부산대학교 도서관

Summary: When Donna Haraway's essay, "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," was published in 1985, it was heralded in feminist circles as a re-envisioning of female identity, a radical reconfiguration of woman that was based in science and technology rather than in nature. But Haraway's essay can also be read as an apex piece that gathers together much earlier strands of technologically-influenced versions of woman. By looking at specific nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century instances of women's fiction in which technologically- and scientifically-modified characters demonstrate characteristics of Haraway's much later cyborg, we can see that a lineage of cyborg characters has populated women's fiction for more than two centuries and contributed specific elements of cyborg identity to Haraway's late-twentieth-century formulation. Writers of literature of the fantastic, such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, C. L. Moore, and Judith Merril, regularly align the tolerance for ambiguity in the real/not-real fantastic with the tolerance for ambiguity in the human/not-human technobody. Each of these writers draws on contemporary conversations about new sciences and technologies in order to turn the "natural" female body into a fictional technologized body that circumvents the charge that female destiny is linked to biological destiny. Here we can track the lineage of the cyborg metaphor: from its initial, tentative experiments with non-binaristic and non-dualistic identities to its celebration of radical and no-longer-taboo female fusions with new technologies.