraway: Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
Donna Haraway: Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
Donna Haraway: In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This.. is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, 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.
Donna Haraway: The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.
Pleasure to read, and the exact angle making the situation transparent and simple. This is brilliance.
Beautiful! Thank you. Two great tastes that go great together.